This is part 3 of 4, in The City Church's journey through Leviticus.

• General Intro to Leviticus here (.pdf)
• Discussion Guide for part three here (.pdf)

• See part 1 here (ch.1-7)
  
• See part 2 here (ch.8-10)
• See part 4 here (ch.17-27)

In Leviticus 10:10-11, God gives his first-ever priests a specific command: “You are to distinguish between the holy and the common, and between the unclean and the clean, and you are to teach the people of Israel all the statutes that the LORD has spoken to them by Moses.” Amidst mediating between God and man, carrying out the many sacrifices prescribed in Leviticus 1-7, and many other duties, this is one of a priest’s main “job descriptions”! In Leviticus 11-15, God instructs his priests on how to do fulfill these verses. To understand this, the most confusing part of Leviticus, we must note a few general concepts, which we’ll see throughout each week.

This is the main block of chapters in Leviticus that Christians today look at and disregard as being outdated and meaningless. We must walk a fine line carefully: on one hand, it is true that in the death and resurrection of Jesus, the cleanness/uncleanness laws ceased to be binding – so a woman can now worship freely with others during pregnancy, and we can enjoy bacon if we want to! Jesus accomplished the Levitical system of sacrifices and purification, once and for all.

But on the other hand, “it was the ritual of the law that came to an end in Christ – not what the law revealed. The regulations were particularly for Israel and were temporary, but the revelation of God’s holiness and what it demands remains applicable for all” (Ross, 246, italics added). Here’s what we’ll see in these chapters: the world we live in is full sin, “dis-ease,” decay, and brokenness. As followers of Jesus, we are priests in this present brokenness. So we mediate between God and man, leading others to holiness, moral uprightness, and purity/”cleanness.” And we point each other and our world to the purification that is found only in Jesus. To say it another way, we are “ministers of reconciliation” (2 Corinthians 5:17): our job is to reconcile to God any of the present brokenness of this world we can, as we join him in the priestly “ministry of reconciliation” he gave to us and as we yearn for the future, compete perfection of eternity.