Good morning.
My name is Matt Armstrong.
I'm an associate pastor here at Redeemer, and it's a joy to get to bring the word to you this morning.
We're continuing in a series in the book of Leviticus, everyone's favorite Old Testament passage.
We've done a great job over the last few weeks of making fun of this book.
It's one of the least accessible books to a 21st century context.
And that makes sense.
You know, I've I've read through the Bible a number of times, and for me, this phrase, the long lobe of the liver, like it kind of like sets my teeth on edge.
And it's in Leviticus like 400 times.
You know, sacrificing animals, draining blood into bowls, throwing blood onto altars, dipping your finger into blood, animal entrails, right?
It's like another world.
You know, is this sci-fi?
Is this fantasy?
Is this another world?
No, this was actually done in our world.
And there are still some cultures and some peoples who do animal sacrifices.
Um it's also important to remember that this is the revelation of God.
This isn't some strange pagan ritual.
This is God's word given to God's people.
Uh, and that's something I want us to talk about as we jump into this chapter four and five of Leviticus.
We need to understand the law in its context when it was given.
That brings us to point one for today.
The law was actually a beautiful gift from God to his people.
We don't talk about this much here at this church, and that's for very good reason, as we'll see shortly.
The gospel, the grace of the gospel given through Jesus Christ far surpasses the law.
Jesus is God's greatest gift to us.
But at its time, when it was given, the law was revolutionary.
It was mind-blowing.
Imagine that you have cancer.
You feel it inside of you, it's growing, it's going to kill you.
You're familiar enough with cancer to understand that this has happened.
It's happened to loved ones of yours, others that you know.
It will be slow and it will be painful.
But you're living in a time before modern medicine where people don't actually know much about cancer, know what it is, where it comes from, what to do about it.
But then someone comes to town.
His name is Moses, and he has received a revelation from God with all the ins and outs of cancer, the various types of cancer, how they manifest, and how to treat it.
This would be amazing.
This is revelation, information about a pressing problem, something affecting your own life that you really and no one really understood fully.
This would be revolutionary.
But beyond that, not just knowing about cancer or more about it, God revealed to Moses how to treat cancer.
There's various types of cancer and there's various types of remedies, but whichever it is that you have, we know how to treat it.
If you bring the right sacrifice, if you bring the right offering, as the passage says, the priest will make atonement for you and you will be forgiven.
Can you imagine the revolution that this would have been for the people of God?
This thing that had affected humanity for generations and beyond memory.
God has now revealed what it is and how to deal with it.
This is why Psalm 119 exists.
If you're familiar with this Psalm, it's the longest in the Old Testament, in the Psalter.
It's 176 verses, and it's all about this one subject: the law of God, the Word of God.
This is how the Psalm opens.
Blessed are those whose ways is blameless, who walk in the law of the Lord.
And then this is how the book closes, 174 verses later.
This is not the way we often talk, right, today.
Ah, I love the law, that light unto our feet.
But those of us who have come to know and to understand the Word of God, maybe less so the book of Leviticus, but but we have seen that God gave us his revelation, his special revelation, as a great gift.
And this is exactly what the law was.
It uncovered, it shined, it revealed this incredible problem facing humanity and specifically God's people.
And so the law was this incredible gift.
I think it's important for us to keep that in mind as we continue to walk through this book.
All right, let's keep going.
Let's look at verses one and two of chapter four.
And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, Speak to the people of Israel, saying, If anyone sins unintentionally in any of the Lord's commandments about things not to be done, and does any of them, dot, dot, dot.
He continues.
This brings us to point two.
The law teaches us about the reality of sin.
The book of Romans notes this.
He says, There was a time before the law when sin was not counted, when sin wasn't known.
Right?
We knew right from wrong, and God's judgment was still upon sin before the law was given.
But the revelation of the law revealed incredibly important information to us about the law.
Here's a brief outline.
We're not going to read all of chapter four and some of chapter five, our passage.
But as what we just said here, saw here, it's talking about unintentional sin.
And then it breaks it down into four categories.
If the priest sins, what is the priest to do?
The priest was incredibly important, right?
He was the one who could make sacrifice.
If the priest was taken out by sin, there was no one to stand between us and God to make the sacrifice.
That's why the priest comes first in these laws.
Second, what if the whole congregation of Israel sins unintentionally?
That's another topic we don't think much about, that we can sin as a community, as a culture, as a group, not just individually.
That's important.
Third, what if a leader of the people, a representative of the people, sins?
And then fourth and finally, the laws cover what if just a normal, everyday, common person sins before the Lord?
And each one has a detailed description, just as we saw a moment ago.
And so what does this teach us about sin?
Well, first the law teaches us that there is our sins of omission and sins of commission.
And what that means is sometimes we omit things.
God says there are things we ought to do, like worship him and pay him homage and give him glory.
And sometimes we don't do that.
Sometimes our heart is in rebellion against God.
But there's also sins of commission, things that we do willfully.
These are often called high-handed sins.
Well, then there's two other categories, one that our passage covers.
There are intentional sins and unintentional sins.
Things we mean to do or things we mean not to do, and then things we stumble upon.
This chapter covers the unintentional things.
And this reveals to us that sin is kind of like a state of being, right?
It's almost like getting sick.
And I don't want to traumatize us, but you remember COVID?
Man, what a horrible time to live.
Right?
We had all these new laws and new norms and things to do, right?
And we even had apps on our phone that would like ping and be like, you may have come in contact with someone with COVID.
And you're like, seriously?
What am I supposed to do?
Stay in my house for 14 days and try not to go crazy?
Right?
You would do, you could do everything in your power not to get sick, and you get sick.
Well, you don't say, Well, I didn't mean to get sick.
I worked really hard not to get sick.
They would say, You're sick.
You've got a quarantine.
And that's how sin is.
And the problem is that sin, the result of sin, is a separation from God.
It's a quarantine from God.
And as God's people came to know that God was their savior, God was their safety, God was their provider.
To be separated from God was a horrible fate.
But even worse than that quarantine from God, sin was a death sentence.
Because God is holy.
And we are not.
Sin separated us from God.
And it had to be dealt with.
It would not just go away.
God couldn't simply turn away from sin.
And so the law revealed that there's an underlying moral structure to creation, right?
Whether we mean to or not, there are things we are to do, things we are not to do, and we are constantly falling short.
But here's the thing about the law that Paul will point out in the book of Romans, law didn't create the problem, right?
The law simply revealed what was true about us already.
Well, this also shows us how pervasive sin is.
I was part of a trial last year, that trial is being appealed to the higher court, and so we are going back through a lot of old documents, emails that have been sent, uh, pieces of evidence and minutes from meetings, because you've got to put together this record of the case.
And they even call the process perfecting the record.
And let me tell you, this is a painful process.
Not just because you have to go back and find things, but you comb through those documents and you realize, oh man, there are so many typos.
This thing is mislabeled.
I can't even find this piece of evidence.
And the the higher court is asking for those things and asking about things, and you're just like, man, we tried so hard.
We knew this was important.
And yet, look at this laundry list of mistakes and omissions and failures.
And that's we call that being human, right?
No matter how hard we try, we fall short.
And that's exactly what Leviticus chapters 4 and 5 point out to us, that sin is simply pervasive, that it's not, it's it's not just that we fall short some of the time, but that we are constantly walking in this perpetual state of need.
So let's keep going.
Let's look at verses 32 to 35.
If he brings, if if the the one in offense brings the lamb as his offering for a sin offering, he shall bring a female without blemish and lay his hands on the head of the sin offering and kill it for a sin offering in the place where they kill the burnt offering.
Then the priest shall take some of the blood of the sin offering with his fingers and put it on the horns of the altar of burnt offering, and pour out all the rest of its blood at the base of the altar, and all its fat shall be removed from the fat of the lamb, as the fat of the lamb is removed from the sacrifice of peace offerings, and the priest shall burn it on the altar, on the table of the Lord's food offerings, and the priest shall make atonement for him, for the sin which he has committed, and he shall be forgiven.
This brings us to point three.
That the law actually provided a remedy for sin.
This last phrase from this, what we just read, it says that the priest shall make atonement for him or her and uh for the sin which they have committed, and he shall be forgiven.
Six times in this one chapter, it says that.
And so imagine hearing this chapter read out loud.
This would stand out.
Along with all the long lobes of the liver, there's this phrase the priest shall make atonement, and they shall be forgiven.
This is this is another incredible point of revelation, and something that we, understandably, often take for granted.
That there is atonement.
God could have dealt with sin by simply saying, if you sin, there is death, right?
That is just.
And yet that's not what God did.
Out of love and compassion, knowing us in the state that we are in, knowing it before the foundations of the earth, having his plan of grace and salvation in place, he provides a means of atonement from the very beginning.
For those who wonder why there even needs to be sacrifice or atonement at all, it's important to remember that when uh remember a time when you've truly been wronged, when a real injustice has been committed against you.
What happens in our own hearts?
A desire, uh a need for justice rises up in us.
And that's appropriate.
That is the image of God in us.
Because God is a God of justice, and justice brings equity back, it balances the scales, as it were.
And as long as injustice and sin remain, things are not equal, things are not just.
And so God will not rest, and God will not simply pass by or overlook sin.
All sin must be dealt with.
And so, God, this is the other thing that our passage reveals to us, that he provides something called substitutionary atonement.
That someone or something else can atone for my sins.
Did you notice it in the passage, a couple passages we've read, it talks about the one who brings the offering, as you're about to offer this animal in your place, you lay your hand on the head of the offering.
And there's an exchange going on there.
Your sin is passing from yourself to this animal.
Can you imagine?
And the text actually says that the person bringing the offering is the one who sacrifices the animal, would cut the throat of the animal.
How weighty would your sin feel if you looked into the eyes of another animal and knew that it was about to die for you.
This was the power of the law.
And it was it was real.
Right?
What did the passage say?
The priest will make atonement for the one bringing the offering, and they will be forgiven.
The law really was bringing forgiveness of sins.
It really was bringing healing from that cancer inside the human soul.
But there still remained a problem.
Those sacrifices only covered past sins, right?
You come because you have sinned, you offer the sacrifice, and those sins are forgiven.
But what would happen?
You would go out and realize again you have unintentionally or intentionally sinned, and so you would have to come back.
Imagine a lifetime of coming back to the priest, of making the offerings, at minimum on an annual basis.
Would your heart not begin to long for a better solution to the problem?
Well, this is exactly what the book of Hebrews talks about.
Hebrews is like the New Testament commentary on the book of Leviticus, if you're interested in that.
The book of Hebrews says in chapter 10, he says, it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sin.
And that leads us to our final point, that Jesus was the fulfillment of the law, the one to whom the law always pointed.
Again, let's look at a couple passages in Hebrews.
The author says, For since the law has but a shadow of the good things to come, instead of the true form of these realities, it can never, by the same sacrifices that are continually offered every year, make perfect those who draw near.
Otherwise would they not have ceased to be offered, since the worshippers, having been once cleansed, would no longer have any consciousness of sin.
But in these sacrifices, there is a reminder of sin every year.
What the author is saying is that the law was there to deal with the bad fruit of the root of cancer, but the root remained, and the root itself needed to be dealt with.
But Jesus was different.
He continues, and every priest stands daily at his service, offering repeatedly the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins.
But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God.
For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified.
As beautiful a gift as the law was, Jesus far surpassed it.
The law required repeated sacrifices, it needed multiple priests, and the priest himself needed sacrifices to cover his own sins.
And yet God sent the Son, Jesus, to become our great high priest who had no sin.
And so when he offered himself as that substitute to whom all those Old Testament sacrifices pointed, it was truly the perfect sacrifice.
So not one lamb or one goat or one bull for this sin, this one time in the past, but one sacrifice that would cover all time.
This is why we worship Jesus' name.
This is why we revere him above all things, and this is why he was, it was such a bomb on the Jewish community.
That this substitutionary atonement could do away with the temple, the sacrifice, those things that were central to the identity of Israel.
But beloved, this is the freedom that is ours in Christ.
That if you've put your faith in Jesus, it's as if we have laid our hand on Jesus' head.
We transferred our sin to him.
But in a fascinating twist, he also transfers his righteousness to us.
He dies on the cross, takes away our sin, but he rises to new life and gives us eternal life.
Beloved, this is the beginning of the freedom that is ours.
No longer do we need to return again and again to the temple with a new offering, for Jesus is our one and only offering.
Yes, we continue to sin each day, intentionally and unintentionally, and we come back, we confess our sins to Jesus, but not to be forgiven.
But because we have been forgiven.
Beloved, that is true freedom.
We are no longer slaves to sin, no longer are we crushed by the burden of sin.
Let us rejoice and celebrate the one who sets us free.
Let's pray.
Our Father in heaven, thank you for the gift of Jesus, the perfect Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the whole world.
May we walk in the joy and the freedom of his sacrifice today and every day.
Amen.