He Who Has The Son Has Life

"The friendship of the Lord is for those who fear him, and he makes know to them his covenant." Psalm 25:14.

The books of Exodus and Leviticus have been often wrongly thought of as irrelevant and misleading.  People will ask "how can a loving God kill people and such".  The books of Exodus and Leviticus simply raise a profound question, the question that Jesus Christ has answered--how can a holy God dwell in the midst of a sinful people?  In the book of Leviticus, the sinfulness of God's people renders his closeness problematic, even dangerous.  The book of Leviticus also teaches that the relationship between a holy God and sinful people can be maintained by sacrifice. Leviticus 16 describes the Day of Atonement.  Aaron the high priest is to first make atonement by blood-- just for the tent, as unclean people have been in and out of it.  He is then instructed to take two goats.  One is to be killed and its blood is to be sprinkled on the tent and altar, the other is to be left alive--for awhile.  Aaron was to lay both his hands on the live goat's head while confessing all the sin of the people over it.  After this the goat was to be led away into the wilderness (Azel) which means "cut off".  Throughout Leviticus, we find that to be excluded and cut off from the camp of Israel was absolute punishment.  A terrible fate is in view here, entailing both exclusion, and the certain expectation of death.  All of this foreshadowed  the work of Christ in the new covenant, where God's wrath against all his people was propitiated by the once-for-all substitutionary death of his Son.

The Israelites often abused the sacrificial system in two ways.

1. Presumption:  The people thought that as long as they just did a ritual once in awhile they could simply live a lifestyle of sin that would be pleasing to God.  Sadly the sacrifice of Jesus is often thought of in the same way without the understanding that life apart from him is death.  Thus the trying to delight in eating cow-pies.

2. Syncretism:  The attempt to combine the worship of the Lord with paganism.  Oftentimes they would try to bring in pagan statues into the temple.  The Lord will not tolerate this: his people must worship him alone, and in the way he stipulated. It often shocks me how churches try to draw people by tricks and gimmicks.  I have been through many church services where the name of Jesus is not even mentioned.   This is why we are all about Jesus!

These are the same abuses today.  God has made it clear that we can only come to him through his Son.  "Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him." (Jn.3:36).