1. “A Universe of Mysteries” (Exodus 40 and Leviticus 26)

“A Universe of Mysteries”

Exodus 40 and Leviticus 26

So, we’re starting a new series this morning on the book of Leviticus. Leviticus, it seems to me, is the place where New Year’s resolutions of reading through the Bible in a year go to die. 

Perhaps it’s happened to you. You start with enthusiasm in Genesis, even bravely powering through a couple of genealogies. You gain speed with the stories of Jacob, and Joseph, and then the Exodus out of Egypt, going to Sinai. Things start getting a bit trickier in the second half of Exodus with long descriptions of how to make the tabernacle, but you’re committed and keep going. And then you get to Leviticus. 

7 long chapters about sacrifices, followed by lengthy instructions about priests. For a moment it gets interesting, as a couple of priests offer what is called “strange fire,” and they die as a result; but then it jumps back into chapters about what animals one might eat and what to do when you find white spots on your skin. By the time it gets to how to treat mildew and bodily discharges, you’re done. Back to the more familiar territory of the gospels!

Leviticus is weird. It’s so different, so specific, that as we read it we find ourselves wondering what in the world we’re supposed to do with it. Could any of this be at all relevant to us?

Well, actually, yes! Very much so. The key lies in realizing that it’s supposed to be weird. We’re not supposed to make this book feel normal and understandable, decoding it so that it becomes 5 practical steps to a good life or a philosophical treatise on being God’s people. No, Leviticus is strange, because our world is strange, and we who live in it need to be oriented to the strange realities in this world. For though we in our modern scientific society don’t like to admit it, this world is in fact filled with mystery.

One of the gifts that Christianity has given the world is an understanding of how there is an order to this world—a structure given to it by a God who creates and sustains it. And that vision of order is what allowed the project of scientific investigation to emerge. The slow and careful process of experimentation and measurement using tools such as scales and microscopes has brought us such wonders as modern medicine, the airplane, and the microchip, to just name a few. Science is awesome.

But, over time, something less awesome also happened. Made confident by all these amazing advances, some people began to think of science as the key to all knowledge. That all that is important, all that we can know can and must be discovered through observation and experimentation. If something can’t be somehow measured on a scale or seen through a microscope, it’s not real; or at least, not relevant. This view has sometimes been referred to as scientism—the view that science is the only source of real knowledge. 

If you pay attention and look for it, you’ll notice that by and large, scientism is what shapes the way most of our stories are told and how our news is reported. If an idea can’t be scientifically proven; if something can’t be measured, then it shouldn’t be taken seriously. And it’s not hard to understand why this position became popular. There’s a kind of comfort in believing that everything that matters can be known and understood through human tools and observation. If we can completely understand it, we can also perhaps control it. 

The problem of course is that this way of seeing the world simply doesn’t work. Because our world cannot be reduced to what can be measured or observed. What hospital scanning device can map out the human soul? Do we find it somewhere in a CAT scan or maybe an MRI? What scale is able to weigh the goodness or evil of an action? What theory of evolution can explain love? What complicated computer algorithm can identify beauty? Each of these things are immeasurable and invisible to scientific observation, yet they are very, very real. They stand out as the proverbial tip of the iceberg, signaling to us a depth to reality far greater and far more mysterious than what science can see. 

And our fairly common experiences of things such as love and beauty are not the only indicators. If you look and listen, you’ll find signs of mystery everywhere. 

I recently read an account by Michael Shermer, the Director of the Skeptics Society, an organization dedicated to promoting “scientific skepticism.” What was interesting about this particular account was how strange it was. His fiancée, Shermer writes, inherited an old beat up 1978 radio from his beloved grandfather when he died. Because of the deep sentimental value of this radio, Shermer tried everything he could to make this radio work, but to no avail—it was just too old. And so he shoved it into his desk drawer, forgetting about it. A few months later, on the very night of their wedding, they heard a romantic love song strangely emanating from his study. Sure enough, in his desk drawer they found her dead grandfather’s radio, having come on just at the time that they had made their vows. It played music all that night, and then the next day stopped and never played music again. Shermer rather sheepishly writes, “I have to admit, this shook my skepticism to its core.” 

In a recent podcast Richard Schwartz, pioneer of a therapy model known as “Internal Family Systems” spoke with another therapist about something strange they and other therapists have encountered in their clients: what they called a “part” of that person who, “when approached will acknowledge that they don’t belong inside the person..these kind of have a life of their own…they’re often very nasty and they just want to do damage to the person and make the person hurt others.” The term these therapists have begun using for this strange phenomenon is “unattached burdens.” There’s a better, more ancient term, of course. Those who have gone with Ted to Haiti can tell you based on firsthand experience: these are not “unattached burdens.” It’s demonic.  

And we don’t need to look so far away to find evidence of the mysterious. Among us in this room there are stories unique to us; moments that feel so personal that when we speak of them we feel shy: miraculous healings; encounters with angels in mundane places like a taxi; answers to prayer too obvious and strange to be a coincidence.

To only be willing to see and believe in those things that we can explain and measure is to look at this world through a straw. The way of scientism cuts us off from being able to think or talk about some of the parts of reality that are fundamental to our humanity. And I think people feel that. I mean, is it at all surprising that we keep telling stories where the main character discovers there’s a whole hidden world: there’s a strange Jedi force that has been long forgotten, a magic of wizards hiding in plain sight, a wardrobe into another world? We keep coming back to those stories because deep down in the very core of our beings we know that reality is far bigger than all of us are pretending it to be. That it is weird, wild, mysterious, and cannot be reduced to something we can explain. It can only be observed and wondered at.

Once we recognize this, Leviticus starts to make a bit more sense. Because Leviticus is given to us by God as a kind of Rosetta Stone, meant to help us to see more clearly this mysterious world and the God who stands at its center. The Rosetta stone, as you might remember from elementary school, was an artifact that had a familiar language—ancient Greek, side by side with the previously bizarre and indecipherable hieroglyphics. By connecting the unfamiliar to the familiar, scholars could begin to discern the rules and the meaning of those mysterious ancient symbols. 

In the same way, Leviticus takes things that are familiar to us: animals, blood, tents, clothing, and so on, and uses those things as symbols to connect people’s experiences to the deeper and more mysterious realities of this universe. God invites his people into a lived set of practices and rituals that create a daily drama meant to form their intuitions and orient them to hidden truths: to help them experience things about the eternal God, about life, holiness, sin, atonement—mysteries things that are just as real as gravity or photosynthesis.   

In fact, Leviticus is meant to do more than just provide insight. God gives these practices in order to bring life. That is fundamentally what Leviticus is for—to bring people out of death into LIFE.

To understand what I mean by that and to orient us for our future explorations of this important, misunderstood book of the Bible, I want to briefly name 3 mysterious realities of the universe that lie near the heart of Leviticus. These truths are not something you will find in a science textbook, but they are as real and universal as any law of physics.

First Mysterious Reality

If you were to ask science what life is, you might be directed to a heartbeat or to brainwaves or to some other observable phenomenon. But we know better. Yes, these are signs of human life. But they are not life itself. When we say, “This makes me feel alive,” we’re obviously talking about more than our biology. We feel alive with creativity, with exploration and risk, with experiences of beauty, of love, of joy. Because that’s where life is found. And, when we grieve over the loss of a human life, we mourn for far more than the loss of a heartbeat. While science can observe signs of life, life itself is bigger and far more mysterious.

We can’t fully comprehend what life is: it is beyond us. And yet we can know its source. Scripture teaches this fundamental truth: that the Triune God is the source of life. Life comes from this God, and is found in being with this God. Psalm 36 speaks of how human beings “Feast on the abundance of your house, O Lord, and you give them drink from the river of your delights.” You, O God, are the source of all joy and delight, the Psalm is saying. And then it develops this truth with two metaphors. “For with you is the fountain of life; in your light do we see light.” 

And then to add to the mystery, the New Testament tells us that the life that is found in God is Triune. The Father has life in himself, Jesus tells us, and he has granted the Son to have life in himself, and the Spirit himself is Life and gives Life. There is a sharing of Life in the person of God, and that life overflows, it radiates outward to be shared with others.

God is the fountain; all life flows from him. God is like the sunshine and life is his light by which we walk. This is a fundamental truth of reality: Life is found in our Triune God. 

Each of us deep down finds within ourselves a longing. We long for joy. We long for peace. We long for love. We long for beauty. In all of this, what we long for is life. And the truth is that if we want to experience life as we were meant to experience it, it is found in God’s presence. For the mysterious thing we call life comes from God and is found with God. 

The end of Leviticus makes it clear that this is the purpose for the instructions of Leviticus: so that God’s people might share in the Life that comes in his presence. “Here’s what will happen, he says in verse 3, if you take these instructions to heart: you will experience life. In concrete terms, verses 5 & 6 describe prosperity and security: “you shall eat your bread to the full and dwell in your land securely. 6 I will give peace in the land, and you shall lie down, and none shall make you afraid.” And notice the culmination, the high point of what God intends here. Verse 12 “And I will walk among you and will be your God, and you shall be my people.” This is the language of Eden, and that’s no accident—a return to Eden is what it’s all been about. God is saying, “These instructions are given so that you can experience the life you were created for the life that is found in my presence.” Because this is how it is, not just for Israel but for humanity. It is a rule of the universe. Life—the life we were meant for—life is found in the triune God.

Second Mysterious Reality 

The second mysterious reality central to Leviticus is that Evil is the opposite of life. 

There was a time when people rolled their eyes at the word “evil.” For a time, polite society acted as if evil were the stuff of fairy tales and superstition. Because, again, evil is not a scientific word; there is no radar or oscilloscope that can detect evil. But I think we are beginning to understand that the fairytales had it right. We might not understand it or be able to explain it. But we know evil is real. We have seen it in the horrors we find in the news. We have experienced it in human cruelty and even hatred.

And it’s important to understand that the fundamental truth taught by Scripture that this evil, which is all too real, is anti-life. That life and evil are opposed to each other. 

There are certain things that simply cannot go together. Ice cannot last in the presence of fire. Shadows disappear with the shining of light. So also with evil in the presence of life, of the living God. The Life found in God includes truth and love and beauty; evil is the opposition to all these things, evil is lies; evil is cruelty; evil is corruption. Evil is fundamentally a rejection of God himself. And so evil, or to use the more biblical term, sin, has no place with God. It cannot last in his presence.

Like all of these things that we are discussing, this is not something we can fully understand or provide a formula for. But I think we experience it, don’t we? What is the shame we carry, what is the sense of guilt we feel if it is not an awareness of how our own sin and failures have no place in the presence of God? 

In the presence of God, evil is fully exposed for what it is. In the presence of God all that is evil is put to death. This is why in the Old Testament, God in his mercy, keeps sinful people such as u from coming too close to his presence; because evil, because sin cannot survive in the presence of God. When God rescued people from Egypt and brought them to Mt. Sinai, and when God’s glory came down upon Mt. Sinai like a fiery cloud, God said to Moses, “Warn the people not to get too close, for if they do, they will die.” Because evil cannot last in the presence of the living God.

And here is where we find a very significant problem, a problem that lies at the heart of Leviticus, really at the heart of the Bible. The life we long for, the goodness and beauty and joy and creativity we need is found in the presence of God. And yet because of human sinfulness, because of the evil that stains us and holds us captive, we cannot enter into that presence, we cannot draw near to God and survive.

We see this very thing in our passage. In the final verses of Exodus, something very important happens. God is committed to bringing life to his people, and so he has given his people instructions to build a tent—a tent that was meant to be a portable Eden, a place where God could dwell among his people. Moses follows all of the instructions God gives him. The tabernacle is built, and then, what do we see? “The glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle.” God is there, right next to his people. This is big! And yet, what is the very next thing we read? “Moses was not able to enter the tent of meeting.” Moses, the Israelite who perhaps experienced a connection with God deeper than any other—even he, even he could not fully draw near to God. Even he could not experience fullness of life in the presence of God. For even he is too stained by sin.

So what can be done? 

Third Mysterious Reality

This brings us to the third of the mysterious realities that help us to understand Leviticus—perhaps the most mysterious of the three. Here it is: There is a way of moving from the death of evil into the life of God, there is a special way that God makes for us so that we who are sinful can enter into his holy, living presence. The biblical word for this mysterious way is atonement. 

Atonement is what ultimately drives the whole book of Leviticus. Atonement is what all of the strange sacrifices and all the detailed instructions about the priests, and all of the other laws are ultimately about: to give God’s people experiences that would begin to put them in touch with this unfathomable, glorious reality: that God is making a way back for them. Through these practices, God’s people would begin to understand that there is a way that our guilt can somehow be removed; there is a way that we can be cleansed from the stain of sin; there is a way that life can overcome death; there is a way back to God.

This is why I am saying that Leviticus is meant not just to give insight, but to give Life. Because, though Moses and his followers could not have understood this at the time, God’s instructions in Leviticus were meant to prepare people, to turn their hearts in anticipation toward Jesus. And as we in the coming weeks more deeply understand Leviticus, we also will find ourselves drawing nearer to Jesus. We will come to know more fully what it means that he came to bring abundant life; that he is the new tabernacle to bring God in connection with humanity, that he is the one true high priest; he is the atoning sacrifice whose death brings us out of our death into life with God.

As Hebrews tells us, “Since we now have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, 21 and since we have in him a great priest over the house of God, 22 let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.” There is a special way that God makes for us back into his presence: there is an atonement through Jesus. This too is one of the fundamental mysterious realities of this universe.

I realize that even as I’m talking about these things, it might not sound like I’m making no sense to some of you. Sprinkled by the blood of Jesus, atoned for by our great high priest, welcomed into the holy place of God’s presence—it all sounds like the stuff of fantasy. But really, that’s not a problem once you realize that this life is the stuff of fantasy. That what is put forth in our day as realistic is actually falsehood, and what is treated as children’s stories is actually sometimes where reality is to be found. 

Because this world is in fact far more wonderful and mysterious then experts would have you believe. There is life, life abundant, and it is found in our triune God. There is evil, it is real, and it has stained all of us unto death. And yet there is also a happily ever after—there is a way back to life that God has made for us, a way of atonement, and that way is found in Jesus.