The Extra
The Extra is a podcast hosted by Crosspoint Christian Church in Conyers, Georgia. Senior Minister, Curtis Zehner, and his friend, Ken Pierce, talk through each week's sermon unpacking the extra material that didn't make the cut for the weekend message. Curtis' and Ken's conversational and relaxed style lend itself to listeners of all ages and spiritual maturities.
The Extra
Leviticus pt. 1
What if all those complex, sometimes baffling laws in Leviticus weren't about burdening people with rules, but about making relationship possible? This episode dives deep into the heart of biblical law, uncovering the surprising connection between ancient legal codes and divine love.
Check out more at www.CrosspointConyers.com
Welcome to the Extra Podcast with Ken Pierce Curtis Zahner. We're talking about the law today. Hope it goes okay. Welcome to the podcast, ken. You married into a family of lawyers.
Speaker 2:I did, yeah, one lawyer that persuaded successfully his kids not to become lawyers. So he says he's like, if you can do one of those, if you can do anything else, do that. This is not the type of law you need to practice and they took that to heart. Obviously because none of them are lawyers, but Mack and Faith have wanted to be lawyers in the past and they would be amazing at it. But knowing the law is so difficult. Oh yeah, it is so nuanced Law and medicine, it's just so difficult.
Speaker 1:What if it takes the same type of person to do both of those professions?
Speaker 2:That's a good question. You have to be so verbally capable with the law, that's true, and Ron is, faith definitely is, mac definitely is, but just expert-level communication when it comes to them. And that's what you need. When you talk about the law, you need explanations. First you need to see the law, then you need the explanation. This is why that's there. You need reasons upon reasons, because, guess what? For every law there's a question about the law. Why does that exist? Why is that there? Why are there so many laws? Why isn't there a law to prevent this or that or whatever? And you need to know those things, in my mind. You need to know those.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that would be very difficult. You have to constantly be thinking about how you're going to answer yeah. But also not just answer the question, but answer according to the law.
Speaker 2:Answer according to the law, and maybe even answer all future questions pertaining to that law. You know, like well, because that's why there's judicial review, that's why there's law review. Like well, 50 years ago the law said this, but now it says this. Well, why is that? Well, a long time ago, dot dot, dot. You know.
Speaker 1:I just did a quick search Like what are the top personality traits of a lawyer?
Speaker 2:Okay, good Analytical thinker yeah.
Speaker 1:Disagreeable. Detail-oriented Okay, strong communicator, you've already said that Resilient and thick-skinned.
Speaker 2:Yeah, okay, the big five personality traits like agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness, extroversion and neuroticism. You have to be open to possibilities of new laws and ways to be creative in explaining the law. You know to defend your client, you know, with jealous fervor, whatever they say.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:With a, be an overzealous representative of your client, right, and then you can't be too neurotic. But because you can't be that withdrawn, you have to be able to explain yourself. You can't get uptight. The thick skin thing, you're right. That's what. Not being neurotic, um, conscientiousiousness for sure, yeah, but disagreeable. You got to be disagreeable because you're going to argue.
Speaker 1:Some of these traits I'm just feeling like find their way into my profession in some ways as a preacher. So, okay, I've been using ChatGPT for like random things lately and so I said how close are lawyers to preachers? What does AI have to say about the two of us? We have to be persuasive communicators, yeah yeah, strong command of language.
Speaker 2:That's the same thing to me, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:It would be a good communicator.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Knowledge of foundational texts. Okay, sensitive, oh, excuse me, a sense of justice. Okay, that might be the biggest part of what god's doing, okay, in the human heart, yeah, and in explaining the law to the people. It's the relationship we'll get into this, but, yeah, it's so that they can have relationship with him. But also, god is a god of justice and that's a huge part of being a follower of him and his kingdom. Public speaking, calling to serve people. Yeah, interesting, I just got to thinking based on those first personality traits.
Speaker 2:Well, that's an interesting question and now everybody's hopefully everybody's going to search, like what are the personality traits of the job I have? Do I have this and what job should I have based on my personality?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's interesting.
Speaker 1:What's your StrengthsFinder? Do you know, I can't remember.
Speaker 2:I don't remember mine either I've done it before. I did it in college, but I can't think of it.
Speaker 1:Do you have any idea what your?
Speaker 2:When I did positive psychology. I'm an INTJ.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Is that what you were going to ask? Intj.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's StrengthsFinder, isn't it?
Speaker 2:That's.
Speaker 1:The architect. Intj is the architect. Strategic logical loves solving complex problems.
Speaker 2:Yeah, setting up systems.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I do that like all day.
Speaker 1:That's awesome.
Speaker 2:Yeah, let me solve this problem and all future problems pertaining to this big issue. I wish I knew what mine was ENTJ.
Speaker 1:Maybe future problems pertaining to this big issue? I wish I knew what mine was ENTJ maybe.
Speaker 2:I could see that. Maybe Funny thing is, faith is exactly opposite of me, I believe. Okay, wow, I think she's exactly opposite letter-wise, I think, huh.
Speaker 1:Yeah, myers-briggs, yeah. What does that mean? Completely opposite. Letter-wise I think Huh, yeah, myers-briggs, yeah. What does that mean completely?
Speaker 2:opposite, letter-wise, let's see Not an I but an E, not a T but an F. She's not thinking, but feeling Okay. And she's not judging, she's perceiving. But I can't think of the second one. There's always four letters.
Speaker 1:I'm more familiar with the Enneagram.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Which I know some people could take or leave. I'm a five.
Speaker 2:These are all just tools in the basket. You know what I?
Speaker 1:mean You're a five. What does a five mean?
Speaker 2:Five is the investigator.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, investigator, with a five, wing four and faith is a two A two, yeah, five.
Speaker 1:Is the investigator or the observer?
Speaker 2:The observer. Yeah, I would much rather watch something than actually take part in it. I would much rather watch something than actually take part in it, because you can't really study something to me, unless you observe it from the outside to me.
Speaker 1:But I don't read as much as your average five. Okay, like I barely read. We talked about that. Yeah, compared to the average five.
Speaker 2:Faith reads like a five, but she's a two.
Speaker 1:So core fears for you being useless, being useless.
Speaker 2:Helpless, incompetent.
Speaker 1:Yeah, incapable. A core desire is to be competent, capable and self-sufficient. So what does? I'm looking at mine as well. I think I'm a six on the Enneagram. A fear is being without support, without guidance or without certainty, and a desire is to have security, support and belonging. So, okay, we're talking about the law in Leviticus. That was the sermon. This week we introed the book of Leviticus this weekend. How does your personality trait view the law?
Speaker 2:It's absolutely necessary in some cases. Yeah, and I don't like, I'm a rule follower. Rules are there for a reason. Yeah, you cannot have chaos ruling the day, but I know that laws can be changed. They're not made to be broken. I really think they're made to be changed. Now, rules are different. Okay, rules, yeah, to get. A lot of times, the people that we know as successful or to get somewhere sort of have to break rules.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:One of my favorite rule breakers of all time is Bruce Lee. Yeah, rule breakers of all time is Bruce Lee. He took the rules of all these martial arts that he grew up with and he said okay, rules get you in trouble when you're in an actual fight. So I'm going to create a system that is not a system.
Speaker 1:Well, there's a paradox, right, yeah.
Speaker 2:So he said, instead of in karate, you're going to have this wide leg stance, hands in front of you guarding your center line. And he's like, okay, the center line matters, but why would you have a wide stance like you're doing one of the five animals in Kung Fu? He says, no, get in a fencing style so you can move back and forth and put your strong hand out front instead of your weak hand out front interesting so he's breaking up.
Speaker 2:They're like whoa, you're not actually going to teach this. Or he's like, oh, he's like, oh, yeah, I'm teaching him breaking the rules.
Speaker 1:Yeah, to create new rules. I like it yeah. So, that's how you're viewing it right as your personality type. My personality type sees the law at least I see it and I think, oh my goodness, I'm, I'm doomed, yeah, yeah, you can't do anything. Oh gosh, where do I even begin? I have decision fatigue already. How can I possibly keep all of this stuff that? I have no hope. I'm done.
Speaker 2:Take me now, lord, it's over. There's a ton of rules in my job, like getting releases of information. If a patient wants me to talk to somebody else in their life, I'm like, well, you got to sign all this stuff telling me that I can say certain things and not say certain things. So it's a slow process. That's why sorry, that's why medicine is such a slow process is because there are so many rules. Yeah, to protect the patient, right. So rules are definitely there to serve a purpose. Honestly, people don't just come up with rules for a reason. There is a protection in place, yeah, for no reason. They come up with rules for a reason, not just for fun. What I meant to say. They come up with these rules because there was a situation that required a rule. It may change later, fine.
Speaker 1:That's okay. Well, I think we see a little bit of that or a lot of that. I was going to say a little bit of fluidity, perhaps in the way that the Jewish laws had evolved over time, but where it is in just Leviticus we're talking about the law of God in relation to how people can be in proximity to God. So all of these laws, you're right, they're not just for fun. Some of them sound ridiculous, like I mentioned on Sunday, like can be in proximity to God. And so all of these laws, you're right, they're not just for fun.
Speaker 2:Some of them sound ridiculous, like I mentioned on Sunday like don't wear clothes that are made of two types of material right and there's weird laws all over the country that are still in the books, like certain things you can't hold in your hand walking down the street in a big city, and it's not a gun or a knife. It's not a gun or a knife, it's like a chicken, that's still on the books from the 1800s when the city was first formed. Like we can't have all these chickens on the street.
Speaker 1:Or why not just remove those then, like, just take them out. We know that's ridiculous, I don't know.
Speaker 2:There's so many unobserved laws that are still on the books that are like it would take a mountain of litigation probably to get it off of a book and we don't. We're not worried about it.
Speaker 1:Nobody's doing it anyway. That blows my mind is that we know that something is obsolete or useless, but it would take so much effort to just erase it. Yeah, instead of just going through the effort to get it off the books, we're just going to pretend like it's not on the books.
Speaker 2:From now on, don't hold a chicken in your left hand. But it's fine, no big deal, like the city alderman back in the day was like, okay, chickens aren't a problem anymore, we have farms, we have cities, no big deal. So that law, even though it's on the books, nobody's looking at it, all right, and eventually it'll fade away. It already has faded away in practice, but obviously the law is in writing and in practice simultaneously. Yeah, so maybe there's still some life in that law. Maybe it'll come back around. You never know. Maybe.
Speaker 1:We'll see, I hope not A lot of these laws in Leviticus are not coming back around for us Right yeah, thankfully. Thankfully too. Yes, I like wearing my synthetic shirts and denim jeans.
Speaker 1:Yeah yeah, I know that that's silly, but but really, there's so many confusing things in the book of Leviticus and I'm not claiming to be an expert on Leviticus by any means, but just studying it for this sermon series and kind of diving into the nuances of it has been really eye-opening.
Speaker 1:It's been really really interesting. But, like I explained on Sunday, the purpose of all of this is to bring people into relationship and proximity to God, because God set up camp for the Israelites. He created this camp for them, told them how to build it and that where they were supposed to live, based on their family group and at the middle of all of it, was God himself and his very presence. His spirit would dwell in the middle of the camp. It was God himself and his very presence. His spirit would dwell in the middle of the camp. And so if you're going to live in God's camp, that means you have to live within the proximity of his holiness. And if you're going to live in his proximity, then you also have to live in some kind of pure state. Leviticus would call it being ritually pure, living according to the laws and the rituals which are the sacrifices and the feasts and the laws of separation.
Speaker 1:That's something we didn't really get into. I mentioned it briefly, but things like separate yourself from clean things and unclean things like bees who would have thought Swarming insects apparently are unclean in the eyes of God.
Speaker 1:And there's actually a really interesting in Judges in the story of Samson. Samson has the Nazarite vow. He was born and his parents were instructed to never cut his hair, along with a bunch of other things. Nazarite vow is actually listed in numbers. I believe all the details of it, but Samson couldn't cut his hair. He would be this super strong dude as long as he was following the rules of the vow. Well, there are moments where Samson becomes unclean because, number one, he ate honey that was from a beehive and the beehive was inside a dead animal carcass. So that's two things that make him unclean. Honey is sweet and good for you right, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:But he ate it from bees, which is listed in Leviticus and dead animals. So he's like double unclean now. I never knew about the bees and now he has to purify himself. Like, yeah, both of us. He's like double unclean now. I never knew about the purification, now he has to purify himself. Like, yeah, it's very very interesting, and so how does that all apply to us is the big question.
Speaker 2:You, like we said, you have to keep a body of a certain body of laws. Yeah, and everybody is completely inconsistent within their own life. Right, I have laws that I live by. You have laws that you live by, but nobody knows about them. And Faith has her own laws, and Vivian will have hers, and so on, and Emily has hers, but she'll break them from time to time because she's a human being and we're not perfect. Perfect, so you can't, no matter how, no matter how amazing and internally coherent and perfect a set of laws are, they will be broken because we're human beings. Yeah, now these new laws, these 10 commandments, you know, and really the first two love god, love others. It's almost like Jesus in his teaching is saying okay, there's only two laws, now in the garden there was only one law, now there's only two. That's not really that big of an ask. And the rest of this book, the presence of this book, is made to show you how to do that.
Speaker 1:Isn't it interesting You're just sparking this in me how, in the garden, Adam and Eve are in perfect relationship with God. Like the situation is like, it couldn't be any better for them.
Speaker 1:They get to be in proximity to God. Face-to-face is the idea that we get. Face to face is the idea that we get, and the only rule that God places in front of them is don't eat of that one tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. But they messed it up right and then, after the mess up, now more laws have to come out of them. It's like the more we keep messing up, the more laws we have to have. But the more laws we have, the more we keep messing up, there's more opportunity for sin and for disobedience against.
Speaker 2:God. It's a positive feedback loop because it builds on itself.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's sort of like a self-fulfilling thing. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy too.
Speaker 1:So I think, maybe I mean, let's just put this in the perspective of Jesus and that we read in Hebrews, in the sermon on Sunday, that Jesus is doing away with the first to make way for the second, which is the first is the old law, the covenant with Moses and the people, and the second is the covenant in his blood, which frees us. It frees us from the penalty of not keeping the law.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Right. Well, it's interesting, you asked me off air earlier. We're discussing kind of where we're going. We start with the 10 commandments. That's an Exodus at Mount Sinai. It's a little bit before all the camp is set up. It's the initial, like marriage covenant, it's the vows. If you will, the 10 commandments and it's, can you list them? I should have opened my Bible but I'm not going to, so maybe I won't list the whole thing. But the first five have to do with your relationship to God and the second five are your relationship to people.
Speaker 1:Let me try and pull them up. Let's see if I can get them up here, and then I can actually say them out loud.
Speaker 2:Because it's almost like well, what else is there? Jesus is basically saying look, you can do away with all those laws if you just keep these two.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Well, okay, that's in the New Testament. Yeah, okay, right, this happens every time. My internet just goes dead as soon as I need it to work.
Speaker 2:I've been using it this whole time.
Speaker 1:Oh really. But as soon as I open up the Bible app, it stops working. I'll bring my physical Bible to the podcast next week. Okay, matthew, chapter 5, jesus. He talks about the fulfillment of the law and what we need to do, what he's doing in relation to that law. Now it also does this when I open my Bible. I've asked me if I want to rate the app every time I do this on the podcast.
Speaker 2:It's a great app.
Speaker 1:It's a great app. Now leave me alone. Matthew, chapter 5. Here we go, here we go, here we go. The fulfillment of the law, beginning in verse 17,. He says do not think that I've come to abolish the law or the prophets. He says do not think that I've come to abolish the law or the prophets.
Speaker 1:Don't think I've come to abolish that. I've not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them Truly. I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen will by any means disappear from clear that the law is important. What Moses has delivered to us from God is absolutely vital to our life here on earth. But Jesus is the fulfillment of all those things, and there's a place in Mark, chapter 12, down in verse 35,. I believe I'm getting there. Here it is, maybe it's a little further. Oh man, mark, chapter 12. Here we go, verse 28.
Speaker 1:One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, of all the commandments, which is the most important? Okay, in this day and age, I know that there's a scholar of Jewish religion and history who listens to us, and so I'm going to get this wrong and he's going to correct me on this, or maybe I'll get it right and he'll give me a pat on the back. There were 613 laws in Israel at this time that Jesus is being questioned by this particular religious leader, and so when he says commands, he's not just talking about the 10 commandments that were at Mount Sinai and Exodus. But all of these laws, right. So it's a trick question Out of 600, out of 1 billion possible choices, which one is the most important? Because obviously these laws are created to uphold each other. At this point you create laws around the law. It's a body of laws, absolutely, and so you okay. So he's trying to trip Jesus up and he says which commandment is the most important?
Speaker 1:Jesus says this is Mark 12, verse 29. The most important one is this hear, o Israel, the Lord, our God. The Lord is one. Love the Lord, your God, with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength. Now, that comes directly from Deuteronomy, chapter six. It's called the Shema. That means to hear or to listen. That's a Hebrew word for listen, and it's actually it's kind of like a prayer. It's a cadence that you would say early in the morning. It's a daily kind of cadence to wrap your daily life around the Lord, our God. The Lord is one. Love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, all your strength. And so Jesus says that's the first commandment, that's the greatest, verse 31,. The second is like this Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no command greater than these things Interesting to me that Jesus says.
Speaker 1:The first is the Shema love the Lord, your God. The second is just as important. It's not a ranking system. It's not number one and then number two. Both of these laws are the most important things that you should follow.
Speaker 2:And you wouldn't think like you said. You wouldn't think that jesus would say oh no, there there are two that are more important than the others. Yeah, but you would think that is all. Of them are the most important thing that you could possibly think about. But no, he says no, there's two that are more important than the others, and if you do those, the others sort of flow from that. He said yes, you're not going to steal from somebody you love as yourself.
Speaker 1:Yeah, or yeah, exactly Right. So like there is okay. Now I'm really going to start throwing some Hebrew words at you. Okay, sin, transgression and iniquity those all, if you break those down into their Hebrew roots essentially they are terms for sin means you've missed the mark. There was a target that you needed to aim for and you missed it.
Speaker 1:Iniquity is like the burden that you carry because of how you mess up. So imagine, like in your mind's eye, a person who's like carrying a big boulder on their back and then another boulder gets put on top, and then another, and eventually you're crushed under the weight of all of these things. Right, that's iniquity. And transgression is the things you do to the people in your community. Like it's the sins you commit against the people who are close to you. So like if I were to go and talk behind your back after this, I'm committing transgression against you, right, and so they're not all in relation to God, but those laws also not laws. Those aren't laws. Those are my sins against the law.
Speaker 1:They're in relation to God, but also to you as a person, and I think that's why Jesus says all the law and all the prophets are boiled down into these two number one commands love the Lord, your God, and love your neighbor as yourself, because God is the creator and he made you. He's the perfect being of all things, right, but God also made your neighbor, and Genesis 1 tells us that you and I are both created in the image of God. We're both created in that same image, and so if I sin against Ken, I'm also sinning against God, because you are a person made in his image. You're a reflection of the creator, and so I'm like, yeah, I can hurt you, but, man, I'm also hurting God because you're made by him. So, love God, love others, yeah, and I think it all boils down to that, because that's life.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's the very essence of who we are.
Speaker 2:The arrow. It's one of those love God up here, love others down here. Yeah, my hands are above each other and then there's an arrow pointing down to the one and then up to the other. It's just a perfect cycle.
Speaker 1:It is a perfect cycle. In fact, I would even take away the term cycle and say it's just, it's one. You cannot do one without doing the other Right, and so I can't. Where is it In? John? Jesus says they will know that you belong to me by the way. You love each other. Greater love has no man than this.
Speaker 1:This is a different passage now Greater man has no love than this that one would lay down his life for his friends. The perfect expression of love for God is when you perfectly love your neighbor, and the perfect expression of love for your neighbor is when you perfectly love the Lord, your God. So they're not even separate. It's one thing in each other. I'm doing a lot of hand motions in front of you right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, a lot of hand motions. I feel like a cheerleader. My arms are going up and down. I wonder if it's. I don't think it's coincidence that, the second one and the first one being equal, they constitute, like you said, a perfect relationship with each other, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:That second part. I don't think it's a coincidence that it is maybe the most difficult thing to do To love others. Yeah, yeah, it is one of the most difficult things to do.
Speaker 1:But if you really thought about it, I think that you'd find that loving God is also one of the most difficult things to do, because the one hitch in the cycle that throws it off every time is the love of self.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It happens in relationships between you and me and other people in our communities, and it happens so much more often in our relationship to God and man. The love of the self, that's the thing that gets us in trouble. Absolutely. We are supposed to deny ourselves, die to ourselves so that we can take on the fullness of Christ. Because that's what he did. He completely denied himself and perfectly loved people on the macro level like the global historical level, yeah and perfectly loved his heavenly father.
Speaker 2:Yeah, not just individual people. He loved Well, not just individual persons. He Well not just individual persons. He loves people.
Speaker 1:But he did both. Yeah, I mean, he demonstrated his love for all humanity by demonstrating love for the sick person by the pool of Bethesda Right. Do you want to be healed? And he said yes, I want to be healed. And he got up and picked up his mat and walked home after being lame for however many years.
Speaker 1:When the man was lowered through the roof. He was a paralytic and his friends broke through the roof and lowered down. He said I'll demonstrate that I have the power to forgive sins by saying get up, pick up your mat and go home. That was one-on-one. I mean, it was in a crowd of people, but he loved the individual and demonstrated his great love for us by showing his love for the individual and I just. That's what the law is about. It's about loving God and loving others and now as born again Christians in the New Testament era. This is where the kind of focal point of the sermon was this past Sunday era. This is where the kind of focal point of the sermon was this past Sunday. We can actually live by the law because Jesus has purified us completely because of his death on the cross.
Speaker 2:We have an opportunity now where before it was like, okay, there's no way I can keep all these laws, but now I have a chance to keep those two laws. I actually have a good starting point.
Speaker 1:Yeah, jeremiah says I see he says it like this that they will have God's law written on their hearts. I think we said that on the podcast recently and the dichotomy between our hearts of stone have now become the place where the law which was on stone has been written Right. We live in that day and age because of the spirit of God can dwell in us. I just think it's amazing. I just love that picture in Leviticus where we landed on Sunday, which was God invited the Israelites to come and live in his camp, and in order to live in the camp where the Holy God lives, then you have to be pure. So all these rituals, all these laws made it so that they could dwell in proximity to God. But now Jesus has become the lamb who was slain. We are covered in his blood.
Speaker 1:Marcos said it really good from stage or at least like prefaced it that the priest would basically the priests were covered in the blood of all these animals that were sacrificed, like they'd had to put a little bit of blood on their earlobe and then there was some blood that had to go on their foot and then they would sprinkle the blood on the altar and on the day of atonement, sprinkle the blood on the inner walls of the Holy of Holies and the tabernacle. They are literally covered in blood of all these animals the goat and the ox and the like. It was just ridiculous. But now in the New Testament we are symbolically, but also spiritually, covered by Christ's blood. Yeah, because we are high priests. Now, the way that 1 Peter says it, we are the priests and we've been covered in his blood, which redeems us of our sin. It washes us clean. It doesn't just push back our sin, it doesn't just cover it up and make us look like we're clean.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:We have been purified from the inside out so that now God can come live in us. We become the camp. Our bodies, our souls, our spirit, we become the place where God dwells. I just love that mental picture, yeah. But, it's also the reality. The spirit of God dwells in us. It's amazing, amazing, god's infinitely beautiful plan. It's just fantastic. Yeah, I love it.
Speaker 2:It's on paper. If you were to say, okay, this sermon, the sermon this Sunday, is about the law, you might get an eye roll. You might get like, well, I'm going to say, romantic is as romantic as anything else in the Bible and it's not legalistic. It absolutely has to do with the relationship between you and God.
Speaker 1:Yes, and God had to be so distinct with those people, like the law had to be nuanced, it had to have so it had to be robust. That's what I'm trying to say. Because they were. The Israelites were being moved into the land of Canaan, the promised land, and there were foreign people Well, they're foreign, isn't the right word. There were people, groups already living in Canaan the Canaanites, the Jebusites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the blah blah blah blah blah ites and they were all living pagan lifestyles, worshiping false gods, child sacrifices, there were rituals and feasts that dishonored God. They had different ideas of how the world was created. I mean, they were pagan in every sense of the word and so God needed his Israelites who were decompressing from Egypt.
Speaker 2:Yeah, right.
Speaker 1:They were decompressing from their time in Egypt. I love that, and they were— that's a buzzword they were, yeah, they were transforming into God's holy people on earth, and so, like, of course, god has to create all these systems for them so that they would look different. Spoiler alert they fail in a lot of ways when they go into the promised land and they get punished for it along the way. But God and his relationship to them, he needs them to be set apart another term for holy. He needs them to be holy as he is holy because he's doing a holy work through them. He's bringing the Messiah through these people. So, yeah, you got to have a bunch of laws in order to keep that intact.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is yet another example of how okay things are one way now they're going to be different once Jesus comes along and the Bible so much of the Bible is. Things are one way, now they're different. There's the reluctant participant. That's going to end up being the most important thing in the story, and it's one of the central themes of Christianity that this one event changed the entire course of existence.
Speaker 1:Yeah, all these different motifs that you just described are all making up the bigger part of the picture. Yeah, all these different motifs that you just described are all making up the bigger part of the picture. Yeah, god created us to be in relationship to him and we are best in relationship with him when we have a right relationship to him, when we are actively posturing ourselves toward him and pursuing right relationship with each other.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And Jesus has made it possible for both of those things to actually play out.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I talked one time about. It might not have been on here, it might not have been with you, but I talked to this guy, dr Greg Deloach, about the form of the cross. Has to do with our relationship to God and relationship to others. Oh, interesting, the vertical and horizontal.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and he's like I thought I was going to blow his mind and he's like interesting, and I'm like you've heard that before, don't even string me along. But this was all over email and I was like I thought I was about to break the internet and he said oh, that's interesting.
Speaker 1:Any more thoughts?
Speaker 2:That's all he said. Yeah, and I'm like, okay, you don't have to tell me, you're the smartest person in the room without telling me. Right, and I'm like thanks for pinpointing that I have a huge hole in my body of knowledge as far as Christianity goes. But I was like that really, maybe there is something there. Why the cross? Oh, yes, maybe there is something there. Why the cross, oh yes it was a Roman tool of crucifixion? Yeah, but is it a coincidence that there's a vertical relationship and a horizontal relationship?
Speaker 1:Listen, I think if that kind of symbolism points us toward God and his ultimate plan for us, why not? Why can't that work Right? I'm not sure of like the actual historical, like purpose of the cross, if there was anything that pointed to those relationships but man, why can't that be a symbolism for us to remember? The vertical beam is our vertical relationship to God and the horizontal is our horizontal relationships to each other.
Speaker 2:Here on, earth and you're, in a way, you are carrying that cross.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:In a way.
Speaker 1:Absolutely.
Speaker 2:You know. So we all have our cross to bear.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Air quotes. But it's I mean, it's a really good mnemonic device to remember. I need to be vertically integrated buzzword, buzzword and horizontally we're saying buzzword because we talked about that before we had recorded. We need to be vertically integrated and horizontally related.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, man. I'll tell you what If we were any good at this, we would write a book about horizontal and vertical integration and then we would have a conference about it, maybe like a two-day event, where we get people together and we just talk about vertical integration and then horizontal integration. Wireless mics yeah, those big Britney Spears microphones on our faces. Then we could have some plants in the audience.
Speaker 2:There's a TED Talk in there somewhere. There you go. We should have a plants in the audience. There's a TED.
Speaker 1:Talk in there somewhere. There you go. We just have a TED Talk. Yeah, as if this isn't our TED Talk already.
Speaker 2:It is.
Speaker 1:Thanks for joining us today on the Extra Podcast. I really enjoyed our conversation and there's so much more to be had about the law and our relationship to Jesus. I encourage you to open up your Bible and read through Leviticus with a mind to see how does Jesus change this for me? How does Jesus play this out in my life? Man, I hope you'll do that and join us next time on the Extra Podcast and, as always, we'll see you on Sunday. See you on Sunday. Bye, everybody.