Leviticus 1:1-9 Bible Study | Episode 653

April 10, 2024

Hope Alive: Applying God’s Word to Your Daily Life

Leviticus 1:1-9   Bible Study | Episode #653

I am Chad Harrison, and I am the teaching pastor of Lake Community Church and had been serving as a pastor for 25 years. I'm also a practicing attorney. This podcast is designed to help you study God's word and find God's will for your life. The purpose of studying scripture is that you might know the character of Jesus Christ, and that you might see the world from the Father's perspective. That you gain wisdom that changes your life. I pray in the name of Jesus right now that God would open His word to you and allow you to see Him and to know Him. To know His will, that you might glorify Him and that you might walk in faith and power each day, especially today. In Jesus name.

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Transcript

This is Chad Harrison, and you're listening to Hope Alive, Applying God's Word to Your Daily Life.

Hi, this is Chad Harrison, and I am the teaching pastor of Lake Community Church and have been serving as a pastor for 25 years. I'm also a practicing attorney. This podcast is designed to help you study God's word and find God's will for your life. I pray in the name of Jesus right now, that God would open up his word to you and allow you to see him and to know him and to know his will, that you might glorify him and that you might walk in faith and power each and every day.

Especially today. In Jesus' name. Good morning and welcome to the Lake Community Church's Morning Bible study. We are in the book of Leviticus. We have made it to the book of Leviticus. We're we're 30% of our read through what is called the ook, which is the first five books of the Ever Testament.

They are written by Moses. They. sequential. They really tell them not only the story of Israel, but they tell, they explain God's letter. And that's really how it's how it's spread out. It's God's letter. And we'd like to say that, even though we've been in the last two and a half years, we've only covered 30 books of the Bible, that sounds a little bit.

Yeah. Genesis and Exodus, other than two of the major prophets. Those are the three biggest books in the Bible. And actually constitute as far as chapter wise 21 percent of scripture. In two and a half years, we have managed to cover 21 percent of scripture. And I am I'm excited to move on and perhaps even over the next several years, 10 or 12 years, maybe even make it all the way three, but that being said, we're in.

Leviticus, and a lot of people hate Leviticus, and I, myself, and I'll be honest with you, when I was a young pastor, I didn't like the book of Leviticus either. It you, when you're reading through the Bible, you oftentimes bog down in the book of Leviticus and the reason we bog down in the book of Leviticus is, first of all, you see the understanding, you have the understanding that this is a picture of Christ.

This is giving us, this is giving us understandings of who Jesus is and his sacrifice, and what his sacrifice meant. Is giving us, in fact, who the planners the book of Leviticus is pulling us straight to Jesus, but the Leviticus is also pointed us to ourselves. And these sacrifices or these offerings that are being made to God they revere aspects of how God provided for us the atonement for our sins.

And it also would you insight into how your sin controls you, how you're saying operates in your head, your mind and without this understanding, you just miss out and you just see sin is just a singular thing. And sin is so pervasive in our lives and God's. God's will of redeeming us from it is so pervasive in our lives because remember, God's atonement is greater than our sin.

And so understanding how all this plays out in your life and in your head, understanding that is really important. It's if you don't really understand the sacrifices oftentimes I would say. You really don't understand how sin is affecting you. You really don't understand how God's grace is affecting you.

And therefore it's really hard to make it. It's hard to make it. And faith and really faith requires me to hear God believing and act upon it. If I don't really know, I haven't heard, and so I can't believe what I haven't heard, and I can't act upon what I haven't heard, and so then I really don't know.

Leviticus, even though there's very little research out there as far as commentary, and when I say very little, I'm saying in comparison to other books of the Bible. It is one of those books that's just not really talked about, but we're gonna, we're gonna go through it. And It's one of those books that kind of sets itself up to move through fairly quickly because it speaks of individual sacrifices.

And in fact, the first seven chapters is all about the sacrifices. And that tells us a lot. It tells us that God's got a lot. going on and a lot of offerings that he wants us to understand and how we interact with him. So it says now the Lord called Moses and spoke to him from the tabernacle looting, saying, spoke to the children of Israel and say to them, when every one of you brings an offering to the Lord, you shall bring an offering of the livestock of the herd and the flock.

Now, This offering is going to be the burnt sacrifice. In fact, that's what it says in verse three, it is offering is a burnt sacrifice of the herd. So God says, if you're going to make a sacrifice, if you're going to make your sacrifice, you need to make it at the tabernacle, you need to bring it. When you build it, you need to build it to the tabernacle.

And you go, where does that matter? Often times we try to make we try to make offerings and sacrifices to God that are not that are not holy. They're not in, deep in our heart. They're, The really, I know that really, I missed a third way that those things where we said, I'm giving this to you, God I don't, it really could be an investment of anything of my size.

I'm going to make an investment of somebody else's. Okay. And those type things in fact two major celebrities, as far as I said, Raleigh incident issues as far as time arranged money are in trouble right now because they after somebody else's sacrifice from another location they offered somebody else's gift and said that they would raise gifts from other people rather than giving from their own self and in social media, they'll get no trouble for it.

Why? Because it's not coming from you and it's not personal. And it's not in your own heart. It's a, it's something that you're trying to get other people to do. And as sometimes we try to do that with God, we try to say pastor's going to do that. Or my, my seventh school teacher, my small group leader, they do this and then I help them do it.

That's not how you, that's not how to live with God. And that's not how you interact with God. And At the very start, God says, I want you to speak to the children of Israel, and when you bring them this offering, you need to bring, you need to bring this offering from the tabernacle, to the tabernacle.

Why? Because remember, that's a picture of us. It's a picture from inside of us. It's a picture of how we approach God, and out of the study of the end of the book of Exodus, we talked about that. And when you're dealing with the Levitical offerings when you're dealing with the Levitical sacrifices here, You need to understand that they're personal and these are your personal beliefs with God about what he's done on behalf for sin and how you deal with your own sin out of faith in him.

So in verse three says, if his offering is a burnt sacrifice, now this is the first type of offering that is being bought and don't sacrifices the. As far as pictures of Jesus, this is the primary picture of Jesus. It is the offering that is most symbolic of the offering that Jesus gave on the cross.

It is it is the most powerful of the offerings. It's the most personal of the offerings. And it's the most interactive of the offerings that a that a Jewish person could make. They bloom. Then bring another thing. And I want you to let us, it's not super particular about what you bring, because as we go through this chapter over the next couple of days you're going to see that you can bring an offering of the herd.

You can bring an offering of the flat. You can even bring a bird sacrifice and you go why is that? Because God is a God who who understands that people come from different places. And He made sure that as far as this offering is concerned, everybody could afford to bring a bone offering sacrifice.

Now, we're going to do it with the herd, but we're going to make those also we're going to make those understandings with the other two sacrifices. Also, we're going to time off because each one of them is almost exactly the same, except for the birds. It says, if his offering is a better Sacrifice of the herd, letting effort a mayor without blemish.

Now, this is a picture of well, it's picture of Jesus. He's a mayor Jesus was a man and he was without blemish, meaning he was without sin. He had no outward appearances of imperfection. He had no inward appearances of imperfection. He shall effort to his all of his all free will at the door of the tabernacle meeting before the Lord.

Now let's. Interesting about this is it's not tied to any festival. It's not tied to a feast. It's not tied to an event. It is a personal offering. That's brought individually by an individual to the tablet to the tabernacle. And later we'll be back to the temple which are both pictures of us. It's a personal sacrifice that's brought to me by us.

Now that's. I add that because why we have the personal relationship with God. I love the picture here because it's the offering that's most associated with Jesus and it's the offering that's most personal to us. We bring it and it is all that the offering that's most associated easily most.

It's the bestly, easiestly associated offering that we make personally when we offer ourselves as living sacrifices. Now you say, Pastor, those words are not real words. That's right. It's the mostest, greatestest, bestest sacrifice that we make. It is. It's the it's the sacrifice that pictures what we do with God.

We give of ourselves to God. And so Mary's in any time, there's not a stipulation as to when you can bring the sacrifice as far as the time of year. It's personally by the individual. And so it's powerful in that it's you and God, this is really, there's really no sacrifices.

That's just you and God. He says, then he shall put his hand on the head of the bale offering. And what that is a picture of is you were taking your sin and placing it on the sacrifice. And that's the symbolism of taking your hand and placing it on his head. Now. That's important for many reasons.

But the most important part of the sacrifice is even though God placed on Jesus on the cross, the sin of the whole rib, this is our personal giving of ourselves and offering our sin as a sacrifice. Meaning we're going to lay aside our sin and reckon the light as he is in the light.

We're going to lay that sin aside and we're going to place, we're personally. Placing our sin on the sacrifice, which we've already said is the most complete picture of Jesus of the sacrifices. And so we say didn't God ever do that? Sure he did. Sure he did. But in order for me to really reckon my salvation without my salvation meaning go through the process of sanctification, salvation for me to do it completely.

I've got to place my sin on him. I got to give him. As an offering, literally give him my sin, sinfulness, so that I might rise up and wreck as Jesus did, so I might reckon the kingdom power. And and let's know we do that. When you go there, when you struggle with God, you struggle with the getting up of sin.

That's the first thing you start with. You, Many people struggle now in our church with figuring out what their gifts are, figuring out what their purpose is to serve God, to be a part of the kingdom work. Those are all great, and those are all things that we want to really invest our lives in doing.

But the first thing any believer's got to do is wrestle with their own sin, wrestle with their own selfishness, wrestle with their own ungodliness. And when they're doing that, when we're wrestling with those things, when we're struggling against those things, This sacrifice is a picture of it, and it's one of those sacrifices where you lay it on this animal, and I want you to see what happens to the sacrifice.

It says that you we shall offer it of his own free will at the door of the tabernacle meeting before the Lord. Then he shall put his hand on the head of the burnt offering, and it will be accepted on his behalf to make atonement for him. Notice Christ makes atonement for us, but And here's a picture of the sacrifice, but really, and Jesus sacrifice paid for the sins of heaven, that's what 1 John tells us, but really, ourselves.

Bring our sin to God and lay it at his feet also. Why? Because that's how you wrestle with it. You allow God to have full control of your life and you allow him to remove the sin that so easily entangles you. He says, it's got to be accepted on his back. Now notice he didn't have to do anything right outside.

He had to be good. I'm doing, sir. He had nothing. I had nothing. I had to happen. All he had to do was bring it. Just bring yourself as a sacrifice. Bring that sin to God. You didn't have to make right with God. You didn't have to fix anything beforehand. All you have to do is bring yourself humbly before Him and offer this sacrifice to Him.

Verse 5, it says, He shall cure the bird before the Lord. This is the only sacrifice where the one who brings it actually does the killing. It's the own sacrifice where the one who brings it actually does the killing. The priest did the rest. All they ever sacrifice and all they have offerings, the priest are going to do it.

But in this sacrifice, you've got to do it. You got to put to death. You know what I'm saying? You go I'm just too weak to do that. No, we're not. No, you're not. Once you've been redeemed by the blood of the lamb, you're not too weak to do this. You can put to death your sin and choose the life that God has for you.

That's what the whole process of salvation is about. That's why God has given us the power to overcome sin and death. That's why he's given us eternal life because we have the power to overcome our sin. We have the power To put to death, the things that control us, the things that destroy us. And and you have the power to lay down your sin and take up the life that God has given you.

And the sacrifice, the first sacrifice in Leviticus tells you that you can do it and you can't do it on your own and you can't do it outside of the the finished work of Jesus Christ, but you can do it and you need to learn to function and operate in it, who says He says he, he shall kill with bill before the Lord and the priest, Aaron son shall bring the blood and sprinkle the blood around the altar that it is by the dura of the tabernacle meeting, meaning the sac, the blood after he sacrifice right there, that where the where the altar revs right there at the door.

And notice they take the blood and they sprinkle it around the altar, and it's a picture of the blood of Jesus. It's a picture of the bed of Jesus being surrounding us. It's a totality of god's God's atonement. For us it's a completeness. We often talk about a wedding ring in a ring in a wedding.

Being, being round and having no end. The atonement of God is, it has no end. It. Fixes, it cleanses us, it makes us whole and complete with no beginning and no end. It is a complete work of God in our lives. And then it says he shall skin the burnt offering and cut cut the, and it says it, but it means the offering into pieces.

So what do they do? They took the skin off. By the way all the rebel sacrifices are going to be a sacrifice where both the both the giver. And the priests are going to be able to eat some of the sacrifice. They're going to be able to enjoy it, consume the sacrifices. This is the kind of sacrifice where it's not going to happen.

It's the sacrifice where they give it all. And not only that they give them the skin and remember the skin is the skin is or flesh is a picture of the covering of sin and our flesh doesn't cover sin very well. And that's not what sacrifice. What sacrifice is our the sinfulness of our heart.

It is a hot sacrifice. It says, the sons of Aaron, the priest shall be put a fire on the altar and the lay the roof and the river and the fire and the priest and son shall lay the parts. The head and the fat and early and the rune that is on the fire upon the altar, but he shall rash it.

Sun trails and its legs with water and the purse shall burn on the altar as a burnt sacrifice offering made by fire, a sweet aroma to the Lord. Now I want to deal with the sweet aroma to the room. You say you missed two verses there. Not really. Because we're in. Yeah. And. Tomorrow we're going to deal with the other two types of sacrifices and they're exactly the same than I want to.

I want to get into some detail about how this offering is made and how the done offering happens. But the main thing I want you to understand is that this sacrifice is a sweet arraignment before the Lord. I taking on the power And the realm of Jesus, really, that's what we're doing. We're becoming the light as he is the light.

We're acting in his way as he has already shown us that way. We, when we choose to lay down our sin and to take up the eternal life that God has provided for us, we choose to do that. That is a sweet aroma before the Lord. It is like seeing one of your children grow up and realize that they have become an adult.

It is a powerful, it's a powerful thing for God to see his children, not only be saved from their sin, but become masters of his life that they, that he's given us and ranking in that power. It's powerful to see someone actually figure it out and walk in it. And and. That is the desire of God, that we be mature, not lacking anything, but in everything choosing Him, walking with Him.

And the sacrifice, this this power that God has given us, not only to join Jesus, In his death, burial, and resurrection, as we are for ourselves as living sacrifices, the ability to to wrap in it and to, as Jesus said the miracles I do, you shall do, the power I have, you shall have, and even greater than these.

Why? Because because we can rap because he did and the first sacrifice is about that. It's about you learning how to rap as he did and laying aside the sins of our lives. I pray that you'll learn how to do that, you'll rap in it. As you go today, I pray that the Lord will bless you and keep you.

That he'll make his face to shine upon you and that he will give you hope and peace today in Jesus name.