Sermon Transcript
From Leviticus chapter 16. The Lord said to Moses, tell your brother Aaron that he is not to come whenever he chooses into the most holy place behind the curtain in front of the atonement cover on the ark. Or else he will die, for I will appear in the cloud over the atonement cover. This is how Aaron is to enter the Most Holy Place. Aaron is to offer the bull for his own sin offering, to make atonement for himself and his household.
Then he is to take the 2 goats and present them before the Lord at the entrance to the tent of meeting. He is to cast lots for the 2 goats one lot for the Lord and the other for the scapegoat. Aaron shall bring the goat whose lot falls to the Lord and sacrifice it for a sin offering. But the goat chosen by lot as the scapegoat shall be presented alive before the Lord to be used for making atonement by sending it into the wilderness as a scapegoat. He is to take a censer full of burning coals from the altar before the Lord and 2 handfuls of finely ground fragrant incense and take them behind the curtain.
He is to put the incense on the fire before the Lord, and the smoke of the incense will conceal the atonement cover above the tablets of the covenant law so that he will not die. He is to take some of the bull’s blood and with his finger sprinkle it on the front of the atonement cover. Then he shall sprinkle some of it with his finger 7 times before the atonement cover. Cover. When Aaron has finished making atonement for the Most Holy Place, the tent of meeting, and the altar, he shall bring forward the live goat.
He is to lay both hands on the head of the live goat and confess over it all the wickedness and rebellion of the Israelites, all their sins, and put them on the goat’s head. He shall send the goat away into the wilderness in the care of someone appointed for the the goat will carry on itself all their sins to a remote place, and the man shall release it in the wilderness. This is to be a lasting ordinance for you. Atonement is to be made once a year for all the sins of the Israelites.
A quick survey to begin our time today. Just raise your hand if this is you. You don’t need to move, don’t need to fill anything out. I’ll actually be a little surprised if any single person raises your hand, but just by show of hands, whose favorite book in the Bible is Leviticus?
Anybody? Your favorite book? It’s not mine either, actually. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever even heard of a Christian who says their favorite book of the Bible is Leviticus. What I have heard many times are Christians who say that they started a Bible reading plan on January 1st, and Exodus and Genesis went okay.
Those are the first 2 books in the Bible. Maybe they hit a few bumps in the road, but they caught up, they stayed on track until Leviticus, and they stalled. They were unmotivated, they were confused by what they read, so they missed a few days in the reading plan, then they missed a few more, and then they felt too far behind to catch up, so they dropped the plan. And I get it, I’ve been there actually. All these random laws that we don’t do.
We talked about that last week if you weren’t here, all this sacrifice and blood, slaughtering of animals at the temple, all these offerings, all these highly detailed specifications regarding what seemed like ornaments and decorations, and you’re like, why am I reading this? Who cares?
Well, as it turns out, the book of Leviticus has much to teach us. Us. It has much that can encourage us. And most importantly, Leviticus, like all of the Bible, which is the series that we’re in, shows us the glory of Jesus. Jesus is in the genre of Leviticus.
So, as we study this text, which Laura just read from the book of Leviticus today, we will learn about the Old Testament temple with all these sacrifices and regulations The Old Testament temple was really a place of meeting. The temple is where heaven met earth. The temple is where life met death. The temple is where grace met justice. And then we’ll finish of how all of this is really actually about Jesus.
So in the temple, heaven meets earth, life meets death, and grace meets justice. And then we’ll finish with Jesus. So first, temple is where heaven meets earth. In some ways, the story of heaven and earth is the story of the Bible. In the beginning, there was no separation between heaven and earth.
And by heaven, we don’t mean the stars or the sky. Of course, there is separation between stars and earth. By heaven, we mean where God is. And in the beginning, God lived on earth with man and woman in the Garden of Eden. You could say Earth was God’s temple.
There was zero separation between God and humans, and it was paradise. We lived in harmony with God, harmony with nature, harmony with each other. We had work to do, but it wasn’t like laborious. It was actually energizing. We loved work.
We thrived in every single way in the garden with God. And for many of us, if not all of us, we have some kind of collective subconscious memory of being in that garden and the goodness of it. So, for instance, if you are someone who loves camping or treehouses or the wilderness, like something in your heart wants to be more a part of nature than you are, but at the same time you can’t really be part of it, not really. There’s something in between you and where you want to be in nature. And then there’s some of us who hate hate camping or being in the wilderness.
And if that’s you, you probably hate it because it’s uncomfortable or it’s dirty or it’s hot or it’s cold or it’s wet and it’s too much work, right? But either way, whether you have a longing for nature or you are repulsed by it, you’re feeling like the separation from it. There’s distance between us and harmony with nature. And no matter how great of gear that Columbia or North Face make, we cannot be fully restored to the harmony with nature that we had in the garden. But like we said, it wasn’t just harmony with nature that we had in the garden.
In fact, harmony with nature was not the best part of being there. The best part of the garden was that God was there. We had unrestricted access to the perfection and glory of the It was paradise. But as you likely know, our ancestors who were in the garden with God, they ruined it. They chose deception and corruption, lies instead of goodness and God and harmony with creation.
It’s hard to get too mad at them for that though, ’cause we probably would’ve all done the same thing. But their choice tainted everything. It has corrupted everything. It’s like an oil spill in Yosemite. It’s a tragedy.
The world will never be the same. Like, we broke creation and we broke our relationship with God. We separated from him, separated from his wholeness, his purity, his light because we chose this darkness or this self-centeredness. And at that moment, Heaven separated from earth. Again, we’re not talking about the stars in the sky, we’re talking about God’s presence.
Man was separated from God. And similar to how we feel the distance between us and nature, we can probably sense our separation from God. Whether we believe anything about the Bible or not, we notice the gap between us and the divine. Philosophers have talked about it for ages. Back to Plato, he had the concept of the ideal versus the real.
Anything that was real that we can experience with our senses is only a shadow of the ideal. The ideal lies in kind of the transcendent beyond, basically out of reach. The Greeks had this idea of logos. The logos, the governing principles of the universe or the ruling force in the cosmos, but how to get to it, how to know it, how do we seek this thing that’s elusive? Or even still today, if you didn’t pay attention in philosophy class, totally okay, just think about our movies.
Every time somebody in a movie goes on a quest to seek some kind of like spiritual wisdom, what do they do? They always climb a mountain. It’s like I need to get to the top of the Tibetan Alps and that’s where I’ll discover purpose or insight from God. We think we need to go somewhere to get connected to the divine, which means we have a sense of a distance or gap between us and God, between heaven and earth. And the reason that we feel that distance is because there is separation between the two.
But Scripture would tell us it doesn’t matter how tall a mountain we climb, doesn’t matter how hard we strain, we will never bridge that distance. There will always be some amount of separation. Just like there was always some amount of separation between us and nature, there will always be some amount of separation between us and God. In fact, in the creation account, after we separate from God, it says that angels called cherubim block the way back. We can’t return is the idea.
We can’t get there. We’re stuck on this far side of the chasm. But God, the God of the Bible, rather than letting that distance between us and him remain, he had a heart to fix what we have broken. He wanted to walk toward us even though we had walked away from him. So what does he do?
He introduces the temple. The temple is a shelter of sorts in the midst of a damaged world where God would meet with man once again. The first temple wasn’t even a permanent structure. It was a tabernacle, which could also be called a shelter, and it’s where God’s presence would dwell on the earth again. The temple, therefore, is where heaven meets earth because God God is there.
God is in the temple, kind of like he was in the garden, but not totally. He’s only kind of there. That’s why we say that he was shrouded on our slide. He was partially concealed. We’ll get to that point in a second.
But God tells Moses, verse 2, I will appear in the cloud over the mercy seat. God comes to us. We don’t have to climb the mountain. Nor is he out in some inescapable transcendent plane of existence. He comes here.
God jumps into the middle of our oil spill, so to speak. That’s what the temple is. God brings his goodness here. It’s like he’s establishing a beachhead in the middle of enemy territory from which he’s going to launch a campaign to take back everything else that was lost. Or you could think of the temple as like an embassy on foreign soil.
You step into the embassy, you’re not actually in the same country as you were when you were right outside of the embassy, right? So when you stepped into the temple, you stepped into heaven, so to speak, because God is there. Except it’s not totally heaven. It’s not fully what we had in the garden. There was still some separation from God even within the temple.
And our text gets this idea of separation even in the temple temple across when it describes the veil, the smoke, and then the COVID on top of the Ark. The veil, the smoke, and the atonement cover. So this curtain or veil that you see in verse 2, it served as a barrier. Many of you know, know this, to the innermost chamber in the temple, and only the high priest could go behind that veil, and even then only once a year. But it was behind that veil that God’s presence was.
So only the high priest could get super close God’s presence. It wasn’t for everyone. But then even the high priest, when he got behind the veil, seeing God’s full glory would be such an overwhelming experience that it would kill anyone who saw it. So there needed to be additional protections even for the high priest. And if you kind of scoff at the idea of dying because you see God, I, I actually think it makes a tremendous amount of sense.
Because we’ve probably all experienced moments in our lives that were so powerful or overwhelming that we involuntarily began to cry or our breath was taken away, right? We witnessed some act of kindness, whether it’s in a movie or it’s real life, and we get all misty, right? Or we love someone so much that we feel like we’re going to burst, or we see a landscape that just leaves us speechless. We, we We have these reactions to various types of beauty in our world, and the more intense the beauty, the more intense our reaction. So if we saw God, he would be trillions and trillions and infinite times more overwhelmingly beautiful than anything else that we’ve ever seen.
And God says it would be too much for us to see the full measure of his glory, to witness his unparalleled majesty. Just flatten us. So, even the high priest, when he went behind the curtain, he needed to fill the area with smoke to cloud his view of God or he would die. You see that in verse 12 and 13. And then the last measure of protection, which is more symbolic, is the top of the ark, the atonement cover that it refers to, and then it’s described in detail in other passages.
But this is the place where God’s presence would rest, and on that cover were these carved ornamental angels, cherubim and seraphim, one on each edge of the ark with their wings spread out over the COVID The idea is these represent the cherubim who are blocking the way to the Garden of Eden. It’s symbolically saying we can’t get there. Even in the temple, we aren’t there. The temple is where heaven met earth, but it wasn’t fully so. We still only had a limited amount of interaction with God’s presence even in the temple.
Okay, so that’s the first point. It’s where heaven and earth meet. Second, the temple is where life meets death. One of the consequences of us separating from God is we began to experience death. God is life.
God is eternal. Away from Him is decay, entropy. We physically rot. Away from God is the stench of death, and we have infected all of creation with it. It’s like how corruption can spread in a city, maybe how a computer virus spreads to every system it touches.
God told our ancestors, Adam and Eve, the day you eat of the tree, the day you choose to walk away from Me, you will surely die. And they did. They didn’t drop dead immediately, but when their relationship with God was severed, which was one kind of death, the process of physical death began in their bodies. It’s like a zombie bite. It starts the process of death, of decay.
If you’re a Lord of the Rings fan, when we walked away from God, we became less elf, more orc. We had this eternal status, this eternal life, but we adopted corruption and decay. So when God comes to meet with us again in the temple, he brings life with him. If we’re thinking about the temple as like a beachhead in enemy territory, then we should understand that enemy territory is death, but the fortified beachhead or the embassy is life, and life is symbolized in the temple by the sprinkling of blood. Everywhere, verse 14 and 15, which to our modern ears, sprinkling of blood everywhere seems gross.
As a culture, we’ve tried to remove as many references to blood as we possibly can. When we buy meat from the store, we don’t even want to think about how that meat used to be an animal, right? We just want it to have magically appeared here in the case, packed, packaged all nice and pretty. And we certainly don’t want to think about the process it must have gone through in order to have become meat. And then, oh goodness, if there happens to be a tiny bit of blood still on the meat when we buy it, it’s like, almost gag, right?
We don’t want to think about how this piece of meat used to be totally covered in blood. Just push that out of our minds. It’s not true. It didn’t exist. Magically The only times that we make reference to blood in our culture is hospitals, surgeries, this time of year, Halloween, vampires, right?
In our culture, blood is almost a symbol of death. It’s a reminder of our mortality, and we do not want to be reminded that we are mortal. So we probably have difficulty with the metaphor of sprinkling blood. But to them, blood did not symbolize death. It symbolized life.
If something had blood, it was alive. You see many references in Scripture to the lifeblood of an animal. So when the priest is going around sprinkling blood everywhere, it symbolized the sprinkling of life. Here they were in the midst of enemy territory, so to speak, the territory of death, but they’re dropping little bits of life on top of death. The image is God is reclaiming the territory from the kingdom of death by the sprinkling of life.
And everything that the blood touches, that little amount of square footage, that has been redeemed back to God, back to life. It shows, or it’s supposed to, that life wins symbolically. Symbolically. When life meets death in the temple, life symbolically wins. Death is being overcome.
God is reversing the damage that we have caused. If you’re a Narnia fan, uh, the plot of Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe is the evil witch has taken over and made it always winter but never Christmas, right? Everything is covered in ice and cold, but then Aslan, the true king, shows up and he’s on the move and he begins to reclaim his territory. And everywhere that Aslan goes, winter begins to thaw, flowers bloom, birds and bees return, it becomes springtime. Aslan is this little beach of goodness in the midst of all this evil and corruption.
That’s the idea of sprinkling blood. It’s like sprinkling springtime. It’s sprinkling life onto the rot of death, showing that life overcomes death. Now, again, it’s just a symbol. It’s not like the blood actually brought anything back to life, but it is an image that God is reclaiming and will one day totally, really reclaim death back to life.
Life, that life really will win in the end. It was supposed to give the Israelites hope that death will be overcome, not just symbolically, but for real, that one day death will lose. As ludicrous as that is from a scientific point of view, Israel was supposed to have hope that life will eventually overthrow death. And in fact, In fact, we all have that hope in our heart, even if you aren’t a Bible person. We believe for some reason that life can win, even though it’s impossible.
There’s something that rings true when we hear that life is more powerful than death. If you remember once upon a time, long ago, when we first saw the first Jurassic Park movie, do you remember that? And they said, life will find a way. And we were like, yeah, that’s right, it will. Life will find a way.
Even though scientifically that’s false, right? It won’t. It’s ludicrous to say life will win in the end. Given a long enough timeline, everything is going to turn to darkness and dust. Everything.
That is undeniable. Universe will run out of energy, 100% guaranteed. And yet our hearts tell us there is a way for life to win. There is a way when life meets death that life can be victorious for real, that life can reclaim some of death’s territory. We all have that hope.
There’s something about that that rings true for us even though it’s impossible, even though that’s ludicrous, we have that hope. And we should listen to what our hearts tell us because that is true.
So, the temple is where life meets death and life symbolically wins. Now, lastly, before we talk about how all this is really about Jesus, the temple is where grace meets justice. Both grace and justice are good. Both grace and justice are part of God’s goodness, but they are in tension with one another, and it’s not immediately obvious how they can meet. Because on one hand, we believe in second chances, don’t we?
We love the idea of redemption, the comeback story, someone who has totally blown it in life but then shows genuine remorse, seriously takes responsibility for the pain they’ve cause, and then that person is restored. We love that story. That’s a good story. But at the same time, on the other hand, we love justice because evil must be held accountable. Crimes must be punished, must be.
If crimes aren’t punished, everyone ends up getting hurt. Either the offender is emboldened to commit even more atrocities or other potential perpetrators see evil isn’t going to ever be punished, so they just go commit copycat crimes themselves. It’s bad for everyone. Evil has to be held accountable. Allowing evil to spread is in itself evil, right?
If you permit the evil, you’re part of the evil. It is good to stop evil and hold it accountable, to punish it. It’s noble. We all know that. We feel that.
But now the dilemma: how do we at the same time perform both justice and grace? Both are good. We want both. But if we’re gracious, we minimize justice. If we stand firm on justice, we aren’t gracious.
Grace, grace isn’t fair. Grace isn’t just. And they’re in tension with each other. So how are we going to do both? How’s God going to do both?
That’s the issue. In the temple, God gives us a picture of how both happen. On the forgiveness side, God comes to restore relationship with us even though we walked away from him, even though we broke his creation and spread this corruption. He still came to us. He pursued us.
Heaven has met earth. Life has met death. And a little beam of glory has broken through the darkness darkness, tremendously gracious after what we’ve done. But then on the justice side, we see God’s grace wasn’t without cost. God introduces the principle of substitution in order to meet the demands of justice.
Substitution claims someone other than the offender can bear the consequence of the sin. Symbolically, Symbolically, in the temple, substitution happened when Israel’s sins would be transferred to an animal, and then the animal symbolically would bear the cost of the offense instead of the people. In the case of the ceremony of our text, 2 different goats were substituted for 2 different consequences of sin. One goat would be killed, representing death associated with sin, verse 15. The other goat would be banished to the wilderness, representing separation and isolation from God, which is associated with sin, verse 22.
And then the real offenders, the people, would be forgiven. The idea is, or the symbol is, that God could maintain His justice because the offense was punished, the animal paid the price, and at the same time, God maintains His grace because the offenders aren’t punished as they deserve. That’s substitution. Someone other than the offender pays the cost. So grace meets justice in the temple because sin is symbolically paid, symbolically.
Now, if that bothers you, if you are sensitive to animals losing their lives for the sins of people, for instance, if it bothers you, you’re on the right track. It’s supposed to bother you. It was supposed to bother Israel. They were meant to learn that sin is a big deal. It carries a heavy cost.
If they didn’t have any concern for the animal, if it didn’t matter to them that someone had given its life because of their sin, then they wouldn’t have any change in their behavior, right? The animal’s life has to mean something to you if the sacrifice is to produce any sort of transformation. You’re not going to be grateful for forgiveness if the cost of forgiveness is inconsequential. You’re not going to live life any differently. And there are times in Israel’s history that they lost sight of the value of the animal’s life, of that sacrifice.
They thought, I’ll do whatever I want and I’ll make a sacrifice to make up for it, like no big deal. And whenever they trailed off in that direction, God was quite upset with them. They were supposed to grieve over their actions. They were supposed to be humbled that an innocent animal paid for their sin. Symbolically through death and banishment, supposed to have a sense of gratitude for the animal that stood in their place, which should have transformed them to some degree.
Again, if that bothers you, you’re getting the point.
At the same time, the sacrifices were intended to make Israel look forward because sacrifices never really fixed the problem. They had to be offered over and over and over again. God even says the blood of bulls and goats cannot take away sin. It’s really just a symbol. God was just introducing the concept that substitution is possible, but also that true substitution had not happened yet.
So Israel was longing for, or should have been longing for, the day that God would provide a substitution that really would take away sins. Which brings us to how all of this is about Jesus. Jesus is the ultimate temple. Jesus is truly God with us. Jesus literally defeated death.
Jesus completely pays our debt. Jesus is where heaven meets earth because he is God with us. He’s Emmanuel. We sing in here, you didn’t want heaven without us, so you brought heaven Heaven is where God is, and God came here, not symbolically, truly. Jesus is God with us.
The fullness of the deity dwells in him, Colossians 1:19. And Jesus is where life meets death because he swallowed up death with his life. The grave could not hold him. Jesus literally rose from the dead, not symbolically. Life really meets death won on Easter morning.
You know, do you know why you have a hope in your heart that life can defeat death? Do you know why that’s there? Because it did. It happened. Your heart is speaking to you, telling you that the resurrection is real.
Jesus literally defeated death. And Jesus, of course, is where grace perfectly meets justice. He is where the picture of substitution was pointing. As the goat was banished outside the city, Jesus was crucified outside the city. As the goat was slain for the sins of the people, Jesus on the cross paid the debt of death that we owe with his life.
Jesus completely pays our debt, not symbolically, really, fully, finally. No more payment is needed. His life for ours. God’s perfect justice God’s perfect grace through Jesus’ death and banishment on the cross in our place. Now, if goats, goats, if goats who only symbolically carried the cost for Israel’s sins were supposed to make Israel grieve over their actions and at the same time be filled with gratitude because an innocent sacrifice stood in their place.
If Israel should have been humbled and grateful because of goats, how much more us with Jesus, the Son of God, loving us so much that he freely chose to stand in our place, to bear our cost. He chose that. He wasn’t some helpless victim. He wasn’t pressured against his will by by an angry, vengeful God. He chose to do it.
How much should that transform our hearts to make us grieve what our actions have caused and then fill us with gratitude for him? Jesus is the ultimate temple. He’s the temple incarnate. He’s heaven. He’s life.
He’s justice. He’s grace. He’s a living, breathing, walking temple. The old temple was just a shadow of him, not the realities themselves. And now that Jesus has arrived, there’s no need for that old temple.
There’s no need for sacrifices. We can be with him anywhere at any time with unrestricted access. The way to him is not blocked by these cherubim angels. When he died, the veil of the temple was torn in 2, granting us access to God all the time for all of us who trust Jesus. We’ve regained through faith in him the best part of when we lived in the garden.
We have God. And one day God will fully restore all of the earth. Eventually there will be a new heaven and a new earth where there is no corruption, no decay, no sin, no death. And in that city, what does it say? There will be no temple, for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple.
When heaven and earth are one, when life has totally conquered death, when grace and justice are prominently displayed in the slain Lamb, and we live there forever and ever and ever, never to ruin God’s creation again. Let’s pray.
Father, thank you for providing a way for us to be with you even though we ran, even though we continue to do so, Lord. Thank you for pursuing us. Thank you for giving us a picture in the Old Testament of what you would do fully in Jesus, and then thank you for fully fulfilling what you said that you would do in Jesus, Lord. We pray that we look to him as where we meet you. Pray we look to him as where life overcomes death.
And we pray we just worship in gratitude, Lord, that you have so perfectly tied together grace and justice by Jesus’ voluntary substitution on our behalf. We pray those things in his name. Amen.
