Leviticus - really!

My last two posts were a bit lacking in background. They were the diagram of the Tabernacle (find here) and a chart detailing the five offerings listed in Leviticus 1-7 (find here). 

This autumn, on Sunday mornings, we're following the Israelites on their journey from Sinai, where God gave Moses the 10 Commandments, to their arrival at the borders of the 'promised land' where Joshua replaced Moses as the leader of the people. It's a journey that took forty years and stretches from Exodus 20 right through to the end of Deuteronomy - a journey that we're going to cover in twelve weeks.

It's a journey that takes in Leviticus and Numbers - books that don't often appear in lists of 'my top ten favourite books in the Bible'. For many Christians their only encounter with Leviticus comes late February or early March as part of a 'Read the Bible in Year' programme. Up until that point it has been quiet a discipline to read 3-4 chapters a day, but at least in Genesis and Exodus there are some interesting story lines to follow even if some of the detail is a bit alien. Then second half of Exodus got to bit dull with all the details of how to build the Tabernacle, and then building the Tabernacle, and what the priests should wear - but there was still a bit of narrative thrown in along the way to help us progressing (e.g. the story of the Golden Calf).

But then we hit Leviticus with the blow by blow details of how to sacrifice a goat and what to do with the fat around the kidneys; and when to burn the skin on the altar of burnt offerings, or when the priest could keep it for himself, or when it needed to be burnt up in a ceremonially clean place outside the camp. And that's all before we hit sections on mildew and defiling moulds. But for those who make it through Leviticus their reward is ... Numbers.

Maybe it is not surprising that many stop at this point. If you miss a couple of days suddenly you have to wade through 90 minutes of law, which seems alien and irrelevant to us and so far removed from the stories we know from the gospels and Acts. Or alternatively we skip large sections and wait for the story to pick up again in Joshua - but then how do we make sense of all the ethnic cleansing...maybe we just should wait until later in the year and pick up the reading programme when it reaches Matthew and Mark.

So why are we looking at this section this term and what do we hope to get out of it?

One reason for looking at this part of the Old Testament is because all of the Bible is 'God breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness' (2 Timothy 3:16). We will encounter God in these chapters - even if it appears, at first sight, that the God we discover is very different to the God of the New Testament.

Another reason is because when we come to the NT, Jesus, the disciples, and most of the people who made up the very early church were Jewish, and therefore their lives and their worldview was shaped by these chapters in the Hebrew Bible and the encounters that we read about here between God and his people. The more we understand these books the better we will understand the writers of the NT - what they thought about God, what they thought about the world, what they thought about themselves.

The Bible is many different books, brought together, in a collection that tells one big overarching story. We won't properly understand the end part of the story if we don't better understand the bits nearer the beginning.