Audio Transcript:

Welcome to Missions on Point, the Propempo perspective on church and missions.

Hello and welcome back. This is episode 229 of Missions on Point where we are always talking about what we call the Propempo perspective on church and missions. Propempo is the Greek word meaning to send forward. We use that word because it is a biblical word and we contend that the whole story of the Bible is pointing us to this moment today that the church finds itself in now, waiting for Jesus to return, and obediently following his command to send out workers into the harvest field to plant new churches. And rather than an addendum or afterthought in the New Testament, the entire Bible leads us to see this as the church’s current task. For the last few episodes we have been talking about preaching about missions from the whole Bible. We have already seen ways that Genesis and Exodus lead us to think about all the nations of the world, and God’s plan to dwell with man, now found in his presence made known through local churches worshipping him. You see, the Bible does not just promote global missions generically, like most people think traditionally about it. The Bible promotes a specific vision for missions as originating from local churches and creating local churches all over the earth, countering the darkness with the light of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

And today, I want us to consider the book of Leviticus. Now, I understand that you might not be preaching from the book of Leviticus. But I want to encourage you to do so, and not only that but to preach with the biblical, theological framework of global missions. Global missions should frame your thinking when preaching, and it should come out occasionally as a specific application too. But, how can we do that? How does Leviticus lead us to be motivated to go into all the world and preach the gospel?

First of all, I want to remind us of where the book of Exodus leaves us off. Every book of the Old Testament further develops the plot line of the promise given to Eve, and then to Abraham and the Patriarchs, leading us to our need for Jesus Christ. Exodus significantly develops that story in many ways: redemption through the Passover Lamb, the Law of God constituting the people of God, and the need for God’s presence to dwell with man so that we might obediently follow God. The great problem highlighted toward the end of that book was the dreadful account of the golden calf. The people need God to go with them if they are to enter into the Promised Land like he wants them to, but if God goes with them then he is bound to destroy them because God is holy and the people are not. The question of the holiness of the people is what the book of Leviticus gives us an answer to. We must be holy as God is holy. God has called his people to leave a sinful nation and become a distinct people. He has called them to enjoy his presence, by living a holy life.

The book of Leviticus has two main sections to it. Chapters 1-17 teach us about how to approach God, and then chapters 18-27 tells us how to live like God. It’s a movement from fellowship to lifestyle, from worship to service, or you could say from knowing God to going out and showing the world what he is like. The climactic turning point is the Day of Atonement in the middle of the book. As the central book of the Pentateuch, I believe this movement also characterizes the entire Bible, with the cross and resurrection at the pivot point. In the whole of the Old Testament we are drawing near to God to know who he is at the one place where he makes an all-sufficient sacrifice, and then from that moment on we are called to go out from that place and live like him. It’s like the Old Testament has a centripetal movement toward the one place where Jesus was born and died, and then from that moment on we move outward, like a centrifugal movement.

In that first half of the book of Leviticus, I would then break up that half into two parts. It’s all answering the question about how to approach God and we find there both necessary and sufficient conditions for approaching God. The necessary conditions are the components that we need to have, but in and of themselves they do not provide for access to God. The sufficient component is what actually provides for our fellowship with God.

There are two necessary conditions found in chapters 1-10 and those are the sacrifices and the priesthood. Ever since sin entered the world, God has made it clear that a sacrifice is necessary to worship him. And furthermore, mankind needs a mediator, we can’t approach God on our own. Someone must go to God on our behalf and offer the sacrifice for us. The first sacrifices show us that we need complete devotion to God in the burnt offering, we need thankfulness for God’s provision in the grain offering, and we need to enjoy a meal with God in the fellowship or peace offering. This, of course, is the sacrifice that everyone wanted, because the worshipper and the priest would eat it, sharing a meal in God’s presence, at peace with God, in fellowship with God. That’s the ultimate aim, a return to the Garden-like life in God’s presence. So too the ministry we have now is one of reconciliation. The fellowship of local churches all over the earth is still about sharing a meal with God, now in the Lord’s table. Yet, the sacrifices for sin and guilt, the next two sacrifices, show how complicated that has become. Our sin separates us and must be dealt with. If there is one thing that we are regularly reminded of over and over in Leviticus it is that life is in the blood. It’s a bloody book. And we should wonder that since all of these sacrifices are necessary for the Israelites, then why are they not needed now? Because the sacrifice of Jesus is sufficient. All people everywhere should inherently know that injustice exists, like the blood of Abel calling out to us, so death speaks a message requiring an answer that only the death and resurrection of Jesus satisfy. Similarly, the requirements for the priesthood and the immediate failure of Nadab and Abihu to take seriously God’s requirements call out to us for our need for a better mediator in Jesus. This is a fundamental need that all humanity longs for.

Moving on then, Leviticus chapters 11-15 list the infamous food laws and cleanliness laws. Cleanliness is a visual lesson on holiness. And it teaches us that we are separated from God and completely dependent on God to cleanse us. The multitude and the non-sinful nature of many of these laws would mean that being unclean was simply inevitable and a daily struggle. You would want to be clean, because you wanted to worship. The conclusion a faithful Israelite would draw would be their complete insufficiency in themselves to come to God on their own. These laws proved that mankind was insufficient to approach God by obedience to the law. Mankind is inescapably needy. The Israelites would realize that they are dependent on the only sufficient means of approaching God, the unilateral grace of God to forgive and cleanse them of their sins. And that’s what the Day of Atonement provided: one sacrifice for all of God’s people to cleanse them of all of their sins, for one whole day.  Nothing else levels the playing field better than the unconditional grace of God to save sinners through substitutionary atonement. This is what the sacrifices, the cleanliness laws, and the day of atonement point to, the one hope for all mankind, the all-sufficient grace of God. Through the one sacrifice of Jesus Christ, it wouldn’t be just one day that God’s people would be made clean, but all of eternity, around the throne together with people from every nation and language. You see, we cannot preach the nature of these sacrifices without pointing to the end for which God designed them.

For the second half of the book of Leviticus, I will make two points.

First, most of this section is filled with regulations. And these regulations span all of life, teaching us how God is Lord over all and how we might worship him with every part of our life. These regulations include sexual purity and protecting the family. Regulations for the priests were stricter. Regulations were given for living in the land and protecting the poor, and these were important because how they maintained their inheritance served as a spiritual barometer for their relationship with God. Obedience brought blessing in the land, and disobedience brought the curse and exile. And these laws should not be seen as a burden for gaining a right relationship with God, because they come after the sacrifices and the cleansing. They show how the Israelites could preserve and celebrate their relationship with God. When you rejoice that God is holy, and that he has made you holy, then you are motivated to want to live a holy life, to display the glory of God to the whole world. Holiness is about making a distinction. God’s holy nation was to be different, living in contrast to the rest of the world. Holiness has a missiological component to it. We cannot be a light to the nations unless we are living holy lives. Israel failed to be distinct from the nations, but the church is succeeding as churches and missionaries are distinct from the world.

The second lesson with missions implications to be learned from this second half of the book of Leviticus has to do with the feasts at the Tabernacle found in chapters 23-24. The calendar and time are holy. Seven feasts in the year spread out between three times that the Israelites would gather at the temple to worship. There were feasts of remembrance, the Passover and Unleavened Bread, thankful for what God has done in the past. Feasts of harvest, grateful to God for what he has provided in the present. And Feasts anticipating the future, Trumpets, the Day of Atonement, and Tabernacles, all turning our attention to a confident hope in what God would do in the future. Put together, the yearly calendar was a retelling of all of God’s actions toward the nation from the beginning to the end of time. The feasts tell the story of God’s work in all of history to save a people for himself. And with three feasts on either side, the central feast was the feast of Pentecost, a feast of harvest. And as we know from Acts chapter 2, on the day of Pentecost, God’s true harvest is gleaned from every nation of the earth. And the church now finds itself in the middle of a plentiful harvest, that needs more workers to go into it. God is gathering his people together who await the final trumpet blast and our final dwelling place with God, the perfect and eternal temple of heaven, because we are still sojourners here on this earth. The nation of Israel was to be a light to the world, telling the story of redemption from beginning to end. And the church now completes that story by completing the harvest gathering of all of God’s people.

There, of course, is more that we could say, but I hope this has given you a clue as to how missions might slip into any sermon, even one in Leviticus. I pray that you love the book of Leviticus and you love to preach it as applicable to the church, not in following these laws as a code, but in learning what they teach us about what we have in Jesus Christ. The message of the book of Leviticus should motivate us to want to share this wonderful good news with everyone in the whole world. As you preach about the holiness of God, and we learn of how we are all separated and far off from God, we learn that we are no different than the pagan in a dark country. But only by the grace of God are we saved. And may God use your church to preach that grace to those who need to hear it the most. May you and your church and the world through you be blessed as you faithfully preach the word of God.

Thanks for joining us today on Missions on Point. We trust that you'll find more help and resources on our websites at Propempo.com and missioserve.org. We are so thankful for those who support us, enabling us to produce this podcast. Now to God be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus forever and ever. Amen.