Laws of Worship Prefiguring Christ

Laws of Worship Prefiguring Christ

Leviticus 17:1-16

Main Idea: God commands us to worship only Him and in the way He prescribes, and we obey His worship commands.

I. God Commands Us to Worship Only Him.

II. God Commands Us How to Worship Him.

III. God Commands Us to Worship through Blood.

Leviticus 17 begins a new division in Leviticus. Chapter 16 is the central chapter, culminating the first major division of the book that primarily describes laws for sacrifices and purity. Chapters 17–27 describe the holy living God required of His people. Leviticus, therefore, can be partitioned into two main divisions. The first division is chapters 1–16 and the second division is chapters 17–27. The first division is theological and the second is practical. The first division consists of laws establishing holiness by drawing near to God in worship, and the second division has laws about demonstrating holiness in everyday life. Such a thematic division is similar to the way some of Paul’s letters can be divided. The first part of Romans, for example, addresses doctrine, while Romans 12–16 addresses application. The first three chapters of Ephesians primarily address doctrine, and the last three chapters address application.

So if we divide Leviticus into two divisions, in this section we begin looking at a new major division in Leviticus. The first major division is primarily about worship and ritual cleanness, and the second begins in chapter 17 with the subject of . . . worship. So worship is the main subject of the first division of the book, and worship is the first subject of the second division of the book. That fact highlights that for God’s people worship is central. The book of Leviticus makes it clear that knowing God and worshiping God are to be at the center of the lives of His people. That was true for His people in the old covenant period, and it is true for His people in the new covenant period today.

Several years ago I was involved in crafting a church’s vision statement. Our motto became “Together for God’s Glory.” Under that motto we listed three primary ways we wanted to glorify God, and the first was “Exalting God in Worship.” In another church where we wrote a vision statement we used the word “reaching’ to express each of our major functions. The first way we were reaching (before reaching “out” to others or “in” toward one another) was “Reaching Up to God in Worship.” Followers of Jesus have no higher privilege, no more solemn obligation, and no greater joy than exalting God in worship. Of course, exalting God this way does not refer merely to attendance at worship events; it refers to the act of offering heartfelt praise to God, expressing sincere adoration for God, and inviting God to do His work in us. We do all of that wherever we are, especially in corporate worship. Leviticus 17 describes three worship principles.

God Commands Us to Worship Only Him

In the first nine verses of Leviticus 17 God told His people to offer sacrifices only to Him. God said in verse 7, “They must no longer offer their sacrifices to the goat-demons that they have prostituted themselves with.” “Whore” is the word the English Standard Version translators used to translate the Hebrew word that has most commonly been translated “to play the harlot” or “to prostitute oneself.” “Whore” is a strongly negative word; in polite circles it’s a vulgar word. When the ESV was first published I was surprised they chose an English word that borders on being profane. I was uncomfortable with it, but I also had to admit that the connotation conveyed by the Hebrew word is strongly negative and insulting. In the Old Testament the word refers to physical prostitution, but it also often refers to spiritual prostitution, as it does in Leviticus 17:7. God was declaring that when His people are unfaithful to Him and worship other gods, they are doing something that is spiritually vulgar. Idolatry is spiritually profane; it is blasphemy. Literally, verse 7 says, “sacrifices to goats,” but most translations have “goat demons” or “goat idols.” Obviously, if people were offering sacrifices to goats they must have seen them as representative of deity. Hence, translating the word as a reference to an idol seems appropriate. Later in Jewish history, rabbis seem to have conceived of a demon in the form of a goat, and that is likely the reason people began to portray the Devil as goat-like (1 Enoch 8:1-3; 10:8-9; cf. 3 Enoch 4:6 and Apocalypse of Abraham 13:4-9).

At this point in Israel’s history the Israelites had just left Egypt, and the Egyptians worshiped numerous gods—Ra the sun god, Isis and Osiris, Anubis, Nut the sky god. My favorite is Bast the feline goddess (evidently already in the ancient Near East they knew that cats expect to be worshiped). The Israelites were about to enter Canaan, and the Canaanites had their own pantheon—El, Anat, Baal, and Mot. However, the one true God said to His people that they were going to be different from the other peoples of the world; they were going to worship only the real God. The first of His Ten Commandments required His people to worship no other god. Unfortunately, the history of God’s people is replete with examples of disobedience to that command.

The impulse to worship other gods was a perennial problem for the Israelites, and it is still a perennial problem. Followers of Jesus worship the one true God who has revealed Himself in Jesus, God the Son, but idolatry is still a temptation. It continues to be one of the most common problems for Christians. Idolatry is a disordering of affections. The rightful object of our greatest affections, our worship, is God. He is our magnificent obsession. When something takes His place as the object of our greatest devotion, it is a case of disordered affections. Our affections are out of order. What are some gods that replace the Lord as the object of our greatest affection, some of the “goats” we worship?

Some people, even some followers of Jesus, worship possessions. First Timothy 6:10 says, “The love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.” But when our affections are set in the proper order by the Holy Spirit within us, we don’t love money; we love God. First Timothy also says that some people fix their hope on riches. However, riches are uncertain (1 Tim 6:17). Therefore, we cannot count on them. Possessions are false gods, temporary, weak gods that disappoint. They are not worthy of our worship.

It is also possible for us to worship people. We can have greater affection for a person than for God. Having great affection for people, especially family members, is a virtue. However, when such people take the place of God in our hearts, such affection becomes a vice. Jesus said the greatest commandment is to love God. The second greatest commandment is to love others (Matt 22:36-39). We must not get the order wrong; love for God is first, love for others second. Yet, sometimes we care what people think of us more than we care what God thinks of us. Such an attitude is a disordered affection; it is idolatry.

Some people worship pleasure. We worship pleasure when we give our devotion to what pleases us, not what glorifies God. Some followers of Jesus are away from worship on many Sundays because they are engaged in activities they enjoy—travel, relaxing at the lake, etc. One wonders why they do not enjoy worshiping more than doing those things. Is it a case of disordered affections? Has pleasure become more important than worshiping God? Many Christian men and some women seek pleasure by looking at something on their computers that also starts with “p.” They set aside affection for God and what pleases Him, and they place their affections on the image on the computer screen. Jesus told us that lusting is adultery (Matt 5:27-28). Therefore, leering at explicit images is disobedience to God and another case of disordered affections. Affection for the image is greater than affection for God, because disobedience to God is required to look at the image. It is idolatry, whoring after a demon.

Fourth, some people worship promotion. We want to be more important—more important to us and more important to everybody. Instead of crucifying the self we exalt the self. We want the highest position, the corner office, the recognition. The male ego seems especially driven to be first. The desire to be excellent to the glory of God is a godly desire, but we so easily deceive ourselves into confusing God’s glory with our own. We want to be at the top of the heap, when only God belongs at the top. We tend to worship the god of promotion. God commands us to worship only Him.

God Commands Us How to Worship Him

Verses 3-5 of Leviticus 17 prohibit killing a sacrificial animal away from the tabernacle. Furthermore, if someone offered a sacrifice in a way that violated God’s law, he was charged with murder and “cut off from his people” (vv. 4,9,10). Being cut off from the people of God was a loss of fellowship, a separation from family, and possibly even a death sentence as a person went into the wilderness alone. Clearly God took His worship commands seriously, and He intended for His people to take them seriously too.

God commanded that all sacrificial animals had to be killed in the way He prescribed, in the place He prescribed. God did not allow His people to offer personal sacrifices any way they wanted to offer them, any place they wanted to offer them. God still expects us to worship Him according to His Word, not according to our desires. When we were raising our children, we had many times of family worship. We wanted to show our children how to worship every day, and we wanted them to see that for their parents a relationship with Jesus is not just a Sunday phenomenon. On one of our summer vacations, each day we read part of a book together for our worship times. The book was The Heart of Praise, by Jack Hayford. He wrote,

I confess to being old enough to remember the . . . Don McNeil Breakfast Club on radio. The program . . . was something of the equivalent of television’s Today show. . . . During each day’s program there would be a time when Don would say, “It’s prayer time around the breakfast table. . . . Each in his own words, each in his own way, bow your heads and let us pray.” It’s moving to recollect such a thing being included on a nationwide, secular program! And yet there was something about the Breakfast Club’s invitation to worship that was much more “American” than it was scriptural. We have a national disposition to emphasize our right to worship “in our own way.” While I’m grateful for that freedom, . . . it misses an essential fact about true worship: biblical worship is on God’s terms, not ours. . . . Once I choose the Living God as my God, I give up the right to worship “in my own way.” In the very act of naming God God, you and I are granting to Him alone the right to prescribe how He wishes to be worshiped. (The Heart of Praise, 13–14)

Hayford is correct. Determining the way God’s people worship Him is God’s prerogative, not ours. God illustrates that fact in His worship commands in the book of Leviticus with all their particularity. The first 16 chapters of Leviticus are replete with God’s specific instructions about how to offer sacrifices, how to prepare incense, what parts of sacrificial animals to discard, what priests were to wear, and so on.

We no longer follow these rules about how to offer sacrifices. We no longer offer sacrifices at all. God has abolished His old covenant laws about worship, and He has initiated the new covenant. Jesus, God the Son, offered Himself as the final, once-for-all sacrifice, and He is our high priest. Through Him, God has made the old covenant worship system obsolete. However, God gives worship commands in the new covenant too.

In Hebrews 10:25 God tells us that He does not want us to neglect getting together with other believers for worship. So we gather for worship with brothers and sisters in Christ to obey God’s command. In John 4:24 Jesus said God is looking for people who will worship Him in spirit and in truth. So we worship God according to His truth in His Word, not according to our opinions or preferences. We also worship God with our spirits, not just in appearance or in external compliance. In Romans 12:1 God tells us to present our bodies as living sacrifices to God. We figuratively lay ourselves on the altar and offer ourselves to Him in worship. Psalm 95, verse 1 is one of many places in the Bible where God tells us to worship Him with musical praise. It says, “Come, let us shout joyfully to the Lord, shout triumphantly to the rock of our salvation!” In Hebrews 13:15 God tells us to offer our sacrifice of praise through Jesus. We worship the one true God through Jesus, who is God the Son and our Savior. God commands us how to worship Him. When God commands, we obey. God’s people say and write so many things about worship that relate to their preferences, not God’s commands. Followers of Jesus, though, are obligated to learn everything God says about worship and conform our worship to His Word.

God Commands Us to Worship through Blood

In Leviticus 17:10,13-14 God did not permit His people to eat blood. Verses 11 and 14 state a principle that is important in the Old Testament and in the New Testament. Verse 11 says,

For the life of a creature is in the blood, and I have appointed it to you to make atonement on the altar for your lives, since it is the lifeblood that makes atonement.

Verse 14 says, “The life of every creature is its blood.” We could express that statement as an equation: blood = life. The blood represents the life. In the modern age we now know that statement is more than metaphorical; it is physical. If an animal has no blood, it has no life. The blood equals the life. So blood given = life given. Since the blood is the life, when we give blood we give life. To understand the sacrificial system God commanded, it is essential to understand this truth. When God’s people offered sacrifices, they shed the blood of the sacrificial animals. When the sacrificial animals shed their blood, the lives of the animals were being given in the place of the lives of the worshipers.

What is the significance of the connection between the blood of the animals and the lives of the animals? God’s immutable, eternal law is that sin leads to death. God’s perfect holiness and justice requires sin to lead to the death of the sinner. However, in His mercy God allows a sacrifice to die in the place of the sinner. That is the heart of the old covenant sacrificial system.

The shedding of blood is also the heart of the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross for our sins. In the old covenant the sacrifice was the blood of an animal. As the worshiper shed the blood of the animal, the animal died as a substitutionary sacrifice for the sinner to atone for sins and reconcile the sinner to God. In the new covenant the sacrifice is the blood of Jesus, God the Son. When Jesus shed His blood, He died as the substitutionary sacrifice for sinners to atone for sins and reconcile us to God. The writer of Hebrews wrote the following contrast between the blood of Jesus and the blood of sacrificial animals in the old covenant:

He entered the most holy place once for all, not by the blood of goats and calves, but by His own blood, having obtained eternal redemption. For if the blood of goats and bulls and the ashes of a young cow, sprinkling those who are defiled, sanctify for the purification of the flesh, how much more will the blood of the Messiah, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without blemish to God, cleanse our consciences from dead works to serve the living God? (Heb 9:12-14)

The blood of goats and bulls substituted for the blood of old covenant worshipers, atoned for their sin, and reconciled them to God. The blood of Jesus accomplishes the same substitution, life for life, perfectly and eternally for all who put their faith in Him.

Years ago I had lunch with a pastor friend named Bill Farris. During lunch he asked me, “Allan, have I ever told you about my name?” When I told him he had not, he said, “My full name is William Ott Farris. My father’s name is Ott Farris; I’m named after him and a man named William Caddy. William Caddy was my father’s best friend during World War II. They fought side by side in the Marines in the Battle of Iwo Jima. One day William Caddy said to my father, ‘Ott, you’re the best friend I’ve ever had.’ The next day, my father and William Caddy were in a foxhole together. A hand grenade landed in the foxhole between them. William Caddy jumped on the grenade. It exploded and killed him, but he saved my father’s life. When I was born, my father decided to name his first child after the man who died to save his life.”

The message of the Bible is that all of humanity is in a war, and a hand grenade landed next to all of us. That hand grenade is sin, and it will destroy our lives and send us to everlasting condemnation. Jesus, who is the best friend we could possibly have, has jumped on that hand grenade for us. When He died on the cross as our substitutionary sacrifice, He was dying in our place, taking our sin and its penalty on Himself so that we might live. He could have chosen to let us die for our own sin; we deserve it. Instead, He gave Himself as our sacrifice, even though it cost His life.

This section is entitled “Laws of Worship Prefiguring Christ.” Those words are taken from the Westminster Confession of Faith. The Westminster Confession of Faith refers to ceremonial laws in the Old Testament, old covenant laws concerning worship. It says,

God was pleased to give to the people of Israel, as a church under age, ceremonial laws, containing several typical ordinances, partly of worship, prefiguring Christ, His graces, actions, sufferings, and benefits; and partly, holding forth divers instructions of moral duties. All which ceremonial laws are now abrogated, under the New Testament.

Old Testament laws relating to worship were given by God, and God knew that one day He would declare those laws obsolete because they would be fulfilled in Jesus and superseded by Jesus. They also prefigure Jesus.

How do the worship laws in Leviticus 17 prefigure Jesus? In Leviticus 17 God says to worship only Him. Jesus is that God whom we worship, and He repeated God’s command to worship only Him (Matt 4:10). In Leviticus 17 God says to worship Him in the way He commands. Jesus commanded the same thing, and Jesus is that way. He said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me” (John 14:6). In Leviticus 17 God commands us to worship through blood. Jesus said that when He died on the cross and shed His blood, He was establishing the new covenant in His blood (Luke 22:20).

The Westminster Confession of Faith says that the Old Testament laws of worship prefigure Christ—His graces, actions, sufferings, and benefits. This is why we worship Jesus. First, we worship Him because of His grace. Second Corinthians 8:9 says, “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ: Though He was rich, for your sake He became poor, so that by His poverty you might become rich.” We also worship Jesus because of His actions. What action did He perform for us? Jesus said in John 10:17-18, “I am laying down My life so I may take it up again. No one takes it from Me, but I lay it down on My own.” We also worship Jesus because of His sufferings. First Peter 3:18 tells us to regard Him as holy, “For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, that He might bring you to God.” Finally, we worship Jesus because of His benefits. Romans 5:9 says of Jesus, “Much more then, since we have now been declared righteous by His blood, we will be saved through Him from wrath.” The shed blood of Jesus gives us an eternal benefit: we are saved from God’s wrath against past sin; and we are saved for a future in glory. The wrath of God was poured out on Jesus when He died on the cross in our place as our sacrifice. Praise His name! We praise Him because of what He did on the cross. We also praise Him because in Leviticus, written 1,400 years before the incarnation of Jesus, “God was pleased to give . . . laws . . . of worship, prefiguring Christ, His graces, actions, sufferings, and benefits.” (Westerminster Confessions)

Reflect and Discuss

1. How can we partition the book of Leviticus into two divisions? What are the main themes of the two divisions?
2. What are the three worship principles found in Leviticus 17?
3. What is idolatry?
4. Why is “whoring” an appropriate term for describing our idolatry?
5. What are some of the “goats” we worship, false gods that replace God as the object of our greatest affection?
6. If an Israelite offered a sacrifice in a way that violated God’s law, what happened to him?
7. What worship commands has God given in the new covenant?
8. How did the people of Israel worship through blood? How do we worship through blood?
9. How do the worship laws in Leviticus 17 prefigure Jesus and His redeeming work?
10. Why do you worship Jesus?