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Elevate your worship
In dual Torah reading אחרי מות Acharei Mot (“after the deaths”) and קדושים Kedoshim (“holies/holy”) (Leviticus 16–20) the Creator is calling on the people to elevate their worship beyond the ways their neighbors worship the demons. The God of Israel tells the Israelites to present all of their offerings only at the Mishkhan (Tabernacle) from this point forward. He also tells them that the life from the Life-Giver is in the blood but life doesn’t come from the blood of other lifeforms. In many pagan (i.e., not from God) cultures, it was common to drink the blood of sacrifices to take in the life and strength of the animal. The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob tells them to either bury the blood in the ground or bring it to the Tabernacle to be placed in specific places, such as the altar and the Most Holy Place.
Recall what Yeshua the Messiah (Jesus the Christ) said: “Drink my blood and drink my flesh” (John 6:53–54, 56). He was specifically calling to mind the fact that He came to earth as the ultimate sacrifice (Heb. 7:26–27; 9:27–28; 10:10, building on Yom Kippur as the pattern).
A reason why those who heard Yeshua’s jarring flesh-and-blood statement justifiably recoiled from it (John 6:52) was because of centuries of admonitions from God that one does not drink human blood or eat human flesh (Deut. 28:53–57).
Some teachers point to passages such as Isa. 1:11–14 to support the contention that the Torah instructions for worship ended at the cross. But taken in context, we can learn that God didn’t hate the sacrifices. Rather, He hated how the audience of the prophet brought the sacrifices as though it were a transactional, the way pagans brought sacrifices to the demons to perhaps buy favor.
The lesson of true heart-based worship taught in the Torah is this: When God shows up, we should too — being “present in the moment,” wresting the catchphrase from Transcendentalism and returning the concept to its biblical roots (Matt. 6:24–34). The sacrifices the LORD established were opportunities for Him to commune with His people, but if His people were “checked out,” the offerings were in vain.
Find out what it means to Me: R-e-s-p-e-c-t
Another lesson from Acharei Mot–Kedoshim is Heaven calls us to recognize and respect God’s boundaries and the boundaries of our family and neighbors. This is something that the sons of Aaron failed to appreciate, and their disrespect toward God caused their deaths (Leviticus 10).
The first offering the High Priest made on Yom Kippur was for himself and his family (Leviticus 16). The priests did not have a “multi-pass” to be able to waltz into the Most Holy Place anytime they wanted to do so just because of who they were or the special clothes they wore. They approached by invitation only.
When God tells us to love your neighbors as yourself, this includes keeping boundaries in our relationships. God tells us not to behave like animals. We may have some biological similarities to animals but we are not animals. We are made in God’s image. But our culture encourages us to act like animals and it’s come to the point that in some countries such as Japan, people no longer want to engage in any sort of interpersonal relationships at all because they have become so repulsed by the kinds of bestial behaviors that western cultures exalt in popular media.
God gave us taste buds so we can distinguish various tastes and flavors, and also gave us noses to smell various fragrances, but the question is this, are we in control or our senses or do they control us? We are called on by God to master our impulses, not just the sexual impulses, but all other impulses as well.
What does holiness look like?
Leviticus 19 tells us what holiness looks like, and thus is often called the “holiness code.” The Apostle Paul also did a deep dive to explain in his first letter to his gentile audience on Corinth what unrighteousness is (1Cor. 6:9–20). Paul also reminded us that we all were once unrighteous until God called us out of the kingdom of this world and into His Kingdom.
The word translated as “unrighteous” in 1Cor. 6:9 in both the NASB and KJV is the Greek word ἄδικος adikos (Strong’s lexicon No. G94), which according to the Thayer lexicon means “descriptive of one who violates or has violated justice.” The word we might use to describe a person who violates just is a criminal. We all are criminals. We were criminals when we first heard God’s call to come back to Him, His call of repentance.
Romans 7 says that we all have failed to live up to God’s standards, we are all criminals against the standards of God. We were all criminals against God, we have all broken His law. We all used to wallow in the mud like pigs, but God calls us to obey and follow His law and has cleaned us from the filth of the world.
In 1Cor. 6:11, we see the Apostle Paul uses the word “justified” (NASB, etc.) translated from δικαιόω dikaioō (G1344) which means either “to declare, pronounce, one to be just, righteous, or such as he ought to be” (Thayer lexicon) or “to cause someone to be released from personal or institutional claims that are no longer to be considered pertinent or valid, to make free/pure” (BDAG lexicon).
Dikaioō is the reverse of adikos. In Greek, the letter a in front of a word changes the definition of the word to be its opposite. For example a theist is someone who believes there is a God, while an atheist is someone who does not believe God exists. The Greek version of the Hebrew Bible, called the Septuagint, translates the Hebrew word tzadek (“righteous”) with dikaioō.
This is an issue we’ve been exploring in our current Romans study. When the Bible says that Heaven has “justified” us — has declared us not guilty — this is hard for our finite minds to grasp because it’s clear from the Scriptures that means it’s gone.
For example, the Torah says that Noach (Noah) was “righteous in his generation” (Gen. 6:9). When God refers to people like Noah or even Lot as “righteous” (2Pet. 2:7), many of us who read this are confused because the same Torah accounts record some very questionable things these men did. But holiness (literally, apartness) and righteousness (living in a right way) are not synonymous with sinlessness. All have sinned, except Yeshua, but all mankind also have the invitation to righteousness (walk God’s Way) and holiness (be separated from the ways of the not-God world).
Yeshua calls on His disciples “…to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” (Matthew 5:48 NASB)
We all have different backgrounds and different life experiences that were often unrighteous, so when God declares us righteous and justified, how are we to live? How should we respond to the leniency of God?
He didn’t lower the bar, He raised it, not because we can earn His gift of salvation but because we want to respond to His mercy with love. We want to live in the way that the One who loves us the most wants us to live.
We should live in such a way that we understand how merciful God was towards us and we should never desire to return to our prior way of life. But if we do fall into old ways, we have an advocate, our Messiah, who understands the human experience and He extends mercy and encourages us to return to the new way of life. He tells u s that the old way of life has no future for us.
Parallels between Leviticus 19 and Exodus 20
| Leviticus 19 | Exodus 20 |
|---|---|
| “You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy.” (Lev. 19:2 NASB) | “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before Me.” (Ex. 20:2–3 NASB) |
| “Do not turn to idols or make for yourselves molten gods; I am the LORD your God.” (Lev. 19:4 NASB) | “You shall not make for yourself an idol, or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water under the earth.” (Ex. 20:4 NASB) |
| “You shall not swear falsely by My name, so as to profane the name of your God; I am the LORD.” (Lev. 19:12 NASB) | “You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain, for the LORD will not leave him unpunished who takes His name in vain.” (Ex. 20:7 NASB) |
| “you shall keep My sabbaths”(Lev. 19:3 NASB) | “Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.” (Ex. 20:8 NASB) |
| “Every one of you shall reverence [יָרֵא yareh: “fear”] his mother and his father’” (Lev. 19:3 NASB) | “Honor [כָּבֵד kavod] your father and your mother, that your days may be prolonged in the land which the LORD your God gives you.” (Ex. 20:12 NASB) |
| “you are not to act against the life of your neighbor” (Lev. 19:16 NASB) | “You shall not murder.” (Ex. 20:13 NASB) |
| “Now if a man lies carnally with a woman who is a slave acquired for another man, but who has in no way been redeemed nor given her freedom, there shall be punishment; they shall not, however, be put to death, because she was not free.” (Lev. 19:20 NASB) | “You shall not commit adultery.” (Ex. 20:14 NASB) |
| “You shall not steal, nor deal falsely, nor lie to one another. … You shall not oppress your neighbor, nor rob him.” (Lev. 19:11, 13 NASB) | “You shall not steal. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife or his male servant or his female servant or his ox or his donkey or anything that belongs to your neighbor.”” (Ex. 20:15–17 NASB) |
What we often see in the world, that the false “deities” or demi-gods our ancestors worshiped, in their stories and myths, they strongly believed that they could tap into the truth by tapping into the energies of nature, such as the sun, moon, trees, etc. We find plenty of evidence of this in archaeology that pretty much every nation group made idols of their favorite deities, and even in the land of Israel, they made small figurines and full statutes and placed God’s name on them, against His explicit command.
The instructions of God are simple but also have many layers of meaning.
Golden Rule: ‘Love your neighbor’
“You shall not hate your fellow countryman in your heart; you may surely reprove your neighbor, but shall not incur sin because of him. You shall not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the sons of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself; I am the LORD.”
Leviticus 19:17–18 NASB
The context of a verse helps you understand the meaning and also can jog your memory. If you look back to the Founders of our county, they quote from the Scriptures all the time, often without citations. In those days, people memorized entire section of scripture so when they quoted a smaller passage, the readers immediately recalled the greater passage the quote pulls from.
When God says not to hate your countryman in your heart, He is telling us not to have malice against our neighbor, but we are told to warn them of the error of their ways with love and compassion. We are called to reprove them without sinning ourselves, we don’t want to be complicit in their sin by simply watching as they go off the cliff.
God also warns us not to allow any malice we have not to fester and destroy ourselves, this is what holding onto grudges will do, destroy us from the inside out.
As Heaven is willing to forgive us at least 490 times (Matt. 18:21–22; Luke 17:3–4), we should be willing to purge our hearts of grudges and forgive others. Forgiveness is not just for others, it’s also for ourselves.
Does proclaiming what Heaven declares to be holy make us “holier than thou”? How do we look at the log in our eye before looking at the speck in someone else’s eye? We are to consistently examine ourselves, our sins, our motives. We have to remind ourselves what God has done for us so we can extend that mercy to other people.
There are wrong motives for pointing to the problems of others such as, using the sins of others to make them feel lower than us. Do we seek to make others feel lower so we can feel higher? Do we want to extend dominion over others, to control them? The only motive that will reach someone intrenched in sin is when our only motive is genuine concern.
The LORD created us in His image, as male and female (Gen. 1:26–27). He made animals and made them good, but we are not animals. We were made to have a connection with Him, and even when Adam and Eve decided to find out what is good and what is wrong in their own way, rather than God’s way, God still loved His creation.
Even when His image-bearers preferred to worship idols rather than Him, in the midst of our impurity, He came down to wash our impurity away and promised to remember them no more. Even if you come back 490 times for cleansing, He is willing to extend forgiveness and mercy (1John 1:9; 2:1–2).
Summary: Tammy