WORSHIP ACCORDING TO GOD

Sermon #1 Leviticus 1 with Heb.10:1-4

INTRODUCTION

Imagine it’s my wife’s birthday. We like to make a fuss of people on their birthday in our family. So it’s breakfast in bed for her: coffee and toast laden with jam. Then it’s time to open the presents. First one, mine. A big box. She carefully unwraps it. It’s an electric drill. She looks at me quizzically. “You’re always saying how much DIY needs doing round the house,” I say. “I thought you’d like it.” She says nothing. Next surprise. I tell her I am taking her out for lunch. “Have you booked somewhere nice?” she inquires. “No need to book the Truck Stop,” says I. “The Truck Stop,” says she. “Yes, they do great bacon sannies. And the beauty is, we can walk.” “What other treats have you in store for me?” she asks, her voice peppered with sarcasm. “Tonight,” I say enthusiastically, “we’re going to the flicks. You know how much I’ve been wanting to see the new Die Hard movie.” With that Kim disappears under the covers with a groan. “Whatever happened to ‘It’s the thought that counts’” says I, sensing a distinct lack of appreciation.

BRIDGE

It’s not much of a birthday treat if everything revolves around what the giver wants rather than the receiver. If we truly want to show our love to someone on their birthday we will make every effort to find out what it is they want, what it is that they like. That’s obvious.

Yet strangely we don’t seem to realize that this applies to God as well. How often do we hear someone say something like—I don’t need to go to church, I can worship God my way. It doesn’t occur to folk that God may have an opinion on this, that God himself may have an idea of how he wants to be worshipped. Has that ever occurred to you? When you think about it, it makes perfect sense. We believe that the Living God has revealed his mind to us through the Bible.

He has revealed how he wants us to relate to one another, with love as the guiding principle. He has given us guidance on prayer—that we are to address him as our Heavenly Father; and that we are to bring all our needs and concerns to him.

 He has told us how the Church is to function—with every member exercising their spiritual gifts for the good of the whole. And how the Church is to be governed—with elders acting like shepherds, overseeing the welfare the flock entrusted to them. The Living God has not left us to guess how he wants us to relate to one another. So why would he leave us to guess how he wants us to relate to him? The fact is, he hasn’t.  

The God who reveals himself in the Bible has very set ideas about how we are to worship him. It’s just that we are such self-centred creatures that we tend to imagine that he is bound to be happy with whatever we do; just as Kim should be happy that I even remembered her birthday.

LEVITICUS

More than any other book in the Bible, Leviticus is about how God wants to be worshipped. It’s about how God’s people are to be God’s people. It’s about how people who are sinful and unholy can have a living, vibrant, friendly relationship with the Lord their God. Leviticus is not exactly the most popular book in the Bible. Those of you who follow the “read the Bible in a year” programme probably grit your teeth and take a run at it like a school-boy being forced to run the gauntlet.

Why read Leviticus? Simply because it’s there? There are far better reasons.

Leviticus teaches us how God can be holy and yet merciful. It teaches us about sacrifice. Our Lord Jesus once said that he had not come to abolish the Law and the Prophets but to fulfil them (Mt.5:5:17). The wonder and the grace and the cost of what our Lord Jesus did at Calvary can only truly be appreciated if we take time to consider what it was he was fulfilling. These sacrifices, with their blood and guts and offal, which we find so disgusting, were in fact pointing forward to the ultimate sacrifice of the Son of God.

So as we look at some of these sacrifices we’re going to learn some very important things about our God and about ourselves and how he wants us to relate to him. God does not change. His nature and character never change. He is the same yesterday, today and for ever. The God of Leviticus is not a different God from the God of the Gospels, or the Epistles. He’s the same God with the same expectations. If we no longer need to slaughter animals on an altar it’s not because God no longer requires a sacrifice. It’s because a sacrifice has already been offered that has everlasting and universal power.

CONTEXT

Leviticus is really a continuation of Exodus. At the end of Exodus the Israelites are camped at the foot of Mt. Sinai. The Lord speaks to Moses, giving him the Ten Commandments, and instructing him to build a portable-temple, the tabernacle, to very exact specifications.

Within the tabernacle was the Tent of Meeting, or Holy of Holies, which contained the ark of the covenant. For a people with no image of their God, the Tent of Meeting provided a visible, tangible focus. Exodus ends with the glory of God filling the tabernacle in the form of a cloud. The very last verse says (40:38): So the cloud of the Lord was over the tabernacle by day and fire was in the cloud by night, in the sight of all the house of Israel during their travels.

You turn over the page, and the next thing you read, literally is: And the Lord called to Moses and spoke to him from the Tent of Meeting

Our modern translators don’t like starting a sentence, let alone a book, with the word “and”; but that’s what it says in Hebrew. Having given them instructions on building the tabernacle, God isn’t going to leave the Israelites to guess how to use it. The last time they were left to their own devices they constructed a golden calf.

Do you remember that incident back in Ex.32? And do you remember how they claimed that this idol of theirs was none other than the Lord God, the Lord who had delivered them from slavery in Egypt? But the Living God has very clear ideas on how he is to be worshipped. He doesn’t want his people constructing images and statues and icons of him; for the True God should never be compared to anything he has made.

Also interesting is the way the Israelites went about worshipping this golden calf. They made their sacrifices and then launched into a drunken revelry (Ex.32:6).

But again, that’s not how the Holy God wants to be worshipped. Worship involves the whole of our being, including our minds, and we can’t do that if we are drunk and out of our minds. More than that, the Holy God demands a high degree of ethical integrity from his people.

The phrase Be holy for I am holy, runs through Leviticus like a motto through a stick of rock. And it is repeated in the New Testament. With nothing else to go by, the Israelites were merely imitating what they’d seen in Egypt and in the surrounding pagan nations. They had picked up human ideas of worship. If they were to be the covenant people of God, with all the benefits that flow from that privileged status, they had to learn how the Living God himself wants to be worshipped.

I hope it’s a lesson you are willing to learn too. Almost unthinkingly we so easily adopt the world’s standards. For example, this notion that we don’t have to be in church to worship God. People say, “I can worship God when I’m out hill-walking or when I’m in the garden.” On the face of it, that’s true. We don’t need to be in a church building to worship God.

 But when we are out hill-walking, and when we are in the garden, do we worship God? Do we raise our minds towards heaven in prayer and thank him for the glory of nature? I suspect not. I suspect if we do consciously praise anything, our praise is aimed at nature itself, rather than her Creator.

But even if we do consciously praise God when we’re surrounded by the beauty of creation, that can never be an alternative to coming together with fellow believers to sing and pray and learn from the scriptures together. The Biblical pattern is that we do this at least one day a week. And I deliberately say one day a week, not one morning, or one evening a week, let alone one hour a week. One of the great gifts this church offers its members is a Sunday evening service, to help you keep the whole of the Lord’s Day. Where did we get the notion that having been at church in the morning our duty to our Maker is done? The commandment clearly states: Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy…the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God (Ex.20:8,9)

Leviticus is going to help us think through our relationship with our God. How much of that relationship has been on our terms rather than his?

TEXT

So Leviticus begins: And the Lord called to Moses and spoke to him from the Tent of Meeting The Lord calls Moses and says to him (v.2): Speak to the Israelites and say to them: When any of you brings an offering to the Lord, bring as your offering an animal from either the herd or the flock. And then what follows are specific instructions on how the Israelites are to offer their burnt offerings. A couple of preliminary observations.

First, note how Moses is instructed to speak to the Israelites, that is to all the people, and not just the tribe of Levi, the priests. The whole people were to be informed of God’s will, not just a professional class of clergy. The rites and rituals were not a closely guarded secret. The priests had their responsibilities and so did the people; and both knew what was expected of the other.

Surely one of the greatest curses to befall the Church of Jesus Christ is when her members start regarding the clergy as a breed apart, or as the guardians of certain mysteries. It amazes me how, even among Protestants, this attitude can prevail.

Friends, all the Word of God is for all the people of God. My duty is to exercise my gift in preaching it to you so that, as Paul says in Eph.4:12, you in turn may serve God according to your gift.

My second observation is based on the words When any of you brings. In other words, there is an expectation that the people of God will want to bring an offering to the Lord. There are numerous reasons why someone would want to make an offering. They may want to give thanks for a bumper harvest; they may be seeking forgiveness of sins.

The point is, the Lord expects his people to want to approach him, to draw near to him, to want to be in fellowship with him. So he makes provision for this. That in itself raises a question: Why does God need to make provision for us to approach him? Why can’t we approach him any way we like?

Answer: he is a holy God but we are not a holy people. Sinners just can’t go barging in on God.

In chapter 10 there is the sobering story of Nabad and Abihu, Aaron’s sons, who worshipped God the wrong way, and were consumed with fire. Approaching God can be dangerous. What Leviticus teaches us is that God himself has made approaching him possible. He has made it possible for sinful men and women to come into his presence. More than that, he has made it possible for us to be at peace with him.

How? By the offering of a sacrifice. And not just any old sacrifice; but very specific sacrifices, offered in very specific ways. They may seem unnecessary to us. The rules may seem tediously heavy on detail. May I suggest that this is because we so minimised the effect of our sin upon our God that we fail to understand just how wide the gap is separating us from him. It is because we have such a poor appreciation of what our Lord Jesus Christ achieved for us on the cross.

We’re like those who curse their computer for taking more than 10 seconds to send an e-mail; forgetting that not so long ago we were doing well if a first-class letter arrived the next day. Because we are unfamiliar with the Old Testament sacrificial system we take for granted the momentous achievement of Calvary.

Our sins are so offensive to the Living God that the only just penalty is death. The Apostle Paul says, For the wages of sin is death. (Rom.6:23) If a sinner approaches the Living God he will die. What happened to Aaron’s sons is what should happen to each and every one of us. The fact that we don’t is down to the grace and mercy of God. He has devised a way for sinners to be made right with him. Something still has to die. But instead of the sinner, the Lord allows a substitute.

You want to come before me? says the Lord. You want to be at peace with me? Then don’t just come barging in. And don’t come empty handed. You must bring a sacrifice.

The rest of chapter 1 explains the procedure for making a burnt offering; that is, the kind of offering that was totally consumed by fire on the altar. There were other kinds of sacrifices where only parts of the animal were burned, and the rest was eaten by the worshiper. The fellowship offering in chapter 3 was like that. It was as if you were sharing a meal with the Lord. The burnt offering, however, saw every part of the animal, except the skin, totally consumed. This was the most basic sacrifice and though it could be offered for various reasons the most common was for the forgiveness of sins.

Look what had to be done. The worshipper had to bring an animal from his herd (that is a bull) or his flock (a sheep). If he was not wealthy enough to own either cattle or sheep, he could offer a bird. So no one was excluded by reason of poverty.

That said, do not underestimate the cost to the worshipper. He couldn’t bring a wild animal he had captured; he couldn’t bring a defective animal that no one wanted anyway. He had to bring a male without defect, the best he owned. And it had to be alive; it couldn’t be something that had died of natural causes anyway. It was a real sacrifice.

The worshipper had to lay his hand upon the animal’s head, symbolising that this animal was taking his place, that it was his substitute. He would slit the animal’s throat and the priest would collect its blood in a basin before splashing it on the sides of the altar. The animal would have been skinned and then chopped into pieces which were then placed in the fire which always burned on the altar.

It couldn’t have been easy for the worshipper to watch something that constituted a valuable investment literally go up in smoke.

That having been done v.4 tells us that it will be accepted on his behalf to make atonement for him. God’s anger at man’s sin is now placated. There can be peace between the sinner and his God. v9 puts it like this: It is a burnt offering, an offering made by fire, an aroma pleasing to the Lord. That phrase is repeated at the end of each paragraph. The Lord is assuring the worshipper that if, by faith, he follows these instructions, believing the Lord’s promise that this is how to approach him, he will be accepted; his offering will be pleasing to the Lord.

CHRISTIAN APPLICATION

As Christians we no longer need to bring the pick of our herd or flock to receive forgiveness of sins. But that’s not because God changed him mind about how sinful men and women are to approach him. We still need a sacrifice.

 What the New Testament teaches us is that our Lord Jesus Christ is that sacrifice. We read earlier from Heb.10. v.1 says: The law is only a shadow of the good things that are coming—not the realities themselves. The law was preparing us for the One who was coming who would do more than simply allow sinners to approach a holy God. He would deal with our sin once and for all. Heb.10 tells us the limitations of these animal sacrifices. They did not cleanse, they did not lift the burden of guilt, they could not take away sins.

But Jesus does. Later in Heb.10 we read (v.22) that because of Jesus we can draw near to God in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from to cleanse us from a guilty conscience. Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. We have been redeemed, says Peter, not with silver and gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect. (1Pet.1:19)

Do you want to be at peace with God? Do you want a living, vibrant relationship with him? Do you want the sin that prevents such a relationship with him removed? In by faith you must come to him with the sacrifice he has provided. You must come to him believing that his Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, gave his life for you. He is your substitute; and therefore he is your Saviour. It may not be your idea of how to approach God or relate to him. But the Bible tells us it that it’s God’s. He wants us to come to him by faith in his Son who, as Paul says to the Ephesians, gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. (Eph.5:1)