4.6.25

Good morning!

I'll be traveling down south to Ft. Walton Beach, Florida today (a14-16 hour drive)...prayer appreciated :-)

This weekend, we concluded the opening chapters of Leviticus/vayikra. And this week, though I will be focused on Passover and Unleavened Bread in Florida, I want to devote the entire week to realigning our thought patterns on the offerings/korbanot in Leviticus 1-6.

To be quite honest, as you listen to yesterday's zoom call, you'll see that during these events of bringing the animal or grain offerings that there was tremendous joy experienced by all the parties involved: the individual, the priest, and God. Do these events of drawing near with the sacrifice not sound joyful? I’m not talking about sacrificial, giving or sacrificial living, we're talking about blood and death and fire and burning flesh and smoke. Hardly images that struck us as joyful...and if you are one who thinks it sounds beautiful, as I do, you are not one of the animals involved in the process (LOL)! You ask them if they might have a different perspective. Would they call this joyful? Clearly we do have a little bit of a difficulty with this description of the sacrifices, joyful association.

Why what is this about? None of us would acknowledge that God instructed Israel, as we studied the past five weeks, to build me a sanctuary that I may dwell within them (Ex. 25:8).  Last week we spoke of how to build him a sacred space, follow the directions, follow the instructions right and His glory will appear (Ex. 40:33-35). And now, in the Torah anyway, as we began the book of Leviticus, it is actually an ongoing interaction between God and the people as to how that was accomplished. 

In Leviticus, it says the answer is clearly laid out: draw near to me through sacrifice. On the surface, if that’s how God says it should be then it should be done that way and that’s enough, right? That's certainly pretty straightforward, but it’s not that easy. It’s not that easy when we talk about using animal sacrifice to draw near to God. In it we're immediately confronted with very deep challenges to our modern mindset. When we talk about it It’s a massive story filled with complexity, layers upon layers of theological interpretations, thousands of years of conclusions drawn apart from Torah and the Bible as a whole. And that is to say there are not many objections at the top list. For instance, you will hear many say, "God never liked it." In fact, God hated it. He said it all over the place. Through the prophet Isaiah 1:13 as an easy example taken, I’m taking it out of context here for sure to make my point. 

"Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination to me; the new moons and sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity, even the solemn meeting." (Isa. 1:13)

It says so they say God never liked it. Why would we still be talking about it to further complicate the issue? We often hear the claim particularly that one of Jesus' primary purposes for coming to the Earth was to end the sacrificial system; to put it into it to this barbaric blood...actually He didn’t come to do that. As a matter of fact, we read in a verse we discussed yesterday, telling His disciples about forgiveness: If you’re coming to the altar, you bring your sacrifice and you realize that your brother has something against you should go and be reconciled first and then, and only then can you approach the altar with your sacrifice (Matt. 5:24). 

Unfortunately, for our western mindset that doesn’t lineup very well with the idea that he is getting rid of it; Not to mention that for 40 years after his death, his disciples continue to participate in that barbaric system...not to mention that his mother brought a sacrifice as part of her Levitical obligation as a mother and childbirth (Lk. 2:21-23) and not to mention, one more time, the fact that Yeshua was in the temple all the time while the sacrifices were going on, but that’s another study for another day.

For today, at least consider that God's eternal decrees are eternal and though we may not understand them completely, we may want to refrain from adding to or taking away from His Word (Deut. 4:2; 12:32; Josh. 1:7; Prov. 30:6; Eccl. 12:13,14; Gal. 3:15; Rev. 22:18,19).

More tomorrow from Florida :-) Yahweh willing!

Shalom


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