Leviticus Series #4
Personal Holiness
Leviticus 17-27
CHCC: July 4, 2010
INTRODUCTION:
Well, today is July 4th, a national holiday which just happens to coincide with one of our days of worship. While we are celebrating Independence Day today, I will be taking the time to outline for you your independence from the old Levitical Law system. Believe me, you can be just as thankful for your freedom from the legalism of the law system as you can be thankful for your freedoms as a citizen of the greatest nation on the earth. By the way, your freedoms in Christ come because you are a citizen of heaven. God not only redeemed you from slavery to sin, he adopted you into his family and made you a joint heir with Christ.
Since it’s July 4 – we will focus on Freedom from trying to obey the LAW in order to be personally righteous.
I remember something that happened just after I moved to Texas from New Mexico in 1974. I was driving down a street in Alvin and was pulled over by a city policeman. He asked me if I was aware that I was driving over the speed limit in a school zone. Having just moved to Texas, I didn’t know enough about Alvin to know I was anywhere near a school. As it was, the school was about two blocks away and I had not passed by it yet. There had been a school zone sign, but I hadn’t seen it. (New Mexico school zone signs are accompanied by a yellow flashing light and cross hatching paint on the street – Texas just has a white rectangular sign and a car hiding around the corner.)
Anyway, that happened to me twice in the first month of my arrival in the state, which was enough to mess up my driving record and almost made me ineligible to drive the new church van the Arcadia Church bought for my youth ministry. The point is, that I arrived in the state ignorant of some of the laws of the State of Texas, and I paid a penalty for my ignorance of the law.
So try to imagine this: I’m driving carefully, just under the speed limit in a school zone when I see the police car light behind me and I pull over. The policeman gets out and walks up to my window with a big smile on his face and says, “Mr. Skidmore, thank you for driving so carefully at such a safe speed. You are a good man and the state of Texas just wants to show it’s appreciation by giving you this Good Driver certificate.”
How many of you believe that story? It doesn’t happen that way because the LAW only pays attention to us when we’re wrong. In the same way, the Old Testament Law only points out when we fall short.
James 2:10 points out the nature of the law when it says, “Whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles in just one point is guilty of breaking all of it.”
(Naked Gospel, Andrew Farley, p. 41)
The point is that the law had no provision for rewarding those who obeyed it perfectly (which no one ever did). It only had penalties for breaking it, and provisions for making sacrifices to make things right after sinning.
1. Laws for Personal Holiness
Leviticus 17-22 outlined various laws relating to personal holiness. These included the following:
· Ch. 17 Said the tabernacle was the only proper place to sacrifice animal offerings, then it gave various rules about not eating blood.
· Ch. 18 Listed prohibitions about improper sexual behavior
· Ch. 19 prohibited idolatry, profaning of offerings, mistreating the poor and unfortunates, and a whole list of various commands in miscellaneous categories.
· Ch. 20 addressed human sacrifices, spiritism, and another list of miscellaneous immoralities that were to be avoid
· Ch. 21-22 contained regulations concerning the priests.
· Ch 23-24 gave commands about feast days they were to celebrate (we will look at that more closely next week)
· Ch. 25 gave rules about the land they would inherit once they entered the land of Canaan (the land of promise)
· Ch 26 gave warnings against apostasy
· Ch. 27 had laws concerning gifts and endowments, and ended up with rules about tithing.
That’s quite a laundry list in those 11 chapters. There was quite a lot to remember if a person wanted to live a holy life. There were hundreds of ways a person could stray into sin and uncleanness if they weren’t careful. Unfortunately, a devout Jew would probably have to memorize the whole law in order to be able to keep it properly. Fortunately, memorizing the law was just what the priests, scribes, and Rabbis did. This made them valuable members of the Jewish community. If you had a question about a particular point in the law, the Jewish leader could explain it all to you.
For example, if you wanted to know how to keep the Sabbath perfectly, the Priest could outline all the ways you might inadvertently break the Sabbath if you weren’t careful. And once you found out all the rules you discovered that the best way to keep the Sabbath was to go nowhere, and do nothing from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. Otherwise you might mess up.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not criticizing the law itself. For as King David said in Psalm 19 which is about the Law of God, “The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul. The statutes of the Lord are trustworthy, making wise the simple. The precepts of the Lord are right, giving joy to the heart. The commands of the Lord are radiant, giving light to the eyes. The fear of the Lord is pure, enduring forever. The ordinances of the Lord are sure and altogether righteous. They are more precious than gold, than much pure gold; they are sweeter than honey, than honey from the comb. By them is your servant warned; in keeping them there is great reward...” (vs. 7-11)
The law itself is not the problem. The problem came when the people of Israel said to Moses, “Just tell us what to do and we will listen and obey.” (Deut 5:27). Those words were just barely out of their mouths before they revealed that they didn’t have it in them to actually do what God commanded. God was a righteous law giver, but Israel was not a righteous law keeper. We may listen to the law and learn what to do, but we are hard pressed to actually do it with any consistency.
But make no mistake about it; when God gave Israel the Law He knew what would happen. The law was not a failed experiment, but rather, an illustration of God’s purpose in making the law temporary, and sending his unique son to earth to fulfill and then replace the law with a much better way. The truth is that trying to keep the law will be a frustrating endeavor every time. We just aren’t wired for successful law keeping on our own. So what then is the better way, and how does it work?
2. Liberty from sin and death
In the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus talked about “gouge out your eye and cutting off your hand” etc. to show how hopeless the idea of personal perfection really is. Then in his Death and Resurrection, Jesus set us free from the LAW of sin and death. And why did we need to be set free from the limits of the law?
Well, for one thing a really good Legalist can give the appearance of morality, but Legalism can never produce Love. (Naked Gospel, A. Farley, p. 41) (any more than it can produce perfection.) The best that the Law can accomplish is to give budding legalists something to shoot for … even though they will miss the target by a wide margin every time.
But the law wasn’t designed to justify anyone. Instead, it was made to magnify sin so we would eventually run headlong and fall into the loving arms of the one and only savior. And let me tell you what the savior does for us. When we turn away from the impossible rules of the law and turn into the relational way of our Messiah. He does for us, the only thing we truly need done.
Since the law can’t die and it only condemns us, our only hope is to die to the law. (Romans 7) If we die, then we are set free from the impossible system of rule keeping. And that is what happened to us when we got connected to Christ. He died on the cross (literally died a human death), and we died (figuratively) with him. In fact, that is what our baptism signifies. It signifies that when Christ died, we died with him. We are buried with Christ in baptism and raised up just as he was to live a new life. (Romans 6:3-4) It is our death with Christ that takes us away from the realm of the law and frees us from the bonds of that whole system of attempted righteousness on the basis of flawless behavior. Instead of that, we now enjoy imputed righteousness on the basis of God’s grace and our faith in Christ. The law can never die, but we can, and in Christ, we did.
CONCLUSION:
Imagine coming across a body lying beside the road. You pull over and jump out of your car to check on him. You don’t see any evidence of an accident, but when you take his pulse, you realize the man is dead. You figure it might be from a heart attack … and from the condition of his body you figure he probably died from a lifetime of poor eating habits and lack of exercise.
So you run back to your car and pull out a new diet book that you bought recently. And you sit down beside the body and start reading it to him. “Chapter 1 – Eating Habits and your Heart …”
What good is that going to do? He’s DEAD.
That’s the way we are apart from Christ. We don’t need more education. We don’t need more rules to follow. We don’t need self-help programs. We need NEW LIFE. We need resurrection! (Naked gospel, A. Farley, p. 59)
And praise God, what we need the most is exactly what we receive from Christ. He frees us from the law itself by allowing us to die along with himself when he died on the cross; and he resurrects us to a newness of life where we are no longer married to the law which condemned us, but we are now free to be part of the bride of Christ. We know that when Jesus died on the cross he nailed the law to the cross (Col. 2:14) and in doing so took it out of the way.
As good and upright as the law is, we can all be glad that we are no longer under its scrutiny, for we could never live up to its righteous standards. Praise God, our righteousness was secured for us by Christ’s finished work on the cross. We now stand before God with the imputed righteousness of Christ because we are in Christ and He is in us. Christ himself is all we will ever need.
