The odd (to us) rituals listed in the Old Testament had a broader purpose than we are used to thinking. If we come to the Bible with one lens, all we will see is sin and sin solutions. If we replace that lens, we can see so much more (and more clearly). Listen to this episode for a take on Leviticus you probably haven't heard before, as well as why it matters for understanding the Story and what God is up to with us.
The odd (to us) rituals listed in the Old Testament had a broader purpose than we are used to thinking. If we come to the Bible with one lens, all we will see is sin and sin solutions. If we replace that lens, we can see so much more (and more clearly). Listen to this episode for a take on Leviticus you probably haven't heard before, as well as why it matters for understanding the Story and what God is up to with us.
Hello, welcome back to the willing fool. This is episode seven. I'm your host and lead fool, Paul Trimble. We are going to continue on today. We've talked quite a bit about what is the frame, to understand the biblical story? What is the driving force? Well, who are the main characters and what is. Our role as people as humanity, so we're going to continue that discussion today, and I'm going to shift the portion of scripture We're looking at but continue on that same theme so is sin and mankind's Individual sinful nature and sin problem that needs remedy is that at the center of the story or is there?
A better way to understand it that puts things in their proper perspective. I'm going to argue for the second, and here we're going to look at a little bit later in the story. We talked about Genesis 1 through 3 and how, yes, we can understand that as human sinning and all the effects that came with that.
But we can also understand that the entire context was God actually creating humans because he really wanted to invite them into a closely held... One of intimacy, one of connection, one that humans could rule in, in God's way and God's image as his co regents, co rulers, kings and queens. Um, and so we don't want to lose that because it really affects the way we understand the story and then how we come to see ourselves.
And, that's very important. It has all sorts of outcomes for how we actually live, how we look at ourselves, treat one another, et cetera, et cetera. So as the story continues, um, we do have a scenario where humans, along with spiritual beings, have made a series of terrible decisions. Things have gone downhill.
God has hit the reset button a couple times in a couple different ways. And he's constantly working to try to continue to bring about the situation that he wants, which is living in... Closeness, proximity, intimacy with humanity and, transforming them into who he wants them to be to rule along with him.
So in Exodus 25 through 40, there's a big chunk of scripture there where God gives Moses the instructions to build a tabernacle. Which eventually will be replaced by a temple, but in essence, the tabernacle was a means, a way that God could live with and among and in close proximity to his people, just as we've been talking about.
And so, elaborate instructions were given, very specific, very precise. In fact, they were given twice. If you read carefully, that chunk of scripture, you'll see that they're given twice. Once in the giving of the instruction, once in the carrying out, and right in the middle there is the incident of the golden calf where people, after a few days or weeks without Moses, have already degenerated into idolatry and, broken the terms of the covenant, literally, and its exception.
This would be like cheating on your spouse, right before the wedding, essentially. Um, so, very, very bad. But , interestingly enough, we, we hear over and over God expressing what his desire is, what his purpose is in giving these instructions. It's not to be religious, it's not, just to have something to do or a place to live.
Of course, God can live where God wants to live, but he had a plan to make, special presence known among his people. So, one of the places you see that is... In Exodus, uh, 25
verse 8, he says, they are to make a sanctuary for me so that I may dwell among them. And he goes on from there and he gives a ton of instructions about how the tabernacle is to be built, lots of details. And in Exodus 29, he repeats the same idea. I will consecrate the tent of meeting in the altar. I will also consecrate Aaron and his sons to serve me as priests.
So here you have an explicit statement of what God's up to and what he wants. After the golden calf incident, God is understandably angry. Moses intercedes on behalf of the people and remonstrates with God to stick with his people, stick with his plan. And he says, God, we don't, you know, don't, don't send me anywhere without you.
I do not want to go. And. God in return in Exodus 33, he says, my presence will go with you and I will give you rest. And that idea of God being present with his people again is really the framework within which we need to read this section and understand what's going on is this is a drive.
This is an attempt. For God to dwell with his people and of course he lays out the conditions of that and what he needs to make It work, and he's very Specific and precise and he makes known his desires and what needs to happen And he also gives these conditions in a way where he lets the people know What's gonna happen if they don't abide by it and so you can read things like Leviticus 26 Jeremiah 25 and 29 where those conditions are laid out and he puts it out there.
He says, if you guys don't listen to this and make this work, eventually the bad case scenario is the land will spit you out. This land that I promised you and that I'm bringing you into through all these trials and difficulties and challenges, eventually it will just spit you out if you don't listen and cooperate and obey.
And eventually that is what happens. That's the exile. And so, most of the Hebrew Scriptures are written from that time period and from that perspective of, Oh my goodness, we did this and what has happened and now we have been spit out. That's the frame. Actually, for most of the Hebrew scriptures, up until Jesus comes, and it's important to understand that.
Even as Jesus talked about repentance and forgiveness of sins, as those listeners heard forgiveness of sins, they're not necessarily thinking exactly what we're thinking about, like my personal moral shortcomings and I need to get my moral slate wiped clean. They are conjuring up this story that we're talking about right now.
Forgiveness of sins was associated with exile. Forgiveness of sins would be associated with being able to return from exile. So Jesus goal was to help God's people return from exile. And yes, that included, uh, physical ailments, and yes, it included what we might call spiritual ailments. Uh, and it included things at the group level, things at the individual level.
But just so you know, the context for that, those terms repentance and forgiveness of sins would have in many years been heard at the group level and, having to do with this exile and a potential return from exile, which would include God coming once again to reside with him. Again, that's, that's kind of the, the key anchor idea wise here that we're going back to.
Um, so it's important to understand this is the frame. Um, Second Chronicles 36, uh, helps kind of put that into view. Ezekiel 37, I think it's verse 26 I want to say, also is another iteration of God saying I want to be with and among my people. And then you have scriptures like in Psalm 72, where it, it, describes this image of the glory and presence of God filling the whole earth.
Which of course is actually the goal from the beginning, is God created his creation to take up residence. with humanity and to be close to them, and co rule with them. And most of what happens in the story is, divergences from that, and then how is God going to work to bring that back into fruition.
So, that's really important because, again, our paradigm is very geared towards, um, the, the problem in the bible, the frame of the bible story is my individual sin. and needing to get my moral guilt, my moral slate wiped clean, my moral guilt forgiven. And so as we look at scriptures, that's what we tend to see because we have this preconceived notion that that's what the story is.
And so of course, when you have a lens looking for something specific, you're going to tend to simply reinforce that existing paradigm, that understanding. So in Exodus, uh, the book of Exodus, the building of the Tabernacle, all that. It ends with Moses understanding that God's presence is there, but not being able to go in and commune.
And then, you have Leviticus in the middle and then Numbers right after that. Numbers 1, you have the very opening of Numbers, you have Moses actually is able to go into the tabernacle. And so that's helpful as a observation. And I didn't come up with this observation. I've just seen it from other people.
So I understand it now. But Leviticus, this weird book that people tend to skip understandably when they read it, is sort of like a help guide, an instruction book for how is this going to work for a holy God to be living amongst, you know, regular people who are not always holy. So holiness, we tend to look at as primarily a moral issue.
Like if you're very moral, then you're very holy. And if you're unholy, that must mean you're immoral. As we'll see in this episode, it's actually broader than that, and that is important, but, morality is a component of holiness, but it doesn't describe the whole thing. God is set apart, God is holy, He's one of a kind, and with that comes some, in a sense, if you want to call it danger, some danger, you know, An oft used metaphor would be like a nuclear reactor.
It's very powerful. It's great but there are precautions you need to take if you're going to live inside the realm of the nuclear reactor And so that's kind of the position the israelites are in with god taking up residence so to speak In the tabernacle in their midst they had to figure out. How do we get along with this?
Holy god and so Leviticus 16 is a hinge point there with the day of atonement. And that was a way that, God had provided for the people as a whole to continue to live in his midst, given the fact that they were not always holy. And part of that unholiness could include sin, but it covers quite a bit more than that.
And so I want to look at some of the early chapters of Leviticus because. They're another little test case. When you read these, these accounts, we tend to use the word sacrifices for these, events that took place. These rituals, they involved animals, they involved killing, they involved blood.
I understand all that's very, I'm squeamish with that sort of thing. It's very off putting culturally, but That is what it is. And not all of it. Some of it involved grain or oil. But some of it was animals. So we tend to look at these as um, rituals. That would forgive a person of sin. In other words, wipe their moral slate clean.
And we might say, Oh, that's what you mean when you say make a way for God to be with people. And all that. And believe it or not, what I'm going to say is No, that's actually not the best way to understand this. And if you ever have read or heard read to you, I believe it's in Hebrews 10, there's a passage that says it was, it was always impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away the effect of sin.
And so you might look at that and say, well, what in the world was the point of all these sacrifices? I thought that was the entire point. And I think if that's the paradigm you come into, the, the scriptures with that is probably what you're going to see and what you're gonna think. And, if you read the passages, you could be forgiven also for drawing that conclusion.
So there are a handful of different kinds of, of offerings that would be an, an alternative word to sacrifices offerings. It's a little more general. Sacrifices carries more of a connotation of, This is to procure something from the one to whom you're sacrificing, in this case, you might think forgiveness of sins.
Well, there was a burnt offering, and you might think of that as just sort of a, I want to have an audience with God, I want to commune with God. There was fellowship offering, there was grain thankfulness.
have to do with a vow, all these sorts of things. They enabled communion with the priests, um, meaning just time fellowship together. So it, as a whole, the offerings were broader than sin, but then there's these two. Okay. And this is where it gets really interesting. There's a sin offering. And okay.
I know how most people, most religious people think, or at least some, and you know, I think some people would immediately just go to a conclusion of, okay, how are you going to wiggle out of this one? It's called a sin offering. Well, yeah. And even the language that goes with it, the sin offering obviously says when someone sins, um, you're going to do this.
If someone incurs guilt, he has to confess about sin. He's going to bring his restitution for the sin. He's going to make atonement for his sin. So. You could look at that and be like, there's no Houdini way out of this, that this is about sin. Well, not so fast. Actually, there is more context.
The first little piece of it, which I'll take note of is, it says when someone sins unintentionally against any of the Lord's commands. And it goes on from there to describe everything about the sin offering. So, for you and I, I think mostly we would put the, quote, unintentional sin in the not even sin category.
Like, sin is when you do something wrong, assuming that you know it is wrong. This is a little bit broader than that, based on the fact that it's sin unintentionally. And in fact, here's a little divergence. Here's a fork in the road. That we probably are not familiar with, I'm guessing. If you grew up in church and exposed to the Bible a lot, you're most likely used to thinking of these offerings as something that would again remove moral guilt.
That was the point of them. But, in the Old Testament, in these laws mixed in them, is what to do when you do different kinds of sins. And for many sins, what you would do is, uh, well, in some cases, nothing like certain sins you were to be executed for certain sins, you were to be banished from the community for cut off, one or the other banished or cut off and other sins.
The proper response was not to offer, an offering or sacrifice. It was to go make it up to that person. So. If you did economic damage, you'd go restore the economic damage, make it up to them, plus a surcharge, essentially. I'm just giving examples. And ultimately, collectively, just as I mentioned a little bit ago, if the sin in the land was so bad, there was no recourse.
The whole people would just be kicked out. Like, that's the only way to deal with it. The land would spit them out and then God would have to figure out what might be able to happen next, but at least the land would be able to rest easy. That's just very, very different than our way of thinking. You know, it's, it's, it's not only individual, uh, as we mentioned, it includes unintentional things.
It's broader than, what we would probably call sin or think of as individual sins. And so it's broader, but yeah, how are you going to get out of this? It's using the words of guilt, sin, atonement, confession, seems pretty clearly to be talking about what we would call sin and guilt. Well, that seems fine until you continue reading a few chapters later and you see that some of the priests were ordered to do this in order to get ordained.
There's just a regular part of their ordination process. It wasn't necessarily in view of any particular sin and Then well, there's this kind of interesting thing where? the mother of Jesus the family of Jesus offers this very sacrifice because Jesus was born So, if we're going to stick real hard to this is an offering or sacrifice for sins, moral guilt incurred due to sin, then, then you're in the position of having to call the birth of Jesus a sin on behalf of his parents.
You probably don't want to go there, and so if you want the reference, you can go back to Leviticus 12 and this was an offering that people made as a result of childbirth. Childbirth was one of those. Natural, not sinful bodily human processes where people came into contact with bodily fluids associated with life.
And so part of God's prescription for dealing with that was, Hey, when we, we touch or come into contact with those bodily fluids that represent life and therefore by implication loss of life, we're going to have a cooling off period. We're going to have a reintroduction period. Why? Because it's, morally guilty?
No, not because it's morally guilty. It was something called ritually impure, which did not imply moral guilt. It's this broader category. Ritually impure is this broader category. And so some people, say that this really sin offering is, you could call it that, but you could just as well translate it as a purification offering.
And so the idea of Mary, for example, offering a purification offering after her childbirth, I think is a lot, a lot more understandable, comprehensible than her offering a sin offering as if she had just committed a sin by birthing Jesus. I think you're probably with me on that, even though you might be processing that that's, this is really the case.
Well, after that, they go on and talk about a guilt offering. Which if you notice has the word guilt in it, you might think once more well It'd be hard to get out of that, but it uses the the same language guilt, sin, atonement, forgiven, guilty before the Lord And there were situations where this would be made in association with a choice that somebody made that could be called sinful But once more it was broader than that and it also was incurred and used when A leper was to be purified, or a Nazirite who had made a commitment vow to the Lord was going through a purification ritual, neither of which was seen either by us or by the biblical writers as something sinful.
So even the guilt offering with the words guilt, sin, forgiven, restitution, all that built in, is, is applied in a way that implies that it is. Not simply moral guilt in a way of mechanistically wiping that away we might think So if mechanistically wiping away moral guilt and wiping that slate clean is not the main goal and not the view What is the main goal in the view?
Well exactly what we've been talking about. It fits with literally all the rest of these scriptures It's simply a way Uh, that God had instituted. Do we understand exactly why, how? No, I, I don't. But I, I can understand the concept that God wanted there to be ways to, I'm going to use the word decontaminate or purify the environment so that it made it safe for people to be with him.
I'm not saying there isn't some cultural distance there and difficulty of understanding, but it, it is a really powerful, precise. Biblical argument against what's in view here being simple individual guilt and removal of that guilt. And you don't have to make a note here of one of the thing I've, I've at least mentioned or alluded to already in this episode.
Uh, but there is really a lot, a lot, lot, lot of evidence that, um, what is viewed as a sin problem or need for purification is not. Not simply things at the individual level. It certainly includes that, but a tremendous amount of the biblical story is about what's taking places in people, groups, and communities.
And you can't always pin that down into, a single person. So I've mentioned this Matthew 18 thing, uh, dilemma, and I'm going to mention it again in the next episode, but there is a tendency that I've watched at work in churches. Um, when there's things going on that people feel the need to talk about, address, or potentially correct, it can quickly get shut down by Matthew 18 speak, which is, Oh, well, if you think there's a problem, you need to go only to one individual, whoever you think has committed a quote sin quote against you, preferably individually.
And, redress it with them. Well, there's times where that's absolutely what needs to take place. But, there's many, many instances where that makes no sense, uh, whatsoever. And so, you see Jesus clearing out the temple in Matthew. 21, I think it is, you see Jesus, uh, rebuking whole groups of people and publicly embarrassing them in Matthew 23, rebuking, very directly.
But Matthew 21, Jesus and Matthew 23, Jesus are, are apparently not following Matthew 18. We would understand it. And I think he was okay. I think he was on solid ground there. So. We've got to be able to broaden our thinking, um, to not get just pigeonholed, but what can justify that, that application of Matthew 18 and the shutdown of, , addressing things, correcting things, bringing things up.
That logic gets really tight and hard to penetrate when we have this view of sin, that everything is driven by sin. All sin is individual. All of it is identifiable with a simple label of adultery, theft, or murder. Um, this is just not the case, not in real life, and certainly not biblically. And so I'm making the case for this that we've got to be able to think much better and much more broadly, and that can be a remedy for this dilemma or paradox that I'm talking about.
So, that's what I wanted to talk about today. Again, main theme, God wants to make his home with humanity, and that is because he has this very high view that we've talked about. From Genesis 1 all the way to Revelation 22. It's the same through the entire story and he finds a way To make it happen. Is there a reality to sin?
Yes. Is there serious consequences? Yes, but that is not the framework of the story. That is not center stage We need to understand that. We need to understand the bigger picture and put things into their proper place. So that's it for this time. Join me next time. We're going to wrap up this entire season.
Thanks for your attention so far. See you next time.