Leviticus

Teacher: Darrell Rott

Key Verse Leviticus 19:2 "You must be holy because, I the LORD your God, am holy.

Outline:

• * Burnt and Peace Offering   1-4
  • Herd
  • Flock
  • Birds
  • Grain
  • Fat
  • Blood
  • Yeast
  • Salt
• * Unintentional Sin   5:2-4
• * Sin of Nadab and Abihu   10
• * Clean and Unclean Meats   11
• Purification After Childbirth   12
• Serious Sin Diseases and Contaminated Clothing   13
• * Cleansing from Skin Diseases  14 (special attention 1-8, 28)
• Contaminated House-Mildew 14:34 (49-53)
• Body Discharges   15
• * Day of Atonement   16
• Sacrifices Must be at Tabernacle   17:1-10
• Prohibition against Eating Blood   17:11-16
• Living a Holy Life   18-22
  • Sex   18
  • Personal Conduct   19
  • Punishment for Disobedience   20
  • Rules for Priests   21-22
  • Worthy and Unworthy Offerings   22
• * Seasons and Festivals 23
  • Weekly Sabbath   1-4
  • Passover and Feast of Unleavened Bread   5-8
  • First Harvest (First Fruits, or Wave Sheaf)   9-14
  • Harvest (Pentecost)  15-22
  • Trumpets   23-25
  • Day of Atonement  26-32
  • Shelters (Tabernacles)   33-44
• Pure Oil and Holy Bread   24:1-9
• Example of Just Punishment   24:10-23
• * The Sabbath Year and Jubilee  25
• Blessings for Obedience   26:1-13
• Punishments for Disobedience 26:14-46
• Redemption of Gifts Offered to the Lord   27

“Looking at the Cross”

Taken from "The Mind of Jesus" by William Barclay  1960. Pages 249-286.

The Cross is designed to awaken within us not theological disputation but adoring love. It is nevertheless true that the more we think about the cross and the more we understand it, the greater will be the love and adoration within our hearts.

1. It is clear that Jesus went willingly, spontaneously, and open eyed to the cross. There never was a time in his earthly life when Jesus was not aware that at the end of the road there stood a Cross.  Matt. 26:12, Mark 12:1-12, Luke 9:22, 44, Matt. 9:14, Mark 1:11
2. Although Jesus voluntarily accepted the Cross, it is also true that he looked on the Cross as an utter necessity.  He regarded it as necessary and essential. Mark 8:32, Luke 22:22
3. Jesus was certain that the cross was a part of the eternal will and purpose of God. Jesus, therefore, did not regard himself as the victim of men (or God), but as the agent and instrument and willing servant of God. The Cross is a part of the plan, and the purpose and the design of God. To Jesus it was voluntary, and essential, for his will was fully, perfectly and voluntarily identified with the will of God (his Father).  Thus the basic question is: "Who do you say that I am?" Matt 16:15.  It is not enough to quote what others have said about Jesus. Personal knowledge, personal confrontation, personal discovery and personal decision alone are enough.
4. The basic New Testament statement about the death of Jesus and its significance is 1Cor.15:3: "Christ died for our sins, in accordance with the scriptures." The word for in this statement does not mean because of or in place of.  It means on behalf of, for the sake of, a fact most translations fail to bring out.
5. The word atonement is really at-one-ment. We may, therefore, go on to say that the death of Jesus has done something which nothing else could ever do to make us at one with God.
6. The two great kindred facts of the Cross are that Jesus died on behalf of the sins of man, and the effect of his death is to remove the estrangement between man and God and to make man and God at one.

Various views on the work of Jesus on the Cross.

1. The simplest view of the work of Jesus Christ is that he lived and died to be our example. 1Peter 2:21
2. Closely allied with the idea of Jesus as the perfect example is the idea of him as the divine bringer of knowledge, the divine illuminer of men, the divine revealer of God and the truth of God. 1Cor.4:6, John 8:32, 2Tim. 1:10.  In him the invisible becomes visible, the incomprehensible is made comprehensible, the impassible becomes capable of suffering.  But clearly the work of Jesus, the atonement he made, must mean more than that, if for no other reason than that example without the power to follow it, knowledge without the power to put it into practice, revelation without the power to turn it into life, can bring nothing but bitter frustration.
3. Another of the great early Church conceptions of the work of Jesus Christ is expressed in the idea of recapitulation. Eph.1:10, Rom. 5, 1Cor. 15:21.  The idea is that Jesus Christ recapitulates, re-enacts, reiterates, repeats the whole course of human history. In himself with this crucial difference-that he at all times presents the perfect life and the perfect obedience which man ought to have offered and failed to offer. By so doing Jesus Christ reverses the whole course of human history; it makes it what it ought to be; he cancels out the sin and failures and the rebellions and the disobediences. He thus by living life as it ought to be redeems man from the consequence of his sins. Jesus Christ repeats human history in the way it ought to have gone. In Jesus Christ the whole course of human evolution was perfectly carried out and realized in obedience to the purpose of God; he is the man God meant all men to be. He recapitulates human history, realizing the ideal instead of losing the ideal, and so redeems humanity from its sin.
4. The great dominant pictures of the work of Jesus Christ in his life and in his death, in the New Testament, in the thought of the early Church, as well as in SDA theology, is the Great Controversy idea of Christ the Victor. This is the idea that in his life, death, and resurrection Jesus finally and utterly defeated the evil demonic powers whose aim was to compass the death and destruction of mankind. The idea is that on the Cross there was a death grapple between Jesus Christ and the demonic powers of evil, and that once and for all Satan's power was finally defeated and broken forever.
5. One of the great ideas of the work of Jesus Christ which runs through much of early church thought, and which is still dominant in the thought of the Greek Orthodox Church, is the idea of the deification of man because of what Jesus Christ has done.   The idea is that Jesus Christ by taking human nature upon himself freed human nature from the corruptibility which is the consequence of sin and deified it. This idea does not mean that man becomes identical with God. It is to say that man can come to have the same kind of life, existence, and being as God has, but without becoming identical with God. The conception of deification is that man through Jesus Christ can be lifted out of the life of fallen and corrupt humanity into the very life of God.
   
   The incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the coming of God into humanity in human flesh, did something for human nature which cannot be undone. Call it deification, call it what we will, something has happened to mankind because godhead took manhood upon itself.
6. The most influential conception of the work of Jesus is that of Jesus as the victim and sacrifice for the sin of man. The idea of Jesus as the sacrificial victim for sin takes on three forms.
   1. Ransom Price (redeem): The death of Jesus paid for the liberation of man from the bondage which sin held him and from which he could never free himself.  Matt. 20:28, Mark 10:45, 1Tim. 2:5, 1Pet. 1:18, 1Cor. 6:20, 7:23, Gal. 3:13,4:5
   2. Sacrifice which atones for the sin of man: This is the most universal of all ideas on the cross. Orthodox Jewish religion was founded on the sacrificial system. In Jewish religion it was sacrifice which restored the lost and broken relationship between God and man.  Jesus was supremely and uniquely the one who restored the lost relationship between God and man. whose work bridged the gulf which sin had created between God and man, who made it possible for the sinner to receive forgiveness and to enter into the presence of God. God but forward Jesus as an expiation by his blood: Rom. 3:25, 1John 2:2 4:10, He 9:12, 10:11
   3. Satisfaction: This idea came out of the Middle Ages terms and categories of chivalry and knighthood.  To maintain the moral government of the universe, its moral governor must exact satisfaction when his law is broken, and his honor insulted. Jesus became man and in man and for man he offers to God the complete obedience to the will of God and complete submission to God which alone can satisfy and honor of God. This complete obedience of Jesus satisfies the injured honor of God, and saves man from the penalty and punishment which his sin had necessitated.
   4. Substitution: The idea is that Jesus Christ offered himself as a substitute on our behalf and endured the punishment which should have fallen upon us. He is the substitute for sinners; he suffered in our stea This is often called "forensic salvation" and is specially connected with Reformation thought. In modern times this interpretation has fallen into disrepute. It has undergone much criticism and there are many thinkers who have recoiled from it. But two things have to be said.
      1. There is something here that is fundamentally true. (I nailed him to the cross.  Check hymns; "At the Cross" #163 and "Amazing Love How Can It Be" #198)
      2. This is an interpretation and understanding of the Cross which has existed without break since the beginning of Christian thought. 2Cor. 5:21.
         There is no age in Christian thought to which the idea of Jesus Christ as the Savior, whose death was voluntary, vicarious, sacrificial, substitutionary has not been dear.

From this short study we can see the main great interpretations under which the work of the Cross has been understood. Broadly speaking, they may be grouped under three classes; Ransom, Satisfaction, and Sacrifice/Substitution.

It was never the attitude of God to man which had to be changed; it was the attitude of man to God. The New Testament makes it quite clear that the whole process of salvation finds its initiative in the love of God. God's attitude was always love. John 3:16, Romans 5:8, 1 John4:10

The moral influence interpretation of the cross is connected to Abelard who was born in 1079.  Here is a brief summary by J. K. Mozley, "Christ died, neither because a ransom had to be paid to the Devil, nor because the blood of an innocent victim was needed to appease the wrath of God, but that a supreme exhibition of love might kindle a corresponding love in man's hearts and inspire them with the true freedom of sonship of God." To but it very simply, we may say that Jesus came to proclaim, to demonstrate and to exhibit the love of God, to say in his life and death for men, "God loves you like this". Jesus came because, as Abelard believed, men had only to see the attitude of God to them, men had only to behold the love of God to answer and to respond to it.

When we bear all this in mind, we can lay it down that there are four great truths which we can affirm about the work of Jesus.

1. The work of Christ was a fourfold demonstration. In Jesus we see God in his attitude to men. We see in Jesus what man ought to be. In Jesus we see the perfect demonstration of the love of God. In the events which happened to Jesus we see the demonstration of the awfulness of sin.
2. The work of Jesus is sacrificial work. IT COST THE LIFE AND THE DEATH OF JESUS TO TELL MAN WHAT GOD IS LIKE!
3. The work of Christ is objective in its character. It is objective in the sense that it quite definitely produces and achieves something which forever continues to exist. It is not objective in the sense in which a legal transaction is objective. It is objective in this sense-- it produced a completely new situation in regard to the relationship between God and man.
4. The work of Christ is effective in its dealing with sin. At its lowest and its most obvious, the work of Christ provides man with the example of the good life. Man does not need only an example, he also needs power. We are not dependent on a Christ who lived and died, we are dependent on a Christ who lived and died and who is alive for evermore. Since he is alive, he is here in such a way that we can draw upon him for power other than our own.

It is quite wrong to think that one must confine oneself to one of the great classical interpretations and to hold that it expresses the whole truth, to believe that it alone is right and that all the others are wrong, to believe that belief in any one of them is essential for salvation, and to hold that he who believes in any of the others is a heretic and unsaved.

Finally: In the evaluation of any interpretation of the work of Jesus we must not test it by the bringing to it proof of texts; we must bring it to, and bring to it the whole of Scripture.

Listen to the book of Leviticus from BibleGateway: ESV, KJV, MSG, NIV, NKJV

Short Outline of Leviticus from Today's English Version

• Laws about offerings and sacrifices (1:1 – 7:38)
• The ordination of Aaron and his sons as priests (8:1 – 10:20)
• Laws about ritual cleanness and uncleanness (11:1 – 15:33)
• The Day of Atonement (16:1-34)
• Laws about holiness in life and worship (17:1 – 27:34)