I will admit that sometimes I have little patience for some
passages in the OT. I am now reading the
Books of Moses, and sometimes I wonder why I invest my time reading about
outdated religious rituals, dietary restrictions, treatments of skin disease, and
the extremely tedious details of the construction of the Tabernacle. But not only are there jewels of spiritual
brilliance hidden within these dusty old Scriptures, the overall vision they
create seems to me to be a perfect backdrop against which to view and
understand the NT Scriptures and to make sense of the spirituality of the New
Covenant.
I often say that my own Christian faith is Jewish to the core. I happily and gratefully acknowledge that
Jewish theology, Jewish spirituality and Jewish sensibilities are locked into
the core of my own worldview. This
morning’s sermon will give us an opportunity to consider the value of the OT
Scriptures, especially when we see the OT as the stage onto which Jesus appeared
and accomplished His most monumental triumph on the Cross. My intention is to set before us three
specific ways in which the OT prefigures the arrival of Jesus.
I think it is important to consider both Judaism and Christianity
as religions of blood. It may sound a
bit strange but one of the reasons I have such a deep appreciation for Judaism
is that it grounds my own experience of spirituality in a truly earthly
reality. Judaism is not a philosophy
pulled out of the wispy realm of intellect.
At its heart is a system of bloody sacrificial rituals, and that
grounding in this-worldly physicality is not confined to the OT; when Jesus
dies on the Cross He walks to it upon the bridge of OT blood-religion.
We are tempted to confine spirituality to a realm that is decidedly
unearthly. God himself is exalted beyond
this realm and, although He penetrates this world with His presence, God is
truly not part of this world. He is the
Creator and the world is His creation.
And so it seems right that our own spirituality should somehow be
divorced from all that physically pertains to this world. But in the thick part of our Bibles (the OT),
God has denied us the separation of spirit and flesh. They are inextricably tied together.
In the first place, we see the seemingly illogical approach to
Jewish notions of being “clean” or being “unclean” before God. On the one hand, one may become unclean by
transgressing the commands of God. Sin
has the power to stain our inner being.
But on the other hand, one may equally become unclean through bodily
discharges, or through dietary choices, or by touching a corpse in the process
of committing the dead body to burial.
And however one becomes unclean, God tied the removal or purification
from uncleanness to a system of sacrifice so bound up with bloody animal
sacrifice that it is gruesomely disgusting to many of us who get our meat
cleanly wrapped in supermarkets without ever experiencing the process of slaughter
and butchering.
And we should not forget that many religions that developed in
pagan antiquity were likewise bloody.
Some of these religions gave expression to a bloodlust that was
primitive and frenzied even to the point of slaughtering human victims. It is here that we find a clear departure for
Judaism. While the OT religion called
for rivers of bloody sacrifice, there was no uncontrolled enjoyment of
bloodlust. The priests did not set
themselves upon victims with wild enjoyment of cruelty.
What we find is that instead of spontaneous thrill-killing, the
blood was poured out only by the priests and the only through carefully
prescribed rituals. It is as though the
blood is spilled only to fulfill some carefully devised purpose and with great
forethought. There are actually several
basic categories of sacrifices, and some of these could have different
functions. There are sacrifices both of
animals and of grain or drink offerings.
Animals could be used in burnt offerings, peace offerings, sin or guilt
offerings. I won’t take the time to
explain the whole sacrificial system, but the point is that the blood of these
animals was not shed to give some thrill to the guy with the knife, but to
effect some kind of purification. In
fact, the priests were required to forge some sort of personal connection with
the animal by first laying their hands upon its head. I can only imagine that this connection touched
off some feelings of empathy and sympathy, and a realization that some other
living thing was dying in order to correct the uncleanness that originates with
my own guilt.
We also need to explore the whole Jewish notion of
“uncleanness.” We find this described
especially in the book of Leviticus. The
setting is just after God has redeemed His people Israel in the Exodus from
Egypt and entered into covenant with them at Mt. Sinai. Now that they are God’s people and now that
He is their God, through the most solemn relationship, God tells them over and
over again, “You shall be holy, for I am
holy” (Lev. 11:44). And then God
spells out in great detail what exactly makes a person “unclean” (which means
that the person has in some way deviated from the holiness that characterizes
God). And this uncleanness was not
merely personal; it had social implications for the whole community of Israel
and clearly had to potential to be infectious to other people if it was not
cleared up and eradicated. Especially,
the uncleanness that erupted among the people was understood to contaminate the
Tabernacle or the Temple, which is why the sacrifices took place here on the
holy altar. Also, each unclean act or
sin was understood to accumulate in the physical geographic land—the Promised
Land, the land flowing with milk and honey.
By polluting the temple and the land, anything unclean was somehow being
made to attach to God; and God would not allow Himself to be soiled this way
because He is exquisitely holy. And God
threatened that the impurity of the Jewish people might result in Him leaving the
Temple or Tabernacle abandoned (and God made good on these threats several
times). And, God threatened that the
pollution of human uncleanness would cause the land itself to vomit out the
people who were under God’s ownership just as it had vomited out the previous
pagan inhabitants of the land.
And so, the books of Moses declared plainly what did or did not
make people unclean. And when they felt
the stigma of guilt, the remedy was through a bloody sacrifice of an animal and
the matter had to be handled by religious officials. It was as though the blood of the sacrifice
were a sort of detergent that would scrub and purge the stain of unclean
behavior, and only this cleaning would enable to person to rest comfortably in
the presence of God.
Now there is a sense in which this whole system—drenched in the
blood of innocent sacrificial animals—was nothing but a fiction. We see this on the one hand where God rejects
sacrifices because those who offered the sacrifices had hearts so unclean
toward God that rivers of blood could not have cleansed them. There was no repentance, no intention of
mending a damaged relationship. And on
the other hand, we have the explicit declaration in the NT book of Hebrews, “For
it is impossible that the blood of bulls and goats should take away sins”
(10:4). That whole system really
was a fiction. Likewise, when we look at
the rather arbitrary selection of foods that were considered clean/unclean,
that whole system was also a fiction.
Eating a lobster, or a BLT was considered “unclean” in Israel, but we
eat such foods and don’t think for a minute that we have become disgusting to
God for doing so. There is a sense in
which true spiritual concerns are not bound up in such earthly considerations.
Why then was Jewish religion so bloody, and what possible
significance could this have for we who embrace Christianity. When I first thought this through, the 1984
movie Karate Kid was big at the box
office. A boy named Daniel was being
bullied in a new neighborhood, and a karate expert named Miagi came to his
rescue. He agrees to teach Daniel
karate, but first he has him come to his house and work chores for long
hours. First, he has him wash the cars
in his collection and then wax them with very specific movements: “wax on/wax off.” Then he has him paint his deck and fences,
again with very specific movements:
“brush up/brush down.”
This goes on for so long that Daniel feels like the work is going
to go on forever and feels that he will never get to start karate lessons at
all, and so Daniel throws a tantrum and declares that he is done with the whole
Miagi-thing. But then the karate-master
explains that the activities were not just busy work; the specific actions of
the chores were actually karate moves, and they also strengthened the muscles
that would perform those moves: “wax
on/wax off; brush up/brush down.” And
then Miagi attacked Daniel with punches and kicks, and Daniel responds
instinctively with the moves he had learned from washing cars and painting
fences. The lesson taught by Miagi, at
first, was cleverly hidden.
I saw that and realized that the OT sacrifices were like that in
relation to the later sacrifice of Jesus.
God was teaching us that every decision in life, however earthly and
detached from spiritual concerns it might seem to be, has ramifications for our
relationship with God. They are
potentially defiling. And God was
teaching us that our approach to Him needs to be thoughtful and extremely
considerate. One does not simply saunter
up to God supposing that God could not possibly reject us or consider us to be
disgustingly unclean. In fact, God was
making absolutely clear that our worthiness to approach Him would be possible
only through the sacrifice of some being other than ourselves. As we conclude, let us all carefully read the
fuller passage in Hebrews from which I earlier quoted (Hebrews 10). We
are allowed to see that the OT system, built in fiction, was a shadow of a
reality that came when Jesus took the Cross.
The relationship with God intends to infuse us with His holiness. And we dare not become unclean with sin.
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