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* Leviticus: In the book of Leviticus, the law of the priests, God describes the sacrifices He requires of the priests and the Israelites. In this study Bob Enyart looks at the meanings of the burnt offerings and the lamb without spot or blemish. We learn of offerings of birds and of bread, and peace offerings of bull and calf, cow, ox, and goat, and trespass offerings for sin.
God here commands integrity toward our neighbors, diligence in religious service, and the consecration of the Aaron and his sons as priests. Sadly, though they were chosen to be teachers of the people and serve the Lord as priests forever, God kills two of Aaron’s sons, Nadab and Abihu, for their rebellion against Him. God gave to Israel symbolic ordinances both to teach the world eternal truths and to provide a cultural fabric that would bind Israel together keeping them through the millennia as a cohesive ethnic group through whom the Messiah would come and for whom future End Times prophecies will one day be fulfilled.
This 3,500-year-old book presents applications of what, thousands of years later, became modern medical practices. In some contexts an unclean person may have an infectious disease, is diagnosed from bodily discharges, and God instructs isolation, observation, and cleansing, with clothing and personal objects either washed, discarded, or even burned. God even warns that one unclean person or object can make another unclean, revealing all this thousands of years before biblical creationists discovered for the word the germ theory of diseases. God imbues blood with an intensity of symbolic meaning because without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness and because penultimately, Jesus would incense His hearers saying, If you want eternal life, drink My blood. God chose this book also to explicitly condemned all forms of sexual immorality including adultery, incest, and homosexuality. Yet, for those who obey Him, He also filled their lives with the blessings of the annual Feasts of Israel, and the eternal relief symbolized in the very real Sabbatical Years and the once-in-a-life Year of Jubilee! Finally, God’s insistence on treating the poor well was anything but a foundation for a socialist or welfare state. And by the way He created us and the world, with the laws of cause and effect, no man can escape the curses that are all around him, for every act of disobedience, nor can men out give God, with the blessings that He has assured for every act of obedience. For what God expects of men in vows and tithing, He has committed Himself to give infinitely above what we ever could.