Author: myer4269

Reflections on Leviticus

“Worshipers confront God as an overwhelming and yet appealing mystery, and then recognize themselves as creaturely.”  Dictionary of Biblical Theology

A peasant may not know he is a peasant until he stands in the presence of a king.  In the same way, a man may fancy himself a god until he stands in the presence of the Almighty. To experience the holy is first and foremost a confrontation between the visions we cherish of ourselves and the infinite actuality of God.  To see that God is God is to see, among other things, that we are not.   And when we have this realization we have to worship.

That is why Leviticus as a book about the holiness of God is by necessity also a book about worship. Creatures worship the Creator in part to remind ourselves that we are in fact creatures.  And when we worship the very elements of our worship serve again to remind us of our creaturely state. Indeed, for Israel, “the material of the offerings are the Israelite’s ordinary foodstuffs” (DOBT).  They offered wheat, barely, oil, sheep, bulls—the very ordinary elements of their lives. As creatures ourselves all we can offer up to God is the stuff of creation.  Without this realization, we might start to believe that what we offer up to God somehow impresses him, or worse still somehow obligates him.  Herein lies the fundamental difference between pagan worship and the worship of God’s people.  Yahweh cannot be conjured or bartered with.  Worship is not an incantation by which we summon God to do our bidding.  If Yahweh heeds us at all it is because of the surpassing splendor of his grace, not the supposed splendor of our worship.

It is easy to miss this because we might wonder why God require these ordinary things.  Why does he ask for  bulls and grain?  It is not because he is hungry.  After all, we can bring God nothing that he does not already possess.  God does not require worship in the sense that we are offering up to him something that he lacks.  God requires worship only in the sense that we as his creation are obligated to him for life and breath and all we possess.  In this way our worship is not primarily a reminder to him of our devotion, but a reminder to ourselves of our great need.  Take Israel as an example.  They weren’t offering food to God because he needed to be fed, but because they did.  To willingly offer up what sustains us is to cry out for a different kind of sustenance.  Truly, man does not live by bread alone.  We only truly remember this when we worship God.

Reflections on Leviticus
We tend to think of God’s holiness in a clinical sense, as if his separateness were such that he were completely removed from every sphere of human life.  The book of Leviticus reminds us that the Lord of Heaven who is utterly holy is also the creator God who is present within his creation, and more specifically, he is the covenant God who dwells among his people.  Indeed, God’s presence permeates every sphere of human life, such that for the people of God, his holiness serves as a constant reminder of his utter beauty and purity.

But a God who is both immanently present, while also being transcendentally holy presents a problem for sinful humanity.  Focusing specifically on God’s unique presence in the Tabernacle, Leviticus is written in part to answer the riddle, How does a holy God dwell among a sinful people?  In answering that riddle, Leviticus describes not only the sacrificial system that cleanses the people of Israel from their sin, but also the ins and outs of daily life that come to make one unclean.  That is why a book about God’s holiness is also about menstrual cycles, emissions, and leprosy.   By presenting the stunning beauty of God’s beauty, the book must also present the sometimes crippling ugliness of humanity.  When God dwells among his people, the light of his holiness casts all that is unholy in us into the harshest of lights. In that light our ways, manners, and means of being human can appear as nothing less than grotesque.

Any faithful accounting of our true nature must always consider humanity in the light of God’s holiness, otherwise we will begin to believe in our own righteousness simply because we are “better” than some other person.  This sort of reasoning is like a beggar with $10 calling himself rich because he knows of another beggar with only $1.  Such accounting fails to recognize the possibility of billionaires.  There are several ways to reckon ourselves rightly in light of God’s holiness.  Sitting under faithful preaching is one of them.  Reading the Scriptures is another.  Living in Gospel community is still another.  And these are potent ways of not only remembering, but of also growing into our own holiness.  But I would argue further that certain types of stunningly honest art can be another means by which we rightly reckon our plight.  Films, music, novels can all hold a mirror up to us so that we might behold something of our own deformities and point us back to God.

Flannery O’Connor is one such writer.  As Frederick Buechner writes of her, ” I suppose it is precisely because she has a mystic’s sense of what holiness truly is that she is able to depict in such a wry and sometimes uproarious way the freakish distortions that it suffers at the hands of a mad world.”  In reading her work, with characters like the Misfit in “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and Hazel Motes in Wise Blood, we become keenly aware not only of their freakish distortions as characters, but also of our own twisted selves.  Buechner goes on, “Human life is so grotesquely distorted and distorting that the grace of God is broken to pieces by it like light through a prism and reaches us looking like everything except what it is.”  And so it is.  Because even the best human can only refract and bend the light of grace, we must always look to God himself to behold the depth of holiness and grace.  Indeed, in the person of Jesus Christ, God has fully and finally answered the riddle, How can a holy God dwell with sinful people?  Only a brilliantly creative, story-telling God would answer one mystery with another–the incarnation.

1 Pet. 1:1-2
Peter, an Apostle of Jesus Christ, To those who are elect exiles of the dispersion…according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, in the sanctification of the Spirit, for obedience to Jesus Christ and for sprinkling with his blood:  May grace and peace be multiplied to you.

We are elect exiles.  In two words Peter has given us an elegant summation of our life in Christ.  These two words pull against each other, laying before us the whole of the Christian life, and so we must walk it, taut as a tight rope.  To be elect is to be remade, to be fashioned and formed into citizens of a fundamentally different place than the here of the here and now.  And so in election we become exiles, because in election we become new. But ours is not an exile of relocation, but of reorientation. In election the Father foreknows, the Spirit sanctifies, and the Son sprinkles with his blood, so that we are invited to leave the home we have known to venture into the life and community of the Triune God. The Spirit who is the foretaste of our true and better home groans for our true and better homeland, and so do we, longing for the fullness of our life in the Triune God.

And the Creation groans too.  This is how we know that our exile can never mean disengagement from the world.  To live in exile is not a disembodiment, rather it is a re-embodiment that redeems Creation to us.   In that sense elected exile is a homecoming to what we were meant to be.  We enjoy this creation in worshipful gratitude of God’s goodness in the here and now and also in anticipation of the world to come.  We are not exiled from creation.  Instead, our exile means that we are freed from creation as an end in itself.  Elect exile is an invitation to transcendence through embodied worship in the world.  In election we experience a transformation by which we are able to see the world and its trappings as means and not as ends.  All that is is fading.  The rot of the fall is comprehensive–all will decay, all will fail.  And so it groans for resurrection.  Our election tunes our ears to the groan of creation, and we raise our voices too.  The song of the elect exile is the straining sigh for resurrection.

Numbers 33:50-56

“And the Lord spoke to Moses in the plains of Moab by the Jordan at Jericho, saying, “Speak to the people of Israel and say to them, When you pass over the Jordan into the land of Cannan, then you shall drive our all the inhabitants of the land from before you and destroy all their figured stones and destroy all their metal images and demolish all their high places.  And you shall take possession of the land and settle in it, for I have given the land to you to possess it…But if you do not drive out the inhabitants of the land before you, then those of them whom you let remain shall be as barbs in your eyes and thorns in your sides, and they shall trouble you in the land where you dwell.  And I will do to you as I thought to do to them.”

As they stand on the cusp of the land, God calls for the cleansing of the land itself.  To maintain the holiness and distinctiveness of his people, God demanded not only the casting down and destruction of idols, but also the driving out of all idolators.  Given Israel’s history with idolatry, this is not surprising. In their worship of Baal at Peor (Num. 25), Israel had proven that in the mere presence of idolatrous people, they would turn their hearts to false gods.  Here we see God’s mercy toward his people.  The command to cast down the idols and to cast out the idolators was meant to protect them and to preserve his relationship with them.

This command also displays the wisdom of God.  He knew that for the people of Israel, it was the idolators, not the idols who posed the greatest threat. But why is this so?  In the old covenant, complete eradication was the only solution for idolatry because the old covenant does not explicitly deal with the heart. If the heart were inherently good, or even neutral, it would have been possible to live among idolatrous people. But the heart is “deceitful above all things and desperately sick” (Jer. 17:9).   And so it is.   It is not the sun or rain or sex or money or power that demand our worship and declare themselves as gods, but the dark alchemy of our heart that distorts creation into deity.  In seeing false worship, the seeds were planted in the hearts of the people of Israel and found purchase in the decaying compost of the human heart.  Idolatry always begins with idolators.  Without false worshippers, the accouterment of false worship are almost meaningless.  Without idolators, idols are simply stone and metal, and high places are simply places.   It was the presence of idolators that would prove to be “barbs in your eyes and thorns in your sides.”

We can see the destruction in Israel’s failure to obey this command played out again and again in the cycle of the Judges and the parade of wicked kings culminating in the Exile.  Even still, we must ask, does this principle stand for us as new covenant believers?  Certainly, the New Testament has much to say about idols.  Paul exhorts us to, “Flee from idolatry” (1 Cor. 10:14).  John likewise exhorts, “Little children, keep yourselves from idols” (1 John 5:21). But neither of them say, “Flee from idolators.” Why is this so?  Because the new covenant is the covenant of the new heart.  The reality of renewed heart arms us with the weapons of grace so that we can live among idolators and still be a holy people.

It is interesting that the promise of a new covenant and a new heart is first made explicit in the prophecies of Jeremiah and Ezekiel, men who stood on both sides of exile (Jer. 31:31-34; Ez. 36:22-31).   These prophets deal explicitly with the problem of the heart and the problem of idols because they know the people of Israel will be flung to the nations where there will be no escape from idolatrous people.  In light of this, these prophets wrestle with the reality of God’s goodness and faithfulness in the midst of turmoil,  But through their toil and suffering they are able to see a new day where God will re-form his people with a new covenant.

And in these promises, God proves both faithful and true to his unfaithful people. In the new covenant, God proves gracious beyond our reckoning because the promise of the new covenant deals both with the heart and with the cleansing of idols:  “I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you.  And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you.  And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh” (Ezek. 36:25-26).  As new covenant believers, we are the inheritors of these promises, and so we can live among idolators and proclaim the light of the gospel because our hearts are new.  Though we bend ever towards idols, the blood of Christ has power to expel what we cannot expel, and to cast down what we cannot cast down.

In reading the litany of sacrifices prescribed for both Sabbath and Feasts, I began to think about the relationship between rest, celebration, sacrifice, and remembrance.  For Sabbath, the connection between rest and remembrance is explicit.  Within the commandment for Sabbath there is another commandment:  “You shall remember…” (Deut. 5:15).  You shall remember deliverance.  You shall remember provision.  You shall remember guidance.  You shall remember all that is good and holy.

And to remember well we must rest.  Without the pause of rest, we make no space, no silence for memory to speak in to.  Rest leads us to reflect and reflection helps us stitch the loose threads of happening and circumstance into a larger tapestry of meaning and purpose.  The random doings of our days, the quotidian collection of occurrence all coalesce in the crucible of rest.   What emerges from our rest is remembrance and what emerges from our remembrance is celebration.  We celebrate what God has done and what he will do.

The connection between rest, remembrance, and celebration goes a long way to explain the nature of God’s own rest.  The first seventh day, the original Sabbath, was God’s feast of remembrance, his celebration of all that he had made.  The Voice that created rested in the perfect silence of what he had created.  In his rest he surmised all that he had made, and in the silence of rest he rehearsed the symphony of his making.   The timeless one reflected, and he exhaled a sighing breath of satisfaction.  In reflection there was celebration.  Truly, it was good.

Part of our rest then is to reflective on what God has done, and as creatures our reflection should always take the form of worship.  So for us to truly Sabbath and to truly celebrate the work of God, we must not only rest, we must also sacrifice.  But sacrifice too is a kind of rest.  To sacrifice is to worship and to worship is to declare our dependence on God, and in our declaration of dependence, we rest in him and his provision.

Sacrifice is also a kind of rest because it is a type of remembrance.   When we worship, we remember.  And our memory itself can be a kind of sacrifice.  We walk the corridors of the mind and offer memories on the altar, praying they would burn sweet, that the flame of sacrifice  would transfigure the ambiguity of ordinary living, with all its trial, boredom, uncertainty, and frustration into a sweet and pleasing aroma.  To rest and walk the fields of memories in faith is to worship him and celebrate not just what he has made but what he is making and remaking.

Numbers 27:18-22

Take Joshua the son of Nun, a man in whom is the Spirit, and lay your hand on him.  And he shall stand before Eleazar the priest and all the congregation, and you shall commission him in their sight.  You shall invest him with some your authority, that all the congregation of the people of Israel may obey. And he shall stand before Eleazar the priest,  who shall inquire for him by the judgment of the Urim before the Lord.  At his word they shall go out, and at his word they shall come in, both he and all the people of Israel with him, the whole congregation.

Every coronation bears with it  both hope and doubt.  In  best of men, we hope for a new day either by way of return to former glory or by way of a new path ahead.  Even with the worst of men, we might hope against hope that the weight of the office might steer them to good.  And so it is.  A new leader emerges and we dream again, we hope anew. Even with the greatest of men, the reality never corresponds with our hope.   Moses himself, he who spoke with the Lord face to face as a man, he who saw the glory of the Lord, faltered.

For the people of Israel, who witnessed the commissioning and coronation of Joshua, it would seem that even in the midst of hope, there was surely doubt, more than a slight sense that Joshua would fail.  It seems almost certain that the people of Israel would doubt him.  But what of his commissioners? Was the heart of Moses heavy as he laid his hands on Joshua?  Was the mind of Eleazar unsettled with doubt as he consulted the Urim on Joshua’s behalf?  Moreover, what of Joshua himself?  Surely he had his own doubts not only in himself, but especially in the people he was commissioned to lead.  Save for Caleb, Joshua had watched an entire generation of his kinsmen, the generation meant to enter the land, die in the wilderness.  He had witnessed them falter in rebellion, crumble in their murmuring, and whore after the gods of the nations.  Not even Moses, Joshua must have thought, emerged from leading this people unscathed.

But Joshua had something not even Moses had–he had tasted the fruit of the land. He had walked among the softy rolling hills and in the green pastures.  He had beheld the cities, the homes and farms, the Lord had promised them.  God had promised a land flowing with milk and honey and Joshua had not only beheld it, he had tasted and seen its goodness.

It was because of Joshua’s foretaste that he was able to overcome doubt and to lead the people.  He would lead Israel to their inheritance.  He would conquer and they would possess.  Truly, in Joshua, we see the best of all men.  But even with Joshua, hope outpaces experience.  Not long after his death, the people of Israel descends into the darkness of the age of the Judges.  But as God raised up each new judge, so did he raise again the hope that this deliverance would be full, this salvation final.  And the people were delivered, if only for a time, then darkness again and the need for a new deliverer.  And so it was.  New leader. New hope.  Imperfect leader.  Imperfect hope.  Only in the true and greater Joshua, his namesake, Jesus do we find our greatest hope fulfilled.  He is the leader whom all leaders point to, the hope that all our hope bends toward.  He has conquered.  He has vanquished our enemies.  And he will lead us into the land of truest rest.  Might we taste the fruits of that land, the Holy Spirit, and know that in Jesus our hope is not in vain.

Numbers 23-24

“The Oracle of Balaam the son of Beor,
the oracle of the man whose eyes is opened,
the oracle of him who hears the words of God,
and knows the knowledge of the Most High,
who sees the vision of the Almighty,
falling down with eyes uncovered” (Num. 24:15-16).

A full three chapters of Numbers are devoted to the Balaam story, making it by far the longest narrative in the book.  The question is why.  Why would this much space be devoted to the exploits and oracles of a pagan prophet? One answer lies in its position in the book.  The story occurs after a series of Israel’s rebellions and failures to keep the covenant.  In the midst of their rebellion and wandering, the Balaam story illustrates to Israel that even in the midst of their wilderness they are still the covenant people of God. No pagan king or pagan prophet, no matter the amount of gold, no matter the amount of sacrifice, no matter the amount of perceived spiritual influence, can undo what God has done in binding himself to a people.  It is the Lord who has declared Israel to be his treasured possession among the nations (Ex. 19:5).

But there is more to Balaam’s prominence.  Israel had forgotten not only their privileged place, but also the power of the God who promised his allegiance and because of this they fundamentally doubted the goodness of God.  The wilderness had become their only reality because they did not rehearse the covenant, and they had forgotten their mighty deliverance from Egypt, the words of blessing and covenant at Sinai, and the provision of God in the desert.  So through the mouth of a pagan prophet, God choose to remind his people of all he had done.

Balaam, the internationally renowned prophet, is helpless before the power of the Lord.  Balaam, in the midst of his oracle, asks,  “How can I curse whom God has not cursed?”  In Balaam’s utterance Israel is reminded that the Lord is the one who blesses and curses and the Lord is the one who opens and closes.  God had opened Balaam’s eyes, so that his oracles, was “the oracle of the man whose eye is opened” (Num. 24:3; 25:15).  God has opened Balaam’s mouth because of “the Lord [who] put a word in Balaam’s mouth” (Num.23:5).  And when he opens his mouth to speak, the words of Balaam’s oracles are stunning.  He rehearses the covenant for Israel.  He reminds them of their privelage.  He reminds them of the might in the Lord.   But most stunning of all, Balaam prophesies a coming king, who will crush the enemies of God,  “a star shall come out of Jacob, and a scepter shall rise out of Israel” (Num. 24:17). This is the Messianic promise, the coming Christ, who is the true seed of Abraham who will be a blessing to all nations.  In the end, the prominence of Balaam, has much to do with God’s plan to use his treasured possession Israel to bless all people’s in all places through the coming of the true and better Israel, Christ himself.  In light of that vision, we all must fall down with eyes uncovered.

Numbers 22:1-21

Over the next few posts, I plan to do a closer reading of the Balaam story and of Balaam’s oracles than I’ve done in previous posts.  Growing up in church, I of course heard the story in Sunday school, and though the felt board made it clear that the donkey was talking, it was never very clear why the donkey was talking.  Nor was I taught that Balaam, the died-in-the-wool pagan, prophesied under the influence of the Holy Spirit on behalf of the people of Israel.

So to start with, who was Balaam?  As an internationally known prophet, Balaam was considered an arbiter of spiritual power.  Balak, the king of Moab, saw the multitude of Israel camping in his land and he feared conquest.  In his fear of them, he summoned Balaam because he believed that nations rose and fell at Balaam’s word.  Indeed, Balak ascribes Balaam god-like powers: “He whom you bless is blessed, and he whom you curse is cursed” (Num 22:6).

It is also clear from the story that Balaam, the pagan prophet, knew of the Lord, and more than that God talks to him.  Make no mistake, it is the Lord, Yahweh, the God of Israel, who Balaam consults and it is He who answers Balaam. And God makes something very clear to Balaam. The rising and falling of nations in general, and the fate of his covenant people in particular did not lay in the words of Balaam but in the word of the Lord.  It is the Lord and the Lord alone who utters the words of blessing and cursing: “You shall not curse the people, for they are blessed” (Num 22:12).

The language of blessing and cursing, so foreign to us, seems like it is straight out of a fairy story.  And maybe that is no accident.  Perhaps the reason the story of Balaam, particularly the part about the donkey, seems so much like a fairy story, is that blessing and cursing runs at the very heart of our understandings of good an evil, and our understanding of magic.  Take Narnia, for example.   Aslan’s self-sacrifice on behalf of Edmund is a deeper magic that the White Witch is powerless before.  Take Harry Potter as well.  Lily Potter’s self-sacrifice marks Harry so deeply that not even the death curse from Voldemort can break it.  In the world of fairy tales, there is no deeper magic than love.  This is the truth of fairy tales.  In this sense, the covenant love of God is the deepest sort of magic there is because  you cannot curse what the Lord has blessed.   No amount of gold, no measure of shed blood, can purchase the cursing of God’s people.  Though Israel had floundered in the wilderness, though they had consumed themselves and each other by their own murmuring, though they had rebelled in utter faithlessness, God remained faithful to them and would not remove his blessing.  This is the security of covenant.  To be God’s covenant people is to be a blessed people.  And as people of the new covenant, how much greater our  blessing,  how much deeper our security, now that we have been purchased by precious blood into a covenant built on better promises.

For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Romans 8:38-39

“Because you did not believe in me, to uphold me as holy in the eyes of the people of Israel, therefore you shall not bring the assembly into the land that I have given them.” (Num 20:12).

Moses raged against the rock, and with two swings of his staff, he lost the promised land.  Of all the tragedies the Bible records, this one is among the most heartbreaking.  Instead of possessing all that God had promised, the land, the milk, the honey, the rest, Moses would only view it from afar.  Only his bones would possess the land.

How do we understand Moses’ fall?  How can we understand his sin?  The people of Israel had already come to rely on Moses rather than on God.  By striking the rock, Moses put himself forward as their savior, saying in effect, “I am your provider.  I am your deliverer.”   God calls this particular sin unbelief: “You did not believe in me to uphold me as holy” (Num 20:12).  For a moment, if only for the fraction of a second it took to swing the staff, Moses stopped believing in God and started believing in himself.  He did not believe God.  Here we see the connection between Moses’ sin and his punishment.  To possess the promise of Abraham, one must believe (Gen 15:6).

Perhaps my sense of tragedy in seeing Moses’ fall stems from my own tendency to elevate leaders. I see myself in this story.  It would have been so easy to put my trust in Moses rather than God.  But Moses was just a servant:  “Now Moses was faithful in all God’s house as a servant, to testify to the things that were to be spoken later, but Christ is faithful over God’s house as a son.” (Heb 3:5-6).  We sin in our elevation of leadership when forget that Moses fades and that Christ endures. In the end, Moses, in all his faithfulness was still just a servant.  His sin came when he forgot this and our sin comes when we forget that our leaders, however dynamic, however brilliant, however persuasive, are still just servants too.  Even the promised land Moses was leading them to was not the fullness of their inheritance.  There was a better Moses to come, and there was a better rest to come. “For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ” (John 1:17).    In Christ we possess better promises, we bask in the light of a better covenant, we stand on the boarder of a better rest.  Our sin is to look at whatever Moses stands in front of us instead of to the rock. As Paul makes clear, there is much more at work in this story than thirsty Israelites:  “For they drank from the spiritual rock that followed them and the rock was Christ” (1 Cor 10:4).  Might we drink from him and possess his fullness.