So yesterday I gave you a sampling of five laws in my household growing up. One is a civil law that you put toilet paper on the right way so it rolls toward the person on the toilet, not away. The second was a sacrificial law: if you violate curfew, you have to pay by being grounded. The third is a ceremonial law about how we do sacred things, that is, don't set your alarm to go off at noon in church and disrupt your dad when he's preaching. The fourth is a clean and unclean law about not licking fleece waters. Again, no idea why that had to be a rule in my house, very hard to say. And the fifth is a universal moral law that just says don't punch people. As we were discussing, the Old Testament is a lot like the household rules that your common sense applies to, and that there are different reasons for those rules to exist. So Jesus is talking about the law and how he's the fulfillment of it. And if we really understand that, want to understand that, we got to go back and look at the aspect of the law that would be the rules. And I used that segue to give myself time to flip over here to Leviticus. Have you read Leviticus lately? It is kind of nuts. If you're gonna read it, read it in conjunction with all of Matthew and all of Hebrews. It really does help make sense of the thing. But even if you go through here and you just look at the headings, you get a sense of this multifaceted law, which is part of what's being explained in the book of Leviticus. So we open up and we're reading about uh burnt offering, grain offering, fellowship offerings, sin offerings, guilt offering. That's like the first five, six chapters worth of this stuff. So it's giving all these details about how you actually present and give these sacrificial offerings. We're gonna come back to that concept in a little bit. Yeah, chapter seven is more about that trespass offering, fellowship offering. But then we get into chapter eight, and it says the consecration to priestly service. The Lord said to Moses, bring Aaron and his sons their garments, the anointing oil, the bull for the sin offering, the two rams, the basket containing. You've heard this stuff from the Bible, right? Where it gets real weird about like then put on this outfit, wear this weird hat, and stand over here and do this thing and wash your hands and sprinkle this stuff. And it's like, why do you care so much? Why are there all these details about these ceremonial things? And I mean, there's a ton. Chapter nine, the inauguration of priestly service, chapter 10, the how to screw up priestly service. That's not what it actually says in the text, paraphrases mine. And then chapter 11, we turn the page again and we start getting into something different again. Purity of food. Like what food are you supposed to eat or not eat? Chapter 12 in relation to childbirth, how to get that right and what is clean and unclean regarding childbirth. Chapter 13 gets us into skin diseases and which ones you can be around and which ones you're not supposed to be around. Chapter 14 is about how you cleanse those. Chapter 15 is bigger picture stuff in relationship to the body and the cycles that the body goes through. And so there's all of this stuff about what is clean, what is not clean. You get into chapter 16. And now we're talking about festivals and offerings and what you do during the most holy days of the year. Then chapter 18, you get into sex stuff, and maybe that's what that reviewer was talking about yesterday. Maybe he cheated ahead and anticipated this episode. Chapter 19, this one gets crazy, like into uh the stuff about your daily life and man, this this stuff about clean and unclean with the sex stuff. I mean, the word discharge gets used way more than you would be comfortable with. It talks about menstruation and all kinds of weird relational stuff that we look at and have very little historical context to. And it just reads as strange. Uh, what to do with heinous offenses, chapter 20, how the priests are supposed to conduct themselves, chapter 23, what to do with the Sabbath and additional events and festivals. And I could go all the way through the whole thing, but what we see in Leviticus, in that quick 90-second subheadings-only summary of the thing, is a very diverse expression of the law. Some of the law, like what to do about heinous crimes, is moral. We don't hit people. So this is universal. You don't stab people, you don't steal from people. This goes back to the Ten Commandments. This stuff's just a no-brainer. But some of that has to do with the dietary expectations of the day. You can eat this kind of food, but not that kind of food. Well, why? Is that universal? Is there something innately evil about pork or shellfish? The New Testament gives the impression no. In the New Testament, you know, you get that moment in Acts where Peter has that vision of that sheet with all the different kinds of animals being lowered from heaven, and then God says, just take it all, eat it, take, take this and eat. And so it's kind of an abolition of the clean and unclean aspect of laws. And at that point, I guess you just eat things that are good and not gross and use common sense or eat to taste, I suppose, or eat out of consideration to others instead of some arbitrary set of rules. But but back then, the clean and unclean thing, maybe it made more sense for where they were at culturally, for who they were amongst the peoples, for hygiene, or maybe there's even some sort of illustration implicit in those clean and unclean animals that the Bible is going to cash in on later with another one of those ba-ba-da-da-dot completion in Jesus moments. And I would argue that the clean and unclean stuff does round out in that way, and it helps set up the whole picture of who Jesus is and what he's accomplishing. You know, you see stuff in that summary through Exodus about the ceremonial business, the stuff in there that involves how to dress and what to do. Well, the same way if I'm doing stupid things with my watch alarm in 1990, whatever, as a kid listening to dad's sermon, that is disruptive to this really important thing. Likewise, there are going to be ground rules, especially in a theocracy, in a religious society governed theoretically by God, there are going to be rules about how you do church. Now, will those apply forever? Well, those don't seem to make as much sense once you get outside of a theocracy. Um, the civil rules, you know, what I compare to the toilet paper on top or on bottom, those things again make sense. If those are the ground rules, those are the taboos, those are the ways that we're supposed to do life in this theocracy in the ancient world, cool, but those probably aren't going to translate across the board into all society moving forward as this goes beyond the boundaries of a theocracy where God is king. And then you got the sacrificial stuff. What do we do with that part of the law? The stuff about if you get something wrong, you do this. If, you know, even if you get everything right, you still do this sacrifice at the end of the year, and like some animal or something actually dies as actually a way to demonstrate the price of sin and violating the commands of God. That's a pretty weighty thing that each person in this society, in one way or another, had to participate in. Now we can look at these laws and say, wow, that's why I'm a Christian and not a Jew, I guess, because the Old Testament stuff, that's crazy. That's so dumb and backwards. People were dumber back then. The God of the Old Testament seems way different from the God of the New Testament. I don't believe in the God of the Old Testament. He seemed oppressive and like he liked dumb arbitrary rules, but the God of the New Testament, Jesus, he's more likable. He's got those eyebrows that go up in the middle and the sparkling blue eyes and the perfectly conditioned long hair. And he just goes around saying nice things about love your enemy and turn the other cheek and be nice to people. I like New Testament God. I don't like Old Testament God. But Jesus is not giving his audience, both his immediate audience or the us audience, permission to make that separation here. Because what he's saying is that somehow he's the completion of all of those rules. And I would submit to you that he's the completion of all of those rules in three ways as we look at the larger context. One, he's the completion of the aspects of those rules that are universal by bringing them forward with his teaching into forever. The moral law, it doesn't go away. At no point do we see Jesus be like, okay, go ahead and violate your neighbors, mess with their stuff, mess with their person, kidnap people, harm them, stab murder, whatever, because the law is fulfilled in me, so don't worry about any of that. No, Jesus clearly affirms all of that. And if you don't believe me, well, uh just look at the next bits of chapter five. He covers all of that kind of stuff. It doesn't look like he's abolishing the law of murder when he goes on to remind us that murder is bad, and even beyond murder being bad, a desire to murder in the heart is bad. So it's an expansion or a completion of this. No, no, no, he's not getting rid of the moral law. So one way that he fulfills all of this is to bring that forward. Another way that we see him fulfilling the law is with what he doesn't bring forward. That the idea here is that Jesus is occupying a new place between humanity and between God. This is profoundly fleshed out in Hebrews. Remember, I said read Leviticus, Matthew, and Hebrews all at once if you want to get this straight. It's really, really helpful. And there we get the idea of Jesus as this perfect high priest, this one who occupies the role that we see described in Leviticus, where they wear the outfits and they do all this stuff and they purify themselves so that they can be the mediator between God and man. Well, in the New Testament, it's being made clear that we have one mediator between God and man, and this is Jesus Christ, that he plays this role. That is how he's holding himself out. So all of the stuff that involves the ceremonial law and even some of the civil law, all of that seems to be fulfilled in Christ as well. And I just mentioned how the clean and unclean aspect is fulfilled in Christ as well, as he makes all things clean. So he fulfills the law by carrying forward the moral law, by completing, rounding out, occupying the space of the ceremonial law, the civil law, the clean and unclean law. But finally, and I think this is what he's really, really driving at here, is that he completes the sacrificial aspect of the law. And as much as I want to tear into that right now, because that really is the centerpiece of this thought, it's gonna have to wait so that we can give it proper time tomorrow. Simply put, there's a whole bunch of law that it's hard for us to really properly understand in the Old Testament, but every aspect of that law at one point or another is gonna get addressed in the New Testament in the person of Christ. And this fulfillment and completion of the law is probably the most profound and glaring. Old Testament goes bun, dun dun dun, dun, New Testament goes bump, bump in Jesus. And I think we're just gonna see that more and more clearly moving forward. So I'm gonna explain the framework with what we just did, with what we're gonna do tomorrow. But in doing so, I have to acknowledge that not all of that is summarized in these couple of verses. There's obviously a ton of questions that come out of that, more things that need to be fleshed out, but it's gonna take more and more shape as we work through the rest of the text. All right, I'm going on and on. We're gonna talk about how Jesus was the completion of the sacrificial aspect of the law tomorrow. And look, if you're starting to feel overwhelmed because this is kind of a lot to process, Old Testament, New Testament laws, sacrifice. I don't know, there's more religion than I'm into. Hang with me. It's an idea that takes a little while to develop, but we're gonna work the whole thing out and you'll be tracking with it. Whether we come to all the same conclusions or not when we're done with the process, you know, who knows on that? But I think we can at least get to a place where the data is clear. We're using the same terms and we're talking about the same stuff. All right, for tomorrow, I'm Matt. This is the 10 minute Bible hour. Let's do it again soon.