Hey, Bible readers. I'm Tara Lee Cobble, and I'm your host for the Bible Recap. Leviticus is a book about a perfect Holy God who wants to draw near to his people who are, unfortunately, completely depraved and sinful. It walks us through the very messy and detailed process of how that can be possible. There are a lot of components involved, so set your mind to press through on the days when it's not easy. You'll be grateful you did, just like you tell your kids when you take them to piano and swim lessons. Those things are good, but your kid's ability to see that it's good just hasn't developed yet. So put on your swim cap. Here we go. First things first, who are the Levites? They're the descendants of Levi, one of the twelve tribes of Israel/Sons of Jacob. And just yesterday, we saw that God appointed this particular tribe or line to be the priests in the tabernacle. So we'll be dealing with a lot of things pertaining to priests. They are the mediators between the Holy God and the sinful people. God is going to show them what steps are necessary to make this relationship functional.

There are three primary ways of being that are laid out in this book: unclean, clean Clean and holy. In general, the people are unclean. Always, God is holy. And the purpose of these rituals and laws set out in this book is to get the people from the state of being unclean to the state of being clean or even holy. There are various ways this has to be approached. First, we'll look at a lot of offerings. While we're in these more challenging parts about sacrifices and offerings, I want to point you to a short article that explains these five major offerings in brief. The burn offering, the grain offering, the peace offering, the sin offering, and the guilt offering. We'll link to that article in our show notes today. We open with Moses speaking with God at the Tent of Meeting, a phrase that now represents the tabernacle. It's very confusing that they use these same terms to refer to different things, but just know that once the tabernacle cycle exists, that's what the phrase Tent of Meeting refers to. Everything we read today was God talking to Moses at the Tent of Meeting. And the first thing God does is establish a lot of ritual offerings.

You may wonder, first of all, why this barbaric stuff has to happen at all. Remember back in the Garden of Eden when God told Adam and Eve about the connection between sin and death? By sparing their lives, God saves them, but something else has to die in their place. In that instance, God killed an animal to clothe them. And here we see lots of animals are going to have to die because we've got 3 million sinners living in the desert together for 40 years. So God sets up this sacrificial system so that animals can die instead of people to make atonement for their sins. Atonement means to cover. So the animal's death is a temporary covering for their sin. And not to give too much away here, but God knows all along that this plan is temporary. It's just a bandaid, not a permanent fix. This is a placeholder, a foreshadowing of the real solution that will come in the form of Jesus and his death on the cross. But for now, we've got this system. And learning a little bit about it should really increase gratitude in all of us that we live approximately 3,300 years later.

Another thing we'll see taking place here is not just God's provision of a blood sacrifice, but also God's provision of food for the priests. They get to keep some of the things that are sacrificed.

Since their job requires them to be working to help mediate this relationship between God and his people, they can't be out raising food and farming.

If they're going to obey God's calling on their lives, they'll have to trust him to feed them. Fortunately, he has a plan for this, and it involves other people bringing them food all the time via an offering. And God calls that offering Most Holy. God also says that no offerings can be made without salt, and he calls it the salt of your covenant with God. Salt implies preservation. So bringing salt with these offerings is a way of remembering and preserving the covenant with God. In these offerings, the fat represents the very best part of the animal. So God keeps all that for himself. 3:16 says, All the fat is the Lord's. Amen. By the way, lots of you asked us to put this verse on a T-shirt or a tank top for you, so we've done both.

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In chapter 4, we see that even unintentional sin requires a sacrifice. That's because sin is still sin regardless of motive, and it still has to be paid for. This is true even for the priests and leaders among them. And the higher your position, the more valuable the sacrifice required of you. Leadership, especially spiritual leadership, comes with added weight and responsibility. To heighten understanding of this, God also required that any time a priest sinned against the congregation or led the congregation in sin, that the blood of the offering be sprinkled in front of the veil of the sanctuary. Let's talk for a second about what that is, just to make sure we don't miss the significance here. Remember how the tabernacle is laid out in the shape of a cross? And the things that are the furthest out of the tabernacle are made of less valuable metals like Bronze. Then they increase in value to Silver, then gold-plated, then pure gold. The first area outside with the Bronze stuff is called the outer court. Then we move into the Holy place. And at the far end of the Holy place is a big curtain that separated the Holy place from the Most Holy place, which is also called the Holy of Holies.

This is the section where the pure gold item is kept, the Mercy seat, which is the lid for the Ark of the Covenant and is where God dwells. No one was allowed to enter that area except the high priest, and he was only allowed in there one day of the year, which we'll talk about soon. But for now, what you need to know is that when the priests sinned or when the whole congregation sinned, the blood of their offering was brought from the Bronze altar in the outer court into the Holy place and sprinkled in front of the veil. With For regular people, the blood was just thrown on the sides of the Bronze altar. But with the priests or the sin of the whole congregation, those sins defiled the whole tabernacle. What was your God shot today? Mine was in the moment I just described where the priest is carrying the blood inside the tabernacle on account of his own sin. This has to feel pretty weighty to have to carry blood up to God's door and sprinkle it there. But I wonder if it reminded the priests that God spared them when they, as a people, sprinkled blood on their own doorway.

Days. The people it happened to were still alive. This was just a year ago that he brought them out of Egypt. They remember the screams of the Egyptian families in the night. They remember fleeing because God had rescued them. And now they stand in front of his earthly throne deeply aware of their own sins and his goodness. I'm in awe of the fact that a Holy God has made a way for our sins to be atoned for. He's merciful, he provides a sacrifice, and he's where where the joy is. We get lots of questions from our Bible readers, and we wish we could handle them all, but we've actually found something better.

We can connect you to a whole community of other Bible readers who are also digging into the word alongside you. Pastors and seminary students and theologians, they're all part of our Recaptains Facebook group. Our Recaptains have access to our official Facebook discussion group, where people post questions, offer helpful info, share funny memes, and are just generally awesome and encouraging to each other. My team and I stay in there to post, comment, and to make sure it continues to be the brightest little corner of the Internet. You can join for only $3 a month by becoming a Recaptain, and that $3 may not seem like much, but it also helps us keep this podcast coming to you daily by supporting the team that puts this together. So for your sake and ours, we'd love for you to join the reCaptains and hang out in our official Facebook discussion group. You can find out more info at thebiblerecap. Com/recaptions, or click the link in the show notes. Hey, Bible readers. For any of us who are working to embrace the gift of singleness, whether temporary or permanent, Hope Nation has something to encourage us. Click the link in the show notes to hear me talk about how to maintain contentment while still having hope for the future.

We can do both.