Leviticus 4:1 Bible Study | Episode 659

April 18, 2023

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

Leviticus 4:1   Bible Study | Episode #659

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. Vinona, welcome to the community churches, Merlin Bible study. We are in Leviticus chapter three. I finally got it right. Leviticus chapter three, and we are dealing with seeing now what's interesting about the book of Leviticus. And I think most importantly, and maybe it's one of the reasons why a lot of people that really like studying through the book of Leviticus is dealing with the sacrificial system and the sacrificial system.

Not completely, but mostly is dealing with sin. And so it is a width of information about how God deals with sin, especially if you take the pictures, the the first shadow moons that God has given us in Jesus Christ, you can learn a lot about. How sin works and for somebody like me as an attorney it is it is very simple to figure out as far as understanding how the legal system works as far as criminality and criminal activity.

Because when you're involved in in breaking the law. And by the way in a criminal sense, that's what sin is. Sin is trespassing or breaking the land. In fact this whole chapter, those whole chapters at the first of Leviticus, there were people and they're trespassing the 10 commandments, because remember the 10 commandments are what were.

just given to them. They they end up coming up. They're not coming up with this sacrificial system. God has come up with it. They've not come up with all these these laws and rules and regulations that they had by the time Jesus came along that were not directly tied to the Ten Commandments.

So when you were dealing with Leviticus, you're dealing with really a direct correlation with sin and the food get into the sin offerings. And there are a lot of them. There, there are a lot of sin offerings that deal with different areas of life. And what's interesting about it is that it's not going to deal with the individual all the while.

There's one sin offering that deals with individual, the rest of them deal with positions with the people as a whole sin and the Son of the whole nation, son of the Leadership of a nation. And so soon in this passage is it's voluminous. There are all kinds of things that it's dealing with, but before we get into that, because especially in verse one, it says, now the Lord spoke to Moses saying, speak to the children of Israel saying, if a person sins unintentionally against any commandment of the in anything which ought not to be done and does any of them.

Now, That's dealing with what we call in the criminal justice system. We're talking about volition of sin, meaning you've done it by, by, by intentionally and intentionally right. And the room for in, in. The legal parrots is Moonsrayer. It is your mind choosing to do it. Now, there are crimes that stricter liability, meaning if you do, even if you didn't know you were doing it, it's still a crime and it's still punishable by prison time.

Those those strict liability crimes, then you have the crimes that are based off of somebody just acting irrationally, somebody acting in such a way that is reckless or dangerous, and they didn't mean to maybe do something that built the lab, but because of their recklessness or because they were they were not acting rationally, they were not dealing with a, The normal, rational person would move, it caused something to happen, and they committed a crime.

Those are unintentional crimes, meaning they don't have the mens rea in the sense of, they don't have they don't have a person who's deciding to do it. And that's that. And they kill less of a punishment. Now if you don't act properly, if you cause somebody to be injured, or you destroy things, or you cause some kind of other damage to other people.

Because you weren't doing what you should have been doing even if you weren't trying to do it, that's still wrong. And it still is a, it still is a mindset, right? You let your, what you've chosen to do. And when we're dealing with sin. We need to understand that. And so many people think that you can confess all of your sins.

That's not what you're confessing to God. You're confessing to God and the sun that you have actively chosen to do your unintentional sin is so enormous. It was so overwhelmingly terrible that those may be ready for you to realize how. Side of the wholeness of God, you actually are.

When the Bible says that Jesus died for the sin of the whole world and that's in one John, when it tells us that it is telling us that Jesus died for all that not God, all that a separation or outside the homeless and the real of the Father, everything. He died for all of that Now.

And you have to have a relationship with him. We have to have faith in him in order for us to receive the fullness of that. That being said, Jesus paid fan of it because there's no way for you to realize how terribly outside of God's will mankind actually is. And you commit sin.

Every day you live literally in a state, in a mirass, in a, in an actual a lifestyle of utter sin toward God, of utter selfishness, of utter separation from him. And let God do it through Jesus to Get us back in right relationship with him is truly amazing. And one day when we're in heaven, you will realize the total depravity of your head.

And in fact, one of that's one of the theological understandings is that man is totally depraved where we are completely and utterly sinful and. And there was no way, and there's no possibility for us to move past that. We are separated from God. We are cut off from him and we have no access except that he make it available to us and make it through Jesus Christ.

When we talk about unintentional sin, there is just so much out there that we don't even know about. In fact, when God gave them the Ten Commandments before that, they didn't even know necessarily that those things were wrong. They wouldn't understand them. And God makes provision for them in the Book of Leviticus when they break Belial and We know that we do that all the time.

In fact, the sermon on the mount gives us that insight. Jesus said, you've heard it said thou shalt not. And then he will explain to them that even if you don't surely act upon it, meaning that you don't actually. And that's the second part of a criminal. Intent when you prove that you've got the means, meaning your mindset, or you chose actively to do something and then the actus rei, which is got to be, you gotta have an action in order to have a crime.

The actus rei is the actions and oftentimes we act. Mindset. Mindset. Mindset. And that's really what we're doing. We're acting simply and don't even have a men's road. I don't even know that we're doing it, but we have no idea. We just, it is innate to our nature to do that. We are totally depraved.

We are sinful. Utterly. No one is righteous. No, not one. Each is turned to his own wicked way. And if you think about that, and you consider the sinfulness of humanity, if you think about that and consider the enormity of our sin and our lives, if you consider that we really did need a savior.

We needed one badly. And if there was any possibility that we could ever live totally by God's holiness and his law after having this sin nature then we wouldn't have needed a savior, but we do. And the reason we do is not just because of the intentional sin that commit, we commit it's because of the unintentional sin that we commit and then.

Oftentimes, and you go, why are you just talking about this? Because before we get into the sin offering and the trespass offering, which is in chapter five, we really do live a little primer on what sin really is. We need to think about every aspects. of what sin is. And you go why do we want to dwell on that?

That's not fun on a thirsty morning. That's not a good time to have. It is if you think about it this way. When I consider all that I'm not it causes me to consider all that God is. And when I consider all that God is isn't that just really wonderful? It would be wonderful to consider the finished work of Jesus Christ handles.

All these issues we're talking about this morning. It handled his little strip and the crash, his complete work and his eternal sacrifice on the crash handles every bit of this. And that is so gratifying to God, and it's so good to us. It's so good for us to think about the full price that Jesus paid through us on the cross.

And then you have and if that were not enough, If that ran out enough, then you have the sin of omission and the sin of commission and commission's what we've been dealing with. Meaning you committed a sin. Meaning you, you knew something was against the wrath of God, or you knew that it was against the holiness of God.

You knew that it was against the will of God. However you cash that out now in this time with the Leviticus, they would have just said the 10 commandments were the will of God. And then instructions they got later on from Moses, they would have understood those were the things that they needed to do.

And part of those instructions was to build a sacrificial system so that they could sing the enormity of their the price of their sin. And by the way, it is great. It is enormous. And the enormity of the sacrificial system that God put in place to deal with sin, it, it was enormous, an enormous task, an enormous work that God was doing in this sacrificial system.

And when you think about all of it, that God was doing in this and you consider it, you, we, our voluntary sin that we choose to do is enormous. There's more to it than that. We don't have just a duty not to break God's law. We have a duty to be righteous and holy as he was righteous and holy.

We were made in the garden to rule over his creation. We were made to represent him. And so when mankind sinned, when Adam and Eve sinned in the garden when we were separated from God when we were cut off from him, not Adam, we were cut off from him by Durham, that which. We were told not to do, but we also cut off from him in our inability to do that, which we were made to do.

We were literally made to have relationship with God and we were literally made to be his representation in the earth. And so there are a lot of things that we should be. A lot of things that God has clearly instructed us in in scripture that we should be who we should act as how we should live our lives.

These are things that God has instructed us to do that we don't. Commit a sin by not doing him. We omit a sin by not doing them. What I mean by that is God says, love your neighbor as yourself. And I choose not to love my neighbor. That's an omission of God's law. I love is an act. Love acts out love.

Love is a overwhelming force. It is God's character and nature in the universe. And if I choose not to reckon that love. That is an action of omission. I choose not to do what God has told me to do. And acts of omission or sins of omission are just as impermanent as sins of commission. Commission separation, God omission causes us not to live as God has made us to live.

And both of them are deadly. Both of them are terrible. Both of them are destructive for our lives. Both of them calls us not to have God best, not to see God at work in our lives, not to see his hand at work in the things that are going on around us, not to understand or to know him in his completeness, cause us not to enter into his presence, cause us not to have his understanding, not to see the room as he sees them, not to be the light.

And as I go through and this, you realize there are a lot of things that God has for us to be a part of, has for us to live out in our lives that we omit, that we choose not to do that. We we do badly. We do Christianity badly. And so as you think about that, as you consider that you were doing Christianity, not very well, you're not working with God as you add to that with God, you're not seeing his hand at work in the world that you live in that, that is pretty terrible.

It's not just pretty terrible because you're missing out on God. It's pretty terrible because those around you are missing out. They're missing out on you being who you were made to be. And they're missing out on experiencing that and seeing that at work. And they're missing out on kingdom.

They missing out on experiencing the kingdom through you. And when you think about that's pretty bad. And one of the things about Jesus was, is that, that everybody was attracted to him. He did not speak as one, as a teacher of the law, but he spoke as one who had authority.

He lived a life that was. Attractive that was desirous and when we do not do the will of God and in our lives, meaning we, we do not make those things happen in our lives. We fail to be the light as Jesus said we would be or should be. And there is unintentional sin and there's intentional sin.

There are sins of omission and commission. As you can tell this state we find ourselves in the sinful state we find ourselves in is it's rough and understanding that and understanding how it works, not glorifying it, but going through Leviticus and getting a deep dive into how great a real Jesus did on the cross is Yeah.

It's something we ought to do, especially something we ought to do when God has given us this book to read and to study. It's one of those books in scripture that a lot of people just skip over, but we're not going to skip over. We're going to deal with the sin of our lives so that we might walk in.

The goodness and the grace God has provided us. So we are looking forward to doing that. We'll take a deep dive in chapter four next week. 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.