Once again our pulpit was filled by a young man, zealous and
sincere who delivered a good message. But due to truncated hermeneutics it
wasn't as good as it could have been. So much was missed and this is once again
due to a misguided understanding of what the Bible is and how Divine Revelation
is focused on the Person and work of Christ.
This time it was a survey of Leviticus which is admittedly no
easy task. It's a difficult book and it's hard to keep people focused as many
find it to be not only dry reading but a dry topic.
But it doesn't have to be.
It was presented to us as God's attempt at 'laying out rules
for holiness'. It was His way of teaching Israel to be different from the
world. They failed and this led to the Church age and thus the removal of
obligation in terms of keeping those commandments.
While his points are technically correct, they omit a great
deal and I kept waiting for him to flesh things out, to help his hearers to
understand the issues. But the development never came.
Of course there's a great deal of confusion and inconsistency
at this point because most Evangelicals are quick to use Leviticus and other
portions of the Mosaic Law to argue for contemporary legislation and to make
points in the culture wars of our day. These exegetical errors are again the
result of bad hermeneutics.
The problem was the preacher never tied in or frankly even
mentioned Christ. The issue of how the Old and New Testaments are related to one
another is one of the great issues in the realm of theology. And all too often
the focus is on one aspect of the question at the expense of others. The truth
is that the relationship between them is dynamic and complex and even at times
confusing. But there is a solution to this seeming enigma and it's found in the
Person of Christ. A proper grasp of Biblical Christocentricity will grant us a
lens through which we can view this multifaceted relationship and structure.
In terms of chronology, in terms of redemptive history, the
Mosaic epoch is often contrasted with the Christ-mediated New Covenant. The New
is not only better in that it actually brings salvation and old burdens are
removed, but it's better in that it's a heavenly and thus eternal order and not
merely a temporal (and thus temporary) model, symbol or type. The salvation and
Kingdom offered in the New Covenant are real (and thus eternal) while the
Mosaic dispensation was simply a proto-type wed to a specific time and place.
In other places the Mosaic order is contrasted in stronger
terms with the New Covenant. If taken alone and viewed apart from Christ, the
Mosaic period is reckoned an administration of death, a form of bondage and
contrary to us.
In the sermon, the role of Leviticus was never made clear. It
was interesting because it almost seemed like some latent Dispensational
influence was being felt. It was presented as simply a part of a failed
administration. It wasn't integrated and of course by integrated I don't mean
in the way many Theonomists and Covenant theologians would seek to bring it
into a monolithic or monistic theological structure... all but erasing some of
the critical differences.
The Mosaic Law was a failed administration but it was meant
to fail. I kept waiting for him to mention the role of the law as schoolmaster,
as a tutor to bring us to Christ. The failure was built in. It was never meant
to be permanent.
If you understand Leviticus in terms of redemptive history it
becomes clear that Christ is at the center of these laws. He is the Holiness of
God. He is Righteousness.
This is where it gets confusing. Didn't we just say that the
Law was opposed to the New Covenant? Viewed through one lens the Law is
inferior and even set in opposition to the Christ mediated New
Covenant/Testament. But in another sense because it points to Christ and in
typological form and represents the blessings and curses presented to the world
by the presence of Christ, it is in the end entirely about Christ and a picture
of the Gospel.
For the Israelites sin was inevitable. The Mosaic code
provided a way of reconciliation through the Tabernacle-Temple apparatus which
the New Testament teaches are pictures or types which point to and are
fulfilled by Christ at the cross. The Temple system, from the blood sacrifice
to the priesthood, from the altar to the Holy of Holies is a picture of
salvation or reconciliation with God.
But in addition to revealing Christ as Savior, the system
also presents Christ as Judge. Transgression of the law meant alienation and
certain categories of sin resulted in death... a righteous judgment by God and
his rejection of the guilty, of the unholy.
Leviticus presents a way of death and a way of life. This
choice or dilemma if you will is presented to the world by the Incarnation of
Christ. We're here to proclaim this fact. Like it or not a choice must be made
by all... repent and believe and embrace Christ, the blessings of eternal life
and reconciliation with God or reject Him and face His judgment and endure the
curse and the penalties of unrighteousness and the blasphemy of unbelief.
But then there's yet another aspect or layer to this
discussion. The way of life provided in the Mosaic order was in the end
insufficient because Christ Himself was not the mediator of the Old Covenant.
The mediator was a type of Christ as was the whole system but it wasn't the
substance, it wasn't Christ Himself. The model could not save. The system
pointed to Christ but at the end of the day the mediator of that covenant was
Moses... the same Moses who (like those who rest solely in his system) could
not cross the waters of Jordan and enter the Promised Land but could only gaze
upon it from the slopes of Nebo-Pisgah.
God's Holy Realm is not contained by or restricted to a tent
or temple building. The blood of bulls and goats could not actually take away
sins. And so we learn that those who were saved before Christ, those who had
saving faith, might have lived chronologically under the Old Covenant epoch but
spiritually they were members of the New Covenant... for it is only under the
New Covenant that salvation is to be found. The New Covenant had not formally
happened yet in time but through the Spirit, Abraham, David, Ruth and the other
Old Testament era saints were in union with Christ, possessors of the Spirit of
regeneration and members of the Kingdom, the same eternal Kingdom and heritage
of which we are a part.
The error on the part of the preacher was to try and teach
Leviticus without viewing it through the lens of Galatians, Hebrews and of
course Christ.
We can read those laws and rejoice that they are not binding
upon us. But at the same time we need to understand them not just as mere rules
to be kept but as a covenant given at a specific place and time which was
pivotal for preserving the seed of the Messiah from the persecutions and
corruptions of the world and its satanic master. This was even while teaching
the believers of that age (and our age) of the works of God and how history was
to be and has been shaped, bringing us to its climax... the Incarnation, the
years from Bethlehem to Golgotha and the ascension from the Mount of Olives.
We are called to holiness but we don't 'need' Leviticus to
teach us that. Leviticus is part of a fulfilled and now obsolete Covenant. We
benefit from its study but only when viewed through the lens of Christ and His
work. Though much of the morality which undergirds its structure is part of an
eternal and unchanging order, its specific codes are not to be followed and it
has no bearing on non-covenantal or 'common' nations of the present era. It
didn't then and it certainly does not today. There are repeated and vigorous
calls to holiness in the New Testament and in fact the demands are in a sense
more profound and of a higher order. Few Christians in our day seem to
understand this.
Christ is central subject of the Scriptures. He is the very
revelation of God. We can study the Old Testament and try to understand it as
it would have been seen by its contemporaries but such exercises are fruitless
in the end if we don't understand the 'why' behind the story. We're not given
very many explanations or sure interpretations in terms of world history but
when it comes to Ancient Israel we have a sure guide... the holy writings of
the Apostles, otherwise known as the New Testament.
The episode was instructive to me and I used it to open a
discussion with my family. Nothing was said in the sermon that could be called
error. And yet, framing Leviticus in other than Christocentric terms can
misrepresent the book, its context and without meaning to such teachings can
mislead people, teach them to read the Bible wrongly and cloud their ethics.
Whether we're reading law, the prophets or wisdom literature
it all must be understood through the lens of Christ. Modern academic
methodologies decry this and argue this is to 'impose' ideas upon the Hebrew
Scriptures. These views and presuppositions represent a non-Christian
understanding of the Scriptures and perhaps without meaning to (in some
instances) they constitute a potentially dangerous rejection of the Spirit's
role in crafting and preserving the Scriptures. The Bible is a supernatural
work. The books are the Holy Books. That's what the term bible means. To treat
them otherwise is to put it simply, sacrilege.
I'm not accusing our preacher of this error. But at the same
time he's being influenced by teachers who are guilty of it, and in the
post-Enlightenment era even otherwise conservative Bible-believing churches,
institutions and teachers are still being affected and influenced by such
secular epistemologies. And this continues to cloud the critical theological
discussion of how the New Testament relates to the Old.