Intimate Holiness - Leviticus 18

               

As a youth pastor, we studied God’s guidance for relationships and how Scripture shapes dating, marriage, and our attitudes towards sex. I would tell the youth that sex is good, but like everything in life, it needs to be respected and reflect God’s presence in our lives. I learned this week that Aldous Huxley, he wrote Brave New World, decided that life has no true meaning, but later in life he realised that his decision was a convenient excuse, a way to get free from Christian morality. He and his friends, as he writes, “objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.” He liked sleeping around, so he developed a philosophy of life that allowed him to do that without the guilt his Anglican upbringing would otherwise have filled him with. He became a slave to his sexual desires. God seeks to free us from slavery to sin; he’s just delivered Israel out of 400 years of slavery in Egypt; God doesn’t want his people to go from one form of slavery into another.

I’ve been asked why God seems so concerned about sex. It’s our most intimate way of relating with each other, and this leads to vulnerability, meaning it also opens people to the potential of great hurt and abuse. It’s the most intimate way of developing trust and depth in a relationship, yet sex is only part of an intimate relationship, an important part, but not the only part. Intimacy, for those who are married or single, is developed through time together, through offering trust and reliability, in sharing life, being a faithful presence during the good, bad, and even boring times. It’s about commitment and promise keeping. It’s about encouraging each other, building each other up, creating safety and hope within the relationship, helping each other to become the person God has created us to be, reflecting the relationships God designed us for with him.

God is addressing the culture that Israel has been living in for the past 400 years. It was common in the Egyptian culture for incest and sex with close family members to be practiced, especially among the powerful and nobles as a way of centralizing their power within their own families and tribes. Egyptian sexual ethics often included marriage between brothers and sisters, and even between parents and children, along with polygamy. God is also warning them not to adopt the sexual practices of the land he is leading them to. Even in their personal intimate relationships, Israel is to reflect who God is by how they relate to each other.

We live in a culture today that devalues sex, it minimises the impact sex has on us, it makes sex about you and what you want, it’s seldom about honouring the other person. Sex has become impersonal, making it easier to walk away, making it only a physical act, not recognizing the emotional and spiritual connections. Because our culture is all about our rights towards our bodies, emphasizing that we’re the only ones allowed to decide how we can use our bodies, we’ve made our bodies and what we do with them idols; more important than God’s desire for our bodies and how we use them.

This section is about holiness in our most intimate and trusted relationships. Sex connects you closely to the other person physically, emotionally, and spiritually. This is why marriage is often used as an image of the relationship between God and his people. Hosea is the most striking example of this in the Old Testament, while Jesus uses the image in a couple of parables, and Paul uses the image in Ephesians 5 when talking about the relationship between husbands and wives.

Sexual impurity is rooted in placing priority in your own pleasure over God’s desires. Sexual impurity flows out of focusing on your desire over the other person’s needs, preventing us from developing close vulnerability with the other person, and separating us from God, just as all impurity does. Sex is too important and intimate an act between men and women to throw away or treat casually. Our bodies are not our own, they belong to God and any act between men and women needs to reflect his holiness.

God’s looking to protect the most vulnerable here, women and children, from being abused, used, and rejected. While men and women were created equally in the image of God, most human cultures did not practice this equality in real life. Even in Israel, Moses is given directions allowing men to divorce their wives, but women were not allowed to divorce their husbands, leading to a power imbalance in the relationships between men and women.  Here God addresses how this power imbalance impacts daughters, mothers, and the other women in the extended family. We see the stories of Ammon and his sister Tamar, Judah and his daughter-in-law Tamar as examples of what God is prohibiting here. This abuse of power by the powerful over the vulnerable is one of the reasons God steps in to save his people out of their Egyptian slavery; there’s no place for such abuse to happen in personal relationships.

How we treat each other needs to be rooted in respect because we’re all created in the image of God. This is why God addresses child sacrifice in verse 21. Molech was an Amorite god. God has shown himself to be more powerful than all other gods, but he knows how we keep turning to the little gods in our lives. Israel showed this when Moses spends 40 days on the mountain with God and in those 40 days, right after being saved from slavery, they convince Aaron to create a golden calf for them to worship. God’s reminding them to not disrespect his name, to follow him alone as their God. This is a warning to not make our sexual desires a god, allowing our sexual desires to rule over our hearts and lives, making us slaves to our desires. Like any god, they will disappoint and hurt us, making us empty rather than full, defiling us, and so taking us out of the presence of God and into the wilderness of despair and loneliness.  

Sex joins us closer together than almost than any other act can; it is intimate, personal, vulnerable, and special. It reflects the closeness, trust, and union found in God as trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; 3 persons and 1 essence, as the church father Athanasius taught. Sex in marriage joins us together physically, emotionally, and spiritually; an earthly glimpse of God’s unity. This is why it’s reserved for marriage, a covenantal promise relationship; this is why divorce hurts so much, reminding us how Jesus looked out over Jerusalem that first Palm Sunday and wept for the people and the brokenness in so many peoples’ lives.

The first reference to marriage is found in Gen 2:23–24, “The man said, “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called ‘woman,’ for she was taken out of man.” That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh.” Jesus refers to this passage when he talks about divorce, rooting marriage in creation norms.

Progressive theology is when there is a belief or norm in the Old Testament that grows in its application, or becomes deeper in its understanding and meaning in the New Testament. We look at how circumcision was only applied to the male child as a sign of belonging to God; this sign of belonging is then expanded in the New Testament into baptism as a sign of belonging and is applied to both males and females. Sexual ethics remain the same from the Old Testament to the New Testament, which is why our understanding of marriage has remained as the coming together of a man and a woman in a committed covenantal union.

Leviticus 18 is a warning against a reckless and selfish approach to sex and marriage. What does a healthy sexual relationship look like in a marriage? It begins by reflecting on what marriage is, a gift where 2 people come together and promise to join their lives together, looking at each other and asking ‘how can I help you become the person God has created you to be, how can I encourage and build you up to realize the potential God has placed within you?’

Marriage is focused on the other person, not on what you get out of the relationship, but on how you can bless your spouse; it’s a partnership of servanthood. Tim Keller recognizes that, “The reason that marriage is so painful and yet wonderful is because it is a reflection of the gospel, which is painful and wonderful at once. The gospel is this: We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope. This is the only kind of relationship that will really transform us.” Marriage is where sin, love, and grace get practiced out, growing us in our sanctification.

When marriage gets hard, we’re called to be tender, understanding, forgiving, and helpful, reflecting Jesus’ character to each other. As Paul says in Ephesians 5:21, “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.” He calls on the wife to submit to her husband, to honour him, building him up, while the husband’s called to love as Christ loves the church, desiring to make her into a radiant church without stain or blemish, echoing the call to holiness in Leviticus. This takes a sacrificial spirit, seeking the best for his wife, to help her become radiant.

Marriage reflects our relationship to Jesus. As his bride, we surrender ourselves to the one who redeemed us. This includes obeying God in the most intimate areas of our lives.

 

 

Power in the Blood - Leviticus 17:1–16

       

The idea of the sacrifices that Israel’s given in Leviticus is not new to Israel. Sacrifices and blood enter into the story of humanity right at the beginning of the Bible. In Genesis 4, Cain and Abel both bring sacrifices to the Lord, Cain brings the fruit of the ground while Abel brings fat offering from the first born of his flocks, offerings that involved the shedding of blood of these animals. These echo ahead to the sacrifices laid out in Leviticus, pointing ahead to the offering of Jesus’ blood for our sin; his death for our lives.

Blood becomes one of the symbols of life. In the sacrifices we see how the Lord uses them to point out, and remind the Israelites of the seriousness of our sin; that the cost of our sin is the shedding of the blood of innocent animals; again, pointing ahead to Jesus, the one-person innocent of sin, and the shedding of his blood for the guilty.

Over time, people began to believe that our life force is found in our blood, as well as the blood of animals. As this belief grew more common, people began to develop rituals to take the life force of animals or their enemies for themselves, to make themselves more powerful. These rituals often involved eating or drinking the blood of enemies or strong animals. God now steps in and gives his people laws to prevent the unnecessary shedding of blood, whether animal or human, revealing how God honours all life, and that all life comes from and belongs to God. This is why Israel was to drain the blood of an animal they had slaughtered and pour the blood out onto the earth and cover it.

This is also reflected in how the people are to bring their sacrifices to the Lord. All those who sacrifice an animal on their own without bringing it to the priests to be approved, are to be considered guilty of bloodshed and cut off from the rest of the people. Blood sacrifices, because they involve the taking of the life of a creature, need to be treated respectfully, acknowledging that the life belongs to God and is not to be taken by their own hands for their own sin offences before God. Only the Lord’s representatives, the priests, are given this important responsibility. In the sacrifices, we see how they point to the seriousness of our sin, that the cost of our sin is life through the shedding of the blood of the animals.

Sin’s not to be treated lightly. The sacrifices are a temporary solution to allow the people to come close to God, but in the end, God requires a perfect sacrifice, a first-born without blemish, holy, set apart completely for God, perfect as God is perfect. Jesus tells us in Matthew 5:48, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” Jesus is the only person who is perfect because he’s also completely God. Because he values our lives so deeply, he sacrifices his own life for ours, so that we can be with God into eternity. God sends Jesus to pay the price for our sin through the shedding of his own blood on our behalf so that we’re washed clean from our sin and made holy in the eyes of God. I appreciate the imagery Scripture gives us of what is accomplished in Jesus’ sacrifice, that when our sins are washed away through Jesus’ blood, as Isaiah 1:18 tells us we’ll be “white as snow,” a visible contrast to the scarlet red of blood. The blood of the sacrifices, and later of Jesus, becomes the way of reconciling God’s people to himself, becomes the way of atonement for our sins.

Because life is a gift from God, and all life belongs to him as the giver of life, God gives Israel some powerful warnings to respect life, “‘I will set my face against any Israelite or any foreigner residing among them who eats blood, and I will cut them off from the people. For the life of a creature is in the blood…. it is the blood that makes atonement for one’s life…. That is why I have said to the Israelites, “You must not eat the blood of any creature, because the life of every creature is its blood; anyone who eats it must be cut off.” This respect for the life of all creatures reminds us that our first task in the Garden of Eden is to care for creation as God’s stewards.

So, what does this have to do with today since we no longer do sacrifices? Creation care is still important; we’re still stewards of creation. How we live in and with creation is rooted in our relationship with God. Living in a part of the country that is heavily agricultural, this is probably understood a little better as caring for life-stock and ensuring the land is healthy for producing crops is part of our DNA.

Yet there’s more here in this passage. Life is a gift, from conception to death. If the life of an animal is treated with such respect by God, how much greater the respect for the lives of those created in the image of God. How do we live this out in our lives and relationships, within our communities? A couple of the issues in our time are abortion and medically assisted dying. Abortion, the respect for the lives of our youngest and most vulnerable has been part of our Christian identity since the time of Rome. In ancient Rome, the practice of infanticide by exposure was common. Families, often constrained by poverty or social customs, would abandon unwanted babies to die from starvation or wild animals. These babies were sometimes left on trash heaps, city walls, or in remote areas. Early Christians, believing that all humans are made in the image of God, stood against infanticide and abortion. Christians would rescue abandoned infants and raise them as their own. These acts of compassion provided a powerful image of the Gospel at work in everyday life.

People noticed that Christians showed love for those society had rejected. Over time, this brought cultural change. By the fourth century, Christian emperors outlawed infanticide. It’s not just enough to say we're against these things, we need to live out sanctity of life by walking along woman who are considering abortion, surrounding them with support. Being pro-life is not just about the birth of the child, it’s providing a community of support and encouragement to help her and her raise the child to maturity, being involved in their lives through the good and bad times. It’s easy to say we’re against abortion, but it takes Christ-like commitment to life to ensure all children are raised with all that they need to grow into healthy adults.

MAID is another huge issue today. When it comes to medically assisted dying, we need to look harder at palliative care and providing comfort and care for those approaching death. Life is a gift, but it can also sometimes feel like a painful weight. Today, people are taking their own lives in order to not be a burden on their families; there’s a call here to walk with the person considering death, and with their family, addressing the big picture, not just the dying. Lewis Smedes tells of a woman named Grace who took her own life because she had developed MS and was completely dependent on her husband who was also busy with caring for their 5 children. She did this to help her family, but was it effective? Smedes asks some hard questions: “Did she in the long run really make life better for her husband and children? Who can tell how much good they lost from life when they lost the burden of caring for someone they loved?”

“Canada is now noted as the fastest growing assisted dying program in the world,” a University of Alberta research team wrote. At the end of 2014, 76,475 MAID deaths have been reported in Canada since it was legalized. We’re expected to reach the 100,000th MAID death by this summer. A parliamentary committee is now meeting to expand MAID to those whose only condition is a mental illness. How are we caring for those facing death, for those struggling with suffering in life; how are we walking alongside their families and supporting their care-givers? These are the Jesus following questions we need to wrestle with.

Valuing life is about creating communities of shalom where people can flourish, find meaning and purpose, where they’re valued for who they are and not just what they produce. Lewis Smedes writes that believing that life is sacred sends us toward any neighbour who needs help to keep going because God loves them. God gives life, God alone reserves the right to take life away. Jesus offers his blood as a sacrifice so that we might live, to wash away our sin which brings death. As we’ve been reflecting over the past few weeks, this looks like coming closer to God, like forgiveness and reconciliation, like respecting life and protecting life, working towards shalom life for all. Because we’ve been given new life through the power of the sacrificed blood of Jesus, we’re called to live for life as Paul writes in Romans 12:1–2, “Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.” And in living in a sacrificial way, living for ‘we’ rather than ‘me,’ we bring life that reflects the new life found in Jesus.