40 Minutes In The Old Testament - Episode 120 (Leviticus 16:1-17:9)

Episode Date: May 18, 2018

Chad and Daniel discuss The Day of Atonement and why this day not only applied to people but places and things as well. Blood, goat demons, flags, and idolatry are addressed. Yes, goat demons. Spiritual adultery vs spiritual prostitution. And what the banner of the church is. Have a listen! 1517 Podcast Network Sinner/Saint Devotional CHF North Dakota

Welcome to another episode of 40 Minutes in the Old Testament. I'm Daniel Emery Price, joined by Chad Bird. 40 minutes in the old testament is a 1517 podcast network podcast go over to 1517 legacy.com slash podcast and check out all the other podcasts that are going on there 30 minutes in the new testament virtue in the wasteland thinking fellows banned books you are forgiven radio ringside with the preacher man there's a bunch of them you can literally have podcast for every day of the week so uh why not why not do that all right also chad it's important that people know by the time this this release this podcast releases what you should do dear

listener is go to amazon and look up the sinner saint devotional and order it because if you need a daily dose of gospel goodness I can take care of your next 60 days for you with a handful of authors all contributing 60 days in the psalms the sinner saint devotional is available

you can get it on Amazon you can get it at 1517legacy.com as well either one of those places you should check it out it's great not just because I wrote for it not just because Chad wrote for it but everyone else that wrote for it it did a fantastic job it's really really good

and uh so you should go get it all right chad how are you doing i'm good i just was looking at the calendar we're gonna see each other like i know i know we're gonna be i i do we do we need a coat i this is i don't say canada we're almost gonna be in canada i know about that i know you know this this podcast is probably going to be released uh just right before uh the the event in north dakota like the day before so here's the thing guys if you listen to this and you are in north dakota even though we are recording this a little bit earlier if you are listening to this the day it comes out and you are in north dakota hey i should see you tomorrow point your car in that direction point your car in that direction let's go that way let's yeah that's right my not

why not my not why not my not yeah come see us hang out it's going to be great come grab a copy of that devotional you can do that that's going to be there

why not my not for you and your family and come and hang out with me and Chad that's what should happen alright Chad where are we at in Leviticus well last time we jumped into chapter 16, which is, as I explained last time, it's really not just the pivotal

chapter in Leviticus, but it's actually the pivotal chapter in the Pentateuch, in the first five books. It's the very heart of Leviticus, and it's the middle of the 36 speeches, the 18th speech, and Leviticus is the middle book of the Torah. So we found ourselves smack dab in the center of the foundation of the scriptures. So the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, whatever you want to call it, the English or the Hebrew name of it. So that's where we spent quite a bit of our time last time. And I think that we covered most of what we at least have time for. We could spend, we could make a whole podcast. We could call it the Yom Kippur podcast, I believe, and spend, uh, spend that much time talking about all of the, uh, the very rich details of this

particular, this particular sacrifice. But, uh, this is not the Yom Kippur podcast. So we have to, we have to keep moving there. There is one, I was trying to remember everything I did say and, and left out last time. And there was one thing I'm pretty sure that I left out that I think is significant, and it's a detail that is not often realized, or if it is realized, it's not often understood by those who might read this chapter. And the detail is this. Oh, about starting at verse 15 and then on to 16, we have this, what strikes us at first glance, it's kind of odd. he talks about how the uh the high priest aaron in this case is to slaughter the goat for the sin offering which is for the people and uh just like he did for the uh the bull which is a sin

offering for the priesthood anyway he takes this blood of the goat inside the holy place and then around the veil separating the holy place and the holy of holies and what he does is he he it says he makes he sprinkles the blood and it says by doing that this is verse 16 he shall make atonement for the holy place that's interesting language because we're we're very accustomed to a description of of god making atonement for sinners we we get that we're sinful we need cleansing we need atonement and blood provides that but this is this is very different. He shall make atonement for the holy place. And then if we skip forward a couple of verses to verse 18, it says after he's done that, then he shall go back outside to the altar that

is before the Lord and make atonement for it by putting some of the blood of the sacrifice on the horns of the altar. Now, this is remarkable. You have plenty of language in the Bible about God atoning for the sins of the world or atoning for sinners. In other words, God atones for people. But here we have atonement being accomplished not for people, but for a place and an object, for the holy place or the tabernacle as a whole, we could say. And then he goes back outside and the place where you would think for sure it wouldn't need atonement, the altar, that itself receives atonement. So what's going on here? Well, we have an explanation for this in the latter part of verse 16. It says that he shall make atonement for the holy place because of the

impurities of the sons of Israel and because of their transgressions in regard to all their sins and thus he shall do for the tent of meeting which abides with them in the midst of their impurities so the the idea the idea is this you have a tabernacle you have an altar you have this sacred space and a sacred object and in and of themselves of course uh there's nothing really pure or impure about them just as far as their substance goes. But what happens is God claims them as his own. He sanctifies them. He purifies them and sanctifies them by his word. But what happens is as they continually come in contact with people who are sinful, it's as if the impurity or the sinfulness of people is a contagion which affects these objects. So they themselves

in some way partake of the impurity of the people who are around them. And so what God does is he provides not only cleansing and atonement for the sinners, but also cleansing and atonement for these objects and spaces that are negatively affected by the the sinfulness of the people so god is concerned in other words not just with his children but also with those places and things by which he brings his children to him and by which he provides a continual atonement for them and the sacrifices. Now, this might kind of seem just one of those esoteric Old Testament sort of things that really doesn't have any application to us, but actually it does, because what we see acted out here on the Day of Atonement in miniature is what God is going to do for,

or really has done already, for the entirety of creation. There's this verse in Romans chapter 8 that talks about how all of creation is groaning as in the pains of childbirth as it waits for the revealing or the redemption of the children of God. So there is within the scriptures in many different places, this idea that the sinfulness of people is not, as it were, restricted to themselves it's not like there's some sort of hermetically sealed container that their sin never gets out of to affect things around them rather that we are like uh we as sinners are like we're porous uh the the sin that is in us and that we do leaks out of us and it affects everything which which which is around us and that includes creation so uh if if you ever see anything in

creation and we do all the time that is wrong that is destructive that is malicious that is ruinous to the lives of people i mean you think right now we've got uh we've got a volcano in in hawaii that's it's uh it's leaking lava out onto left onto homes and into streets that's like yesterday onto a car so when you see things like that when you see that a tornado ripped through a when Hurricane Harvey hit Houston, when all these things happen, that is an indication that creation itself has gone awry, that things are not the way that they were created to be by God. And that's not because volcanoes are sinful or hurricanes are sinful.

That's because we are and our disobedience has permeated creation. But what God does is he doesn't just provide atonement for us, he doesn't just recreate us, but by the death of the creator, he has restored creation. Not just people, but all of creation. So what we see on the Day of Atonement acted out in miniature is what Christ, the incarnate creator, does for all creation by his atoning sacrifice on the cross. He doesn't just reconcile and restore and recreate humanity. He does all of creation, and this accomplishment is what will fully be revealed only on the last day when you have a new heavens and a new earth in which the atoning sacrifice of Christ in history is going to be revealed. the effects of that will be revealed in time so that it's it's it's good friday it's a death of the son of god that finally is going to make possible the creation of new heavens and a new

earth in uh in the second coming of our lord so that's a i think that's sometimes a missed message about the day of atonement there really is eschatology that's in this particular atoning sacrifice because it's offered not just for the people but for the created objects around them and so on the day of atonement we also have a picture not just the sacrifice of christ but also of the restoration of all of creation on the last day yeah you see this in the in the initial fall i mean the the world is not as it should be because of man's sin is is part of the curse I mean, literally, the fact that thorns and thistles exist is evidence of sin. There are things that are present that were not initially present and that are not good.

Like, some people, you might ask, like, what is the good parts of, like, mosquitoes? And I don't think there are any good parts of them. I just was telling my wife that last night. If you were sitting outside, these are a result of the fall. Yeah, yeah, that's how it is. And so what you see then is that there is this doctrine of imputation that is set up at the very beginning. That sin is, like you said, it's like a contagion. That sin is just infectious.

This is also, when you talk about atoning then for not just the sins of people, but also everything that's busted in the world. This is what John explicitly says when he says that Christ was a propitiation for our sins and not our sins only, but the sins of the whole world. Yes, that includes, so we would look at that and say, well, okay, that means that everybody in the world has died for it. Yes, it certainly means that, but it means that because it means something even greater than that. I mean, the word used there is the Greek word that we get the word cosmos from. And so it's literally speaking of the entirety of things that are. He became a propitiation for the sins of not just our sins, but the sins of the entire cosmos, the sins of everyone and everything, all sin.

uh and so what you have then and and this in the day of atonement is this um sort of foreshadowing that of what christ is going to do for the entirety of creation yeah i think that's one of the i don't know i could be wrong but i think that's one of the missing aspects of the of the good news that you just don't hear very often yeah you know i mean it really is uh and maybe just because we tend to focus on ourselves. But we really do just tend to focus upon the freedom, the redemption, the recreation that we have in Christ. But it's actually much, it's broader than that. I mean, we're talking about a whole creation that God is going to renew. And maybe part of the reason of that is because this kind of stunted view that we have of the afterlife. I mean,

there's way too many people think that what christianity is all about is making sure that when we die we go to heaven uh well yeah i mean that certainly that is is part of what christianity's message is that we die we go to to paradise to be with christ but it's not by any means like that is the final chapter christ didn't just die so we we humans go to heaven he died in order to usher in a new heavens and a new earth. So what's going to happen is, yeah, we will. If I die today, then my soul will be in paradise with Christ. But I'm going to be waiting, because that's not the end. That is only the waiting period, if you will, because on the last day, I will receive my body back, resurrected and glorified and perfected, as will all people. And I'm not going to float

in the clouds and strum harps with the angels for eternity. I'm going to be, as now, a creature, flesh and blood except my resurrected body will be perfect and glorified just like everybody else's and i will uh i will live and and play and worship and rejoice in the new heavens and the new earth so that is that is the final chapter and that is the goal of of christianity and that's what we have here yeah well this is the that's something that i think a lot of christians don't understand because they just haven't thought about it or they've been taught badly but yeah you do not spend eternity in heaven that's not how it works uh you spend eternity on earth uh a new one that's probably not all too different than what we have going on now it's just i think i think that it's

just this minus the sin it's just it's everything that god's called very good uh i don't think he's going and saying you know what i'm gonna i'm gonna change it up it was very good but i got some other things i'm gonna do now i know i just think it's i just think it's the the earth as he as he originally intended it to be uh i don't i think what he did was perfect and then we broke perfection and but that's what he's going to bring it back to and so uh yeah the idea that up in the clouds beyond the clouds there's like this celestial city and that's where we're going to be for all eternity i don't think so that's not that's not how the scriptures talk about it they certainly talk about a new heavens but in saying a new heavens they just the heavens are

just the the it's just the stars and the and the planets and this is how the bible refers to heavens and that all of that is going to be recreated too so there will be a new sky a new solar system above us but life eternal life takes place on the new earth yeah i i mean i've never seen any surface but i would hazard that uh probably 80 to 90 percent of christians kind of have that stunted view of the afterlife uh for whatever reason it might be and it and it makes really no sense because uh the scriptures over and over promise this even isaiah isaiah already in the old testament uh prophesied this and it's all over the new testament as well especially in the latter part of revelation so uh if you never heard that before then that that is good news uh

that's what we were what we're created for and we see then a uh kind of a a rehearsal of that an annual rehearsal of that final reality that we have here in the Day of Atonement so anyway that's chapter 16 I don't know if there's anything else you want to say about the Day of Atonement

before we jump to 17 Dan no man let's do it let's jump into it alright so we're really entering into a new section of of Leviticus. This is sometimes referred to as the Holiness Code. I'm not sure who came up with

that. That's not like some sort of church father designation. It probably came about in the 1800s. Some scholar named this the Holiness Code. That's going to take us chapter 17 through 26. And as that particular name for these chapters suggests, there's a lot of talk about holiness, which is not surprising given that we're in Leviticus, which describes holy times and holy sacrifices and holy people and a lot of other holy things. So that's where we're going next, 17 through 26. Now, 17 is a little bit different than the rest of the chapters that we're going to encounter in this section. There's a lot of talk in chapter 18 about sex, the right people to have sex with and the wrong people to have sex with. So we're going to get into that next time, probably.

And then chapter 19 deals with various kinds of social concerns. Basically, you might summarize that as love your neighbor as yourself. So we have in chapter 19 a fleshing out of exactly what it means to love your neighbor as yourself. So we'll get to that in time, but chapter 17 is a little bit different here because it really is, it's almost like an addendum, you might say, to chapter 16 and the Day of Atonement. Because we saw, of course, in the Day of Atonement that the central ritual component or material, if you will, is blood. The blood of the bull, the blood of the goat, the blood that was taken all the way into the Holy of Holies and sprinkled for the mercy seat. And of course, we've seen this plenty of times in the past. Now, what's a little bit

different about chapter 17 is that we're going to have here in verse 11 an extremely important verse about why blood is significant. In fact, I would argue that it's the most important verse, not only in the New Testament, but in the Old Testament, but in the whole Bible, about why blood is so important to God. I think it was Frederick Buechner who once said, and I'm paraphrasing, that religious people have a tendency to try and be more spiritual than God. And one of the beauties of Leviticus in chapters like this is that it strips us of that spiritualizing tendency, and it roots us to the stuff of creation, specifically, in this case, to blood. So in the scriptures, blood is a spiritual object. In fact, I was just reading this morning in John Kleineck's commentary on Leviticus about this chapter, that blood is the only object that is declared to be both spiritual and material, part of the body anyway.

So we're going to talk in this section about not just blood, but also about sacrifices and where they are to be done, because that's another aspect. I guess you could say there's twin themes in chapter 17. One is about blood, why it's important to God and to us. And the second is, to use the old real estate motto, location, location, location. So this is about what location sacrifices can be offered and why that's important to God as well as to his people. So let's jump in. Chapter 17. The chapter starts out with an address to not just to Moses and Aaron and to the other priests, but to everybody. So this is a teaching that is going to be important for every single Israelite. And the teaching is this. I'll start here with verse 3. It says, any man from the house of Israel who slaughters an ox or lamb or a goat in the camp or who slaughters it outside the camp and has not brought it to the doorway of the tent of meeting to present it as an offering to the Lord before the tabernacle of the Lord.

So whoever does that, whoever sacrifices an animal or slaughters an animal ritually in the camp or outside the camp, without doing so at the doorway of the tabernacle, it says blood guiltiness, blood guilt is to be reckoned to that man. He has shed blood and shall be cut off from among his people. Let me pause there for a second. That's an amazing statement, because that's basically the attribution of murder, of bloodshed, if it is not done the way that God wants it and commands it to be done. So what's he saying? Well, he's saying that this is not about just any slaughter of an animal. He's talking about ritual slaughter, and in this case, most specifically, the slaughter for the peace offering, which we've talked about before. If that is done outside the home, or if you take it out into the country and slaughter it there, if you do that, and you do that as a sacrifice to God, then it's not a sacrifice to God. It's actually a sacrilege to the Lord.

And the blood of the animal that is shed is actually blood guilt that is placed upon the head of the offender. So if you have a family of Israelites and they have, we'll say, a lamb, and they want to offer, they want to have a peace offering in which the blood belongs to God and they enjoy the meal, the ritual, sacramental kind of meal among themselves, then there's only one place where that can be done. The animal has to be brought to the doorway of the Tent of Meeting and sacrificed there and no place else. Why? Why is it so significant?

Well, he goes on to describe why this is so important, because evidently what was happening among the Israelites, and maybe they did this back in Egypt, I don't know, but what was happening among some of the Israelites is that they were, they had basically assumed many of the theological presuppositions of the people surrounding them. And they were they were taking animals out into the field and they were sacrificing them there, maybe to the Lord, maybe to other gods, or maybe they were trying to sacrifice them to kind of the, you know, the whole pantheon to cover all of the deities. because we have we have this this verse this is seven it says they shall no longer so evidently this was taking place because this is saying don't do this anymore they shall no longer sacrifice their sacrifices to the goat demons with which they play the harlot this shall be a permanent statute to them throughout their generations you ever have any problems in congregations to serve of people uh sacrificing the goat demons that's been a pastoral issue that's the worst yeah those are always those are always like every pastor's nightmare smith family sacrificing the goat

demons again but i know that somebody's worshiping the goat demon whenever they they get upset when i move the american flag from the stage to the closet that might have that might have that might have rung a little too true for some listeners yeah we might have just lost them we might just lost some listeners yeah there goes there goes a few listeners shut the podcast down all i'm saying is the the goat demon is just it's just idolatry folks uh that's that thing can look like a goat head or it can look like stars and stripes it doesn't really matter yeah i mean that's that's This is a specific instance of a universal truth, I guess would be one way to say it. So, yeah, God is talking, in this case, very specifically about a particular pagan idea, idolatrous idea, that some of the Israelites had, that more or less you had the soil, which was, of course, used for agriculture, you had the soil associated with certain spirits.

and in order to keep these spirits happy in order to have good crops a good harvest we might say in order to have a steady income you got to keep the gods happy you got to make your sacrifices to these gods of the soil which in this case he calls goat demons but i mean it could be any any particular spiritual power and then animistic societies every you know there's powers all over the place and so the idea is that these little gods or spiritual beings or whatever you want to call them they require sacrifice and if you don't give them the sacrifice then they're going not they're not going to bless your your crops so you would take a sacrifice out to the field and you You would, as it were, give a drink of blood to the goat demons, or to whatever powers inhabited that particular acre of soil, or whatever pagan god was connected with agricultural production.

So, this is a particular kind of idolatry that is prohibited here, but it applies across the board. so whatever idolatry someone might be prone to whatever sacrifices they think they have to offer in order to provide for themselves stability financial stability social stability whatever it is whatever they think they have to sacrifice to in order to ensure that they have success well that's what is being talked about here and notice the description of what takes place this is if they do this they play the harlot that basically is self-imposed prostitution spiritual prostitution so that's that's not the way that we ordinarily think about idolatry but that's really what idolatry is when you worship whatever the idol is you are selling yourself into spiritual

prostitution that's that's the that's especially the old testament language of what takes place And that, of course, is not the way that we ordinarily like to think of our love of money or our worship of kind of nationality or whatever our particular idol might be. But that's what we're doing. We are we're not just kind of committing spiritual adultery. We're selling ourselves into a sort of spiritual prostitution in which we are serving this this false god. yeah there is i'll give you an example of of this kind of based on what i just said earlier one of the most horrifying church services i've ever been in is i went to a church uh on the 4th of july uh where it was sunday happened to be on the 4th of july this year and uh a sermon was

preached where the it was explicitly stated that um this this this nation that we live in america i know we have listeners other other places but uh this country was blessed by god because he had observed how much blood we had offered at the altar of freedom which i thought was maybe the most pagan thing i had ever heard in a christian church wow yeah and now you hear this kind of thing all the time like like if you're just you know people are you know support the the military or they'll they'll they'll honor people who have sacrificed a whole lot for their freedoms and that's all fine and good uh until you marry it with your with theology and then say like there is this thing called an altar of freedom where we have

like offered blood you're like that's idolatry dude like that's and that's not just idolatry but like that's like old school paganism right there that's that's straight out of the old testament stuff there i mean it's it is and so if you want a a modern example of us thinking that like blood counts for something at some like weird altar that isn't it's not the altar of god um there you go it it is is still a thing and uh and of course we you know we spiritually do this with all kinds of things but make sacrifices to our idols uh we sacrifice all kinds of things at the altar of our idols so we can get what we want that's not usually blood uh and this particular instance the reference was explicitly blood which made it even freakier yeah yeah that

that is by far the most uh crass national idolization example that i've ever heard yeah pretty horrifying yeah but but i that that kind of thinking even if it's not made explicit like that is rampant uh i mean it has been i don't know if it's like that in other countries but it certainly is i mean we've experienced that many many many times uh i i think it was jerry wilson uh tweeted out not very long ago uh something to the effect of if you if you don't believe that protestants believe in icons and try moving the american flag the church yeah that's why that's part of the reason why i was saying that i i've experienced that too because i don't really like this up like up here um it's just it's weird i'm i am you know

whatever if you have a flags in your church i'm not saying like first thing you need to do is go talk to your pastor about getting that done get this out of there it's a personal pet peeve of mine when there's like flags of nations like on like next to the body and blood of christ or whatever i just i just that bothers me uh yeah it it does me too i can remember one particular instance where i was i was sitting in the pew listening to a pastor preach and just where i was sitting i i i could look behind him and to his left on the wall was a cross but directly behind him with the American flag. And I thought

to myself, I don't know what other people would think, but I thought to myself, this is not the message that I want to see in church. Not because I'm anti-America whatsoever. Just because we're talking about two different kingdoms here. I'm not anti-America.

I'm just pro every tribe, tongue, and nation. Which is what, yeah. One holy Christian apostolic church, right? Yeah. yeah it's not one holy american i'm absolutely church i'm not anti-america i'm just pro being aliens and strangers and uh belonging to a kingdom not of this world and so uh there is there's a sense in which i think and i'm just a total i know it's a

bunny trail but hopefully people will find it interesting i think there's a sense in which churches um you you need to look at churches sort of as embassies uh of a different kingdom right and so yeah if you have like an american embassy embassy in turkey they'll be like an american flag there but the church is an embassy of no particular nation here but for the kingdom of god which means that that what what an american embassy in turkey wouldn't do would be to fly the turkish flag that's why they don't do that they're not that's not what they're doing there and so the church as sort of this embassy of of god's kingdom uh an embassy of the gospel flies no flag they they fly the banner of the cross uh that's that's that's what we that's our

deal and so that's that's the that's the reason behind it again if you i'm not saying if your church has a flag right there on the top of the building that you should leave or anything like that but i will say this i did move a flag once and uh i did get an earful about it and so me too yeah me too we both experienced that yeah yeah well i i think i think that's an example that hopefully everybody can can relate to and it is just one example of the many idolatries that uh that are out there you know it's whether it's uh nationalism or materialism or sexism or all the other kinds of idols that uh in which we fear love and trust more than more than god i mean there's there's a

whole pantheon of of idolatry out there and we tend to just uh move from one move from one to the to the other instead of fearing and loving and trusting in god above above all things that's right and we're out of time man that's it that is it episode well we didn't get around to verse 11 but we will next time next time verse 11 uh guys if you enjoy 40 minutes in the old testament you can help us out by rating and reviewing it over at itunes actually helps us out increases our our visibility also if you just share it on social media and uh just you know old school tell a friend all that stuff helps uh we appreciate everybody listening and sharing and rating and reviewing and all that uh and chad we will see you next week post yeah face to face

face to face post north dakota where we're going to talk about the psalms again uh when this comes out you will have very little time but hopefully if you're tossing around the idea if you're in flux if you haven't decided yet decide now that you will come hang out with me and chad hopefully we'll see you there chad we'll see you next week all right man see you then thanks