40 Minutes In The Old Testament - Episode 125 (Leviticus 21:1-24)

Episode Date: June 22, 2018

Chad and Daniel spend a lot of time talking about death, how the people of Israel viewed it and what changed once Jesus arrived. Priests have very strict rules about who they can marry and what makes them unclean. But the true and great High Priest does things very differently. Have a listen! 1517 Podcast Network CHF New Jersey CHF Hattiesburg

Welcome to another episode of 40 Minutes in the Old Testament. 40 Minutes in the Old Testament is a 1517 podcast network podcast, meaning that we are part of a whole family of podcasts in that family consists theology and apologetics and culture and conversations uh set around a boxing theme something about birds flying not chad bird other birds there's there's all the things that you could possibly imagine over there so you should go to 1517legacy.com slash podcast check out the the family and see if there's something else there that interests you. Chad, it is incumbent upon people to spend at least part of their summer with us

if they are in the New Jersey or the Hattiesburg area because we're spending our summer going to where you are. Taking this show on the road. On the road. So city events, August 4th. That's not that far away. That's pretty soon. August 4th in New Jersey

at Hillside Lutheran Brethren Church we're going to have a city event there and then September 15th Hattiesburg, Mississippi we're going to have a city event there the great thing about both those events is that they are free completely free, we've never done

completely free events and so we're giving that a test run, people have been generous and made it a way to make the events free so you can uh you can come just by signing up we do however need you to sign up uh because we need to know how many of you are going to be there so we can have the right amount of hospitality because we're hospitable people we're good people chad of course we are we're good people everybody

everybody says that everyone says it everyone knows it it's true so you know we want to we want to be hospitable to you so you got to sign up so you can go over to christ sold fast go to city events page you get all the information and register for either one of those events if you're in those areas we'd love to hang out with you they're they're a good time all right chad that was that was the quick laundry i can ask can i ask you one question i heard a rumor what is it i had a rumor that if you're going to san diego you better you better get your ticket because they're about gone or are they already gone no no no there are uh i believe there are last i looked which was i think yesterday uh last i looked there were 13 tickets oh wow 13 yeah yeah so yeah if

you're uh if you're going to if you think that you are going there and i assure you if you think that you are going to buy your ticket in august or september you are mistaken you will not be buying a ticket at that time there are uh there are 13 tickets left for that event uh so and it's not as though you know there's 13 out of 50 uh that's that's not there's there's 13 out of hundreds and uh and you uh have you better get on it so you can go over to here we still stand dot org register actually you know the price right now is uh for those tickets is 249 dollars which also you know includes all your meals and and all that it's and you get beverages and the whole thing and uh and also which is still good is if you want to come you can get 50 off one of those

13 tickets by using the code 40ot it'll knock 50 off so you could come for 199 um we would love to see you there but if you're gonna do that you better get on it all right so now chad we are uh We're in Leviticus, and we're moving right along. We are, yeah. We're about to jump into a new section today. We spent some time on 19 and 20, wrapped up pretty much the main gist of 20 last time. I think we've at least touched on most of the details in that chapter. So we are, yeah, we're jumping the fence here into chapter 21 and 22, because those two

are a unit. So that is the task for today. And I'm kind of hoping we'll be able to cover most of the material in here because some of it is repetitious from what we've seen before. So we'll give it our best shot. So here we go. Yeah, 21 and 22 are a unit because almost all of the of the material in here concerns a select group within uh within the body of israel and that is the priesthood now we haven't if you if you know uh a little bit about the rest of rest of the old testament you know there's a group called the levites who are like the helpers of the priest who who come in later we haven't heard a lot about the levites so far they're they're still coming up. So we'll bring them into discussion a little bit later on as we work our way through

the rest of the Pentateuch. But for now, the concern is with the sons of Aaron, grandsons, great-grandsons, all these descendants of Aaron, because they are the ones who are going to be, in today's language, we would say they are in the ministry. They are the chosen ones from the family of Aaron who enter into the the sacred precincts of God's house and they are they're basically his servants so they're they're they're dual servants I guess you could say because on the one hand they do represent the people to God but they also then are the servants of God and that they represent him to the people but you can kind of think of the priest as they're living and working in God's house.

So they are his servants who are doing all the kind of stuff that needs to be done in a regal house. But they're also more than just servants who are engaged in various tasks. They're also, in a sense, you can think of them as guards, bodyguards, because they're also there to watch over, to guard these sacred precincts, to make sure that nothing enters there that's not supposed to. That what goes on there is in keeping with the Lord's commands. So their basic duty as guards is to guard against any defilement. So anything that's going to defile the name or the presence of God,

they are to keep out. So in that sense, they are really, I think in the New Testament, we even hear about temple guards. Well, the priesthood, they were the guards. They were those who protected the Lord's house, not from what we think of as like intruders. These kind of intruders were the intruders of defilement or unholiness or sacrifices that shouldn't be offered there, whatever it might be. So they were extremely important in that particular duty, but also extremely important in that they were the stand-ins for the rest of the Israelites who were not permitted to enter into certain parts of the tabernacle. And among all of these priests, of course, you had the head priest, the high priest.

And so some of what we're going to talk about in 21 and 22 concerns only him, because there were certain requirements that were exclusively directed toward what he could do or couldn't do since he was the top dog, as it were. So what we're going to see right away in these first couple of sections is a discussion of just priest in general. And then in verse 10, it's going to shift to the high priest in particular. But each of these sections deals with really two different, I guess you could say, just real-life scenarios and how the priests are to address them and how they are to conduct themselves in relationship to these real-life situations. And those two real-life situations are, one, bereavement or death or funerals, everything connected with the death of someone close to them.

So what are they allowed to do and what are they not allowed to do in relationship to death? And then secondly is marriage, relationships. So who can they marry and then who can they not marry? and we'll talk a little bit about why in each of these real-life situations, why at least it seems to us why these are the way they are. So I just kind of go through this rather quickly as far as the requirements go for each of the different groups, the priest in general and the high priest in particular. So it starts out with addressing all the priests, and the basic rule concerning the priest in relationship to death is that if someone close to them dies and this is

this is uh especially when they're especially when they are uh at service so they're when they're serving as a priest so if someone close to them dies uh there's only certain people that they are allowed to defile themselves in connection with so by the father themselves i mean that they They can basically help with the preparation of the body for burial, in some way come into contact with the corpse, and so knowingly and willingly place themselves into a state of ritual defilement or ritual uncleanness. So there's some they can and there's some they can't. And so if it's the mother or father of a priest, or if it's the son or the daughter of the priest, or his brother or his unmarried sister, for all of these people, if they die and their body is in need of being taken care of and prepared for burial, then the priest can place himself in a state of ritual uncleanness to care for them. but anybody else he is not allowed to do that so if if uh and the commentaries disagree on this to some extent uh as to whether and this is this is really this is surprising uh as to whether he's

even able to do this for his own wife i mean verse four can be translated various ways verse 4 says he shall not defile himself as a relative by marriage but that can also be translated he shall not defile himself as a husband by marriage among his people so the commentaries that i look at uh have have basically argued that even for his own wife he's not allowed to be involved in the ritual preparation of her body for burial and because of that he will not do he will not defile himself but the same would go for her extended family or for you know if you're if your good friend dies and you want to help with the burial and your pre i mean help with the you know the preparation of the body uh and you're a priest well you can't do it it's simple as that

nor can you disfigure your body uh as a sign of grief or mourning like shaving your head or shaving the edge of your beard or some of these pagan customs like uh making cuts cuts in the body. None of that they are allowed to do because, it says in verse 6, they're holy to God. The priests are holy to God, and by engaging in these, what we would think of as natural loving actions, they would contract ritual defilement by their contact with the dead, and that would then prevent them from serving at at the sanctuary and if they were you know say they were to defile themselves and then try and enter into the temple courts into the tabernacle courts in order to serve they would bring that defilement into god's house and would be breaking basically the second

commandment so because they're holy because they're set apart because they offer the lord's gifts they are not allowed except in those certain situations with close family members to place themselves in a state of uncleanness. Let me just skip ahead a few verses. We'll come back to the marriage part. Let's skip ahead to the high priest. Now, if you're a high priest, so along these same lines,

if you're the high priest, then it doesn't matter who it is. If you're serving as a high priest, then even if your mother or father dies, then you can't leave the tabernacle to go take care of them so for the high priest basically it doesn't matter who it is for no for no death are you allowed to place yourself in a state of ritual uncleanness so that's the two that's the that's the that's the two groups and how they relate to how they relate to death

so uh yeah i i guess uh just to talk a little bit about why this is the case uh and we've discussed this before but in the in the uh in the biblical in the biblical mind uh and this isn't just old testament this is new testament as well um there's something which is which is very contrary to the way that we think about death today i'm speaking when i say we i'm just talking about in our in a broader in the broader cultural mindset we think of death as simply you know part of the what the circle of life or the cycle of life or we talk about death you know he or she was 85 or 90 and just died of a of a natural death well that is that's completely contrary to the way that the scriptures think about death because in in in the bible death

is never natural uh it is always unnatural that is it is always and you could say it's always anti-natural. It is opposed to the nature that God himself has created within us. So we weren't created to live and then die. So death is always an invader that has come in and has spoiled the good creation of God. So death is not the end of life. Death is the enemy of life. Death always comes as the enemy and thus must be treated in that way and especially in the old testament then when you when you when you have a death occur when you have uh when you have the dead one himself or herself there they become a source of defilement in the sense that by by contact with that death it's a contact with the enemy not that person but death itself and so it places one in this state

of of defilement until they can be cleansed of that but that's a that's a very different way of thinking about death uh from from the standpoint of the day i mean we we are so upside down on on the way that we think about death in our in our culture that uh it's it comes as a shock i think to some people to think about the way that the scriptures scriptures speak of speak of death which is always as as an enemy and not a friend yeah i mean even even a curse right i mean like yeah they understand that um the death is not natural and that uh that it is is evidence of, uh, of the curse. Not that like this person is, uh, brought some individual curse upon themselves, like you said, but that it speaks to the curse of, of sin, because I mean,

as the wages of sin is death, right? And so death is, uh, is even then associated with, with sin that you don't, you don't die probably, you know, I mean, I suppose you could commit some sin that killed you uh you know but uh but largely speaking it's not that oh this person must have sinned in this way therefore they're they died but that the fact that people die uh speaks to the reality of sinfulness so there's nothing sort of more unclean than death because it is the final you know it's the final outcome of the fact that we're sinful yeah and that's and that's the reason i like the way you say it's the final outcome and that's the reason why all of the what you might think of as like uh little deaths little little things that lead up to death are also

in some way connected with death itself you know like the uh uh the presence of blood whether it's a woman's menstrual cycle or something to do with it with a man as well i mean if there's a if there's a presence of blood. Well, blood betokens this loss of blood is like a little icon of death and it partakes of that process that leads to that final outcome. And the same with some other things we'll look at a little bit later in these chapters concerning bodily deformities or bodily ailments or sicknesses. All of this is in one way or another connected with the gradual demise of the human body. And because of that, there are certain kinds of restrictions that are connected with them. So that's why it's, except in certain very specific cases, a priest is not

allowed to come into contact with a corpse because the corpse is like, you can think of the corpse of a person as the microcosm of a world gone wrong. So anytime that you see a dead body, really what you're seeing, if you can kind of think of it in this way, is this is everything that's wrong with the world in this one person. So the fact that someone created in the image and likeness of God, someone that God intended to live forever, someone who is the king or queen on earth someone who is the servant of the most high i mean all of these things when they are dead that is that is the greatest revelation of the fact that the world is is messed up so they're the corpses of microcosm of the world gone wrong and so you could you could touch a corpse in

certain circumstances but not many most of the time a priest was to keep far away from them and and I might throw this in before I forget, that explains then, partly, anyway, in the parable of the Good Samaritan, why the priest and Levite passed by, right? Now, there could have been a lot of reasons why they passed by. Maybe they were jerks, maybe they just didn't care, maybe they didn't have compassion or whatever it might have been, but one of the reasons that the priest passed by on the other side of the road when he saw the man who was beaten up and left for dead is because if he would have come over to that person and touched him and he was dead, then he would have defiled himself.

And he would have been, because it wasn't, of course, his son or daughter or mother or father. It was just a stranger. So because of that, it's one of the reasons that the priest acts the way that he does. It's not an excuse, but that's why that element is in the parable. And that's also why, I might throw this in, That's also why one of the actions of Jesus is so shocking. You remember that when he met the widow who was going out to bury her son from the widow of Nain,

she was a widow, this is her only son, and Jesus stops the procession and he touches the beer. He touches the, what we would call the, I guess, the coffin or the casket where the dead boy was being, on which he was being carried out. By doing that, Jesus places himself in a state of, technically speaking, of ritual defilement. So he was, by touching the dead, he was touching this microcosm of the world gone wrong that I mentioned earlier. But Jesus does that a lot. I mean, he touches a leper. He lets unclean people touch him. And this is one of the ways, I think it's one of the underlooked messages of the gospel, is that throughout his life, Jesus is, as it were, a sponge who's soaking up disease and death and sickness and uncleanness

and defilement. He's bringing it into himself. It doesn't just happen at the cross. His whole ministry is, as it were, a ministry of taking on himself through all of these various scenarios, the uncleanness and the gone wrongness of the world. And then finally, this of course comes to its crescendo on the cross where everything is heaped upon him. But it's not just a one-time event. That's what his whole ministry is about. It's about taking on uncleanness and everything that's wrong with the world, including death and sin, in order that he might die for that, and by his resurrection, defeat death, and then bring life and cleansing and healing to the world as a result of that. That's part of his priestly work for us, and it's a very

un-Old Testament kind of way of doing it, because that's not the way the priests conducted themselves in the Old Testament, but Christ is a different kind of priest. He's actually a priest who seeks defilement he seeks defilement in the sense that he seeks out those who are in the old testament excluded like lepers like dead people like hemorrhaging women he seeks them out lets them touch them touches them because this is his way of taking the tabernacle out to the people and bringing cleansing to them by taking their defilement into into himself yeah this is this is why paul's language about death is it's very different than the old testament language about death i mean so when paul speaks of death he speaks he speaks about death almost in a mocking

tone when he does this like where is your victory where is your sting that kind of thing uh it really is i mean uh if you were if you were a jew in that time and you're hearing the kinds of things that paul is saying about death where he's he he doesn't even look at it as some kind of of great foe anymore i mean it's sort of like a headless goliath now right um so paul gets to talk about death as as this defeated enemy uh as this thing that doesn't have any power uh as a as a bully with no strength right and so uh and that's all because jesus does in fact reverse the very way we think about death uh so before christ it does is all this evidence of the curse and all this stuff now now it's it's just the door to real life it's just something

it's a valley that you pass through right but that's not the case i mean like there wasn't you know in the old testament they don't have this sort of they have this like being laid down with your father's thing but they don't spend there's not a bunch of stuff in the old testament about the afterlife um there's not a bunch of stuff about you know oh well he's in a better place you know i mean they don't really talk like that you know uh death is is not a good not a good thing and uh and they don't they don't talk a lot about hell either uh that these aren't and they talk about sheol but that's not hell the way that any modern people understand hell it's just the place of the dead and it's it's not a good thing uh and there

certainly isn't a whole lot of talk about well he died but you know don't worry he's he's in a better place now and his suffering's over and all that kind of stuff no i mean death was just sort of this strictly strictly spoke of as this evil as this bad thing there's this curse and and christ comes along and defeats that and then essentially changes death into simply a vehicle the vehicle that you that takes you to eternity right uh which is a pretty radical turn yeah very radical i i think one of the clearest indications of this change from old testament to new testament it just struck me this morning i never i had never crossed my mind before uh but i got to thinking about the fact that in in the church today we bring corpses into god's house i know the church

is not the same as a tabernacle but still this is where the people of god are gathered around god's gifts and so yeah there's a there's a very strong parallel between the tabernacle and and where we gather together as the as the body of christ today well you would never ever unless you want to get struck down you would never bring a corpse into the tabernacle for a funeral right we do that all the time we bring dead people into church this is the this is this is the the fruit of the resurrection we because christ has brought his own death into the father's presence he is the He is the lamb slain, alive and yet slain, who is at the right hand of the Father. He has brought defeated death, his own body which defeated death, into the presence of the Father.

And so it's almost, it's really a mockery of death when we bring a corpse into the church. This is us saying that, yes, this body is dead, but this body will be raised. And this person is in the presence of the Lord. And so death, where is your sting? O grave, where is your victory? So the presence of a corpse in church is not making this church defiled. Rather, this body is evidence of this person's baptism into Christ and the hope that they have in the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come. You couldn't have done that in the Old Testament.

No way. It was completely forbidden. So, I mean, you couldn't even touch a corpse and bring yourself into church, much less bring a corpse into the tabernacle. But we do the very opposite, and it's all because of the impact that the resurrection makes upon how we understand ourselves and death and life itself. Yeah, that's also part of the reason why Jesus' command to roll away the stone on Lazarus' tomb is like a crazy command.

because this dude's been dead four days. I mean, there's like all kinds of uncleanness going on. They don't do that. But that's what he does. Yeah, everything changes when the resurrection of the life stands on earth. You know, death is defeated. He's like the David who's holding up the decapitated head of Goliath, right? So death has been killed.

The grave has been buried. And that, therefore, transforms our understanding of death. Not that it is no longer an enemy, but it's a defeated enemy. And so Paul is even bold enough to say that all things are yours, and he has this long list of all the things that are yours, and included in that list is death. So death becomes our, no longer just an enemy, but it's a defeated enemy who's forced actually to serve us, in the sense that it becomes the means whereby we enter into the presence of Christ and then await the resurrection. Something to think about in relationship to the priesthood

and death and how things have changed. Now, the other aspect of this is relationships, so priest and marriage. So there were certain requirements of priest in general, and then and also certain requirements of a, uh, of the high priest. So if you're a priest in the old Testament, who can you marry? Well, of course you just marry the girl you fall in love with, right? No, it doesn't work that way. Uh, so if you're, if you're a priest, uh, you don't go to match.com and find some, uh, some girl that you, that you have a lot in common with and, and decide to get hitched. You, uh, first of all, you, uh, you, you cannot marry a woman who, uh, has been in the, uh, uh, involved in any kind of prostitution. So, uh, in the language

of verse seven, you shall not take a woman who is profaned by, by harlotry, uh, nor it goes on shall, uh, these general priests take a woman who's been divorced from her husband. So those are the two requirements. If, uh, if you're going to get married as a, as a priest, then you can't marry someone who has been engaged in any kind of prostitution, nor can you marry a woman who's been divorced. You marry a virgin who doesn't meet either one of those requirements. So that's for a priest in general. For the high priest, though, it's even stricter. So it says that, I'm down here in verse 13 now, so if you're the high priest, then you take a woman, you take a wife and her virginity, so that's the same as the regular priest, but he also cannot marry a

divorced woman or a woman who's been profaned by harlotry, but he also cannot marry a widow. So the basic requirement for the high priest is the same, except for a general priest could marry a widow, the high priest cannot. So those are the requirements for marriage. Now, what I like about this is when you take these requirements and then you kind of transfer those over into the New Testament and think about this in relationship with Christ as our priest and us as the church as his bride. And you've kind of got a you've got a strange thing going on here because it's like it's as if Christ, when he marries his bride, the church, there's a there's a change that happens with her. Because, of course, when Christ marries the church, he's going to marry a woman who, like Hosea's wife, Gomer, has been defiled. You know, there's there's nothing clean about her. There's nothing clean about us.

So it's not like Christ goes looking for virgin believers, virgin in the sense of pure and blameless. There are no options. The wife search would be over before it even started if that was what Christ was out for. So instead, Christ marries basically a harlot, one who is defiled. But what happens is by his very act of love, his loving atonement, his marriage to her, he transforms her into the bride that she is meant to be. So in a strange twist, Christ marrying the church transforms her into a virgin, if you will. Makes her pure and blameless. Yeah, if you don't think that the language that – well, so the way this works is the language of – that God uses to describe Israel as like sort of his bride.

I mean we've talked about this a ton about the language of like sort of spiritual adultery and that sort of thing and spiritual prostitution, which applies to Israel. But there's a lot of language in the Old Testament, too, about Israel being the bride or a woman, right? And then, of course, we know that Israel is ultimately about the church. The church is the true Israel. But if you're just, like, wondering, like, how unpure does God think his chosen people, his bride is? Well, yeah, you can read Hosea or go read Ezekiel and figure out, like, how impure he thinks that bride is. There's a parental warning on Ezekiel. You might want to read that with your children.

It doesn't paint a great picture of his people. It's an R-rated book. It is. It is. There's a lot of wallowing in blood and whatnot. not i mean there's essentially everything that we've talked about that's like hey this is what makes you pure ezekiel tells you that's like all or these are everything that we've read that says like these are the things that would defile you ezekiel says that's who you are that's that's exactly the state that that i have come upon you in yeah yeah with that in mind and with these

regulations regarding the marriage of a priest in mind, it really clarifies the difference by which Christ is engaging in his own priesthood, because he doesn't marry a virgin. He doesn't marry someone who hasn't been involved in prostitution. He marries the very worst. but what his love does what his marriage to us does is it makes us pure because by becoming one flesh with him we we share in his holiness we share in his purity and basically all of the the nastiness and the filth and the uncleanness by which we had polluted ourselves is transferred it to him and by his atoning act on the cross it's taken care of and so we become recipients of of his holiness and his righteousness yeah there's baptismal implications there too i mean

as paul says in ephesians 5 uh well how how is he make the church pure um just so you know this is not that that passage is not about you washing your wife with the bible um as i've heard some people say it like just you need to wash your wife with the word that's not what that text says uh that text says to love your wife like christ loved the church and gave himself for her and then what he do for the church he washed her with pure water and the word um and where the word and water are combined you have you have baptism so uh god has this adulterous uh whoring um bride that he washes in baptism and makes uh pure and holy sanctifies her and so uh yeah that the you're you are a part of the church so not only is is baptism sort of this thing that brings you into

the church but it's the thing that makes you sort of this um qualify this baptism is in that sense the thing that qualifies you to be the bride of christ because that is where you're made clean It's where all of the whoredom and adultery and all the things that defile you are done away with. I'm still kind of hung up trying to imagine how someone thinks that means washing their wife with the Bible. I don't even know what that means. I don't even know what that is. I've heard it, man. If you have marital issues, you just got to keep washing your wife with the words of Scripture.

That is not, I mean, come on. That's talking about Christ and the church You're supposed to love your wife in that way In the way that he died for The church But the washing with water And the word is talking about what Christ Has done to sanctify

The church And that's baptismal language I'm sorry, it just is I'll have to try that tonight when I get home Stacey gets home I'm going to wash you With the Bible Just to see what her response is

Yeah, I've never heard that, but it's not surprising. People come up with all kinds of crazy things to twist around what Paul says there. But anything to get out of a text being about baptism. Yeah, exactly, exactly. The chapter wraps up with, I think maybe we can just kind of touch on this, and if we want to pick it up next time, we can. But about a few other requirements, these are like physical requirements for if you serve in the priesthood. So if you're blind or lame or disfigured, have deformed limbs, basically any kind of bodily injury or bodily deformity,

which is going to either prevent you from serving in the tabernacle, or in some way, which is an indication of how death has, as it were, worked beforehand to disfigure the body that it will eventually kill, then you are not allowed to serve as a priest. Now, I will say this has absolutely nothing to do with saying these people are somehow less worthy in their humanity of serving. It has nothing to do with that. This has to be understood theologically, because the priests are to be those who are—like the sacrifices, must be unblemished so the bodies of the priest, as much as is humanly possible, are unblemished as well, because the body of the priest is a sacrifice, just like the animals that they bring are sacrifices. And what I what I appreciate about this to kind of go in the same route that we were with our earlier discussion is how this changes with with Christ, because he comes as a one who, if you know the story, Ragman, he is like the Ragman goes around picking up various bodily ailments and problems from people. and he's transformed into all of this pain and suffering of those around him. That's what Christ ends up doing for us. And so he becomes the blind man and the lame man and the disfigured man

and the deformed man on the cross. But that is, in his case, that's his very act of priestly service. Because by that, he is absorbing in everything that's wrong with the human body in order that he might be the source of the resurrection of the glorified body on the last day. And I wish I could say more about that, but I guess if we do, we'll have to do it next time because we are, the 40 minutes is up.

The 40 minutes is up. Well, guys, go and do all the things. The podcast is free. Give it a rate, give it a review. It's the least you could do, but we'd appreciate it. Chad, we'll see you next week. All right, man. See you then. Thanks. We'll see you next time.