Sorting through the Laws of Leviticus and Finding the Gospel

You haven’t read the Bible much, but you were inspired to read through the whole thing. Starting where most people do, in Genesis, you make it through pretty quickly. The Bible it seems is an engaging narrative. You then muscle your way through Exodus — thinking that the latter part started to drag a little with all those rules about the tabernacle and such. Then you get to Leviticus. Suddenly, you aren’t sure if you’ll be able to make it through the Bible. All of these rules and regulations just seem confusing to you. Why would God have this in the Bible? Why do I need to read this? 

What if I told you that just like every other book of the Bible, Leviticus actually points us to Jesus? It does. Yes, it can be a difficult read in places. But there are places in Leviticus which clearly point to the need for a rescuer. 

How Do You Find the Gospel in the Old Testament? 

I suppose before understanding how to find the gospel in the OT, it’d be helpful for us to define the gospel. The simplest definition is one given by JI Packer: God saves sinners. If you’d like to put a bit more meat on your gospel presentation, I use two different frameworks with four points each. The first is God—Man—Christ—Response. The second is more of a story: Creation—Fall—Redemption—Glory. 

The first presentation centers upon God’s character and how humanity fails to meet God’s holy standard, as such the judgment of God is upon us. But the good news is that Jesus Christ fixes this by fulfilling what is required through his life, death and resurrection. Our only fitting response, then, is to respond to Him in repentance and faith. When this happens, we are united to Christ and his record becomes our record. 

The second presentation centers upon the overarching story of the Bible. God lovingly created us to love Him and enjoy Him forever. We were made for rest, rule, and relationship. But we made shipwreck of this, and so rather than having the blessings of obedience we are under the curse of disobedience. Rather than having peace (rest), purpose (ruling), and healthy relationship we often experience the opposite. Ultimately, we are alienated from God. But thankfully God sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to bear our curse and to fulfill what God intended for humanity. As such we now experience the blessings of Jesus’ obedience in our place. He restores the rest, rule, and relationship we were created to enjoy. Someday everything will be ultimately restored and we will live in a new heaven and a new earth. 

We could write entire books focusing on these various themes of the gospel. But every gospel story follows this basic skeleton. No matter where you find yourself in the Old Testament (or the New Testament) you can find one of these various threads. Every place in Scripture is either telling you something about God, something about our rebellion, something about His rescue, or something about our future restoration. If you can spot this, then you can fill out the rest of the story. 

How Do You Find the Gospel in Leviticus? 

For a believer in the 21^st century, the book of Leviticus feels foreign. This would most definitely not have been the experience of someone who claimed to fear God before the time of Christ. Even if you couldn’t quote chapter and verse in Leviticus, its contents would have been woven into the fabric of every day. Leviticus touched how you cleaned your house, how you worshipped at the temple, what food you ate, and many other things. So, why does it feel so foreign today? Because Jesus has fulfilled what we see throughout Leviticus. 

In this sense it is easy to see how Leviticus points to Christ. Leviticus is what it looks like to be a holy people who are dedicated to the Lord. While things like “not eating shellfish” doesn’t even register for 21^st Christians, the questions that it begs most certainly do. God cares about your diet. God cares about your clothes. God cares about how you worship him. The expression of this looks different for us because of the way in which Christ fulfilled the law. We become holy through Christ. And we live in holiness by the power of Christ. 

The most obvious place where we can see the gospel is found in the blood sacrifices of Leviticus. The work of Christ is explained in the New Testament through the burnt offerings, sin offering, and guilt offering that we find in Leviticus. Through this sacrificial system we see the holiness of God and the love and compassion of God meet. In order to worship God rightly, one must be pure and wholly devoted. But we know that humanity does not and cannot be entirely pure. The sacrificial system was a way of communicating that we needed a mediator to come between us and a holy God. 

Leviticus answers, or rather begins to answer, this central question: How can the presence of a holy God dwell among an unholy people. The answer in Leviticus is through the sacrificial system. The Day of Atonement (Leviticus 16) is a beautiful picture of what Christ has accomplished. He becomes the sacrificial lamb who is slaughtered in our place. We are made holy through the sacrifice of another. That is the core of the gospel. 

Andrew Bonar sums up well the importance of Leviticus in its relationship to the gospel: 

“But let us proceed to the contents of this Book. It will be found that it contains a full system of truth, exhibiting sin and the sinner, grace and the Saviour; comprehending, also, details of duty, and openings into the ages to come, – whatever, in short, bears upon a sinner's walk with a reconciled God, and his [conduct] in this present evil world.”

Where Is the Gospel in the Clean and Unclean Animals of Leviticus 11? 

There are some places in Leviticus where we can make obvious connections to the gospel of Jesus. But what about the not so obvious places? What about Leviticus 11, which is a lengthy discussion about what animals are edible and which animals are not edible? How do we find the gospel in Leviticus 11? 

There is not a consensus on why some animals are declared clean and others unclean. Some have suggested that it has to do with hygiene. Other suggestions deal with appearance of the animals, relationship to Canaanite religious customs, or how the animals gather together. We are ultimately left without a full understanding of why God said which animals were clean and unclean. And that may actually be part of the point. God gets to call the shots because He created us. He gets to make the declaration of what is clean and what is unclean. 

If we think about the God-Man-Christ-Response telling of the gospel,  we could easily make the point that God is holy and therefore is the one who establishes the rules. We are accountable to Him. He has declared some things as clean and some things as not clean. The sad story of humanity is that we have often chosen the things which are unclean— and thus by our rebellion we also become unclean. But Jesus came into the world perfectly unscathed by the effects of original sin. There was nothing in Him that was unclean.

Yet, Jesus surprisingly touched that which was unclean. He touched people that Leviticus declared unclean. And he even declared previous unclean foods as clean (Mark 7:19). This tells us that Jesus is God. And it also tells us that His holiness is not tainted by our sinfulness. In fact, He is able to overcome our folly, rebellion, and uncleanness through His perfect life. Our only fitting response then is to acknowledge as 1 John 1:9 does that we are not without sin, but we are guilty and stained and that Jesus alone cleanses us from unrighteousness. 

We can also share the gospel with Creation-Fall-Redemption-Glory in relation to clean and unclean animals. We see in creation that even here God declared something off-limits. Just as they Israelites weren’t to eat a pig because it was off-limits, so also the first couple was not to eat of a certain tree in the Garden. The enemy used this prohibition to twist their desires. Humanity did not follow God’s rule. They chose to rule themselves and as such everything in all creation is turned upside down.

The clean and unclean animals are a reminder of what we saw in the Garden. It is a picture of God’s loving rule — even if it doesn’t make sense to our finite minds — and a question as to whether we will follow Him just because He says. We follow our first couple into rebellion. As such we inherit death and ultimately uncleanliness. We’ve chosen the way of death. But Jesus has come to redeem us from this.

Being perfectly holy Himself, He stands in the place of sinners. The perfectly clean becomes the unclean, so that we are able to be cleansed. And in glory there will be no such thing as clean and unclean. There will be no unclean thing in the new heaven and new earth. Everything will be freely and fully enjoyed. This is where God is taking you.

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How Can We See the Gospel in Exodus?

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