You would open your Bibles to
Leviticus chapter 17. I do not often preach from the
book of Leviticus, not because I think it's not a worthy book
to preach from, but Leviticus is one of those
books full of minute details. It's called Leviticus because
it was written to give rules to the tribe of Levi, who were
the priests. It was to tell them how to conduct
the affairs of the temple. Well, over in the tabernacle
at the time it was written, that tent, which was later replaced
with the temple by Solomon. But nonetheless, the rules remained
the same. And the very fact that it takes
this entire book to lay out, what does it got here, 27 chapters,
to lay out for the Levites how they are to conduct the worship
of God tells us something about the God we worship. And that is, he's pretty particular.
Now, we live in a day of live and let live. And you know, in
human relationships, you gotta do a lot of that. I mean, you
gotta realize we are not the same. And in a society that we
live in, United States of America, where we prize freedom, that
means that in order to have a free society, it can't be that you
just require freedom for yourself, you've got to allow freedom for
everyone else too. But that's in human relations.
God is under no obligation to allow us any kind of freedom.
in the way we approach him. Now, we don't approach him in
a building. I mean, we come together like
this in this building, but that's for convenience sake. This building
does not bring us closer to God. God did not send us a word from
a prophet saying in this building, in this building only shall ye
meet to worship me. There's nothing like that. Yet all the details, and some
of them seem so, for lack of a better word, arbitrary. Why is this important? Why would
God care? Well, as you study, you find
out why would God care. The reason is The reason for
all this detail in the book of Leviticus and the very worst
punishments for those who did not follow the details. I mean,
this wasn't like, you know, seven days you shall be unclean. Then
you can come back. It's like, you don't do it this
way. You're cut off from the people. That's pretty serious. The reason is it all comes down
to something our Lord Jesus said when he was here. I am the way,
the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but
by me." Now, we're probably known by those who know something about
how we preach and how we approach things, and yet are not a part
of our group. We're probably thought of as
pretty narrow-minded, and I don't mind that. because God is narrow-minded.
Now, there's some things we need to be broad-minded about, but
when it comes to the worship of God, we are to be as narrow-minded
as God is. It's not as though I have in
my heart, well, I hope everybody that, you know, tries to come
to God by some other means than Jesus Christ, I hope they go
to hell. That's not why I preach that the only way to the Father
is through Christ. I preach it because that's what
God said through His Son. And I would lead you, and anybody
else that heard me, I'd lead you astray. I would put you on
a path that didn't lead to life, but led to destruction, and I
don't want to do that. Our narrow-mindedness about approaching
God does not arise from a natural narrow-mindedness on our part.
It arises from God's absolute narrow-mindedness. Now, I say
He's narrow-minded. He has every right to be, because
He's right about everything. If you're absolutely right all
the time, then you have every right to be narrow-minded and
say, my way is the way, it's the only way, it's the only way
I'm gonna tolerate. None of us has that right. My right to tell you, quite frankly,
my right to tell you that there's only one way to the Father and
this is it, my only right to do that is because it's written
in this book. If it wasn't for this book, I
wouldn't have any authority to say that, unless I were a prophet
of God, such as the Old Testament prophets were, and the prophets
that preceded Moses. But their preaching, generally
speaking, was always accompanied by the ability to work miraculous
things that gave authority to the word they were preaching.
I can't do miraculous works. I have a hard time with normal
works. I can't do it. The only authority I've got is
this book. Now we read, look here in chapter 17 of Leviticus
and we'll begin reading at verse 10. Any Israelite or any alien living
among them who eats any blood, I will set my face against that
person who eats blood and will cut him off from the people. For the life of a creature is
in the blood, and I have given it to you to make atonement for
yourselves on the altar. It is the blood that makes atonement
for one's life or one's soul. That word translated there can
mean essentially any. Some of us, we talk about the
soul of a person as being something distinct from his body, but actually,
at least when I use the words, I refer to that as spirit. Soul
actually, more often than anything, just meant living principle. Because the same word is applied
to regular animals. So when it talks about the blood
that makes atonement for one's life, it's not meaning one's
lifestyle, It's meaning the actual principle of life within him. Therefore I say to the Israelites,
none of you may eat blood, nor may an alien living among you
eat blood. Now as with all the commandments
given to the Jews, they made them into legalistic matters. I started out saying God is narrow-minded.
He is. But there is no one who has ever
eaten meat who has not eaten blood. Because I don't care how
you drain an animal, you can't get all the blood out of it. In fact, I don't even know that
he was talking about that it that animals had to be killed
a certain way. I can't recall off the top of
my head if there's any rule about this. You know, in order that
the blood be drained before they could cook it and eat it. People ate blood from a sacrificial
animal. And I mean, they would just collect
the blood and then eat it. And they did so for the same
principle as really almost all cannibalism is carried out. Now
these are gross things, but when you're talking about what people
do, generally speaking, you're talking about some gross things.
Cannibalism, as it's practiced in the places where it is practiced,
is rarely a matter of sustaining one's life by eating food. We
just happen to eat humans. Generally speaking, cannibalism
was a way to gain the characteristics of the person you ate. If they were smart and you wanted
to be smart, you eat their brain. If you wanted to be fast, because
they were fast, you ate their legs, whatever. They thought
that if you ate a person, you gained whatever characteristics
that person had. And then when it came to blood,
and everyone understands, the life is in the blood. Now we
may understand that concept with greater scientific accuracy,
but this they could perceive. No blood, no life. So evidently,
this animating principle, this living principle, resided in
the blood. Because you may have every other
part of you in absolutely perfect condition. Drain the blood, you're
gone. So I don't know of a certainty
that our Lord was saying as Jews still practice, you know, at
slaughterhouses for kosher meats, they have to have a Jewish guy
there, an authorized Jewish guy to witness the killings or maybe
even do the killings because they've invented laws about how
an animal must be killed and drained and it's all about keeping
this particular law. But I believe here, he says,
you don't eat the blood. You don't collect the blood and
make a meal of it. Because those who did such thing
thought they were gaining life by eating blood. And this tradition
among the Jews continued even to the apostles. Now, we think
that the apostles gained immediate, full understanding of the gospel
and all its implications. They didn't. Because when Paul
spoke to the apostles back in Jerusalem, because remember,
he hadn't been part of the original 12. And so far as I know, he had
not been to Jerusalem since the Lord saved him. He did not have
the approval of the apostles. least not officially. They weren't
certain what he was preaching because they hadn't heard him
preach. Now, Paul said, I didn't go and speak to them because
I needed their approval. He said, but I wanted to people
to understand that I was preaching the same thing as them. And when
he got done, they said, well, you know, we are in complete
agreement. Just make sure they do this and
they don't eat strangled animals. Why was that? Well, if you slaughter
animals by strangling them, you haven't drained the blood. Even
they still had this very strict view of what the Lord meant by
this. Traditions die hard. If the apostles
struggled to shed all their Jewish traditions, let us not be too
quick to judge those who the Lord has saved them, or at least
they say he has, yet they're still clinging to many of the
traditions of the past. When Lazarus came out of the
tomb, what did our Lord say to the disciples? He says, unwind
his grave clothes. Well, them unwinding his grave
clothes did not make him any more alive. But there's a great
illustration of the fact people are made alive in Christ, but
they are still bound in death clothes, the death clothes of
their tradition. And they'll probably not get
all of them off before they leave this world. But here was this prohibition on eating blood. Now why would
our Lord have this prohibition? Well, for the simple reason that,
as I said, when people ate blood, just had a bowl full of blood
for dinner, I like a rare steak, but I'm not going for a bowl
of blood. But they did. When they were
doing that, they were doing that in an attempt to gain life. And there was, and God had already
made provision or would make provision for that. And the provision
that he made was typified or illustrated in all those temple
sacrifices. Look over here at Colossians
1 verse 15. I'll show you an example of this.
It's not with regard to blood, but another one of God's laws.
You know, God had a law. You shall make no graven image. to worship it. Now, this was
not a general prohibition on artistic representations of religious
things. I know some who are absolutely
opposed to anybody making a picture of Jesus. I'm not for it. For one thing, I've noticed nearly
every picture of Jesus looks a whole lot like us, only with
long hair. And Jesus was not Anglo-Saxon.
If you want to do a rendering of what you think Jesus is, make
him a Semite. That's what he was. He likely
had curly hair. He likely did not have long hair. He looked like every other Jew
living in that day. So much so, they had to pay Judas
to point him out. But it's not as though I think
it's a sin to do so. I think it's rather useless to
do so because we have no description of him other than he was a Jewish
man. That's all we know about him. And I'm also somewhat opposed
to these pictures of Jesus, or even crosses and things like
that. When I say opposed, I'm not saying it's a sin. I just
know this, today's religious symbol often becomes tomorrow's
idol. Now there's a difference between
a religious symbol and an idol. But we are idolatrous in our
flesh. and a religious symbol soon becomes
an idol. People may even make an idol
out of this book. I tell you, I am so thankful
that I have a copy of the Holy Scripture, several. But there are people, you know,
when one gets worn out, they would never think of throwing
it in the trash. They would never think of burning
it. Well, I respect our respect for
God's message, but the pages that are printed on, they're
just pages. We don't worship a Bible. We
worship the God described in the Bible. But there was a law against making
any kind of graven image and worshiping it. And why was that? The very simple reason is God
was going to make his own image. Colossians 1, 15, he is the image
of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. Jesus Christ
is the image of God. Hebrews said he's the exact representation
of his being. Now, if we say we don't worship
images, we're wrong. We do worship an image. We worship
the image that God made. Now, we haven't seen it yet,
but we will, and we will worship that image, and in doing so,
we will be worshiping God because this is the image of God, the
image not only that it is of God, like you talk about a picture
of God or something, it's the image from God, the image God
made. Therefore, we are not to bow
down and worship any image we have made. Now, why were they not to eat
blood in that sense of eating blood in order to gain life? because God was going to provide
that blood. Our Lord said, unless you eat
the flesh and drink the blood, eat my flesh and drink my blood,
you have no part in me. Now we understand he was speaking
spiritually. He was talking about what the
Lord's table illustrates. to eat the body and drink the
blood of our Lord Jesus Christ is nothing more or less than
spiritually to take in that broken body and that shed blood as our
soul's life and nourishment. It's quite simply to trust Him
by means of that sacrifice He made. Now, we represent that
or symbolize that in the Lord's table. But you know, that wine
or grape juice, it never becomes blood. That bread never becomes
human flesh. Now, I've tasted blood before. You know, there've been times
I cut myself and you go like that and try to get it to stop. That wine that we have never
tasted like that. You say, why do you mention that?
Because there are a few denominations who believe that by some priestly
magic, that this grape juice actually becomes the blood of
the Lord, even though it tastes just like grape juice. This wine becomes the blood of
the Lord, even though if you drink enough of it, you're still
going to get drunk. They believe that that wafer or that bread
actually becomes the body of the Lord, and you are quite literally
eating the body of the Lord and drinking His blood. When we participate in the Lord's
table, we are drinking wine or grape juice and we're eating
unleavened bread, symbols of the Savior's blood and body. But he forbade the eating of
the blood of an animal. as a means of obtaining life.
The life is in the blood. They thought by eating it, they
would get life. Well, the life is the blood,
but it's the blood that makes atonement for the soul. Now,
that's the subject of this morning. And you know, blood atonement
is not really in fashion. I don't know that it ever has
been. Blood atonement, such as the scriptures teach us. Because
blood atonement is the requirement of a God that people don't like. Now, we often speak of our Lord's
work in saving us under the words redemption and atonement. And
most people think that those two things are synonyms, that
they mean the same thing. And I can understand this because
Peter says we're redeemed by the blood. And here we read,
the blood makes atonement for the soul. So the same blood provides
both redemption and atonement. It's natural to think they must
be pretty much the same thing. But they're really not because
each perceives sin in a different way. Now redemption, and that's
the word we probably use more than any other, perceives sin
as a debt. So you get mad, maybe even mad
at a friend for some reason or another. And just out of spite, you scratch
up his car or do something or Destroy one of his tires. I've
heard that, putting a knife in a tire, you know, whatnot. Oh,
and the next day, you feel awful. Why in the world did I do that?
And you go to your friend and you say, my anger got way out of line. I shouldn't have done that. Now,
you go down to the store. I've already made arrangements.
You get yourself a brand new set of tires all the way around.
I'm paying for them. Now, you may think to yourself,
yeah, he kind of lost it, didn't he? But you're not mad at him. The
relationship's not been broken. And he has redeemed himself from
any retribution on your part by buying new tires. That's what
redemption is, paying the price for what you've ruined. But atonement
sees sin as something more personal. It sees sin as a great personal
offense. Now, some of the more remarkable examples of sin
in human relationships described in this way and yet forgiven
is when you find that people who were on opposite sides of
the war, and I remember watching a show
about this, a Japanese, I believe he was a fighter pilot or something,
but he had killed the brother of some American man. That'd be tough to get over. You killed one of my loved ones.
I'm not mad at you because you broke a law against murder. I'm
mad at you because you killed my brother. We read about murder all the
time. It's sad. But it's not as though we get
offended by it like we would if a dear loved one had been
murdered. And you know what we'd want,
at least naturally? Blood. That's what we'd seek. Only way
to make this right is to kill the killer. I've tried thinking
about this before. Would that ever satisfy me? I
don't think it would. I've not heard of many people
saying that they got any sense of real satisfaction when the
killer of one of their loved ones was put to death. The reason
being is their death did not make their loved one alive. But when you hear of such horrible
offenses, freely forgiven, how would you ever get over that?
Really? I mean, if someone even accidentally
killed one of your children, you might say, I understand it
was an accident, but I don't ever want to see your face again. Now, that's how atonement perceives
sin. You see, our sin, is not just
breaking a law. It involves that. But it's much
worse. Our sin is a personal affront
to the God who created us. And such is the nature of God,
there are no degrees with Him. It's not like there's little
sins and big sins. Brother Henry used to put it
this way. He said, there are no little sins because there's
no little God to sin against. And while we may think, well,
what Judas did must be a whole lot worse than what Peter did. You know, Judas betrayed him
and Peter denied him. You know what the difference
between Judas and Peter is? Grace, that's all. Grace. They were both guilty of horribly
offenses against the God who made them. What is an atonement? An atonement
is a payment that so puts away the sin, it also puts away the
offense. Now, for some sins we could hardly
imagine any kind of real atonement. If someone purposefully killed
your child, can you think of any kind of
price that could be paid that would make it so that that killer
became your friend? I would consider him a fortunate
man indeed if I did not personally kill him. And I imagine most of you would
feel the same thing. And when I'd done it, I still
wouldn't feel good about it. I wouldn't say, okay, now he
died. I'm okay with it. No. We would probably wish that
he could raise from the dead so he could kill him again. That's
the nature of the offenses of sins like that. And when we perceive
that all our sins are like that to God, We have enraged Him. We have offended Him to the very
core of His being. And yet there is atonement. The blood shall be an atonement
for your soul, your life upon the altar. We know how that was fulfilled. It was fulfilled in our Lord
Jesus Christ. When our Lord hung on the cross
there at Calvary, what we perceive is bad enough. I can't imagine
being crucified. Well, I can imagine it, but like
many of the things we imagine, we can't imagine it as bad as
it really is. It was specifically designed
to be as horrific a death as a person could experience. It
collected pain, excruciating. In fact, the word excruciating
come from the Latin word crucify. Excruciating means pain of the
cross, or that pain that arises out of the cross. Excruciating
pain, humiliation. Those who were crucified were
often not only under a death penalty, that's bad enough, they're
under that horribly painful and very extended. For many, it went
on for days. Because what you really die of
on a cross is asphyxiation. Because when you're hanging by
your arms, you can't breathe right. And so In order to take
a breath, they would have to raise themselves up on their
feet. But if their feet had been nailed to a cross, that's a horribly
painful thing to do. But for days, they could go on
standing up, take a deep breath, and then hang there until their
lungs cried out for more oxygen. And they'd just keep doing that
until they were so exhausted, they couldn't do it anymore. And then they'd suffocate for
not being able to take a breath. That was the standard method
of death. And some would go on like that for days. And as that
was happening, not only the Roman soldiers, but many of the common
population had contempt for them, and maybe rightly so. You can
imagine if it was a murderer, well, the loved ones of whoever
he murdered would stand there and add insult to injury. Remember
what they did to our Lord? They mocked him the whole time
he was on the cross. So the Romans had devised this
method of execution designed to be as horrible a death as
a person can die. But that's not all that went
on. In the book of Isaiah chapter
53, it said, it pleased the Lord to crush him. He has made his
soul, his life, an offering for sin. Yes, our Lord must die physically,
but there was something more going on there. Him, Having our sins laid upon
Him, made Him in the eyes of God,
the judge of all, a horribly offensive thing. Now, we have
to be very careful when we try to describe what goes on in the
mind of God. Because when we talk about what
goes on in our mind, we're linear thinkers. We think one thing
and then another thing and another thing and another thing. God
thinks about everything all at once, all the time. But the only
way we can understand him is in the way we think. And what
I'm saying is, is that our sins were as offensive on Christ as
they were on us. It's not as though, as Christ
bore our sins in his body on the tree, God said, yeah, I know
they're offensive things, but I'm not offended at the one who
bore them, because I realize he didn't do it. God in his infinite holiness
was so horribly offended by the sins borne by our Savior and
thus offended at the Savior himself, that he visited on the Savior
all the wrath and indignation that an infinite God can come
up with. Whatever God would have done
to us without Christ, He did to Christ. And not only His blood as a literal, chemical, physical thing flowed
out. I mean, have you ever noticed
how every aspect of the crucifixion drew blood, whipped, crown of
thorns, nailed? Nothing about it was bloodless. But here's an amazing thing. That blood represented His life.
The life is in the blood. And God saw that blood, saw that
soul or life poured out unto death, and it did something that
no other blood can do. God was no longer offended. God was no longer angry with
his people. Now, once again, we realize God's
an eternal, unchanging God, and out there in the eternity of
his existence, there isn't this change in this passage. But again,
we've got to look at these things as they work themselves out through
time. Until Jesus Christ shed His blood,
God had a cause against us. Until then, His nature cried
out for vengeance and satisfaction. The apostle who wrote Hebrews
was careful to remind us our God is a consuming fire. Now we think God is like us,
the world thinks God is like us, and if you talk about Him
in terms of requiring death for sin, the shedding of blood, without
the shedding of blood there's no forgiveness for sin. They
think, oh, that's just an old, primitive, vengeful God. We don't
like to think of God that way. Well, I'm sorry. Think of him
however you want, but when you meet him, you're gonna meet him
as he is, not as you want to think about him. He's not gonna
say, oh, you were one of those 21st century intellectuals who,
so, okay, yeah, you're right, I really don't get that upset
about sin. No. They will be horrified to find
out that the God that they thought was so unsophisticated, so much
a part of just primitive man's mind of what a God would be,
that He's really exactly what He said He was. A God who will
by no means clear the guilty. A God, he says, those that sin
my soul hates. Oh, but God is love, not toward
everybody. I can't remember ever saying
out loud that I hated someone. I was trained not to. I must
have said it at some point and then was told not to. I've thought
it, but I've never gotten to the point that I can recall that
I said, so-and-so, my soul hates him. God said that. Henry, in preaching on the character
of God, one time made this statement. He said, well, you say your God's
a monster. He said, then get set to deal
with a monster, because that's what he's like. But here's the
thing. Much as he hates sin, much as
he's offended by it, and as much as he's unwilling to accept anything
from us as an atonement for sin. What we could never provide Him,
He's provided for Himself in our behalf. When it says He set forth Christ
to be a propitiation through His blood, that word, propitiation,
atonement, a reconciling sacrifice. I want you to think now, if you
can, for a minute, Believers and unbelievers alike.
But believers will be able to identify it with more. Think
about your sin for a minute. Don't think too long, but just
think enough. Aren't you even offended by it? And you're just a sinful person.
Imagine what God must think of your sin. And yet, such was the love of
God for his people. that instead of pouring out the
wrath from His offense onto us, He sent His own beloved Son into
the world, bundled up all that sin and all
that divine offense, and packed it on His shoulders,
sent Him to the cross. invented a hell's worth of wrath
on him. And he did something that no
one else has ever done. He died. Lots of people died. You just
go out to the cemetery, a bunch of them from Rock Valley. No,
they just got started dying. They're not done yet. at least
the unbelieving ones. When the Bible talks about eternal
death, it doesn't mean just a death that lasts forever. It means
death that goes on and on and on and on because it can never
provide an atonement. God never ceases being offended
by those who undergo that everlasting death. Only Jesus could say it,
and that included His death, is perfected. He went to the
far reaches of everything that death means. And with that, our
God, the deeply offended, irreconcilable God said, there is no wrath in
me." Every one of us, myself included,
when we sin some notable sin, and I say notable, notable to
us, they're all the same to God, but something that's bad enough,
even we're offended by it. Our knee-jerk reaction is to worry that God's offense
has been stirred up again. Well, if it weren't that the
blood of Jesus Christ had been shed and that that blood has
made atonement for our souls, you'd be right. But, oh, precious blood, and
this is why we love to talk about it, it actually satisfied It actually made it so that God
isn't upset. Isn't that a marvelous thing
to think about? You say, but you don't know what I did. No,
but I know what I've done. And I can't imagine that what
you've done is any worse than what I've done. God's not mad at his people. He's not like that figure of
God that they like to scare people with, you know, the old guy with
the, actually they draw him more like the Greeks viewed Zeus than
the way the scriptures present our Heavenly Father, but he's
up there and there's lightning and all this going on, and he's
got a lightning bolt in his hand, and he's just waiting for you
to slip up. Child of God. Your sins are gone. They are covered. They are paid
for. All the ones you thought were
small, all the things you didn't even think were sin, all the
ones so horrible you dare not tell anybody else about them.
The blood of Christ has been equal to the task of so covering
them that not even the Father is upset about them anymore. When it talks about, if the Son
shall make you free, you will be free indeed, that's what he's
talking about. Can you imagine being any freer
than that? That the creator of the heavens
and the earth and the judge of all the earth is not upset at
you? He's not upset at you in matters
of law. He's not upset at you in matters
of personal offense. He finds in you no fault, no sin, no offense. And it's not because you tried
not to offend Him. It's not because you did the
best you could. It's not because you did better than those people
in the other church. It's because Jesus Christ, who
never did anything sinful or offensive, bore our sins in his
body on the tree. And God said, that's enough. That's enough. And when your
conscience accuses you, whether just because you're in the flesh
and the fleshly conscience accuses or if the devil ever takes time
out of his busy day to visit you personally and accuse you,
you say, look, the judge who matters, he said Christ is enough. And if Christ is enough for him,
he's enough for me. Now be on your way. Go bother
somebody else. You think that's too bold? I'll
once again ask you, if that's not the truth, what hope do we
have? Really? Eric.