would be set at liberty.
Jesus proclaimed in Nazareth: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is on me … to preach good news to the poor … to proclaim freedom for the prisoners … to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.’ In other words, Jesus began the real jubilee to which every one of these people had been looking forward. Once again the Old Testament is needed to understand the New.
Rules for living
Clean and unclean
A crucial area to understand in Leviticus concerns the distinctions between holy and common, clean and unclean. Most people think in terms of good and bad, but the Bible works with three categories, as the chart shows.*
There are two processes going on. The first process is when sacred, godly, holy things are profaned and become common. You can spoil a holy thing by making it common. When the Bible Society sent Bibles to Romania, the communist government allowed the pages to be used in toilet rolls. It sparked a revolution started by Christians who were scandalized by this action. What had happened in that situation according to the teaching of Leviticus? In using the Bible for such a mundane though necessary purpose, a holy thing had been made common. The second process is when a common, clean thing is made unclean and sinful.
The three words sacred, secular and sinful correspond roughly to these divisions of holy, clean and common, and unclean. Just as there is a process of profaning the holy to make it common, and polluting the common and clean to make it unclean, so there is a process of redeeming this situation. You can cleanse the unclean and make it clean, then you can consecrate it and it becomes holy.
What is holy and what is unclean must never come into contact. They must be kept rigidly apart. Things holy and things unclean have nothing in common. If there is a mixture of unclean and clean it will make both unclean. Similarly, if you mix holy and common things, that makes them all common – it does not make them all holy.
Hence the downward process shown on the chart leads to death, quite literally, whereas the upward process leads to life – but this involves sacrifice. Only by sacrifice can you cleanse what is unclean and bring it to life.
This has ramifications for our view of life. According to the Bible our work can be consecrated to God. Work can be any of these three things, holy, clean or unclean. There are some jobs that are illegal and immoral, which are therefore unclean. A Christian should not be in them. There are other jobs that are clean, but common. But you can consecrate your work and do it for the Lord, and then it ceases to be common – it becomes a holy vocation in the Lord. So it is possible for a printer to be doing holy work, just as it is possible for a missionary to do only common work. Your money can be unclean if it is spent on bad things, clean if it is spent on good things, or holy if it is consecrated to the Lord. Sex, too, can be any one of these three things.
Plenty of people are living decent, common, clean lives, but they are not holy people. God does not want us just to be living good lives: he wants us to be living holy lives. This is the emphasis in Leviticus.
Those outside the Church may claim that they can live lives as good as the lives of those within it, but they are not the holy people God is looking for.
Holy living
Living holy lives involves all kinds of very practical things.
If you ask what is a holy life, Leviticus says it is how you live from Monday to Saturday and not just what you do on Sunday. God is looking not just for clean people, but for holy people. That is a big difference and until you become a Christian you never even think of becoming holy; you just think of being good – and that is not good enough.
Rules and regulations
We need to be clear about our understanding of the law of Moses. It is called the ‘law’, not the ‘laws’, because it all hangs together. Holiness means wholeness, and all these rules and regulations fit together and form one whole. If you break any of them you have broken them all. (In the chapter on Exodus I likened the breaking of one of the Commandments to breaking a necklace, which causes all the beads to scatter.) This fact cuts across most people’s view of the Ten Commandments. It is generally thought that if we can keep a high percentage of the laws we are doing well! This is not enough.
REASONS
God did not give reasons for all his rules. He did not tell us why we should not wear clothing of mixed materials, for example, or why we should not crossbreed animals or sow mixed seed. We can perhaps see a reason, however, in the fact that God is a God of purity – so he does not like mixed material for clothes, or mixed seed or mixed breeding. Although he does not always give the reasons for a prohibition, in some cases we can make an informed guess. The reason in some cases is undoubtedly hygiene. Some of the regulations about toilets are obvious, for example: there are hygienic reasons behind what God told them to do. Also it may be that some of the food forbidden as ‘unclean’ was also prohibited because of health concerns. Pig’s flesh, for instance, was peculiarly liable to disease in that climate.
Where there are no reasons given, the people were simply to obey because they trusted that the law-giver knew why he had commanded it. In the same way, there are times in the family home when children need to be told that they are to do something ‘because Daddy says so’. Sometimes to give the reason would be inappropriate, or it would be impossible to explain.
With many of the laws God is saying: Do you trust me? Do you believe that if I tell you not to do something I have a very good reason for that?
Too often we are only prepared to do something after we are convinced that it is for our good. We want to be God. Just like Adam and Eve, who took the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, we want to decide, to experience and to settle it for ourselves. But God has no obligation to explain himself to us.
Sanctions
God may not give reasons, but he does give sanctions. There is a call for obedience, but the cost of disobedience is also spelt out. And the punishments are pretty severe. In Leviticus 26, therefore, a whole collection of positive reasons for being obedient is laid out, but by the same token there is also a curse on those who disobey. If a Jew reads the book of Leviticus, he finds that a number of things could happen if he disobeys God’s law.
He could lose his home, he could