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You're listening to audio from Faith Church Indie. This Lent we're studying the book of Leviticus, learning about how imperfect people can have a relationship with a perfect God. Now here's the teaching.

In your sermon journals, as you may notice if you're there on page four, there's an excerpt from chapter 23, which Nick will be referring to in his sermon. I'm going to read a different excerpt from chapter 25, not on my own. And this was Nick's suggestion, so just so you know, I'm not going off the reservation here.

But you can follow along in your journals for the first part and then listen for second passage from Leviticus 25. The Lord called to Moses and spoke to him from the tent of meeting, saying, speak to the people of Israel and say to them, when any one of you brings an offering to the Lord, you shall bring your offering of livestock from the herd or from the flock. If his offering is a burnt offering from the herd, he shall offer a male without blemish.

He shall bring it to the tent of meeting that he may be accepted before the Lord. He shall lay his hand on the head of the burnt offering and it shall be accepted for him to make atonement for him. And from Leviticus 25, starting in verse 35.

If your brother becomes poor and cannot maintain himself with you, you shall support him as though he were a stranger or a sojourner and he shall live with you. Take no interest from him or profit, but fear your God that your brother may reside beside you. You shall not lend him your money at interest nor give him your food for profit.

I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt to give you the land of Canaan and to be your God. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

Well, you heard right. We are in the book of Leviticus, where Bible reading plans go to die. You powered through the genealogies of Genesis, you know, to be rewarded by the action-packed narrative in Exodus, only to wonder what's next and it's an instruction manual for how to use the tabernacle.

I don't know if you're like me. I don't even read instruction manuals. If I get a new phone, I just turn it on and start pushing buttons and swiping around.

It's only if I get like absolutely lost, then I'll go, I wonder if this thing came with a manual. The first half of Leviticus is an instruction manual for worship, for how to use this new device that Israel got called the tabernacle. And listen, some guys ran inside and started just pushing buttons and they died.

So Moses was like, hey, did this thing come with a manual? And it did. Instructions are great. Instructions are great.

They're also very boring. I used to be on the AV team here and when Brittany Johnson was training me, she told me like, hey, if you ever get stuck, there's a binder everywhere. Anybody who's been on the AV team knows what I'm talking about.

They are detailed. They have pictures and step-by-step instructions. Of course, I was like, what do you mean stuck? I didn't pay attention at all, yeah, until the Sunday when she wasn't here and I was in charge to get everything going on and the projectors wouldn't come on and I'm texting her like, hey, and she's texting me back, did you read the instructions? No.

So I got out the binder with like 10 minutes to spare and I just went through them step-by-step and everything worked. Everywhere you find technology in this building, you'll probably find a binder next to it that Brittany put together. She has done an amazing service for this church.

It's awesome. And I hope, yeah. I hope that someday, not today, but someday, every one of those binders is destroyed and lost to history because we don't need the church 1,000 generations from now to like unearth some Indianapolis ruins, you know, and go, you know, behold, right, the work of the church in the 21st century.

Those binders, those binders are written to us and only for us, okay, but we have an instruction manual for how to use the tabernacle and it can seem really dry because it's not written to us, but I think what we're gonna see is it still was written for us. And it can feel like it's irrelevant, it can feel like it's dry and that we don't even really need to read it because we live in the glorious truth that Christ has already perfected this. We read in Hebrews that Christ entered once for all into the holy places, not by the means of the blood of goats and calves, but by means of his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption.

Amen. So we don't read Leviticus the same way that an ancient Hebrew did, right, the way that I was frantically reading that binder that morning with 10 minutes to spare to try to get the projectors and we don't read it, it doesn't carry for us that same level of importance or that level of urgency for us. But if we look for it, what we will find in Leviticus is the amazing character of our God who knew from the beginning that through his son on the cross, he would perfect every bit of this, every requirement that we're about to study, every criteria for sin to be atoned, every drop of blood, every means and every measure, every act of justice that is supposed to mark out a people for God, he perfected that in Christ and what we are gonna see as we study is the character of the one who worked on our behalf.

And as we go through this study together as a church through Lent leading up to Easter, that's what I hope we see. So let me give you an example of how that works. If you have your Bibles open to Leviticus chapter one, verse one, then I'm gonna have you turn one page back, because what I wanna show you is how Exodus ended.

And if you are not working with a physical Bible and you're on a device, then you actually have to type in Exodus 30, or sorry, 40, 34, and that's gonna take longer and so win one for the analog world. But here's the scene that you find at the very end of Exodus. Moses has this new tabernacle, shiny, impressive, we're talking like gold, silver, bronze, gold woven into the fabrics, beautiful, vibrant colors, dyed linens, all of it, though, wasn't just in its structure and design and in the craftsmanship, this tent, and don't think like Coleman sleeps 12, okay, this is, think circus main event, but instead of cheap vinyl, expensive linens, wools, beautifully colored and dyed, gold tensiled out to the size of a thread and woven in to make designs and pictures, just magnificent, but what makes it even more magnificent is that this would be God's tent, this would be his dwelling, this is where he was going to live in direct community, in direct contact with his people.

And they had worked for months, and the whole community had given gifts, they brought their precious stones and precious metals and fabrics, contributed to the cause, kind of like a capital campaign that built this building, and they had watched as the skilled tradesmen had been empowered by the spirit to build this tabernacle, they watched the fabrics take shape and they watched the poles be cut to length and then covered in gold, all in anticipation of moving day, right, God is moving in, he's gonna live next door. Exodus 40, 35 reads, then the cloud covered the tent of meeting, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle, it worked, I mean, can you imagine that excitement, you've watched and you hoped, you believed, you know, that he said he was gonna do what he said he was gonna do, but then you never really know until he's there, and he's there, he's there, God is there, he has now indwelled this tabernacle and fulfilled his promise to live right next to them, and the excitement is palpable, the Lord is present in there, verse 35 continues, and Moses was not able to enter the tent of meeting, wait, what? He can't go in, why? Exodus 40, 35, because the cloud settled on it, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle, and he can't even go inside, I don't think they saw this snag coming, they were probably like, hey, me and God, we're gonna be neighbors, when he moves in, you know, let's head over there, we'll eat some bread and drink some wine, chill with God, that's not how it worked out. Have you ever stood outside of a church building and said to yourself, I'm not sure they want me in there, or maybe you've grown up in the church and so that idea is foreign to you, but have you ever dialed a number and then hung up, because there's just no way that they wanna talk to me, or typed a text and then deleted it, I'm just sure they don't wanna hear from me. 

Have you ever bowed your head in prayer and you start to ramble to God and then you're paralyzed by the thought, does he even wanna listen to this? Leviticus was not written to us, but if you've experienced that, I think it's written for us, right? The glory, the havo, the weight of the reality of who God is filled the tabernacle and it hit them, I can't just casually enter God's presence, I can't just chill with God, Leviticus 1, 1 then, chapter 1, verse 1 of Leviticus, the very beginning of the book opens this way, the Lord called to Moses and spoke to him from the tent of meeting, God's in there, Moses is out here, God is calling to him, but they are not together, do you have that picture in your mind? So, with that picture in mind then I wanna tell you, the book immediately after Leviticus is Numbers and Numbers chapter 1, verse 1 opens like this, the Lord spoke to Moses in the tent of meeting. At the beginning of Leviticus, God is inside, Moses is outside and by the end, Moses is inside meeting with God face to face and that movement from outside to inside is what the whole book of Leviticus is all about. The book of Leviticus is 27 chapters long and in it we find how Moses goes from unable to be in the presence of the Holy God to being in the presence of the Holy God, communing with him face to face and we're gonna go over that over the next seven weeks in anticipation of Easter and we're gonna find not what Moses did to work his way in, but what God did to bring him into his presence and yeah, it can seem dry, it really can because it's full of all the details of every rite and ritual and how and when and at what times and what places exactly these sacrifices were to be done, but I don't want those details to distract us from the drama, how does Moses go from outside of God's presence to inside and how do we? So, over the next seven weeks, the pastors and I are hoping through this series that we gain two main things. 

First, there's a deeper understanding of what it really means that God is holy and we, apart from his intervention, are not and we are unclean. And two, the second thing is the measures, the lengths that God has gone to to cleanse us so that we can be in his presence. The word that's used to describe that process is atonement or being atoned and it basically means cover. 

If you translated it directly, it's just to cover something and in Hebrew, the word atone has the same more or less broad range of meaning that it can have in English. So, what I mean by that is we go out to dinner together, I could cover your tab, right? That's a really nice thing to do, covered. Or I could cover you in glitter, horrible thing to do, right? God covers our tab, you guys get that? He covers the tab for our sin and he also covers you in, don't get grossed out, blood. 

Now, what that signifies, why blood, how that works, we are going to get into that, the significance of that imagery as we go through this study in Leviticus through the Lent season as we prepare for Easter. But the central point of the book were the solution to the problem of Moses being outside, unable to go into God's holy presence to then being in the presence of the Lord. The solution, the climax is this event that God designed called the day of atonement. 

That's it, that's the climax of the book. That is where everything gets resolved, okay? And it's also where everything in the book of Leviticus points to that and everything in the book of Leviticus sort of emanates or radiates out from that. But I want to tell you a little bit about what to expect about how we're going to study this over the next seven weeks because I mentioned that Leviticus is a 27 chapter long book. 

Well, the day of atonement is in chapter 16 and you might be thinking, that's really weird to put the climax in the very middle of the book. We're used to literature where the great resolution to all the problems comes in the final pages. The last battle is usually the last chapter. 

But ancient Eastern literature followed a different kind of structure and so you're going to hear us use a word that may be unfamiliar to you. It's chiasm. It's a geeky word, sorry, but basically what it describes is this kind of structure where the main point of the literature is in the center and everything else is in a sort of concentric circles emanating out from that. 

Chiasms are like a way of telling a story or writing poetry where the main point is the middle. Or where the first thing in the story is directly correlated with and kind of maps onto the last thing in the story. And then the second thing in the story is mapped to the second to last thing. 

And the third thing in the story correlates to the third to last all the way until you're in the middle and that's where you find the main point. Most chiasms in scripture are super simple and short. Like Genesis, like just three stanzas. 

Genesis 1, God created man in his image. In the image of God he created them. Male and female he created them. 

So it's just three stanzas, A, B, A, outside, inside, outside, and the main point is the middle. It gets the focus. But Leviticus is a 27 chapter long giant unfolding chiasm centering on the day of atonement. 

And when you even think about how, I mentioned these books around it, how Exodus ends and how Numbers begins, you can even see how this emanating idea, it stretches even beyond the borders of the scroll of Leviticus. I think it's masterful literature work. All done without the benefit of copy and paste. 

To organize Moses' words for us so that we can focus in and realize the magnificent beauty of the day of atonement. That's what we're going to be doing in this study. But it's not natural for us to read literature that way so to aid us in this study we're going to be using some wayfinding images like this, like a trail map. 

And we're going to be using a metaphor of a hike. We're going to hike up one side of this mountain toward the summit, which is chapter 16, the day of atonement. And then we're going to hike back down a different side. 

That's the metaphor that we're using. Okay? And if you've ever hiked through elevation, maybe this will make sense to you. Like your trailhead will be warm, but you better dress in layers, right? There's grass and there's deciduous trees. 

And as you start going up and up in elevation, deciduous trees gradually give way to more conifers. And then eventually you reach an elevation where the air is so thin that the trees are just tiny and spindly and look more like shrubs. And then you can hike beyond the tree line. 

It's so cold, the air is so thin that trees can't even grow there. And you reach the summit and you have a new perspective on everything that you just passed through. And we even have a word for it. 

I mean, we talk about mountaintop experiences, such that on your way back down, you will pass through the same transitions, but your perspective has been shifted. That's what's happening. That's how we're going to experience Leviticus. 

On the ascent, we're going to see how God makes provision to forgive, cleanse, and commune with his people. And on the descent, on the way back down, then we find how a forgiven, cleansed, and God-soaked people look and live differently in light of that summit, of the day of atonement. Now there's a risk that the way we're going to preach this, and by the time we get to Easter, we've already preached the day of atonement seven times. 

Oh well, right? Oh man, that we could preach atonement over and over and over again and never get tired of it. I pray that would be true for this church. That would be awesome. 

So, let's jump in. The chiastic pair for this week starts with chapters one through seven, which detail precisely how, when, and why to make the sacrifices in the tabernacle. It's that instruction manual that I talked about earlier. 

And then, as your Bibles are put together, as we typically read, this is a lot of flipping of pages. We're going to go all the way to the back of the book, and we're going to find in chapters twenty-three to twenty-five mention of feasts and festivals and celebration of what God has done, and then how forgiveness looks among God's people. So, let's look at the ascending texts first. 

So, I mentioned this is an instruction manual, which is a little dry. It's also seven chapters long. So, you're welcome. 

I'm not preaching all seven chapters. We're going to look at just a few passages to get an idea of what's going on here. And if you look in chapter one, verse four, we read this together aloud earlier, he shall lay his hand on the head of the burnt offering, and it shall be accepted for him to make atonement for him. 

It shall be accepted. I want you to soak on those words for a second, because when you come to realize the weight of your sin, and if you haven't come to that point in your life yet, if that doesn't map for you, the book of Leviticus is going to lay bare the reality of the brokenness, the unworthiness, the disorder that marks out all of humankind. And when that hits you and that sinking feeling, like Moses had standing outside realizing he's not worthy to be in the presence of God, when that hits, I want you to remember these words that Leviticus opens up with. 

It shall be accepted to make atonement for you. You are covered. You are covered. 

If you're reading this first section of Leviticus on your own going through these sermon journals and you're having a hard time sticking with it, it's the repetitiveness of it all, and just the seemingly distance of your reality that you're living today and this ancient reality is just hard to span. I'll have an assignment for you that maybe can keep you engaged. I want you to do this. 

I want you to read the first seven chapters and count how many times you can find this phrase. He shall be forgiven. Just see if you can find it. 

I counted nine times in seven chapters, more than once per chapter. Nearly every single time that there is a detailed, meticulous, tedious description of how to give a sacrifice, it ends with these words. He shall be forgiven. 

He shall be forgiven. He shall be forgiven. The ancient world knew many rites and rituals. 

They were not unfamiliar with the idea of blood sacrifice, right? But pagans living around Israel at the time, this is what their experience would have been like. If they were sick, if their crops wouldn't yield, if things were going wrong, if there was famine in the land, they might think or believe that it's because their god was angry with them. But they couldn't know because those gods don't speak like our god does. 

And then they would bring something to try and appease the anger of a god who couldn't even tell them what they had done wrong. This is where escalating sacrifices that you may be familiar with, the barbaric tales of blood-drenched rituals that escalate all the way even to self-mutilation and human sacrifice. It is all in a blind effort to try and make it up to a god who couldn't even tell you what you did wrong. 

In Leviticus, we meet an altogether different god, a holy god and a just god and a god who speaks these words that if you bring the sacrifice that has been prescribed, the outcome is known in advance. There's no anxiety, no worry, will it be enough? He shall be forgiven. There is an anticipation, there's an expectation at the tabernacle that grace and mercy is there. 

I want to look at another example, chapter 5, Leviticus chapter 5. This is an interesting one too because this one starts off at the beginning of chapter 5 describing sins that you may not even know you did, that you could accidentally do. They're so casual that maybe you find out later, like, I don't even know I did that. You've ever had that experience? Like somebody tells you, hey, you really made me angry and you're like, what are you talking about? Now, that can happen with God too. 

Chapter 5 starting in verse 4, when he realizes his guilt in any of these, he confesses the sin that he committed. He shall bring to the Lord as his compensation for the sin that he committed, a female from the flock, a lamb or a goat for a sin offering. Okay, so that sounds pretty normal so far, right? We all are aware that in the Old Testament God demands sacrifice, so what? So I want you to look at verse 7 now. 

But if he cannot afford a lamb, then he shall bring to the Lord as his compensation for the sin that he has committed, two turtledoves or two pigeons. So there's like a sliding scale, you know, progressive tax. Keep going. 

I want you to look at verse 11. If he cannot afford two turtledoves or two pigeons, then he shall bring as his offering for the sin that he has committed, a tenth of an ephah of fine flour as a sin offering. A tenth of an ephah is a measurement we know in the Old Testament. 

It's basically what a household, what a family would use in one day. It's just a daily supply of flour or bread, your daily bread. This isn't a token sacrifice. 

It's what you can afford. But for the person who this is all they can afford, it is a sacrifice. It is giving up one day's worth of food. 

Can't afford to sacrifice a lamb? Bring two pigeons. Can't afford two pigeons? Just bring flour. Come to the tabernacle. 

Come to God's tent, knowing you are unworthy, unclean, present whatever you can afford, and then listen to these words that God speaks to the man who can bring nothing but a fistful of flour to his presence and ask for his forgiveness in verse 13. Thus the priest shall make atonement for him and the sin which he has committed in any of these things, and he shall be forgiven. God will not let the ability of any person to afford enough to pay back enough keep them out of his presence, his atoning grace. 

I got news for you. Even if you could buy a thousand rams, you're not going to be able to afford to pay back the entire cost. That was never the point. 

The desire for his forgiveness and knowing that he will offer it, that's faith. That's faith. Knowing that your sin, and seeing the separation that your actions or your inactions have created between you and the holy God, he says, come to the tent and hear the words of forgiveness. 

He shall be forgiven. As we're going to learn more deeply as we go throughout this series of the sacrificial system, it shows us the significance of sin. It's not trivial. 

It's not to be ignored, but today I want to remind you that payment has been provided, and it's here at the base of this hike, right, that these foundational truths are shown for us. So what about the descending passages? In the opening, we see these chapters that where forgiveness in God's relationship to his people is made known and is on display. On the descent, then, we're going to see that a people who know God's forgiveness and grace, who know the character of the God who brings them into relationship with them, they are radically shaped and transformed by the experience of the Day of Atonement. 

What a forgiven people look like, okay? So when you read these last chapters, even though they're far away, this chiastic pair paired with the first chapters is what you're going to see. Generally, in chapter 23, it's about the feasts and celebration. Feasts and festivals, there are six of them that God prescribes for people to celebrate before the Lord. 

And that's kind of your basic application, right? That forgiveness, our natural response or our rightful response to God's grace and forgiveness is worship and celebration. That's what we do here, once a week for an hour. These guys, I mean, some of these lasted seven days. 

I mean, these were parties, okay? Now humor me for a minute. One more geekery. Already, I've shown you this chiastic structure in the whole of the book. 

So what I want to impress upon you is that where the author puts things, how they arrange things, where you find certain texts, it's not accidental, okay? The composition of Leviticus is very intentional. So here in chapter 23, there are six festivals. It's a chapter, the section's focusing specifically on feasts to the Lord after experiencing atonement. 

This lays out how and when to observe celebrations of God's goodness, his favor. So if I told you that stuck in the middle of a chapter that's on celebrations and festivals, that there was just a random law just plopped in there, like a pickle in a punch bowl, you just, this does not belong. It's out of place. 

By the way, after first hour, I had a whole lot of people give me other idioms that I could use. Not a single one of them are going to be able to be preached from the pulpit. But they were funny. 

So, but like a pickle in a punch bowl, like the Sesame Street song, one of these things is not like, if I told you that you have in this chapter of six festivals, one random law, and I hope you've been paying attention to whole like structure thing. We've got three festivals and then a law and then three more festivals. Just stuck right in the middle there. 

What do you think God would plop in the middle? Well, here it is. Chapter 23, verse 22. When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap your field right up to its edge, nor shall you gather the gleanings of your harvest. 

You shall leave them for the poor and the sojourner. I am the Lord, your God. Now you may have heard that law before. 

It's a very popular, well known provision of God in the Old Testament. It shows his care for the poor that they should be taken care of and how they should be taken care of. But why does it belong here? Did you know that it was in the chapter? It's not a chapter on social justice. 

This isn't a chapter on care for the poor. This is a chapter on worship and celebration and what happens when you come to the tabernacle. This is not a mistake. 

Listen, here's the picture. All of Israel, six times a year, would travel to where the tabernacle was to have these feasts and festivals before the Lord. It eventually, you know, resided in Jerusalem, so that's a picture in your mind that people are taking a trip there to go have a festival before the Lord. 

You know what else they would do while they were there? This is when they would offer their sacrifices. And by having this law here, what God is reminding us is that there is no way that he wants anyone in his people to be without the means to come by at least a tenth of an ephah of flour. Is this law about care for the poor? Yes. 

Is it about justice? Is it about the dignity of gathering versus begging? Yes, all of that is true. But also, by putting this gleaning law...

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