Sometimes, when I preach at a church where I have not preached before, and I am introduced to the congregation as an “Old Testament scholar,” I start off by noting what makes an Old Testament scholar different from a “regular” person. I say that on a cold winter’s night, the regular person will start a fire in the fireplace, get a cup of hot chocolate, sit in their favorite chair, and start reading a novel, perhaps a Robert Ludlum, a Tom Clancy, or a John Grisham. The Old Testament scholar does something very similar. They, too, will light a fire, get a cup of chocolate, sit in their favorite chair, and then start reading, although their selection is more likely to be Leviticus . . . in Hebrew!
The book of Leviticus is often in the line of fire for trite comments, like, “One of my resolutions this year was to read through the entire Bible, but then I got to Leviticus,” or, “Thank God I’m a Christian and don’t have to bother with any of that dead, boring ritual stuff any more.” But I want to give you just three of the reasons (though there are many more) why you should read Leviticus, pore over it, study it, meditate on it, and indeed, love it.
Leviticus Is a Book That Jesus Tells You to Read
Jesus said that we do not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God. We can live without bread and water; we cannot live without the word of God. A significant number of those words come from the book of Leviticus. Indeed, the book of Leviticus, more so than any other book in the Old Testament, purports to be the very words, the direct speech, of God. If we were to produce a red-letter edition of the Old Testament, with the words of God being in red, the book of Leviticus would proportionately have the highest red-letter count of any narrative book in the Old Testament. You need to read the book of Leviticus in order to live.
I will take the metaphor one step further. There is a popular Christian song that addresses God and says to him, “You are the air I breathe,” and then goes on to say, “I’m desperate for you.” I agree. God is the air we breathe, and the words of God in Scripture are the very breath of God. As we read the Old Testament, we inhale his breathed-out (inspired) words. If you are “desperate” for God, to commune with God, to know his heart, to know what it means that God is “Holy, Holy, Holy”—read Leviticus.
Leviticus Is a High Point in God’s Revelation of Himself in the Old Testament
Or perhaps it is better to say that Leviticus is a low point in Old Testament revelation. Both things would be equally true. Allow me to explain. Previously, in the narrative of the Israelites’ journey from Egypt to Mount Sinai, God had spoken from a distance. When the Israelites arrived at the foot of Mount Sinai, God communicated (“thundered”) to them via Moses from the top of Mount Sinai, in the midst of the cloud and the “pyrotechnics,” the smoke and the lightning and the storm. But then we come to the end of Exodus 40, where we are told that the “glory of the Lord” filled the just recently completed tabernacle. The next words we read come from the first verse of Leviticus: The Lord called to Moses and spoke to him from the tent of meeting.
Prior to this, the Lord had called to Moses from the top of Mount Sinai. Now he speaks to Moses from the very entrance to the tent of meeting (the tabernacle). And where is this tabernacle? It is situated right smack dab in the middle of the Israelites’ camp. Not at the top of the mountain, but at the foot of the mountain, right in the midst of the tent-homes of all the Israelites. His dwelling, his tent, is right in the midst of all their tents, and it is from that tent that he now addresses the Israelites through Moses.
The Old Testament scholar, Samuel Balentine, captures the breath-taking nature of this development:
Leviticus presents what God now says to Moses, and what Moses must now speak to the community of Israel, as the most immediate and intimate revelation from God available in the cosmos.
This is surely an astonishing claim. The closest parallel in Christian Scripture is the assertion that God is fully present in Jesus (John 1:14-16).[1]
The closest analogy there is in the Old Testament to what God did in Christ Jesus, sending him in human flesh to dwell (“tabernacle”) and walk among humans on the earth, is what God did in locating his dwelling in the midst of the Israelites and speaking from that location. This is a “low” point in Old Testament revelation, as God moves from atop Mount Sinai to a location in the midst of the camp.” Yet, it is a “high” point in the closeness of God to his people in the Old Testament, only to be surpassed in the very incarnation of Jesus Christ. How necessary it becomes then for us to pay attention to what it is that God says.
Leviticus Clarifies the Meaning of Christ’s Death in the New Testament
In her superb book The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ, Fleming Rutledge memorably says, “The New Testament will not work without the Old Testament.”[2] Accordingly, without the book of Leviticus, the death of Christ in the New Testament does not work (i.e., it cannot be properly understood).
It is therefore highly significant that when God begins to speak to Moses in the middle of the camp from the entrance of the tabernacle, the first topic God addresses for the first seven chapters has to do with sacrificial offerings and atonement for sin. If we, in reading the New Testament, are to properly understand what it means for Christ’s death to be sacrificial; penal; substitutionary; atoning; ransoming; redemptive; justifying; purifying; forgiving; covenantal, we will have to look primarily to the book of Leviticus for that understanding. It does not simply provide the background for the death of Jesus Christ, but the very foundation, the scaffolding, the framework, the blueprint, or the tapestry-design for the proper understanding of what Christ accomplished in his life, death, and resurrection. (In particular, the favorite New Testament book of any responsible Old Testament scholar, the book of Hebrews, is practically unintelligible without a good understanding of the book of Leviticus.)
Over the past few years, a number of figures (even from within professed Evangelical ranks) have argued against the penal substitutionary understanding of the death of Christ. Many of them have done so by maintaining that the offerings described in the book of Leviticus are neither penal nor substitutionary in nature. I find, however, that their arguments regarding the offerings in Leviticus prove to be unsupportable. That Christ’s death was both penal and substitutionary (vicarious) has been a distinguishing mark (a sine qua non) of Reformed and Evangelical theology. I strongly believe that an accurate interpretation of the sacrifices described in Leviticus demonstrates the validity of this Reformed and Evangelical understanding.
These are only three of a number of reasons why the modern-day Christian should read the book of Leviticus. And, as I said before, we should not just read it, but pore over it, study it, and meditate on it. Indeed, we should love it, as the very word of God.
[1] Samuel Balentine, Leviticus (International Biblical Commentary; Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002), 20.
[2] Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016), 215.
