Parting Comments

Well, there you have it, folks.  We've arrived at the end point, the last page, the conclusion.  We've explored all the rooms of the tabernacle - the outer court, the sanctuary, the holiest place - and here we stand, flanked by justice and redemption with the promises of the covenant soaring above our heads.  We have seen how we are to approach the presence of YHWH and bring our sacrifices and offerings.  We've seen how covenant holiness is defined by the community who would host the electric presence of a holy God - how it defines what we eat, how we dress, how we live among one another and the creatures that are our neighbors.  We've learned about boundaries, about purity, and about why these things matter in our approach to God.  We've seen that God's covenant with the people of faith involves not just God-to-human interactions, but human-to-human, human-to-animal, and human-to-land.

What now?

I really just have one final observation to make in conclusion.  Do you remember how the first 17 chapters composed the "perimeter" of the outer court - defining the sacrificial system and purity system?  We might say that that first (roughly) half was about things that pertain to our approach to the presence of God - it's about worship, about loving God above all else and doing it in a tangible, real way.

And then chapters 18-27 are the holiness code - as this section began to define what justice and integrity are, we were able to get closer and closer to God.  Entering smaller and smaller spaces of imagined rooms, fewer chapters, and smaller units, what we read increasingly had to do with how we treat those around us - embodying YHWH's righteousness toward our families, our neighbors, our slaves, our animals, and our land.  And we learned that none of it is really ours.

So in a sense, we might say that when we are furthest away from the outside, the movement is in - toward the holy place, toward the presence of God through the worship that is expressed - moving "further up and further in."  And when we get where we're going, as far as we possibly can go, what we find is that we cannot stay there but must move back out into the world to extend the justice and righteousness of YHWH to the entire created order.  We find that,

"Even going as far as we can go into the interior of the tabernacle, expecting to unveil its secrets, what we find is no secret: still, only and always, the justice of God and his fidelity to the covenants he made with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob."

Worship and justice.  Loving and serving.

This double-movement of Leviticus is, in a sense, what we do every week when we gather as a community at worship.  We come, bringing ourselves and our offerings "at the entrance of the tabernacle," knowing that as we come we are drawing near to the place that is somehow specially God's own house.  We hear the word read and proclaimed, and as we do we are formed into the kind of people that mirror God's very nature in the devotion we express through our relationships with each other and with everything else in the created order.  We respond by celebrating our communion with YHWH through which we have communion with one another, as that great, mysterious symbol that we live into without knowing how to express it in words.  And then we are sent out to love and to serve, to be the image-bearers of YHWH's righteousness, justice, and holiness - to extend that vision from the the throne of God out through all creation.

We already saw how Jesus' response to the question about which is the greatest commandment drew on Deuteronomy 6 and Leviticus 19 to coin what Scot McKnight calls, "the Jesus Creed."  And here we find that Leviticus is about nothing less -

Love God.  Love each other.

*If any of you have any questions about things you'd like clarification on, topics it may have been helpful to address more fully over the course of the study, or just general observations, I'd love to hear your thoughts.  Please reply below!