40 Minutes In The Old Testament - Episode 110 (Leviticus 2:10-16)

Episode Date: February 9, 2018

What is with all the different kinds of offerings? Why is the grain offering significant? Chad and Daniel talk about this and it's connection to holiness and the Lord's Supper. Also, what's the deal with salt in the Bible? Listen and find out! 

welcome to another episode of 40 minutes in the old testament i'm daniel emery bryce joined by chad bird chad this is episode number three in leviticus we are already on three man we are we are making some progress not chapter three not chapter three yeah episode three that's right we are just in chapter two everybody's gonna have to bear with me a little bit here i'm a little bit under under the weather i don't know if you can tell that from my voice or not but uh i'm being i'm being currently attacked by mold and uh cedar and all sorts of other nastiness in the air so hang with me we'll get through this and uh maybe i'll be better next time hopefully so yeah it's all right half the country is sick right now so it's fine maybe i need to offer like a burnt

offering or something make myself feel better we uh was speaking to that we did talk about burnt offerings last time uh that was all about chapter one and uh we're here at the beginning of chapter two now, and hopefully you're learning a few things, enjoying this journey into Leviticus. There's actually a lot here, and every time I go back through this book, either just reading it or teaching something about it, I learn something new. In fact, I can't wait to tell you something I learned just this morning, in fact, about salt. I'll get to that in a little bit. But every time i every time i go back through leviticus there's always something new that jumps out at me whether it's from the text itself from a commentary that i'm reading but just so much that's uh

that's kind of embedded here and a lot of it is it's sort of implicit i don't know if you've noticed that about leviticus there's not a lot of what you might think of as like theology i mean it's it's there but it's uh it's packed into the rituals themselves and when there is any kind of explicit theologizing, talking about God or something like that. It's pretty rare, but there's a whole lot of theology there. It's sort of between the lines or it's in some way communicated by the material, by the action, or by the benefits that are bestowed.

Anyway, we'll see more of that as we go through there. It really is a rich book, but it's kind of like a gold mine. And you got to dig to get to the good stuff. The book starts out with a discussion of various kinds of whole burnt offerings. As the name itself implies, a whole burnt offering was burnt in its entirety on the altar. And if you remember from back in, oh, I don't know, Exodus 25 or something like that, there was a discussion of two burnt offerings that took place on a daily basis in the morning and in the evening. Now, these were national burnt offerings.

So in other words, these were like for the whole nation of Israel. Every morning and every evening, it was a lamb that was offered as a burnt offering. This was what was called the continual or the continuous, the perpetual burnt offering. So every morning, every evening, that's what happened for the nation. Chapter 1 is not about that. It's the same kind of offering. It is still a whole burnt offering, but this is more for the individual or for the family. So that's the way the book starts out.

These are sacrifices that a person, a man or a woman or family could bring to the altar. Now, this might happen just sporadically. I mean, this might be once a year. This might be twice or three times a year. It's not like everybody always lived close to the tabernacle. the only later on when you when they were settled in the holy land the people were only required to go to the tabernacle to gather together for three times a year and it was really only the males that were required although usually the whole family went along and that was the three major festivals

of passover pentecost and booths in in the fall so anyway these sacrifices were we're not necessarily going to be offered all the time like once a week or something but whenever they happen to be at the tabernacle now we come in chapter two to a different kind of offering in fact this one is unique from several of the sacrifices discussed in these first few chapters because this one is not a not an animal sacrifice it's a sacrifice of of flour or of grain or of bread of various kinds so this is it's sometimes called a meal offering so so one of the commentaries i was reading this morning called it a cereal offering and i understand why i mean because we have cereal grains right but i i had to laugh to myself because every time i every time i hear

cereal offering all i think of is like you know you're putting frosted flakes on the altar cinnamon toast crotch yeah yeah give me some fruit loops i'm gonna offer those as a my cereal offering of the day i suppose that is where the world's word cereal comes from though yeah yeah yeah that's it i mean cereal are these these are grains but uh yeah i i didn't think it was the best choice of of terminology just because yeah when most people hear the word cereal they don't think grain they think cheerios or something i think i think i think carbs when i hear the word yeah are you still in the keto diet by the way i am yeah my wife and i are too so i don't know if anybody out there listening is on the keto diet but yeah no cereal for you nope

but there's plenty of fat and as we're going to hear i don't know yeah i think it is this chapter there's even a discussion of a fat so i had to laugh because of course keto diet is all about fat but uh getting back to the uh to the subject to can enough about cereal and keto so uh there's a there's a lot of people not just now but actually the rabbis uh the uh the old rabbis you should think this too that the reason this follows chapter one all about the burn offerings is that uh the meal offering or this this grain offering was actually designated, designed for the people that didn't have a lot of money. So if you want to offer a sacrifice, well, in chapter one, you can go all out and offer a bull,

or you can tone it down a little bit and offer a lamb or something like that, some flock. Or if you don't have even that, well, you can always buy a pigeon or a dove and sacrifice that. But there's a lot of people say, you know what, even even that might have been a little bit too much for some people because they still unless they keep pigeons or doves, then they got, you know, they got to buy one. So it's going to cost them something. So a lot of folks throughout the centuries have thought that chapter two is really the poor man's offering because everybody in the ancient world had flour. everybody had some access to grain because that was the uh that was the principal food i mean that really was the the foundation of the of the pure the food pyramid in the ancient world because it was very rare for israelite families or probably for any ancient families

to have meat in fact you might have meat just a very few times a year for one reason is because you can't keep it so whatever if you if you butcher something you've got to cook it and eat it right away you can't stick anything in your in your in your fridge or freezer so that was one of the reasons plus it just was costly and you needed your animals for milk and for all the other uh all the other reasons wool and and whatnot so to sacrifice one of them that To butcher one of them for a meal was very rare. So most of the time, people lived on fruits and grains and things like that. So bread would have been the principal product on their table.

Yeah, because even fruits didn't have refrigeration or anything like that. You had to eat that fruit in season. Yeah, that's a great point. I mean, seasonally. So the fall would be a lot of fruit on your table. But not the winter, not the spring, or maybe a few in the summertime. But, yeah, I mean, most of it, it's all seasonal. Bread, you can have year-round, of course, because you can store grain.

But not a lot of the other things. Yeah, there's a reason why bread and wine is like a staple. You can keep both of them. You don't keep, I mean, obviously bread doesn't keep forever, but grain keeps for a long time. And the breads they make is a pretty simple bread. yeah yeah i mean this is this is not this is uh uh not kind of some kind of specialty item this was something which was uh easily made easily kept a staple of the ancient world and if they made it unleavened then it would last a lot longer leaven uh would would would uh would speed up the

process of you know getting getting bad getting mold or whatever so yeah that the wine and the bread they both kept they were easy to easy to keep easy to make and so they were staples of the ancient world you see you see that this is a total aside but uh you know this you know that they were this this this diet is pretty simple uh when you read you know uh the widow the story of the widow and and she's like her recipe for bread is oil and water and flour flour yeah right maybe a pinch of salt yeah it's not uh it's not anything special no no this is a this is not something you'd buy at Panera. This is down to the elementary basics of bread making. And that's one of the reasons that actually there are offerings like this. I mean, one reason could

be, as I was discussing, that it was for financial reasons. But another reason, in fact, I would argue that the main reason that you have a grain offering is because what happens at the Lord's altar is very similar to what happens on everyone's table. So if you do have meat, you're going to have bread. And if you have bread, you're going to have oil. And chances are you're going to have a little bit of wine too. And these basically form the sum and substance of the israelite sacrifices you got meat you got bread a grain of some sort you have oil and you have wine these were the uh and incense thrown into the tube but those were the four basic elements of of sacrifice and so the the altar is in some way like a table although it wasn't the table where

the lord ate but rather it was the table from which the people of the lord ate as well as we'll get to in a minute. So just as the Israelite table had these essential elements on them, so the altar did as well. So as far as the chapter itself goes, you've got essentially two different kinds of offerings that are related to grain. Either you can bring just the flour so it's it's called a uh a fine flour in verse one his offering shall be a fine flour this is probably flour that's been sifted several times that's why it's called not just flour but fine flour and you add oil to that and you put a little bit of frankincense on there as well so you could either bring as an offering this flour the fine flour or you could go ahead

and make the flour into bread and there's uh they have listed this chapter i think three different kinds of ways that you could bake the bread to like a a baked bread or fried bread or pan bread Some translations have a waffle in there, some kind of waffle bread. But the essential message is this. You're bringing the produce of the earth, an agricultural product, into the holy space. And when you do, you are going to present it to the priest. And then the priest takes it to the altar. now this is where things get interesting so you've got a you got a common product an everyday product

whether it's the flour or whether it's the the flour that's been baked into bread so it's it it's something from the earth there's nothing wrong with it whatsoever it's a it's a common everyday ordinary product of the earth all right there's nothing sacred about it though There's nothing holy about it. It's just a common everyday element of creation. But here is where it gets interesting. As soon as this common everyday ordinary element of creation is brought to the tabernacle and is given to the priest, and then a portion of it is taken to the altar, then everything changes. because what what happens in this in this action of presenting to the priest and the priest taking

it to the altar is that there is a there's there's a transition that this element of creation undergoes so it comes to the altar in the hands of the worshiper as a common ordinary everyday element of creation, but as soon as it touches the altar, as soon as the priest carries it to this holy place, this holy altar, all of a sudden the bread, the flour or the baked bread or whatever it is, this product of the earth is transformed. It moves from one sphere to the other. It moves from the sphere of the common to the sphere of the sacred. And this is actually not something that's just about chapter two. This actually becomes a major theme of Leviticus as a whole. This idea that something can move from the common sphere to the sacred sphere. And the way

this movement happens is being brought into the house of the lord where you have the holy of holies and the holy place and the holy altar all this holiness that is embodied there where god is so when the when the grain or the flour or the bread is brought to the altar and when part of is offered on the altar, then this product, which was, which had been just a product of nature, now is not only a product of nature in ordinary bread, now it's sacred bread. In fact, it's not just holy bread, it's called most holy bread. And what happens with this most holy bread is that it becomes the sacred food, which had been ordinary food and now is sacred food.

The sacred food becomes the food of the priest who are serving at the altar in the tabernacle. So now when they consume this, it still looks the same, of course. It's not like all of a sudden it's glowing or something. It still looks like ordinary bread. It still tastes like ordinary bread. It's still a product of the earth.

but because it's come into contact with god's altar which is god's altar because he's he's said it's his by his word he's established it as his altar and his presence is there because it comes into contact with his sacred object that's full of the sacred presence of god it now is transformed into something which is sacred itself and here and here is i think the uh the most important element of this this whole process this ordinary bread which has become sacred bread by touching the holy altar when the priests consume it they too consume holiness they too consume this sanctity that the bread possesses because it's come into contact with the divine presence

at the altar. So this is the way that the priesthood in the Old Testament maintained its holiness, its sanctity by literally eating sanctity in

this holy bread that was made holy by its contact with the altar. It's really too bad that that's something that only goes on in the Old Testament. completely an old testament reality and there's i mean i wish i wish that we could now build a bridge and say we had something similar to this would that be nice that would be good that'd be

good you know i mean obviously we're talking about the lord's supper the the uh this is just like doubling down on a point that we've made multiple times about holiness uh well first of that god alone is holy there's there's no possible way for you to become holy apart from him that that holiness is is strictly an attribute of god and that it is transferred uh from god to his uh to his creation and that uh proximity seems to matter absolutely we have this idea about holiness in the in the contemporary church which I think is completely abstracted from its biblical basis, where holiness becomes almost exclusively a moral quality.

So we don't even think so much about holy objects anymore or holy space or holy time or anything like that. The only thing that we really equate holiness with anymore is people. you know he's a holy person or holier than thou or whatever if we want to use it in a negative sense but everything about holiness it seems that we hear anymore is is completely wrapped up in the life that believers live and certainly there's an element of that in the biblical in the biblical narrative. But it's by far not the dominant message of holiness in the Old Testament and the New Testament. Like you said, holiness belongs to God. The only way that we're holy is by God

giving us that holiness. And the holiness, it might have the fruit of a good life. It might have the fruit of what we today call morality but that's just the fruit holiness itself simply means that we belong to god that's what it means to be holy it means to to especially belong to god to be one who to be to be a person or a thing or time or whatever it is that's been brought into the sphere of god himself so that he he claims it or us as his as his very own yeah in the old testament yeah i mean it's it was that that that was the way it worked it was god was here and some for something to be holy it had to be brought near to where god was yeah it's it's it's literally um being connected to god i mean you have to come into contact with god and uh and and we

have ways of spiritually abstracting this too. Like, you know, I was, you might be in a place and you're just like, yeah, I just felt God or whatever. And maybe you did. But throughout the biblical narratives, this contact isn't some hyper-spiritual contact, some invisible contact that takes place but actually something that that takes place and there's almost that there's a there's a connector uh between you and god there's a and there's always a this physical thing uh so god uses things in his creation and he has you make an altar and make bread and this kind of stuff and this bread becomes this conduit to the holiness of god uh it's not it's not different now where we have bread and wine

and Lord's Supper and we eat and drink the holiness and righteousness of God. It's also when you talk about being if holiness is dependent upon your connection to the divine almost all the language

of baptism is about connecting you to Christ. It's about baptizing you into him being you there's there's all the languages union language that that you're united to his life death and resurrection and it's that uniting you to god that sets you apart and makes you holy i mean baptism is at least in the initial holing of you by god there's an element of holiness that's uh or way of looking at holiness it's almost like it's it's a contagion

in a positive way so when you contract something when you're around something or someone who's contagious that means you come into contact with them you're in their proximity and because of that you contract it it's like a physical thing uh with holiness it certainly was in the old testament and this carries over in the new as well it's like you're you're describing you have you have holiness is bound up in the stuff of creation so it's not some sort of abstract thing just kind of floating around or just an abstract philosophical idea but it's a it's holiness that is connected to the stuff of creation so when you're in the water when you're in the the baptismal element of creation then you're connected to the holiness of god when you eat the bread and drink the wine

of the supper, these physical, tangible objects are filled with the sanctity of God himself. It's the same way with the word of God. You hear, these are actual words that are projected through the air and enter your ears, and through these, sanctity is bestowed upon you as well. So So there's this beautiful, very earthy, very tangible aspect of holiness that I think very often gets missed in today's churches, which is probably the reason that there's not as much of an emphasis on the sacraments, on baptism and Lord's Supper as there needs to be in much of the church's life today, because we're missing out on this physicality of holiness that you see in books

like Leviticus. Yeah, I've always thought it was super strange. I grew up in a more charismatic tradition, which I'm not in now, but this isn't to disparage

any charismatic tradition listeners we have, which I'm sure we have some. But one thing I've always found odd is there is this emphasis on some on certain things so like there's almost this this looking for tangible things uh so i was talking to a guy once about this this and and he was talking about anointing oil and so like if

in this particular church like if somebody's sick they would go actually take some oil and put it on them and pray for them and uh and i asked him and i don't have a problem with that i think you can make a biblical argument for that uh but i was asking like why you why you think what do you think's going on there and uh he's like i don't know there's like there's something about you know like the there's like an anointing oil thing that you're doing there and uh and and then another uh you know and this is more fringy but like there'll be things like like prayer cloths and stuff like that right you know that you could you could get and uh and and all of that is is sort of this attempt to have have like a connection a physical connection to some to something holy

to something powerful right uh and at the same time by and large in that tradition uh the lord's Supper is merely symbolic and baptism is merely symbolic. And so somehow the focus has moved away from those being tangible physical elements that connect you with the holiness of God. And you have to then go and try to find things that connect you to the holiness of God when they are right there the whole time. yeah i was thinking about that the other day in a broader context i can't remember this was one of my friends and maybe maybe this friend is actually listening right now but she had been if i'm remembering this correctly this was on instagram she had been to a concert somewhere i believe and and whoever she'd gone to see had signed her her wallet and there was she showed a

picture of this on on instagram and i can't remember the details but you know people get this all the time right they'll have somebody sign something a picture or a t-shirt or whatever it is and so you have the actual physical inked in signature of this famous person and you hang on to that right and i think in a in a similar way uh there's this kind of there's this built-in desire that we have to to have some kind of physical object that connects us to something or someone that is either greater than we are or that we think is greater than we are. And that is, in kind of a sociological way,

a demonstration of what the sacraments are really all about. These are physical things that God has autographed, if you will, with His Word. He's inked them with His Word so that they are now His own, and these become not just a reminder of some encounter that we had, but rather these become the means whereby we have an ongoing encounter with God by which he doesn't just remind us of how great he is but he comes to us to fill us with good things

with his forgiveness and life and salvation so I do think there is this human tendency that we all have we want something bigger than ourselves to look up to to feel like we're connected with and we love these mementos, these physical objects that remind us of even kind of a fleeting, momentary connection that we have with something that's greater than us. And for us, the sacraments are that ongoing physical connection we have with God.

Yeah, I mean, I would argue baptism and even the Lord's Supper, that's God autographing you. Yeah, there you go. Putting his name on you by means of the water and the supper. Yeah, that's his signature being placed on the individual. You're tattooed. Tattooed by God. Yeah, so, I mean, that's a lot to kind of unpack from the discussion of bread and grain and all that. But I do think that is significant because this isn't just the way that Leviticus pictures God working,

but the way that he continues to work. That's one of the things we're going to discover as we keep going through Leviticus, is that even though the outward form of worship is so different than from now, the essential elements of worship remain the same. I mean, this really is a book of worship, Leviticus is. So when we go to our own churches and when we worship God,

even though we're not putting lambs up on the altar and bringing grain offerings and all of that kind of stuff, the the elements of worship really really remain the same of how god meets us and and uh how he blesses us and the the tangible elements of worship in which he is active to give us what we what we need to what we need for life with him but let's get to salt i promised the beginning we get to salt so we we uh we still need to get to that now this is where salt comes up this is uh at verse 13 god says every grain offering of yours you shall season with salt so that the salt of the covenant of your god shall not be lacking from your grain offering with all your

offerings you shall offer salt i was looking at that this morning and uh this got me kind of Jumping in my mind over all of the various images that we have of salt in the Old Testament. I think one of the first we come to is actually the pillar of salt that we read about in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. But more to the point, we have salt with all these sacrifices. We have this language of a covenant of salt later on. there's this uh this use of use of salt as sort of a a bonding agent between two people two parties two leaders two families members of a family and of course you have a lot of language of salt when you get to the new testament jesus talks about the uh the salt of the world and

if the salt loses its salt in us then it's good for nothing but to be thrown out so you got a lot of references to to salt uh in the old and and the new testament now what's interesting here is that you have the sacrifices wait you have the the grain offering that has salt but then you also have uh all the other offerings that are also connected with salt and then we have this language of the covenant the salt of the covenant of your god now i think what's going on here is that first of all salt was was part of kind of this this this bonding between individuals and the reason that was is because most of the time when you had any kind of bonding between individuals say the making of a covenant or a treaty it was connected with a meal and if you have a meal then you share

salt with each other that was one of the basic elements of of the meal so you had salt as kind of a bonding agent between you and and the other person or or person so that was one thing that was going on here also salt is works as as a as a preservative so there's this idea of of longevity of faithfulness of uh the of the uninterrupted nature of the relationship that salt entails as well and of course it's also the idea of of seasoning that that happens there as well so So the metaphor of salt is multifaceted. It goes in lots of different directions. Now here, because it's connected with a covenant,

the salt of the covenant of your God, I think the accent here is upon the fact that these sacrifices that are connected with salt are also covenantal sacrifices in the sense that this is the way that God preserves, just like salt preserves, preserves the covenant, preserves the relationship between him and him and his people now what i what i learned this morning is uh that when you jumped in a new testament there's this fascinating verse i never i never

read this before but okay let's so let's let's make the transition to to the new testament you got you got these these sacrifices they're eaten by the priest in the uh in the sanctuary in god's space so god as it were is hosting this meal where his priest consumed sacrifices that have insulted all right now you jump to the new testament and here you have god in the flesh you've got christ as the new high priest and he has his own people he has his own priesthood which is all of us. It's all of his disciples who are bound together with him. And notice how many meals that Jesus eats with his disciples. Of course, he has the meal of meals in the supper that he celebrates with them on the night of the Passover. So everything in the gospels,

you can trace with him having these meals with those who are his own. And finally, the meal of meals but then we have this this very interesting verse in the first chapter of acts this is acts chapter 1 verse 4 now most of your most of your english translations will say something like this let me find it here this is the way that uh my translation starts out with acts 1 verse 4 it says and gathering them together jesus commanded them not to leave jerusalem but to wait for what the Father had promised. Then he goes on to talk about the Holy Spirit. Now that opening phrase and gathering them together is literally and sharing salt with them. So the Greek word there is sun alazomenos, and it's related to the word for salt. It's this idea of Christ not just kind

of gathering them together, but Christ being with them in the fellowship of a meal said, this and then it goes on to to to document what he said to them so this there's uh the reason i find this was find this fascinating is because here we have the language of salt connected with the meal between god and his people gathered together in which he promises them that he will continue to be with them he's going to he's going to send them the holy spirit he will be faithful to them he will be present to them in the holy spirit now and in the in the days to come so this is this is the language of the old testament that's been into the new testament of how god binds himself to his people by means of a salty relationship if you will that's in the context

of eating in the context of covenant making and in the context then of promise keeping where he swears that he's going to be with them now and in the days to come. When you think about God salting something, it's also this. I don't know if you've ever tried to take

salt out of the thing you just put salt into. Not going to happen. If you're salting some vegetables and the cap comes off,

you can't do salt it's over it's over right so so there is a there is a uh element to the covenant and like being the covenant there's is promise uh and being bound together with salt also like there's no you can't you can't extract the salt once it's there once it's in there that's it that's why you're that's why you're careful with certain things because they're difficult You might be able to add more, but you can't take what you've added out. And when God, in his covenants, when he has bound himself to you, there is no getting rid of that. That is not something you can remove. Yeah, no one can snatch them out of my hand, just like no one can take the salt out of the covenant that I've made with them.

I mean, there's a lot of images of salt in the scriptures, but this one in particular is focused upon the way that Christ holds us fast, the way that he sticks by us, the way that he is permanently connected to us, and will not leave us, will not desalt the covenant, because he has sworn that he will always draw them into its midst and give them the blessings that he desires them to have. Amen. That's good. Oh, man, 40 minutes. And we are done. All right. Hey, you know, Chad, people should probably, if they live in North Dakota or the surrounding area, probably come hang out with us in May.

Yeah, definitely. I mean, if you're anywhere in one of those surrounding states, make the drive. We'd love to have you there. Yeah, we're going to be doing a city event in North Dakota, Minot. I think that's how you say it, Minot? Minot? I don't know. I've never been there.

Somebody will call in and correct us. Yeah. Whatever it is. One of those things. Look it up. It's on the website, chrisfest.org. Go to the events. You can see it.

I'll be there. Chad will be there. Eric Sorensen, Chris Roseborough, Dan Vervoores, Cindy Koch, Ed Nugent. It's going to be a great time. We're going to talk about the Psalms. We're going to share a meal. There's going to be salt. Why would you want to miss it?

And we actually have a little surprise at that event, which I think people will be excited about, which I'm not going to talk about anymore now but there's something happening there that's only happening there that you'd want to be a part of so come on out, we'd love to see you Chad, we'll see you next week

alright man, see you then, thanks see ya Thanks for watching!