In this episode, Nate discusses with Dr Michael Allen how we should approach reading Leviticus in our M'Cheyne Bible Reading plan. With Mike's guidance, we delve into the Levitical sacrificial system and its reflection in today's Christian worship. Navigating the application of Leviticus's ancient laws to the complexities of today's world, we seek to capture the essence of its teachings. From economic justice to sexual ethics, Dr. Allen assists us in understanding the enduring principles of Leviticus while discerning God's logic in commanding total devotion. This episode invites you to reflect on how these sacred texts shape our relationships and guide our worship, offering a mix of historical context and practical application for a faith that seeks to follow Jesus in all of life.
In this episode, Nate discusses with Dr Michael Allen how we should approach reading Leviticus in our M'Cheyne Bible Reading plan. With Mike's guidance, we delve into the Levitical sacrificial system and its reflection in today's Christian worship. Navigating the application of Leviticus's ancient laws to the complexities of today's world, we seek to capture the essence of its teachings. From economic justice to sexual ethics, Dr. Allen assists us in understanding the enduring principles of Leviticus while discerning God's logic in commanding total devotion. This episode invites you to reflect on how these sacred texts shape our relationships and guide our worship, offering a mix of historical context and practical application for a faith that seeks to follow Jesus in all of life.
Welcome to another episode of the All of Life podcast. I'm your host, Nate Claiborne, and today I have the privilege of talking with Dr Michael Allen. How are we doing, Mike?
Speaker 2:Great to be with you. It's rainy and muggy, but it's good to be inside chatting with Dr Michael Allen. How are we doing, Mike? Great to be with you.
Speaker 1:It's rainy and muggy, but it's good to be inside chatting with you. That's right. We got a great view of everything going on outside from up here in our secret podcasting studio that we like to record in. It's been a while since we've recorded. I don't even remember the last podcast that we did, but conveniently, I think it was about Exodus.
Speaker 2:All right.
Speaker 1:And we're here today to talk about Leviticus Moving along ever so slowly. I know so people can. We'll link to that in the show notes. People can go back and pick up the narrative thread but we've been doing.
Speaker 1:Initially we were a little too aspirational, as one is in January and thinking we could do a podcast every week about the McShane Bible reading plan, and then chastened as January moved on. We realized maybe we just do this once a month. So we did one about a month ago in February, with an overview of new books that were starting in February, pointed people to resources we've already recorded and in that initial stretch of Bible introductions we somehow did not cover Leviticus. Actually Leviticus and Numbers We'll get to Numbers later but we never recorded an intro to Leviticus and that's a book that, as people are listening to this they're now, if they're keeping up with the plan, they're now three chapters into it and immediately probably wondering what are we doing here? Where am I? Yeah, where am I? So let's just kind of give a big picture what's sort of happening in Leviticus. We're still at Mount Sinai, we've gotten the law, there's been a rebellion, and so now we get chapter after chapter of instructions that don't seem directly applicable. We'll circle back to that in a minute.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it can be somewhat dizzying. I remember being in a grad school class and a professor began by reading, I want to say, eight straight chapters of Leviticus nonstop, oh, wow. Simply to help us all experience something of the dizzying, wide-ranging set of cultic or liturgical regulations, things that most of us have never heard about, much less experienced, sure, and so it can feel overwhelming. It's important to realize where you've been and important to know where you're going. And Leviticus, it falls in between Genesis and Exodus on the one hand, and then Numbers and Deuteronomy on the other.
Speaker 2:It's right in the heart of what we call the law or the Pentateuch, and that means there's a narrative, a plot line. Leviticus picks up there at Sinai, but Sinai after not only the Ten Commandments have been given, after also the golden calf incident in Exodus 32 and 33, the appearing of God's glory atop the mountain to Moses in chapter 34, and then even after the finale of Exodus, where the glory of the Lord enters the tabernacle. And that's where we pick up in Leviticus 1.1, where God is speaking from the tent addressing Moses. And so it's the next step in God's preparing this leader and these people for life outside of Egypt, life before God, life outside of Egypt, life before God in a very real sense, constituting the people for who they're to be and clarifying what God wants for them in days to come.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, and hopefully, as people are doing this Bible reading plan they literally just finished Exodus that the tabernacle gets constructed, put together the, the lord's presence fills it, and so then that just sets the stage for what you said in leviticus 1 1. Okay, now how do we live with this god in this setting?
Speaker 2:moving forward, and you know you can think by way of analogy if, um, if you, you're thinking of constructing a home for a family, or a new workplace for a business, or a new sanctuary for a church, you give a lot of thought to space, you need to design elements, you plan out what will go where, what spaces will be used in what ways, and then you want to give no less thought to how you're actually going to live in and function in that space. We know we want to care for what we've constructed and, in a very real sense, we see God, who has shown such care at the end of Exodus, in the construction, the design of the space. Now he's giving an equal amount of care in revealing the way in which they ought to carry themselves, the way in which they ought to go about their life in terms of worship, as well as the daily work of being a community.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. And I think that the worship, on the one hand, kind of gives us those first several chapters that are detailing all the different sacrifices you might make, what you should include, based on, to some extent, socioeconomic status Not everyone has to bring a bull to the same offering and then it shifts into this sort of set of chapters that seem to be about really mundane things, bodily functions. A lot of people well, I can't say a lot of people a lot of teenage boys in my experience find particular chapters interesting in the middle section of Leviticus, and then it climaxes in I don't know if climax is the right word, but Leviticus 16, we have the Day of Atonement, which is the big national sacrificial ritual, and then we get let's see. After that we've got chapters on festivals and certain feast days that need to be observed, and then some more regulations about daily life. And so you highlighted, well, it's worship and daily life.
Speaker 1:But how should we think about that as we're reading through it? Because we don't. I mean, we just celebrated Easter. So as far as I know, you know, nobody brought a lamb to church or anything that they thought needed to be laid on the altar Right. So we're assuming to some degree, these early chapters no longer apply because of the death of Christ and sacrificial system has been fulfilled. But then there's these other chapters that we maybe to some degree we also act like none of them apply because, as we talked before, we recorded, we pick up footballs and throw them around and we eat bacon wrapped shrimp and I think we're both maybe wearing clothing of mixed fibers at probably probably, and I didn't really check for sure because I'm not that concerned about it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we do have this question about to what extent we take this seriously as instructive and authoritative for us, as opposed to simply informational about the way in which God related to them back then or the way in which they thought about God in yesteryear, and sometimes it's described as though it's all or nothing. Either we do it just as they did, and you do avoid the bacon and the mixed grains and you do in fact bring a lamb to worship, or you have to chuck the entire thing out and ignore it.
Speaker 2:And what's fascinating is actually to observe the remarkable range and variety of what's found here, even in those first chapters on sacrifice, and you describe the overall structure really well that really, chapters 1 to 16 are about what we'd call liturgy and cult sort of worship and sacrifice, about what we'd call liturgy and cult sort of worship and sacrifice. Even those first chapters that focus so much on sacrifice, they point out in a way that we Christians, and probably especially we Protestants, may not have quite an ear for they're very different kinds of sacrifices. It's one thing to talk about a guilt offering or a day of atonement offering.
Speaker 1:It's a rather different thing to talk about a thank offering, a peace offering or a peace offering and those offerings serve very different purposes.
Speaker 2:They have very different not only mechanisms but significances, and when we go to the New Testament, we see the New Testament, while it speaks in really blunt ways of the fulfillment of some sacrifice For instance, hebrews 5 to 10 is really a long argument that you ought not make blood offering for sin that that has been done and performed once for all by Christ and, as chapter one, verse four put it, having made purification for sin in that regard once he sat down, forever more.
Speaker 2:But Hebrews itself goes on to say that we're to offer a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving. There are other sacrifices that we are still very much expected to offer before God, and so you know it's looking at Leviticus and observing the range of things it calls for that actually prompts us to think we're going to have to develop a more complex palate or a more refined ear. We're going to have to listen to some things where we see Jesus is the fulfillment and we read them as a sign of what he's done in our place. Others where we see these remain relevant as ongoing prompts for what journeying by faith means for Christians as well as Jews.
Speaker 1:Yeah, which makes it a little reductionist. Reductionistic to say what I just said, to say you can't say Jesus fulfilled the sacrificial system, full stop, no qualifications.
Speaker 2:Right yeah, he fulfilled blood, sacrifice for guilt and atonement, and in and through our lips he's fulfilling bit by bit the sacrifices of peace and thanks and praise, and that means we get to continue to play an active role there by his spirit's power. And that's one element of why we gather in worship to praise and to offer thanks and why we do that on a daily pattern in our own lives and homes.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you mentioned just having ears to hear a little bit more what's going on in Leviticus. And when you start thinking about those themes of praise, thanksgiving, peace, and then you look at the you mentioned the liturgy it's like, well, there's a reason. We do some of the things that we do in our Sunday gathered worship and it's not like we're. We're not necessarily going directly to Leviticus to pull those out, but the foundations are found in Leviticus. And then you traced it forward to books like Hebrews, which many a reader has struggled to make sense of. Hebrews, and some of that is well, we don't really have the best grasp of books like Leviticus, so then it's harder to understand what the author of Hebrews is doing when he's trying to show how Christ is better than all these different things. He's got Leviticus in the back of his mind. Well, I can't say that I know what's going on in his mind, but based on what he's writing.
Speaker 2:Yep, he's building on that in all sorts of ways. Yeah, and it's important to understand what the purpose of these things is. Leviticus is all about us sharing in communion with God, sharing God's life in the appropriate way. That's why, in chapter 20, you you encounter the famous line be holy. Why? Because I'm holy. Right, it's this one attribute of God that we're commanded to follow suit on. Yeah, and the holy God is already there, dwelling amidst the people, and this is about us living in a way where he can continue to do so to our blessing rather than our detriment and curse. He can continue to do so to our blessing rather than our detriment and curse. You know, one of the key things is to appreciate, right at the center of this teaching, a passage that really helps clarify the purpose of all of it. We can get lost in the liturgy over here and the legalese about sex and money and warfare over there, but right at the heart of it commentators Jewish and Christian alike will point out in Leviticus 10.10, you come to this passage that really defines the kind of goal that shapes the whole text, and there we read this shapes the whole text. And there we read this Leviticus 10.10,.
Speaker 2:Speaking to Moses, god says you are to distinguish between the holy and the common and between the unclean and the clean, and you're to teach the people of Israel all the statutes that the Lord has spoken to them by Moses and that word offered to Aaron and to be passed on by all the priestly officers. It's a word that calls to two things To cleanliness and to holiness, and it's important to realize those aren't the same thing. In other words, holiness is not reducible to avoiding the unclean. You can be clean and yet common, but we're called to be not only clean but also holy, and that's a reminder we can often lose.
Speaker 2:Holiness, I think, can often just be translated in our minds as religious or pious or super intense about your faith. Fair enough, there are psychological and sociological reasons. We sometimes think of it that way. But in the Bible, holiness means not only turning from that which makes you unclean things like sin and impurity but it also means turning in devotion to God, and this verse reminds us. Leviticus is not merely about getting you away from Egypt. It's about getting you to God. It's not only about calling you away from sin and transgression. It's about devoting you to the Lord's service and glory. It's about not merely avoiding slavery and a death-dealing society. It's about turning you to peace and justice and the good community. And so it models that concern for us to turn from what is death-dealing and to turn also toward what is life giving.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's really good, and I think drawing on those categories is really significant for people to have in the back of their mind that it's almost like a tiered reality, like something can be clean, but that doesn't necessarily make it holy. But in its state of being clean, it could fall. People can't see what I'm gesturing, but it could fall to uncleanliness for a variety of reasons, and then it needs to be brought back to a state of cleanliness before it could then be set apart and become holy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and we know that. I mean we have, for instance, different kinds of dinnerware, ranging from really nice stuff to everyday stuff, to paper plates you literally toss in the trash once you've used them, and we all know in our own way, based on the social circumstance, what's appropriate. If we're having a meal in the park, okay, we expect one thing. If we're going to somebody's wedding reception, we expect something rather different. That said, whether we're picnicking in the park or we're going to the remarkably refined banquet, we do expect the plate to be clean.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's just elemental. So you can't get to the formal, the ornate, the devoted, apart from going through cleanliness. But you can have a clean paper plate. That's nothing special, that's not yet to say you've got a specially devoted plate that's set apart for a unique purpose or meal, and that gives us something of a sense of the categories we're talking about here. God does care that we clean out our lives from sin, and in a real sense. You can see, this journey of the Israelites is a slow and, frankly, pretty frustrating experience of God seeking to purge them of cultural malformations, spiritual distortion that has set in because they lived amongst Egyptians for 400 years, right, and that has to have impacted them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think that's something we lose sight of. I don't know if it's because of the location we're reading the Old Testament from, but I think we hear that they're the nation of Israel and just immediately sort of impute to them oh, you know, they've just been struggling under bondage. They just want to be free so they can go worship Yahweh. And it's like, well, the generation that was brought out of Egypt, like they had their parents and their grandparents and their great-grandparents had all been in Egypt, and so they. It's this distant God in some sense that they've heard about through stories, and now he's come near to them. But it is a they're kind of trying to figure out what's going on, as much as we are as we're reading it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you know we can look back in Exodus 32 when their great civic sin of the golden calf happens. It's not like they make that idea up out of nowhere. They're taking a religious practice, fashioning a golden icon or statue of a god directly from the people they've lived amongst for several centuries. That's an Egyptian thing to do and they're applying it to the true God who's just redeemed them. And it is not the way he longs to be loved. It leads to great punishment, and it's not just the people either. You could think. Maybe. Well, aaron's overwhelmed by the crowd in Exodus 32. But in Leviticus 10, right before verse 10, you've got the story of Aaron's sons, nadab and Abihu, and they're punished for false worship. And again, they're not making up something out of nowhere. We're told that they're zealous or devoted. And again, they're not making up something out of nowhere. We're told that they're zealous or devoted to the Lord, and so they offer him what's called strange fire. It's strange not because it's uncommon. It's strange because it's from another religion or people.
Speaker 2:They are doing with regard to the one true God what they've observed the Egyptian people doing with regard to all their false gods. And so we see, even with leaders, even with those who must be presumed to be the most well-educated or catechized in their day, even they, like the wider crowd, they've been shaped by living amongst this polytheistic Egyptian society and we see that continues to shape the way they relate to the one true God in death-dealing ways.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think you've said this as a kind of summary of this before. But Exodus is a lot of getting Israel out of Egypt, and then now we're shifting into getting Egypt out of Israel. As we move through these books, I think about I'm pretty sure I draw this from Michael Morales' book on Exodus that he just points out, or, I'm sorry, on Leviticus. If we think of the narrative time, however you think of Genesis, it covers a long time, and then Exodus covers a considerable amount of time, and then when we get to Leviticus, it all takes place the course of a month, maybe. It's 27 chapters, almost a chapter a day. Then things speed back up. Numbers covers 40 years, and then Deuteronomy is Slows down again, slows down, again, and so it may be lost to us, but I think that's a authorial intention to slow down in the text, because this is what's really. This is the center of gravity. I think is what Morales calls Leviticus in the, in the books of the law. It's the center point where everything is focused.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and in a real sense what you see is God is moving people and then pausing to describe what life in a new circumstance should be. And so God's moving them. And we see the beginnings of instruction in the law, in Exodus, the Ten Commandments in chapter 20, for instance, some other commands or laws that follow in the immediately following chapters, but then it pretty quickly pivots to describe the building of the tabernacle, and that takes up so much of the last dozen or so chapters. Leviticus is going to fill out not merely construction but the continuance of a life of worship and work as a people of God. Of course we're going to see I this doesn't land well. Numbers proves that. It's in many ways an aborted project in terms of the people's faithfulness and devotion. Almost from the beginning they're murmuring, they're going wayward. This generation has to pass, and so God has to again act in the next generation to move them into the land.
Speaker 2:And Deuteronomy will offer a similar sort of guidance about a new situation and what it means to worship and to work as the people of God. And so we see in kind of that rhythmic pattern of God working and then God instructing God working and then God instructing God's faithfulness. We see other things. There are different circumstances. The laws in Leviticus aren't exactly followed or sort of repeated as such in Deuteronomy, and that's because the context will vary. But we see in God's repeated care and concern to promise deliverance and provision and to instruct us in the way we're to live, that God doesn't merely want to give us a cool thing like freedom or the land. God wants to fashion us to be the kind of people who can freely enjoy it and who can do so in the right sort of way. He wants to educate us and form us.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So we've kind of shifted a little bit into more practical concerns. Maybe we can kind of land here. We already alluded to the tendency to make it all or nothing when it comes to. Well, you know, I can, I can pick up these themes in Leviticus and kind of see how it connects to the New Testament and but then at the end of the day I'm also reading these.
Speaker 1:If I'm doing the full version or even if I'm just doing the two-stream version of the Bible reading plan, it's kind of a juxtaposition to be reading Leviticus and 1 Timothy or Thessalonians or 1 Peter, something like that. That seems a little more directly speaking to my situation and maybe in the back of my mind I'm thinking these are instructions for living that I'm getting in the epistles and maybe there's some interesting themes in Leviticus that kind of help me with the Bible story. But is there anything I don't want to say if there's anything relevant to my daily life? But do I really need to pay attention to these not holiness codes but all these prescriptions? And I'm thinking we alluded to two or three mundane ones, but there's also the larger, the sexual activities that are prohibited in Leviticus. A lot of times we could think or even experience the charge of hypocrisy of well, you're still against these things that Leviticus talks about, but you're totally comfortable doing all these other things that Leviticus says you're not supposed to do, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think there's a number of factors that shape how we think about that second portion of Leviticus where it's talking about the work of the community economically, sexually, militarily, financially and we can observe some of the things are shaped very much by lived context that are no longer quite the same for many of us in the modern world, if not perhaps all of us. And so the way we think about the financial system, the kind of instruction regarding things like Jubilee years and the like, it doesn't directly map onto the kind of global financial system in which so many of us operate, at least in a place like the US, but in an agrarian society.
Speaker 2:It made all sorts of sense. Now, it was scandalous, it was strange. There are questions about if they ever actually followed through and obeyed it as they should, but they knew what they would be disobeying if they didn't. Yeah, and so there is just a contextual challenge, and that's one crucial element. There's also a number of laws where they are clearly serving as parables or figures, and so concerns about cleanliness often take very tangible form, and it's meant to shape our imaginative palette so that we appreciate the significance of cleanliness in a way that prepares us for the work of Jesus later.
Speaker 2:But this side of Jesus, some of those elements, they are not pertinent as such, but pertinent as pointers to his value, and Paul gives us categories for that writing to the Galatians when he talks about the law and this is a portion of the Pentateuch or law as a tutor or paedagogos, this character in that Greco-Roman society who would take an adolescent and prepare them for things that matter later and this is a form of cleanliness is next to godliness, the kind of idea that talking about hygiene and cleanliness, caring for your dwelling space, for your body, for your clothes, that shapes you, to care about cleanliness.
Speaker 2:That matters more profoundly, and oftentimes, with children, we instruct a child or an adolescent from the outside in, and that fits the normal course of human growth and development.
Speaker 2:But once you've reached a point where people individually and communally understand the inner and the more ultimate, you don't need to fix on the outer as such necessarily. Third, though, there are a host of teachings here that simply model perpetual concerns of God, and so, for instance, though the Jubilee year may not make contextual sense in a global system where capital flows as it does in our world, or even potential realistic alternates to our current financial capital system, nonetheless the jubilee concern does show that money is not beyond divine concern, and that both poverty and wealth can be not just materially sort of shapers of our reality, but spiritual concerns, and that either poverty or wealth can be spiritually detrimental, and so we may not apply the overt statue at such. And yet there's what the Westminster confessionals say, the general equity thereof. There's a principled concern that we ought to take as being signaled here and that needs to be something of great pertinence, whether it's about sexual practice, whether it's about economic regulations, whether it's about jurisprudence and sort of the penal system, whatever it may be.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's really good. I think that's going to help people as they wrestle through some of this. It's really thinking about what might be the logic behind some of these commands, and is that still relevant, applicable and shows me how God thinks about how I live my life, how I live with others in community and how I relate to him in worship and devotion.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think there's two things we could keep in mind as we read across all those many chapters. First, we can observe how God plainly is getting all up in our business. So there's not a single area or aspect of life which doesn't seem to be in some way addressed, and that's instructive. God, as we read in Deuteronomy 6, eventually wants all of us heart, soul, mind and strength in Jesus' elaboration of that passage in Deuteronomy 6.5. And we see here total devotion is pertinent and that means every area of life is of religious significance.
Speaker 2:Religion is not, as we sometimes think in the modern West, a private affair what you do here or what you do in your heart, it relates to everything. Secondly, we want to remember that key verse, leviticus 10.10. This is about cleanliness and about devotion. That's what it means to be holy unto the Lord or to be holy as God is holy. To share in his holiness is to flee sin and uncleanness and to pursue devotion and holiness, to be set apart. And so, as we're looking at those passages about our bodies, about our money, about our society, about our courts, about our families, about our sex lives, whatever it may be, in each and every area, we can be asking how does this model turning from sin and uncleanness and how does this prompt people to pursue devotion and holiness and that really will always lead us to be challenged, yeah, and also to be given a hope of what God promises eventually to perfect in us, in Christ.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's really good and that's a really good, great place to land as we're thinking about reading through this book. People have started it and now they can kind of have some anchor points. And, mike, I appreciate you taking time to chat with me today and help us think through Leviticus, and I'll look forward to next time we can do this. Sounds great.