A Wise Sticker
Our family recently spent a week at a meeting that took place at a beautiful East African conference center surrounded by mountains lined with tea fields. One day, our daughter came home from the kids’ session with a sticker that read, “Eat Your Broccoli, Read Leviticus.” So we’ve done both.
Reading Leviticus is no easy task, nor is it most people’s first choice of devotional literature. Perhaps that is the implication of the sticker, that reading Leviticus is as unpleasant as eating broccoli, yet (like broccoli) it is good for us. Not only is Leviticus good for the believer because it is the inspired Word of God, but also because we trust that it is good for instruction in righteousness, like the rest of Scripture.
Various sacrifices, offerings, ceremonies, and laws are noted throughout Leviticus. God gave these instructions to His people so that they would be holy, clean from their sin, and also different from the surrounding nations. How can we apply what we see in this Old Testament book to our Sunday morning worship gatherings? As we look to steward Sunday morning well, what does this book have to teach us?
Hijacking the Worship of God
Our family has lived overseas for over 20 years. Our desire is to see every nation, tribe, and tongue worship the Lord Jesus Christ. But they don’t right now. As John Piper says, “Missions exists because worship doesn’t.”1 Right worship of the One True God has been hijacked.
Living outside of our own culture, we have seen clearly the ways that men and women have tried to make their way back to a holy God. We have worked with one people group who worships the moon. Yet another group slaughters animals in veneration of their ancestors. The group we worked with most recently follows the strict rules of Islam in an effort to please God and reach heaven, but with no real assurance of salvation.
In addition to those whose efforts are in vain, we have also been surrounded by neopentecostals. The late IMB missionary, Randy Arnett, through his extensive research and experience, argued that the neopentecostal movement often replaces the biblical Gospel of repentance and faith in Christ with a transactional religion whereby a believer gives to God, obeys the prophet, and receives blessing.
In our own American culture, we, too, seek the Lord. We make efforts to help our communities through civic involvement. We try to be good people. We go to church, where we often encounter a watered-down Gospel with little to no theology of suffering in an effort to make seekers feel comfortable in the pews. The results of this misguided philosophy have led to a downplaying of the holiness of God, as well as of the reverence He is due in the Sunday morning gathering.
Right Worship, Right Living
All of these man-initiated efforts of worship are an attempt to bridge the gap between God and humanity. The book of Leviticus reminds us how large that gap is. A it also gives us a picture of what it means to rightly worship the Lord, as well as how to do so. God gives Israel five types of sacrifices and offerings: burnt offerings, grain offerings, peace offerings, sin offerings, and guilt offerings. Needless to say, outside of the grain offering, there is a lot of blood in this book – blood sprinkled on the altar, on the furnishings, and even applied to the priests’ bodies. The reason for this can be found in Leviticus 17:11, which says, “For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it for you on the altar to make atonement for your souls, for it is the blood that makes atonement by the life.” We also see in Hebrews 9:22 that “under the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins,” showing that the sacrificial system gave a glimpse of the coming redeeming plan of the Triune God through Christ’s finished work on the cross.
In addition to these offerings, the people of Israel were given laws that dictated practical living, such as dealing with family and neighbors (Leviticus 19), not sacrificing to pagan gods (Leviticus 17), and abominations to avoid (Leviticus 18) to name a few. Again, even these practicalities were supposed to demonstrate to the surrounding nations that the Israelites were different because of their God.
Sunday Morning
It is easy to get bogged down reading Leviticus and even easier for our brains to be “glazed over,” not even really paying attention to what we’re reading. We go back to the question: how does this book of the law affect our Sunday morning worship?
We see in Leviticus that God’s regulations are for His own people, and He sets out the requirements for how He is to be worshiped by them. The Lord provided the Israelites the method and the means for worship. While we are not under that same sacrificial system, God still regulates how He is to be worshiped today. He is looking for true worshipers who will worship in spirit and truth (John 4). Jesus is both the means and ends for us to be able to do so. He reveals himself in Scripture, so Scripture must guide our worship and weekly gatherings.
As we come together as believers and look back to the book of Leviticus, we see that it’s difficult to read, it’s bloody, and it highlights the gravity and reality of all peoples’ separation from a holy God. As bad as that might seem, though, the cross was even worse, and these cultic rituals were but a shadow of Christ’s once-and-for-all substitutionary sacrifice (Heb 10). This understanding gives us perspective and thankful hearts for Christ’s suffering. Not only did He bleed and die, but He took the punishment of our sin on Himself so that we could approach the throne of grace to receive mercy and find grace in our time of need (Heb 4:16). How can this realization not compel us to worship?
Reading Leviticus in light of the cross should inform our decision-making and planning for Sunday morning. It will cause us to have more reverence as we worship together. It will drive us to select songs that are more theologically deep and sound, songs that reflect praise and adoration rather than a self-focus. The service will be saturated with the reading of Scripture because we know it is the only place to find truth.
Conclusion
Remember, as you read the book of Leviticus, that it is a book about worship and should help guide our worship today. Even though Christ was the perfect sacrifice, we are not perfect worshipers, but we look forward to the day when we will be. Until then, we should read Leviticus. And eat our broccoli.
- John Piper, Let the Nations Be Glad! The Supremacy of God in Missions, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2010), 35. ↩︎
