Reading Leviticus for God’s Mission
When my wife and I were anticipating the birth of our son, our whole lives got turned upside-down. Somebody new was moving into our house, and we had some preparation and rearranging to do. Our home office had to be relocated. We painted the walls. We assembled a crib. We got creative and converted an old TV stand into a changing table. Things changed. We had to reorder the house. And this is a really good picture for seeing how Leviticus fits into the mission of God.
Whether you’re anticipating a newborn baby, a new spouse, or just simply a new roommate, some big adjustments have to be made as you learn to share your space. At its core, this is the story of Leviticus. Imagine you were there. You were there when the Red Sea parted. You were there for the party when Pharaoh and his army drowned. And now you’re at the mountain. Moses has come down with the 10 commandments. You’ve survived the fiasco about the golden calf. You’ve built the ark of the covenant and the tabernacle. And now God has taken up residence in your neighborhood.
Now what happens?
Leviticus is where every good-intentioned Bible reading plan goes to die, right? But it doesn’t have to be that way. Keep these things in mind as you read Leviticus and you’ll not only get yourself through the whole book, you’ll see how big a part it plays in showing us God’s mission in the world.
Remembering the big story
Our story is the story of the Church. And the story of the Church is the story of Jesus. The story of Jesus is the story of Israel. The story of Israel is the story of the God who made the world and is putting it all back together again.
The book of Leviticus belongs to a section of books called the Torah, or the Books of Moses. The word torah means “law,” but it also communicates wisdom or instructions. So we can think of these books as an Owner’s Manual for how to be human beings as God intended. These are the first five books found in the Bible—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. The arc of the story through these books—Creation, Fall, Abraham, Moses, Promised Land—is foundational to not only the rest of the story of the Old Testament but also the story in the New Testament.
What kind of God God is like is being established in these books, and Leviticus plays a part in this bigger whole. Genesis tells the stories about the original family tree of Israel. Exodus is about a group of slaves rescued by God and how God comes to live right in their midst. Leviticus is like the instruction manual for what Israel does now that the Creator of the universe lives like a next-door neighbor. Numbers is an anthology of stories of the forty years in the wilderness. And Deuteronomy retells and repackages the whole story in anticipation of God fulfilling his promise to Abraham.
Leviticus is about worship
Perhaps one way of approaching Leviticus is to think of user experience design. UX is all about designing the process that a customer interfaces with a product. Think about the computer or device you might be on right now—the keyboard, the mouse, the touchscreen, the cursor and pointer on the screen, the Mac spinning wheel of death. All of these have to do with how you do what you want to do on your computer or phone.
Two big questions underneath Leviticus are: How do unholy human beings approach and interact with a holy divine being? What processes does God provide to heal the brokenness of being human in the world? Because of the presence of Sin and Death in the world, our relationship with God is broken. Our relationships within ourselves are broken. Our relationships with one another are broken. Our relationship with God’s creation is broken. Leviticus—really, the whole Torah, and all of Scripture—is about God working to heal all these broken relationships.
Because of this, Leviticus is a book all about worship. It’s about how God wants us to order our world with God at the center. This is a powerful message in our Western consumer, entertainment-focused world where worship has come to mean the music performed at our spiritually themed “sing and speak” gatherings. But Leviticus radically reminds us that worship is about a holistic re-arranging of our 24-7 lives around a pattern that God establishes.
Love is the center
When Jesus gets quizzed by religious experts about what he thinks is the greatest commandment, he responds, “‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. A second is equally important: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ The entire law and all the demands of the prophets are based on these two commandments.”
He’s quoting from Deuteronomy 6 and Leviticus 19. There’s an art to the way the writers put the Hebrew text together. This is long before the internet and the printing press. They wrote not for a reading audience, but rather for a speaking, listening, and memorizing audience.
Here in the middle book of the Torah, in the middle chapter, in the middle verse, is the statement, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” In other words, reordering our lives around God involves opening our eyes, our ears, our hearts, our very lives, to our neighbors, our fellow human beings in closest proximity to us. The center of God’s law is love. It’s the bullseye in the middle. It’s the lens through which we are to see all the other seemingly obscure commands and statements we find in the Old Testament. Not only is Leviticus a book about worship, it’s also a book about love.
The most important question
It’s crucial to keep in mind what a foreign world Leviticus comes to us from. Leviticus was written by and for people very different from us. They didn’t speak English. There’s no electricity. There are no hospitals. There are no police or fire departments. There are no grocery stores. There’s no Netflix. There are no weekly church services. The only Bible they know are some campfire stories about the ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and then the 10 Commandments.
“How does this apply to my life?” is often the first question that pops into mind when we approach the Bible. But this question wouldn’t have been anywhere on the radar of the first people who encountered Leviticus.
Rather, our most important question is, “What does this reveal about God?” And a really close second is, “How can I respond in obedience to this God?” The Bible is first and foremost about God. God is the hero of the story. Even Leviticus has something to say about the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Even Leviticus is “God-breathed.” Ironically, unraveling our own addiction to make ourselves the center of the story goes a long way to our actually “getting something out of” our experience of Leviticus.
No doubt, Leviticus is challenging for us today to read. It sparks so many questions. There’s a quote attributed to Mark Twain, “It ain’t the parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me, it’s the parts that I do understand.” It takes a lot of patience, discernment, wisdom to respond to God out of the places of Leviticus that we do understand.
Leviticus shows us what a “new normal” looks like. This is what a holy God looks like. This is what a holy neighborhood with God at the center looks like. And this is what Leviticus has to offer us about God’s mission in the world.
If you want to dig deeper into Leviticus, be sure to check these out:
Exodus and Leviticus for Everyone by John Goldingay
Purity and Danger and Leviticus as Literature by Mary Douglas