The Christians Hour

Aaron Brockett: You're listening to The Christians Hour. Thank you for joining us today. It's a pleasure to have you with us. The Christians Hour is a ministry of Gospel Broadcasting Mission, where we proclaim the hope of Jesus Christ around the world through radio and media until all have heard.

Today, we begin a brand new four-part series that explores one of the most overlooked books of the Bible. It's the book of Leviticus. For many people, it's a book they began reading with good intentions but quickly skip over. At first glance, it can seem a little like these instructions about sacrifices, ceremonial laws, purity, and regulations. But what if those pages contain one of the clearest pictures of God's heart found anywhere in Scripture?

Leviticus reveals a holy God who longs to dwell among His people and graciously provide a way for sinful people to come near to Him. Every sacrifice, every ceremony, and every detail ultimately points us forward to Jesus Christ, our perfect and final sacrifice. Join us as Ben Cachiaras, lead pastor of Mountain Christian Church in Joppa, Maryland, helps us uncover the richness of this remarkable book and discover why Leviticus is far more than a collection of ancient laws. It's a powerful story of God's holiness, His grace, and His invitation to draw near. Well, here's Ben to share more.

Ben Cachiaras: Today, we're kicking off a brand new series, and I'm really excited about it. I think this is going to be one of those where there will be some "aha" moments for some of us. It's going to connect some dots because we're going to dive into a book of the Bible that I think for a lot of us is probably pretty strange. When you meet a couple that has been together a long time, and she says, "When I first met him, I couldn't stand him." They tell the whole story, how he was such a jerk, he was just so weird, he turned me off, and I just ignored him. But then, this happened, and I ended up having to spend time with him, and then he kind of grew on me, and eventually, they fell in love and got married. Some of you, that's your story.

Well, I actually hope that's exactly what happens for many of us as we study this book of the Bible because some of us think it's weird, or we've ignored it, or it's been a turn-off. But as we spend time with it, I think it's going to grow on you. As we dive into what might be the most important book you've never read, this Old Testament book that's tucked away, that is often passed over and ignored, can be something that you can really warm toward, and you'll see why. Let's be honest. This is a book that has derailed a lot of people.

All the people who have said at one time or another, "I'm going to read through the whole Bible," have usually hit a speed bump and fallen off the wagon at this very foreign and difficult-to-know-how-to-apply book. It has lengthy descriptions about worship sacrifices. It has stuff about wearing clothing woven of two different kinds of material. It says stay away from crabs. It's in the Bible. What do you do if you get mold in your house? What if you touch a lizard? How do you trim your beard? There's stuff about slaughtering animals. There's blood. There are detailed regulations about everything from contagious diseases to purity rituals and purification rites for after childbirth.

I told you it was different. By now, some of you have probably figured out that the Old Testament book that we're talking about is the book of Leviticus. It's the third book of the Old Testament, part of what we call the Torah—those foundational first five books of the Bible, or the books of Moses, or the law of Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Sometimes called the Pentateuch—Penta means five, that's why it's called that. For ancient Israel, this book was not weird or strange or foreign. It was very central. It was very, very important.

In fact, for centuries, Jewish children would start memorizing the Bible with this book, the book of Leviticus, at the age of three because there are about 613 commands or directives from God in the Old Testament. About half of them are right here in Leviticus. So, no wonder you want your kids starting right there. A lot of people are surprised to learn that Leviticus is one of the most quoted or alluded-to books in the New Testament. In fact, what we're going to see is that even though this was written and took place centuries before the days of Christ, Leviticus is all about pointing clearly and directly to Jesus.

We're going to learn that you really can't understand so much of the New Testament until you understand some stuff about the Old Testament, and that's where the "ahas" are going to come in. In the book of Leviticus, God gives minute, detailed instructions about how to worship Him and how to stay pure before Him, how to cleanse ourselves from uncleanness so we can be in God's presence and dwell with Him, because that's what we want. We want to dwell in God's presence, and He wants to dwell with us.

So, God lays out what's clean and what's unclean in these Old Testament rules, how to be set apart for Him. He established an entire system of worship and sacrifices and offerings that deal with sins, and instructions for the priests so they could mediate for the people. When someone hears all that, one of the questions we might have is, "Well, what purpose did all that serve anyway? All those laws and all that ritual and all that stuff?" The New Testament actually speaks to this lots of places. Let me just give you one place where a guy who was a very devout religious Jew observing all of this stuff by the name of Paul actually said this as he later became a Christ follower.

Galatians chapter 3, verse 24 says, "Let me put it another way. The law, referring to books like Leviticus, was our guardian until we could be made right with Christ, until Christ came. It protected us, gave us a way to stay safe until Christ came." And now that the way of faith in Jesus has come, we no longer need the laws as our guardian. He's saying books like Leviticus escorted us and led us up to the time when now, through faith in Christ, we can have this access to God. Now, if we were going to say there's a theme for this, it might come in chapter 19, verse 2, and it's this. God says through Moses to the people, "You must be holy, for I, the Lord your God, am holy."

Now, when we think of the word holy, most of us think of someone who's really righteous, like someone who doesn't sin and does no wrong, who's morally upright. But in Leviticus and other Old Testament books, that's not what the word holy really means. We have to get this straight, or you won't understand most of it. Holy just means set apart, separate, not mixed in with ordinary things. That would be profane and common and ordinary. God's not that way at all. You need to also, as My people, to relate to Me, be holy and also distinct from the world around you. Be devoted completely. Some of you have fine china at home. You don't use it for your picnic. It's holy, in a sense. It's set apart for a specific thing.

Be set apart for Me because God is holy. So, He gives instructions for how they could do that, not blending in like the others. Some of it seems strange to us, but it was very important because God was so holy. There's a lot to unpack here. Stay on your toes, buckle up. You ready to go? We're going to cover some miles today. The name Leviticus just means pertaining to the Levites. The Levites were the sons of Levi, one of the tribes of Israel who were appointed to be this special group of priests.

Big chunks of this special book are a detailed guidebook, a manual for these priests, for the Levites, thus the name. It tells how they were supposed to carry out sacrifices, how they were supposed to purify themselves before they went and mediated for the people. It tells the people how they were supposed to live with and for each other to live holy lives so they could be different in order to make a difference. That was the overall picture. Well, the first few words of Leviticus are very important to notice. It's pronounced *Vayikra el-Moshe*, which means, "and the Lord called out to Moses."

It means to call on someone, to summon them, to invite them to say, "Come on, come, come." That's what this book is about. It's about God in His mercy reaching out, calling out in love to His people through Moses in this case, to bring them back into a relationship with Him, to help them know how they, as sinful people, could still come near and dwell with a holy God. He says to Moses, "Here's how we're going to do this." Exodus chapter 25, verses 8 and 9: "Have the people of Israel build Me a holy sanctuary so I can actually now live among them." Unheard of, but He offered that.

"You must build this Tabernacle, this holy dwelling, and its furnishings exactly according to the pattern I will show you." A good bit of the book of Exodus is all the detailed instructions and exact specifications, parts lists, and everything else for this huge tent structure, this special portable Tabernacle. Tabernacle means like tent or dwelling, where God would come. They had to be able to transport it wherever they went because God's presence would be in that Tabernacle, that tent. To understand Leviticus, you have to understand a little bit about this Tabernacle because so much of the book of Leviticus actually takes place in and around the Tabernacle, this tent of meeting where God's presence dwelt.

So, let's use our imaginations now as we kind of get familiar with the Tabernacle. We're going to see and smell and experience this. You leave your dusty tent out in the desert, and you approach this holy dwelling place of God, careful to observe all the stipulations in cleaning, but don't worry, you don't really have to go any further because you can't go in unless you're a priest. So, we'll pretend we're sneaking in with a priest undercover to see what we might see. As we enter in through the purple gates on the left, we go all the way in. The first thing we see is a courtyard, this open area.

The first thing you see when you come to the courtyard is you see a brazen altar. This is where the priests had detailed information about how to offer five different kinds of sacrifices to God on behalf of the people. This is what's talked about in detail in Leviticus 1 through 7, the whole seven chapters. There were different kinds of offerings that they made. For example, there was a burnt offering, the grain offering, and there were other offerings, like the fellowship offering, sometimes called the peace offering. This is where an animal was cooked up, and part of it was offered to God as a way of saying thank you.

But then, the other part you shared in fellowship over a meal with friends, a way to remind them that before you can restore your relationship with God, you've got to restore your relationship with other people. A truth that Jesus picked up on and echoed much later when He said, "If you come before the altar, you make it right with your brother or sister," a truth which we symbolize every time we take communion together. And then, there were others, like the sin offering or the guilt offering. By the way, Jesus fulfills every one of these.

So, even though people couldn't see over the fence, they could see the smoke, they could smell the burning flesh, and the billows rising as a reminder. What might seem offensive to us was beautiful to them because it reminded them sin is so serious, but God is so gracious and holy that sacrifice is necessary and He's given us a way. Without the shedding of blood, there can be no forgiveness, but God has made a way. Back to the courtyard. A few feet away in the courtyard from that altar was a washing bowl called a laver or a basin.

It looked like a big birdbath thing on a pedestal, and the priests would wash themselves not to get physically clean, but to ceremonially say, "I am ready and cleansing myself before I go into the presence of a holy Almighty God." And then, as you come past the courtyard, you come to the Tabernacle proper, an elaborate structure with God's dwelling there. Portable, everything unhooks and pulls so they could carry it. The first room that the priest would go into is called the holy place. The priest would go in there every day. There are some holy special items in there, each one of them loaded with spiritual significance and symbolism.

With the coverings over the top, there would have been a need for light, and so God gave instructions for a golden lampstand. It probably weighed about 75 pounds, beat into beautiful shape with seven stands on it. It burned from a special oil that the priest would cook up every morning and then burning continuously before the Lord, like the Olympic flame, to remind them that they were to be a light to the nations. They were to be different in order to make a difference, a foreshadowing of how Jesus Himself would say, "I'm the light of the world," and then would turn to us and say, "And now all of you are the light of the world."

On the other side of that holy place was a thing called the table of showbread. More wood, more gold, lots of instructions, but 12 pieces of bread, representing the 12 tribes of the children of Israel. Kept there all the time, baked fresh every week and replaced on the Sabbath by the priest. A reminder that God always provided for them when they were about to starve to death in the wilderness and couldn't find a Chick-fil-A. God gave manna on the ground, and the priest would eat those 12 pieces of bread to remind them how God always provides.

One priest, 12 pieces of bread—a beautiful picture because later, Jesus at the Last Supper with one loaf and 12 friends reminded them how their ancestors had eaten manna in the wilderness but they still died. But He says, "I'm like living bread. You eat of Me, and you will live forever," pointing back to that image that everyone would have understood. Then, up against the curtain in that holy place, there was one more item, and it was the altar of incense. The priest would burn incense every morning and every night, and it says it was a pleasing aroma to the Lord.

As that incense wafted up, the Book of Psalms says that when we pray, it's like that aroma to God. Did you know that? It says in the Book of Psalms, "Lord, when I pray, please let my words and my heart behind my prayers be like an incense offering and a pleasing aroma to You. I lift my hands, so I want to be like those priests in that holy place before You." Did you know your prayers are like an aroma to God? It's why Jesus, when He taught us to pray, said, "Do it like this: Our Father who art in heaven," what's the next word? "Hallowed"—it means holy is Your name, like that aroma that went up from that holy place to a holy God.

And that leads us then to the innermost holy place, or the Holy of Holies. There was a curtain separating it and no opening in that curtain, symbolizing the distance that always existed between a holy God and His people. The curtain was beautiful, special instructions about how it was embroidered with figures on it and all this stuff, but separate. No one was permitted behind the curtain, not behind that veil. Only one person, actually, Aaron, the high priest, one day a year on the Day of Atonement, told about in Leviticus 16.

He would go inside. He would enter trembling on behalf of the people to offer a sacrifice one day a year to cover whatever they missed in all the other sacrifices. It was so terrifying to be in the presence and the glory of God that they tied a rope around his leg in case it just blasted him and he died on the spot, they could drag him out. Inside the Holy of Holies, there's one object. It is the Ark of the Covenant, a box of wood overlaid with gold. There were special items inside, like manna to remind them how God always provided for them in their toughest moments, Aaron's rod to remind them of God's miracles and power, and the Ten Commandments—the word or words of God, reminder of His gracious covenant with them.

And then, a gold cover on top with two angels with their wings spread out and in the middle, a mercy seat where God says, "I will dwell in mercy with you," and there, that intense place, the glory of God was manifested. Psalm 99 says, "The Lord reigns as our King. He sits enthroned between the cherubim. Let the whole earth quake and tremble before Him." Can you have some appreciation as we step back and take it all in for the power and the holiness and the reverence and the awe and the mystique that emanated from that place? The holy dwelling of Almighty God.

Directly overhead is hovering smoke by day and fire by night, representing the presence of God consolidated in that place. God said, "I will be with you. My glory will be in that place," and the priest would come, but the veil was always there, separating the Holy of Holies and God from everything else all the way back out to where the people lived. So, you see the paradox here? God's calling out, "I want to dwell with you and renew relationship and be close." And yet, as much as the Tabernacle is about God dwelling with us, it also points very clearly to the distance and separation between us.

It does both. Where are the people? They're out in the tents, way outside the walls, even. But in the Holy of Holies, you've got all this gold and beautiful stuff and tapestries and glory of God. But as you move out, it gets cheaper, it gets simpler, it gets more common out to where we live in the dusty tents. God is holy. He wants to dwell with us, but we're not holy, so there's always a veil. So, you begin to see the question behind all this: "Can a holy, pure, almighty, beautiful God like that live with people who are sinful like us? What about that gap? Can we ever really get close to God?"

And so, there's a provisional answer in the Old Testament, and here it is in the book of Leviticus. God's way of saying, "I'll make a way. Bring a lamb, bring a dove, bring a ram to the courtyard of the Tabernacle and the priest will sacrifice it." Because when you sin, it's like bringing more death into the world. And so, this sacrifice will be a death that I will let be in the place of your death, and you can go free because of My mercy. God calls out to Israel and says, "Look, I can't become unholy, and you can't really become perfectly holy. So, I'll let these sacrifices in this Tabernacle be a way that you can cover your sin, and in a provisional way in these moments, I can accept you and we can dwell together."

For centuries, through many movings of that Tabernacle tent, that's how the people connected with God, and it worked, sort of. Sort of. There came a time, actually, when they started taking the offerings and the sacrifices for granted, going through the motions, really, just like a bunch of empty rituals. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine anyone actually doing that? Like, can you imagine people going to worship and not having their whole heart in it? Just kind of going through the motions or thinking it's some ritual? And God says, "Your offerings are not pleasing to Me anymore. This is not an aroma; this is a stench in My nostrils, because your hearts have changed."

"You've not been faithful, you're not even listening to the covenant. You don't care about a relationship, you don't trust Me, you put other things first." God says, "I don't want your religious games. Stop jumping through hoops. Just stop. I don't want bulls and goats. I want you. I want your heart." That's what this whole Tabernacle was supposed to be for. It gets so bad and the people become so unfaithful that at the end of the book of Exodus, even Moses can't even go into the Tabernacle because God's like, "Just stop." The relationship is really ruptured. And honestly, that's kind of how the Old Testament ends.

The book of Leviticus then just echoes this refrain all through our lives and the Bible: *Vayikra*, where God is saying, "I want you back in My presence." And in Leviticus, God says, "Here's how I'll do it. I will come and I will pitch My tent among you, and I will dwell among you in a special way. And you can approach Me by bringing the blood of the lamb, and I will put My glory and My presence with you in that place. But that veil has to remain in place." Have you ever been with someone that you dearly loved when they were in the hospital and getting ready to go back for surgery?

I was with a family some time ago at a hospital as their father was awaiting surgery, and so we were together, huddling together and prayed, read some Scripture, held hands, and so forth. And then, an orderly and some nurses came, and they wheeled him away, and they took him to this little waiting area. And when they did, the last thing is the nurse pulled that curtain across, and he was gone. Only medical persons could go behind that veil. You feel that? I looked at the faces of that family member, now separated from their father by that curtain, and I knew how much they hated that feeling.

How they couldn't wait for that doctor to get back and tell them your dad's fine, you can go be with him, touch him, visit him, be with him again. That's the power of a veil and the pain of living behind it. We feel that same thing when someone dies suddenly, especially. Like they're there with you on Thursday, and then Friday they're gone, and death has whisked them away and pulled the curtain and they're out of reach. You know what I mean? Like we say, they're on the other side of the veil, and you can't penetrate it, but you wish you could. That's the separation that we feel.

It's exactly what the veil was like. We feel that veil. And you should feel it in your life. You should let yourself feel it, like when you say, "I wish there was more goodness in the world." You should feel that ache. Don't you wish you had more goodness in you sometimes? Like I wish we knew love. I wish it wasn't so crooked and backward, and I wish we were not also unclean. I wish I could just be closer to God, that I could have His presence, His support, His strength, His protection, His guidance, that He could be near us and for us and with us every moment. I wish for that. That's what it's like. And then you can hear, if you'll be quiet, *Vayikra*. God calling out. And in the fullness of time, God called out. This time, not to Moses, but to you and me. And He sent a deliverer, Jesus, who's full of grace and truth. God, known only to this point as a presence through a wisp of smoke or fire that you could see over the Tabernacle, now has come near.

Guest (Acapella Ministries): Lord, when I am alone. And when I am alone. And when I am alone, give me Jesus. Give me Jesus. Give me Jesus. You can have all this world, give me Jesus. In the morning when I rise. In the morning when I rise. In the morning when I rise, give me Jesus. Give me Jesus. Give me Jesus. You can have all this world. You can have all this world. Give me Jesus. And when I come to die. And when I come to die. And when I come to die, give me Jesus. Give me Jesus. Give me Jesus. You can have all this world. You can have all this world. Give me Jesus.

Aaron Brockett: Well, how about you? Have you recognized the deliverer God has provided? Though we are unholy because of our sin, God has made a way for us to come near. In the Tabernacle and Temple, a veil separated sinful people from the holy presence of God, a constant reminder that sin creates a barrier between us and our Creator. But when Jesus gave His life on the cross, that veil was torn in two. Through His perfect and permanent sacrifice, the barrier of sin has been removed, and we are invited into a restored relationship with God.

If you've never placed your trust in Christ, or if you've wandered away from Him, know that His invitation still stands. He is calling you to come near through faith in Jesus. We encourage you to respond to His grace today. Well, our thanks to Ben Cachiaras for sharing that powerful message today, and our thanks as well to Acapella Ministries for their music of worship. If you'd like to hear today's program again or listen to previous programs, visit our website at thechristianshour.org, or you can find us streaming on your favorite podcasting platform. Simply search for The Christians Hour.

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