Loving Leviticus
Don’t you wish some parts of the Bible weren’t there?
Many of us are practical Marcionites. Marcion was the second century heretic who ditched most of the Bible, as he didn’t like the God it portrayed. Marcion was denounced then, and since, by the Church, but the reality is that many of us act like him in our reading of the Bible.
I have a confession to make – whenever my Bible reading plan gets round to Leviticus I feel a sense of inner dread. I know that it is going to be hard work, that it is going to frustrate me, and that it is going to make me angry. I also know that at some point I am going to have to preach through it, if for no other reason than to get clear in my own mind what it is all about.
Recently someone on our Alpha course came in all steamed up because she couldn’t make sense of the instructions for dealing with rape given in Deuteronomy. “How did she get hold of that?” I asked. My colleague who runs Alpha responded, “Someone did something stupid – they gave her a Bible!”
Compare this response with William Tyndale’s declaration about Deuteronomy that, “This is a book worthy to be read in day and night and never to be out of hands. It is easy also and light and a very pure gospel whose message is a preaching of faith and love.” Tyndale’s attitude always amazes me. He made this comment having lost all his translation work in a shipwreck and then having to spend months more redoing all that work. Months and months in the Pentateuch, while living under the constant threat of betrayal and martyrdom, and finding it “light.”
Perhaps our struggle with Leviticus, and Numbers, and Deuteronomy is that we just don’t give them enough time and attention. In skimming through these books as fast as possible to keep up with our Bible reading plans (or in ignoring them completely) we fail to see the gospel in them.
The key to understanding these books has got to be understanding the story of God’s dealings with the earth.
A key scene in this years Oscar winner, Slum Dog Millionaire, is the deliberate maiming of children who are sent out into the streets to beg. It is an ugly and horrific scene. I have four children. I found this scene hard to watch. But the movie needs that scene – without it the story wouldn’t hold together.
When we get to Leviticus we see something similar. In Leviticus we are confronted with the ugliness of sin and the gulf of separation there is between ourselves and a holy God. All those laws and commands – all of them point to the problem of sin, and the way to resolve it. There is no way that sinful humans should be able to worship YHWH, but he makes a way for this to be possible. And in those rules and commands we see something prophetic, a pointing towards Christ who by his own sacrifice will finally and fully defeat death and make real worship possible – make it possible for a sinner like me to become part of the people of God.
Leviticus is an important part of the story. We can’t cover our eyes or fast–forward through it. We need to learn to love it.