It's so good to be with you again
tonight. I heard a lot about streaming today. I learned a
lot about streaming. To me, streaming was going along
a stream with a fishing pole. But now it's taken on a new name,
and we greet those who are listening, streaming. I greet you from all our folks
in the Dalles that worship with us. and I had a brother share
with me, please take back that greetings to Oregon. My dad left
Wisconsin in 1929, at the age of 20 years old, with his mother,
his stepfather, and two brothers, and I, which way is west here?
That way. Okay, I think Wisconsin's that
way, one state. And there were four sisters and
a brother that they left in Wisconsin that never came west. And they
had children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. And
I have cousins galore that I have never met in Wisconsin. Many people are that way. Got
family they've never seen. And I'd heard of you. But I'm
so thankful that now I've met some brothers and sisters that
are my family that I never met in Michigan. And please remember
us in prayer, and we'll remember you in prayer in this place,
in this part of the vineyard. We're not in separate vineyards.
We're in the same vineyard. It's just the world. And I have
a dear friend that's down in New Guinea. He's a missionary
in New Guinea preaching the gospel. to people down there, and he's
still in the same vineyard we are, preaching the same grace,
same gospel, people are being saved, and there are brothers
and sisters in Christ. Would you turn with me to the
book of Leviticus tonight, chapter 2. I'd like to say a few things
about this book, chapter 2. By no means could we cover it,
by no means if we spent 10 years on the book of Leviticus. But
I do have a love for the book of Leviticus that I never had
before. As I shared this morning, I read about the book of Leviticus
is for sinners. And if the book of Leviticus
is for sinners, just like Genesis and John and Matthew and Revelation
and Romans, believers, sinners, then I want to know what it has
to say for me. Because there is so much said in this book
of Leviticus that shares with us what Christ is for his people. In this second chapter of Leviticus,
we find that the Lord is spoken of as Christ our righteousness. Now in chapter one, we looked
at a little bit this morning, the atonement is spoken of, Christ
our atonement or Christ our justification is mentioned in chapter one.
And you cannot have the benefits and blessings of chapter two
or three or four or five or six or seven or any of the rest of
it without first of all, having chapter one applied to you. We
cannot claim the blessings of Christ if we do not claim the
atonement. If we have nothing to do with
Christ and His saving work on our behalf, don't claim any of
the rest. It's not yours. It's not ours.
And I brought up this morning that if we claim, for by grace
are you saved through faith, and we don't want a thing to
do with, and God chose us in Him before the foundation of
the world, We have left ourselves out of all of those blessings
of grace. So here in the second chapter,
in our approach to God, nothing is left to human invention. And
as we follow these ordinances through here, as we follow these
offerings through here, nothing is left to human invention. It
is all very specially documented exactly how it was intended for
these people who brought these offerings to bring them. They
didn't have to guess about which lamb or which ox or which birds.
They didn't have to guess about this chapter 2 about what kind
of flower they were to bring. Chapter 2 tells us about an offering
that is a bloodless offering. It speaks of the righteousness
of Christ and it's just as valuable and as important as the others.
It just speaks about a facet of Christ that the others don't
particularly cover. In our approach to the book of
Leviticus, it is also well spoken of, for we find in the New Testament
that Jesus said, Moses spoke of me. And that gives me great
confidence that when I read the book of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus,
Numbers, Deuteronomy, I'm going to run smack doodly dab into
Christ Jesus in those books. Moses spoke of me. And there
was a believer that shared with a friend, we have found him of
whom Moses and the prophets spoke of, Jesus of Nazareth, the son
of Joseph. Now, they identified him as his
stepson because there was no doubt other people that were
in Nazareth that might have even had the same name. But this is
the guy right here. Moses and the prophets spoke
of him. We have found him, who Moses
and the prophets spoke of. Now, would you turn with me to
the Book of Acts? Keep your finger right there. Book of Acts, chapter
26. And we find these words about Moses, Leviticus, Leviticus chapter
2, in the book of Acts, as Acts chapter 26, beginning with verse
22, it says this, having therefore obtained help of God, I continue
unto this day witnessing both the small and great, saying none
other things than those which the prophets and Moses did say
should come. Now notice the next verse, that
Christ should suffer. Now when we read about that offering
this morning in chapter 1, the bringer of that offering did
not suffer. But the offering suffered. Speaking
of the suffering of Christ on the behalf of the church, they
are pictures of the suffering Christ and then we get to the
antitype the Lord Jesus Christ and he suffered a great deal
on our behalf in Isaiah chapter 53 when it says or uses the word
bruised he was bruised for our iniquities that's more than just
a blue spot like we get that means beaten and I'll tell you
my friends that God the Father bruised his son for our sins. He bruised his son. He saw the
travail of his soul and was satisfied. Going on there in verse 23, that
Christ should suffer and that he should be the first that should
rise from the dead and should show light unto the people and
to the Gentiles. Did you know that Moses wrote
of those things? All of those things. Moses and
the prophets wrote of all those things. This is not a new thing. This is the gospel preached to
Abel. This is the gospel preached to
Noah. This is the gospel preached to
Moses. This is the gospel out of the
Old Testament. Going back to the book of Leviticus,
we find that there are five offerings mentioned in Leviticus chapter
1 through chapter 7. This morning, we mentioned just
briefly the burnt offering, which is Christ our atonement or justification. In chapter 2, we find the meat
offering. It is not really meat. It is
meal. It's grain. And I read with regard
to this word in the King James that to many people at the time
of the writing or the translating of this translation in 1611,
most of the people didn't have the opportunity of eating meat.
Their meat was grain. And just look around the world
and find out, even today, how many people's entire diet depend
on grain. Once in a while, they actually
get some meat, but most of it is grain. And some of it isn't
grain that we would feed to the pig. But it's a meat offering,
a meal offering, a grain offering that represents the righteousness
of Christ, Christ our righteousness. Next, we find there is a peace
offering, and that speaks of Christ our peace. Next is a sin
offering, Christ our advocate. And then we find the trespass
offering, Christ our restorer. So these all picture Christ,
and they were all brought by sinners. None of these offerings
were brought by anybody that knew them, but those who knew
that they were sinners before God. It is much like you and
I talking in conversation and sharing. I am a sinner and I'm
a sinner saved by grace. And we're saying the same thing
that these did as they brought these various offerings before
the Lord, only a sinner. Now, these that brought these
offerings could care less what their family had to say. So all
your family saved. As far as I know, I'm the only
one out of a family of 10 that know anything about the gospel.
My mother and dad were religious to the core, but they didn't
know anything about the gospel. My grandparents, on my mother's
side, were religious. They went to church all the time.
They were married in 1907 and started going to that Baptist
church where I went to in 1909, and they went there all the rest
of their life until they died. But you question them and learn
about them, and you find out that they didn't believe the
gospel. They had followed after another gospel. They had followed
after the freewill works religious gospel. And that was prominent
and there prevalent when I was growing up in that church. I
never heard the gospel in that church. It took someone from
far away to come to Oregon to share with me what the gospel
is, and that is Jesus Christ. I learned where not to go and
what not to drink and what not to do and where all those do's
and don'ts that we learned in religion, but I didn't learn
a thing about Christ. And then when the Lord saved
me, I found out that I have freedom in Christ. I just don't have
to do all those things. Righteousness, as we find here
in chapter 2, is the state commanded by God and standing the test
of His judgment. It is conformity to all that
He commands. That's righteousness. Conformity
to all that He commands. Be ye holy, as I am holy. conformity to all that he commands. We find out that righteousness,
God's righteousness, Christ's righteousness, is the measuring
tool by which God measures everything. He doesn't use our measuring
tool. No, we want to have him use it
in religion. We want him to use our measuring
tool. It's been cut off, though. It's
not an accurate measure. It isn't fit. God has a measuring
tool, and that measuring tool is Jesus Christ. And He says,
if your righteousness doesn't measure up to His righteousness,
you don't have righteousness. In other words, He's saying,
if your standard is not Him, then you don't have the right
standard. If you don't measure up to His righteousness, He is
the measuring tool. Now, in the Daods, we have three
courthouses. There's the first one, the second
one, and the third one. We outgrew two of them, so we
had to build another one. The first one was the first courthouse
west of the Rocky Mountains in those latitudes. Wasco County
was the largest county ever created in the United States. It covered
all of Eastern Oregon, part of Idaho, part of Montana, and part
of Wyoming. We had a sheriff leave one time
to go pick up a prisoner in the eastern part of the county, and
when he got back, he'd had an election, and he wasn't even
sheriff anymore. It was huge. There was a courthouse
in that town, and that courthouse now is a museum. They have another
one that's a pub, and now we have the real one that's left.
Inside of that courthouse is a glass case, and in that glass
case are some standards of measurement. You know, I've heard of a lot
of widows get really beaten by people selling them cords of
wood. My dad told me what a cord of wood was, four by four by
eight, stacked, ripped, split and ripped. And people are buying
cords of wood that are half a cord of wood or a third a cord of
wood and paying for it. My brother's been selling cords
of wood and actual cords of wood. And people, they get mad because
he's delivering too much. And they thought he was after
a second cord of wood. This is a cord of wood. Well,
those scoundrels. My friends, we have standards
for measurement in the United States and around the world. And if it doesn't fit those measurements,
you are a scoundrel. One of my favorite paintings
by Norman Rockwell is elderly lady in a butcher shop buying
a chicken and she has that chicken laying on the scale and she's
pushing up on the scale on one side and the guy's pushing down
on the other side. They're both scoundrels. They're
both trying to get away with something. If the measurement
that God requires is not Christ, then we don't have the right
measure and we will fail. We will find ourselves in jeopardy. It is not the righteousness of
man that God is looking for. He is looking for the righteousness
of Christ. He's the measuring instrument.
And that's why we find ourselves of necessity being found in Christ. He steps on the scale, we're
with him. God says, you're not found in the balance and found
wanting. Now we alone are found in the balance and we're found
wanting, but with him we have all the weight we need. We have
all that God requires, all that God has said must be necessary. So this righteousness that we
find in here, now it's pictured by very fine flour. They had
to grow the flour. I make mention of this almost
every time that we have communion service, when we have the bread
and we have the cup. It takes the grinding of grain
to make the bread that we have for our communion service. And
that represents the Lord Jesus Christ himself was ground, if
you please. And it takes the breaking of
the grape, the flowing of the blood, in order for us to get
the wine. They picture the things that
Christ went through. And in this chapter, chapter
2, they were to take very fine flour. The sinner was. take very
fine flour and grind it. He was to take good grain and
grind it, and then he was to present it to the priest. Now,
how this priest showed this man whether he had good grain or
not, he did not ask for a measuring cup. Now, I'm going to back up
just a little bit. When I was a young boy, my mother
would buy flour and she had an instrument that was required
in those days. Some of you ladies might know
or remember a sifter. Oh, man. We just loved, Mom,
can we do the sifter? And she would measure the flour
out, and you'd go like this, and the flour would drop through,
and guess what was left? In those days, we got burrs,
we got little stones, we got chaff, and woe be to us if we
found a grasshopper. And this is purchased flour.
Now, I don't do that anymore because it's much better today
than it used to be. But we had to sift that flour. Now, this person that brought
this, if he was not careful and left some chaff in there, or
left a stone in there, or left a grasshopper in there, and the
priest reached out. This is what he did. He reached
out. The Bible tells us he reached out and got a handful. Now, have
you ever run a burr into your hand by grabbing something really
soft? It doesn't take long to find
out, whoa, this isn't what I thought it was. Well, the priest instantaneously
is going to share with these people, you have your righteousness
mixed in this mess. This is not pure wheat. This is not pure flour. And the person who brought it,
Now, that's like us coming to God, and we're giving ourself
to him, and he reaches out and grabs our flower and says, you
know what? You've got a lot of your righteousness
here, and it's unacceptable. Now, today, I still substitute
in schools, mainly high school. Sometimes I go down to the elementary.
And did you know that most young people today are responsible
for nothing? They will tell you, it's not my fault. It's not my
fault. Well, whose fault is it? I don't
know, but it's not my fault. Well, that's what most people
do when God points out that their righteousness is not acceptable. Well, it must be the devil. It
couldn't be me. It is you. It's us. When we come
with our own works of righteousness and try to bribe God and say,
this measures up to your standard, we're calling him a liar. Because
he said, only Christ is my standard. And don't you dare make mock
of my son. So the priest went up, took that,
And once he run through his fingers, oh, we used to love to play in
mom's flower. We'd reach down in that bin and
grab a hand. Boy, if she caught us, you know, you're messing
with the food. And where has your hand been?
Where has your hand been? Well, it was so soft and powdery. And it was just fun to get there
and have it all over you. My grandmother. went to the flour
mill when she was a young girl to get some flour for her mother.
It was right there in my hometown. There was a flour mill. And my
grandfather worked at that flour mill. He wasn't my grandfather
at the time. And every time I My grandmother
went over there and get some flour from the flour mill. She
got acquainted with this guy and she kind of liked this guy
and she came home one day with two flour prints on her back
and her mother knew something was going on. My future grandfather
had hugged my future grandmother and left these powder prints
all over her back. Now, I don't know what my grandmother
said about it, but there was a sign that something had happened
at the flour mill. Now, that priest had flour all
over him. If it was good flour, fine flour,
no grit, no burrs, no grasshoppers, he took that handful and put
it on the altar and burned it. And you know, the sinner that
brought that was so thankful because he really, a sinner really
wants Christ's righteousness. We need it and we want it. And
oh, I have a dear pastor friend that said, we are all recovering
Pharisees. We're all recovering Pharisees.
Oh, it takes the grace of God to keep us from pointing out
other people's problems. this flower. Now it's burned.
Now the rest of that, as we look here in chapter two, verse one,
it says, and when any will offer a meat, I'm just going to put
meal or grain offering unto the Lord, his offering shall be fine
flour. He shall pour oil upon it and
put frankincense there on. Now, every one of these things
that's put on there, you had to crush the olive. You had,
and I heard someone, I had some maple syrup. I had some oatmeal and the first
thing I did when I found out I was going to get some real
fresh maple syrup is I poured a spoonful of it and ate it.
Just ate it. Then I poured some on my oatmeal.
You know we get that from a tree but you have to cut the tree
to do that. You have to cut the tree. You have to cut this bush
that this frankincense comes from. You have to crush the olives.
Every bit of this represents what Christ did on our behalf. And these are mixed up, and they're
brought. And he shall bring it to Aaron's sons, the priest,
and he shall take thereof his handful of flour thereof, and
the oil thereof, and the frankincense thereof, and the priest shall
burn the memorial. of it upon the altar, and be
an offering made by fire of a sweet savor unto the Lord." Now, what
happens to the rest? It's given to the priest. And
there is no greater satisfaction by the
bringer than for the priest to accept that Be satisfied with
that. I'm bringing Christ my righteousness.
And the priest accepts that and eats it. He makes a meal out
of it. Now that just speaks to me that
the Lord Jesus Christ, I find a wonderful passage in the book
of Revelation about the marriage supper of the Lamb. Who gets
to sit down there? Who gets to sit down with Jesus
Christ at the marriage supper of the Lamb? All his blood bought
ones. All those that are justified
by Christ. All those who have his righteousness. We get to do something that nobody
else ever gets to do and that is sit down with Christ and commune. Now he practiced that during
his ministry. He even practiced that with Abraham.
Remember Abraham sitting under a tree and three people show
up. And over there, Abraham shares with us my Lord. He did not call
my Lords. He didn't speak of those two
angels as his Lord. He spoke of one as his Lord,
and he says, wait here for a moment. I'm going to get some food for
you. And guess what? The Lord communed with Abraham
only because Abraham trusted God, believed God, and it was
counted unto him for righteousness. He did that with His disciples.
He did that with publicans and sinners. He would sit down and
commune with them. Now, He might have had a meal
with a Pharisee, but He communed with His disciples. He communes
with His people. And when we have Him as our righteousness,
He will commune with us. He will sit with us. He will
be with us. I remember just recently hearing
a message that God promised that where two or three are gathered
together in my name, there will I be in the midst of them. I will commune with them. Why? Because they're my children.
I've saved them by my grace. My atonement was made on their
behalf. And they're trusting my blood in righteousness alone. And so the priest ate that. just
like we read throughout the Scriptures that the Son of God eats with
His children. I would that you turn with me
over to the book of Revelation chapter 19. Revelation chapter
19. Revelation chapter 19 verse 1. God will not, indeed God cannot,
commune with any but forgiven, justified, redeemed, sanctified,
righteous, trusters of Christ alone. That's who he'll commune
with. I know that's a mouthful, but that's just saying, I won't
commune with anybody but my sheep. That's what it is. All right,
Revelation chapter 19, and there in verse 1, the scripture sharing,
after these things, I heard a great voice and much people in heaven
saying, hallelujah. Salvation and glory and honor
and power into the Lord our God. Boy, the book of Revelation just
full of that, isn't it? Praise God. Thank God. Revelation
speaks of our Savior as the lamb more than any of the rest of
the books put together. For true and righteous are his
judgments, for he hath judged the great whore which did corrupt
the earth with her fornication, and hath avenged the blood of
his servants at her hand. And again they said, Alleluia!
And her smoke rose for ever and ever. And the four and twenty
elders and four beasts fell down and worshipped God that sat on
the throne, saying, Amen, Alleluia! And a voice came out of the throne,
saying, Praise our God, all ye his servants, and ye that fear
him, both small and great. And I heard, as it were, the
voice of a great multitude, and as the voice of many waters,
and the voice of mighty thundering, saying, Alleluia, for the Lord
God omnipotent reigneth. Let us be glad, and rejoice,
and give honor to him, for the marriage of the Lamb is come,
and his wife hath made herself ready. And to her was granted
that she should be arrayed in fine linen, clean and white,
for the fine linen is the righteousness of saints. And he saith unto
me, write, blessed are they which are called unto the marriage
supper of the Lamb. And he saith unto me, these are
the true sayings of God. 1 Corinthians chapter 1, we heard
a good portion of that tonight. I would like to read verse 30. Now these are not just words
and this is not doctrine. It's sad when these just turn
out to be doctrine, and it's sad when they're just words.
This is the sinner's only plea. This is the sinner's only plea.
It's not doctrine. Now, we talk about it, and we
preach about it, but it is the sinner's plea. In 1 Corinthians
1, verse 30, But unto him are ye in Christ Jesus, who of God
is made unto us. Now, this is the sinner's plea.
I need Him as my wisdom and righteousness and sanctification
and redemption. This is the sinner's plea. I need Christ as these things
for me. And therefore, if they're mine,
supplied by Christ, I measure up. I measure up. I measure up to the standard
if I have Christ. Christ is the beloved Son of
God. He measured up. He is the standard
by which God will measure all people. And if we are in Christ,
we are caused to measure up. If we're not in Christ, we can't
measure up. We'll never measure up. We'll
never attain to the measuring that God has. So complete is
the curse removed under the of the tree with Abraham, the Lord
did eat Abraham's bread and his fatted calf." Boy, he sits down
at our table as we meet together and partakes with us. We, just
like those sinners that brought that sacrifice of meal and the
priest reached out and grabbed part of it and it didn't pinch
his fingers, threw some on the altar and took the rest, and
the sinner that brought it walked away and says, oh, he's going
to eat my flower. He's going to be satisfied with
his righteousness. Gracious Father in Heaven, it
is because of You that we come. We're thankful that You are our
wisdom and righteousness and sanctification and redemption.
We're thankful, O God, for this, your people, in this place, so
far from the place you've placed us. And yet we realize, O God,
that it is the same vineyard. We're thankful for the dear pastor
here and his wife and family. And we pray that you bless this
church and that, Lord, we would remember these folks in our prayer
and that they would remember us. Be with those so far away
that are listening to this through the virtual miracle of the computer
system. And we pray your blessing upon
them. Lord, bring in your lost sheep as you see fit and cause
them to know the righteousness that is in Christ is their only
hope. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.