Leviticus

The Book of Leviticus

Monday: A Handbook for the Priests: Leviticus 1:1-24:23

Leviticus is the third of these five books of Moses, and therefore stands in the very middle of the Pentateuch. Leviticus has to do primarily with the sacrifices and offerings, and so placing it in the middle of the five books of Moses may be a way of saying that sacrifices stand at the very heart of the Old Testament religion. They also point to the very heart of Christianity, because all of the sacrifices are fulfilled and brought to completion by Jesus Christ. And His death on the cross stands at the very heart of Christianity.

Keep Reading
The Book of Leviticus

Tuesday: Leviticus: An Overview

Of the sacrifices, the burnt offering is mentioned first because it was the most important. Leviticus doesn’t tell us what it was for because the answer is obvious. All the sacrifices on the altar are for sin. The text focuses on how the animals are to be handled. Notice two matters about this. First, the worshiper was to lay his hand upon the head of the burnt offering that was going to be accepted on his behalf (see Lev. 4:1). That’s a very critical idea and it pertains to all of the sacrifices. When the worshiper put his hand upon the sacrifice, this was a way in which he symbolically transferred his sin or guilt to the sacrifice. It was a kind of confession of sin, such that in a symbolic way his sin was passed to the animal. And then when the animal was taken and killed, it was killed in the place of the worshiper.

Keep Reading
The Book of Leviticus

Wednesday: Principles Learned from the Offerings: Leviticus 1:1-24:23

The last offering was the guilt offering, and it was made for damage that was done to another person or to another person’s property. We mustn’t think, of course, that if you damage somebody’s property either deliberately or by negligence, that all you had to do was go to the temple and present an offering. That would be an easy way to get off the hook. No, Leviticus describes very carefully what you have to do. You have to repay it, and then you have to add twenty percent—a fifth of the value—and then you had to give it to the person whom you had defrauded on the very day you went to present your offering.

Keep Reading
The Book of Leviticus

Thursday: The Laws of Purification: Leviticus 1:1-24:23

The first section is that of clean and unclean foods (Lev. 11). This distinction between clean and unclean animals goes all the way back to the flood, because the animals that came on board were identified as either clean or unclean. However, we weren’t told back then how they were distinguished. Now we are told. In addition to making this distinction between animals for health reasons, we can also see how this first section demonstrated the second explanation above, namely, as a way to separate God’s people from the world.

Keep Reading
The Book of Leviticus

Friday: Holy to the LORD: Leviticus 1:1-24:23

n the matter of these purification laws, Jesus explains what these ritual requirements were meant to do. The principle is that it’s not what comes into you or touches you that makes you unclean, but what comes out. The problem is not external, but, rather, the problem is the uncleanness of your heart. Jesus said: “Don’t you see that whatever enters the mouth goes into the stomach and then out of the body? But the things that come out of the mouth come from the heart, and these make a man ‘unclean.’ For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. These are what make a man ‘unclean’” (Matt. 15:17-20a).

Keep Reading

Monday: Ordination and Consecration: Leviticus 8:1-10:20

In last week’s devotional we saw that if you want to understand Leviticus, you have to understand holiness, as seen in the theme, “Be holy because I, the LORD your God, am holy” (19:2), which you find again and again throughout the book. But now we should ask what holiness is, since many of us have a mistaken idea of it. Somehow we think of holiness in exclusively ethical terms. Because we think of ethics as a scale from 0 (if you’re very bad) to 100 (if you’re very good), we think of holiness as kind of moving up the scale.

Keep Reading

Tuesday: Our Prophet, Priest, and King: Leviticus 8:1-10:20

Jesus Christ is the perfect prophet, the perfect priest, and the perfect king. How does that apply to us? It applies to us in this sense: we’re told in the New Testament that although we do not serve as Jesus Christ did, and continues to do, nevertheless, because we belong to Christ we have roles that are somewhat analogous to His.

Keep Reading

Wednesday: God’s Holiness Satisfied: Leviticus 8:1-10:20

The sacrifices that are offered in Leviticus 9 as part of worship are first of all for Aaron and his sons—that is, for the priests—and second, for the people. Now in the previous chapter the sacrifices were made at the ordination of the priests, which were a bull, a ram, and then another ram. But for the people here in Leviticus 9, the sacrifices were a male goat (the sin offering), a calf and a lamb (the burnt offerings), and an ox and a ram (the peace/fellowship offerings). For both the priests and the people, the sequence of the offerings was the same: first the sin offering, then second, the burnt offering, followed by the fellowship offering. This tells us how we must approach God.

Keep Reading

Thursday: The Priests and Their Ministry: Leviticus 8:1-10:20

The end of chapter 9 is probably the highest peak to be found in the entire book of Leviticus. The priests have been consecrated and ordained. They have offered the sacrifices during the first formal worship service of the people. God has come down upon the tabernacle to bless it in the visible presence of the shekinah glory. Yet, when you come to chapter 10 there is an enormous change. Suddenly we are in a different world, because instead of blessing, what you find is death.

Keep Reading

Friday: Every Christian a Priest: Leviticus 8:1-10:20

At the beginning of this study I said that all Christians today are priests. Therefore what we learn from these chapters is to be applied for us. Peter makes a great deal of that, using Old Testament language to talk about Christians. He writes, “But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light” (1 Pet. 2:9).

Keep Reading
The Day of Atonement

Monday: A Very Important Chapter: Leviticus 16:1-34

It’s impossible to overestimate the importance of Leviticus 16 in the religion of the Old Testament. Its teaching about the Day of Atonement is absolutely central to the book of Leviticus. Leviticus contains the instructions for the priests and the sacrifices. And because the sacrifices are the very heart of how one becomes right before God, prefiguring the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ, this chapter is more important than anything we have studied thus far.

Keep Reading
The Day of Atonement

Tuesday: The Day of Atonement: Leviticus 16:1-34

What sets the Day of Atonement apart from the other holy days? The important difference to note here is that it was on this day that sacrifices were made for the entire nation. All the other sacrifices we’ve looked at (and we’ve looked at quite a few of them), were individual sacrifices: one worshiper making a sacrifice for his sin. Sometimes it was a burnt offering, sometimes a sin offering, sometimes a peace offering, but it was always for an individual’s sins or the sins of his family. The Day of Atonement is the only time in the year when sacrifices were offered for the sins of the entire nation.

Keep Reading
The Day of Atonement

Wednesday: Two Goats, Two Meanings: Leviticus 16:1-34

The climax comes when John the Baptist pointed to the Lord Jesus Christ and said, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). Jesus Christ is the culmination of the revelation, the one who embodies everything that all the sacrifices symbolized and the one to whom all the sacrifices pointed.

Keep Reading
The Day of Atonement

Thursday: Mercy on the Sinner: Leviticus 16:1-34

In one of Jesus’ parables, He contrasted a Pharisee with a tax collector, both of whom went to the temple to pray. Pharisees were highly regarded by the people. And when in his prayer he thanked the Lord he is not like other men, everyone hearing Jesus’ story would have agreed that the Pharisee was not like the others. The tax collector, however, was viewed by the people as a sinner. Yet, unlike the Pharisee, the tax collector prayed, “Lord have mercy on me, a sinner.” Jesus said it was the tax collector who went home justified, and not the Pharisee.

Keep Reading
The Day of Atonement

Friday: Christ’s Perfect Sacrifice: Leviticus 16:1-34

How do we apply this? As you compare Scripture with Scripture, and especially as you look to the New Testament for the light it throws on the Old Testament, you find not only that the New Testament gives us the right understanding of the Old Testament, but you also find that it applies it for you. And that is nowhere more apparent than in what took place here on the Day of Atonement, which is interpreted and applied in the book of Hebrews. This letter deals with all these Jewish types, and the whole point of Hebrews is that they are fulfilled in Jesus Christ.

Keep Reading

Monday: An Amazing Year: Leviticus 25:1-55

This is one of the most amazing pieces of legislation that you find in the Old Testament, at least to those people who have been taught that an unlimited and unhindered accumulation of wealth is the ultimate good. In the Year of Jubilee, all land holdings in Israel reverted to the original owners. This was one of the earliest—and perhaps the first—processes and laws for land reform in the history of the world, and certainly one of the most unique.

Keep Reading

Tuesday: When the People Return to Their Land: Leviticus 25:1-55

In this year the land was to revert to the original family owners. But if you look at the text carefully, that’s not the way the chapter itself talks about it. The text actually speaks not of the land returning to the people but of the people returning to the land. Now that must be important because it’s said five times over (see vv. 10, 13, 27, 28, and 41). The point seems to be that God is more concerned with the people than the land. We usually think the other way around. We are glad to manipulate people or get rid of people as long as we can accumulate our holdings. Now today, of course, it’s not generally land so much as it is bank accounts and stocks and so forth. But we manipulate people in order to have things. God says what’s important is the people, not the things.

Keep Reading

Wednesday: The Kinsman-Redeemer: Leviticus 25:1-55

There’s another important idea in this chapter, and it’s that of the kinsman-redeemer (see vv. 25-28). If a family was poor and was forced to sell their land, it wasn’t always necessary for them to wait till the Year of Jubilee came around to get it back. That could be a lifetime away. If that year came in your youth, you may be an old man before you got your land back. However, it was possible for the land to be bought back and restored to the original owner by a near relative who was called a kinsman-redeemer. Or, if the original owner prospered, he had the right to buy it back again. Now the amount the original owner had to pay was the difference between what the buyer had paid for it originally and the amount of crops that he had gotten out of it in the meantime. So if he had paid for ten years of crops and only three harvests had gone by, he had to be paid for the seven years of crops.

Keep Reading

Thursday: Duties to Help the Poor: Leviticus 25:1-55

The long and concluding section of this chapter is verses 35 to 55, which has to do with duties to the poor. You might say, at first glance, “Why in the world are these duties to the poor here at all? Why does this belong in a chapter having to do with the Jubilee?” Well it shows that the central concern of the chapter is to protect or help the poor. There are a number of cases here.

Keep Reading

Subscribe to the Think & Act Biblically Devotional

Alliance of Confessional Evangelicals

About the Alliance

The Alliance is a coalition of believers who hold to the historic creeds and confessions of the Reformed faith and proclaim biblical doctrine in order to foster a Reformed awakening in today’s Church.

Canadian Donors

Canadian Committee of The Bible Study Hour
PO Box 24087, RPO Josephine
North Bay, ON, P1B 0C7