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You're listening to audio from Faith Church Indy. This Lent we're studying the book of Leviticus, learning about how imperfect people can have a relationship with a perfect God. Now here's the teaching. 

This morning we'll be reading from Leviticus chapter 11 verses 1 through 8 and verses 46 and 47 and then chapter 20 verses 25 and 26. And the Lord spoke to Moses and Aaron saying to them, speak to the people of Israel saying, these are the living things that you may eat among all the animals that are on the earth. Whatever parts of the hoof and is cloven-footed and chews the cud among the animals you may eat. 

Nevertheless among those that chew the cud or part to the hoof you shall not eat these. The camel because it chews the cud and does not part the hoof is unclean to you. And the rock badger because it chews the cud but does not part the hoof is unclean to you.

And the hare because it chews the cud but does not part the hoof is unclean to you. And the pig because it parts the hoof and is cloven-footed but does not chew the cud is unclean to you. You shall not eat any of their flesh and you shall not touch their carcasses. 

They are unclean to you. This is the law about beast and bird and every living creature that moves through the waters and every creature that swarms on the ground. To make a distinction between the unclean and the clean and between the living creature that may be eaten and the living creature that may not be eaten. 

Chapter 20. You shall therefore make this you must you shall therefore separate the clean beast from the unclean and the unclean bird from the clean. You shall not make yourselves detestable by beast or by bird or by anything with which the ground crawls which I have set apart for you to hold unclean. 

You shall be holy to me for I the Lord am holy and have separated you from the peoples that you should be mine. This is the word of the Lord. All right, by show of hands, how many of you like bacon? All right, not very often you get to open a sermon with hey who likes to violate God's laws? And the whole church feels safe, just putting their hands in the air. 

Maybe we should get into the word. We're in Leviticus chapter 11 this week if you want to open your Bibles but you probably already know, you're safe, you're aware that the New Testament makes it abundantly clear that these dietary restrictions are no longer binding on us today. Mark 7, Jesus says to his followers it's not what goes into the body that makes it unclean but what comes out. 

Matt read that for us as we were worshiping. In Acts 10, Peter's given a vision where there's a whole smorgasbord of these same animals that were just read to be unclean and he's told eat it, right? But Peter's more like a toddler in a high chair being spoon-fed peas going mm-mm, mm-mm. He eventually got it but he really struggled with it to the degree that even years later in Galatia he was still trying to adhere to some of these purity laws, these old-fashioned purity laws and Paul had to call him out because it was creating a barrier to the unclean people outside of the Jewish community coming to know God's grace. 

So if Jesus says forget about it and sorry, Peter was told to take an E and Paul confronts Peter for being wrong for still trying to follow some of them in public places, why aren't we reading them today and what can we still study from these ancient texts that are not only antiquated, they are specifically set aside by the New Covenant? Well, God doesn't change. We know that he doesn't have evolving and shifting priorities like I do, right? Like I might start a day telling the kids, hey we're gonna have a healthy day today, no junk food. Six hours later I'm the one in the basement popping popcorn. 

The kids are like, that didn't last long, did it dad? No, no it didn't. God doesn't have, he's not fickle, he doesn't have shifting priorities like that. He doesn't get a little edgy, maybe I was hungry that morning, right, and then to lay out some harsh rules only to later feel like it's not worth the effort to enforce those and then walk it back. 

That's not how God works. So what do we make of this? Well, to understand what's going on, first we need to understand what these laws were intended to do in the first place and then how Jews in the time of Jesus, Peter, and Paul had misconstrued them and misapplied them so badly that they not only weren't serving their original purpose but they were hindering God's purposes to call the world to him. So as what was the original intent? Let's start there. 

I commend to you this, the dietary laws were an object lesson, okay? They were a daily reminder in the simple matters of life that pointed to something deeper and more profound. They were something more profound than just the nutrition of pork and lobster, okay? It was a way of living differently, conspicuously set apart, conspicuously differently that served to instruct and constantly remind Israel that they were in ways far more significant than just their diet, different than the world around them. In a world where disorder, chaos, disruption, corruption, violence, where disorder is common, God's people are called to live an uncommon life. 

So we've been studying together Leviticus through this lent season in anticipation of Easter when, unironically, we will all gather and eat ham. We've been studying the book of Leviticus together using this structure called a chiasm, where the climax of the book is in the middle, that's the day of atonement, chapter 16, okay? And this chiastic structure means that things in the front half of the book correlate to corresponding passages from the back half of the scroll. So we've been using a metaphor of a hike, where we're hiking up to this summit, okay? And on the ascent, we've been calling the front half of the book the ascending passages. 

We find passages that are a whole lot more inclined toward ceremonial ritual purity, okay? We're going to see that clearly in today's text and over the next two to three weeks, okay? We're going to be seeing that very clearly. The front half, the ascent of the mountain, is really interested in ceremonial purity. On the back half, after we have seen the summit and we have experienced the day of atonement, which we all have in Christ, right? On the back half of the scroll, we find the same topics visited in a much more lived-out way, in ways that have to do with forming a just society, okay? So we're going to see that same kind of pairing going on this week, and this time the descending text from the latter half of the scroll is very short. 

So if you just keep a finger in Leviticus 11 to hold your place, you can flip with me if you want to for a second, we'll be very briefly in chapter 20. I just want to look at a few verses there, because it's a very short clip this week. So verse 22, chapter 20, verse 22, you shall therefore keep all my statutes and all my rules and do them in the land, or sorry, that the land that I am bringing you to to live may not vomit you out, and you shall not walk in the customs of the nation that I'm driving out. 

What are those customs he's referring to? Well, that's where we're headed. Over the next couple of weeks, we are going to see just how corrupt the nations around Israel really were. We're gonna find out that they had customs, laws, rules, the way that their societies were ordered, that were, they were not merely rebellious toward God, or ignorant of his rule, they were destructive, and destroying, they're harmful to mankind. 

But this week, we're gonna look at something much more mundane, food. So God continues in verse 24, I am the Lord your God who has separated you from the peoples. You shall therefore separate the clean beast from the unclean, the unclean bird from the clean. 

You shall not make yourselves detestable by beast or by bird or anything with which the ground crawls, which I have set apart for you to hold unclean. You shall be holy to me, for I the Lord am holy and have separated you from the peoples, that you should be mine. So there you have it, God had separated Israel from other nations, so like I said earlier, this was a sort of object lesson for them to separate out clean from unclean food. 

It was kind of basic, each time that you would pass by and turn down bacon being sold in the marketplace, every time that you were a traveler in a port city, and you could smell the lobster cooking, right, but you turned that down, every time that maybe there was a traveler coming through your community, and you showed them hospitality, they just wanted to return the favor by offering you a gift, and it's rock badger, whatever that is. You politely decline, and you're reminded, yep, God has separated us from the people around us, so we separate clean from unclean. In a world where disorder is common, you live an uncommon life. 

Now I want to pause before we get into some of the details of these dietary restrictions and what they mean to address somewhat of a basic question, but it's really important. What is unclean exactly? This is key. Unclean does not mean sin, and that is very important to understand, and it's really easy for us to get it mixed up, but unclean, being unclean doesn't mean you are sinful.

That's key, because if you've read ahead, or as you do, you're going to find things like childbirth makes you unclean, and then as you keep reading, you will find that there are all sorts of bodily functions that are normal, unavoidable, and render a person unclean, and if you have conflated unclean with sinning, then you could really come away with the wrong idea. So what is the idea then? Well, here we go. Clean and unclean describe whether something reflects the order of God's good design, or whether it reflects the world warped after the fall. 

Let me repeat that. Clean and unclean describe whether something is a reflection of the original, good, ordered design of God's good creation, or whether it is a reflection of the disorder after the fall, when the world fell into disarray and disintegration. As a designation then, it describes something's or someone's fitness or unfitness to draw near to God, to God's presence, based not on morality, okay, but whether something is reflecting the wholeness of a good creation, or whether it is reflecting the corruption that infects the fallen world.

Fitness or unfitness, reflection of God's original created wholeness, or reflection of the fallen creation corruption, that's how we ought to think about this. Several years ago, one of our kids was peeling carrots, and they did it into the sink because we have a garbage disposal. Yeah, somebody already, some of you already know where this is going, right? And if you don't, then this sermon will leave for you one life-changing, very monumental truth that you need to take away. 

You cannot put peels on a garbage disposal. It'll plug your drains. Now I own a snake, that's a plumbing tool to unclog drains, but it's one that cheap one that I picked up at Lowe's, it's not very long. 

So this clog, evidently, was further down the pipes than my tool was able to reach. I'm also, as I mentioned, cheap, so I didn't want to hire a plumber, and I came up with what I thought, what I thought was a brilliant idea. I want you to picture my wife's face when she walked into the kitchen to find me at the kitchen sink with a toilet plunger. 

Something or someone is unclean in Leviticus when they're in a state that is associated with, or reflective of, the disorder after the fall, not fit to enter God's presence. So plungers aren't sinful. Plungers are great in the bathroom, not in the kitchen. 

Like work boots are great outside, but not inside. Your toothbrush is great in your mouth, but not mine. When it becomes a moral issue, however, when it becomes moral is ignoring uncleanliness. 

That's when it becomes a moral issue. The plunger was not a sinful plunger. It was sin for me, so Kendra made very clear, to bring the unclean plunger into the clean kitchen. 

Leviticus deals with that exact concept, right? So, for example, burying your dead relative makes you unclean, but that's not sinful. That's necessary. You don't want to live in a house where your neighbors are like, hey, how come you never opened that bedroom door anymore? That's where Uncle Al died. 

No, you got to deal with this, right? That's not sin. What's sin is like waltzing into the tabernacle, you know, and like, sorry I'm late. What did I miss? No, no, no, no.

You were unclean. This is key, though. Unclean requires cleansing, not repentance. 

Let me say that again. Being unclean requires cleansing, not repentance. After you bury your dead relative, you need to be cleansed before you can walk back into the tabernacle. 

After I plunged our kitchen sink, it had to be bleached before we could make dinner. It worked. I always like to point that out. 

But this brings us back to the animals. So some animals are clean, some are unclean. Some are fit for the Israelite who's part of God's family and living by God's laws. 

Some are not, and the animals themselves aren't sinful. They're unclean. Refusing to separate, however, refusal to separate the unclean because it's too much of a hassle or because bacon tastes really good, okay, or because you just don't really see the point.

That's wrong. Why? Well, for starters, it is inherently disorderly for the creature, that's us, to say to the creator, I don't really want to follow your rules. I don't see the point. 

I'm not going to do it. If you recall, that was the original disordering. That's the original temptation in the garden. 

When the serpent said to Eve, you won't surely die. You will reorder yourself, be like God. And the disorder that followed which now draws a line between clean and unclean. 

In a world where disorder is common, God's people are to live an uncommon life. But that still doesn't really answer the question, does it? I mean, what was unclean? What was unfit? What was unbecoming, unreflective of God's creation, God's good creation in foods like bacon or lobster or rodents? Okay, the rodents we get, right? But lobster's good. Bacon is better. 

Bacon-wrapped lobster, let's go. Okay, so Dr. Mary Douglas, PhD from Oxford. She was a Christian anthropologist. 

She was a professor at Northwestern and then later at Princeton. She studied this aspect of ancient Near Eastern culture in depth. And after looking at how she framed it, I'm persuaded she's got a very helpful, the right reading of this. 

So here's what she said. The dietary rules are based on the classification of animals according to their proper sphere in creation. Animals which do not conform to their type or kind. 

So I'll recall, that's the language in Genesis 1. God created each according to their kind. So animals which don't conform to their kind are unclean. The animals that are clean, okay, they operate harmoniously in the created order.

They're like the best of their kind, okay? Sheep and a pasture, they work together. Sheep for example. Or there's a kind, there's a type, there's a pattern for a fish. 

What a fish should do, how it should look, how it should behave, what it does. So just imagine if you will, the very first time that a human, a fisherman, hoists up his load, he unloads the net into the boat and he's sorting through the fish and he feels a pinch and he pulls his hand up and there's this reddish water spider on him with big spindly legs. What is this doing here? Doesn't belong. 

Doesn't fit a crab or a lobster, doesn't fit the type. And we're not just talking about neat, tidy compliance. It goes a little deeper than that.

God created everything good, okay? So clean animals, they aren't invasive or destructive. I mentioned there's a design for how a sheep and a pasture works, okay? I mean, the sheep eat the grass, the sheep feed the grass, okay? Pigs destroy it all. Pigs are very destructive.

They root it up. They actually don't even eat very much grass. They're somewhat of omnivores.

They'll hunt things down. They'll eat snakes. They're predators. 

They don't fit the order. They're destructive. And as literature goes, subtle wording is significant. 

So in Genesis 1, God created the birds to swarm in the air, swarm, and the fish to swarm in the waters below, okay? And we see that. Schools of fish and flocks of birds. There was nothing in Genesis 1 that was created to swarm on the earth. 

Leviticus 11.44 says, do not defile yourselves with any swarming thing that crawls on the ground. And that wording was designed to give the original readers the heebie-jeebies, okay? I mean, clean animals, they don't, they're not nuisance animals. They don't infest like rats or like snakes or like cockroaches. 

And lastly, clean animals aren't associated with death. The disorder that ensued after Adam and Eve sinned, it brought thorns, thistles, and death. And so animals that are scavengers or predators that either cause death or feed on death, they are unclean. 

Now, there have been recent explanations that have been offered of a more scientific nature. They seem more rational to us. For example, crustaceans, because they are scavengers under the sea, they have like bacteria and fungus that grows on their shells and they can cause sickness if sanitation isn't done right. 

Pork, you might know this or maybe not. It has a pathogen in it. It's actually a small parasite called trichina, okay? And so you have to properly cook pork or you could risk getting trichina, trichnosis, which is why you can't go order a pork chop, medium rare. 

It's not safe. You can't do that. Now, I don't think that kind of modern rational explanation fits the context. 

We also should be careful about taking our modern way of thinking, our scientific way of thinking, and then applying it on ancient literature. I mean, for one thing, pork didn't stop carrying trichina when Jesus rose from the dead, okay? So if merely hygiene and food safety was the only concern, then it doesn't make sense for these laws to change when what changed in the New Covenant is cultural context but not biology. And I want to point something else out in the text. 

There's this phrase, maybe you noticed it, I am the Lord. It's found over and over again in Leviticus. It's like a punctuation mark or God's, you know, signature stamp. 

He'll say, do this, I am the Lord. Don't do this, I am the Lord. You're going to find this as you read this week's and next week's passages, you find it over and over and over again. 

It's actually, by my count, it's 56 times in Leviticus, I am the Lord, appears as this punctuation. But here we are in chapter 11, this is where it shows up for the very first time. Shows up for the first time in chapter 11 with these dietary laws. 

11 verse 43, you shall not defile yourselves with them and become unclean through them for I am the Lord. Consecrate yourselves therefore and be holy for I am holy. You shall not defile yourselves with any swarming thing that crawls on the ground for I am the Lord. 

Here's the point, see, if a Canaanite came to an Israelite and said, hey, how come you don't buy our bacon? It's good bacon. The Israelite would say, they wouldn't reply to the Canaanite like, well, have you heard of trichnosis? No, they would say, Yahweh, the Lord, has commanded us not to eat it. So we separate clean from unclean. 

And if that Canaanite pressed them like we might be inclined to do, pushed in a little more and said, no, no, wait, hold on. A rule that strict, certainly there has to be some rational, logical reason behind it. There has to be a reason behind a rule like that. 

What's the reason? And the Israelite would respond, oh, yes, there is a reason. You see, God has separated us from, well, golly, this is awkward, you. And so he's taught us to remember that by separating clean from unclean in our food. 

And if that sounds a little rude or harsh, just say that to a Canaanite, listen, the animals which God marked off as clean were ones that fit neatly into their place in his designed order without introducing death, chaos, disruption. And the nations around Israel did not fit themselves into God's good designed order. They caused chaos, death, disruption, subversion to serve their own interests at the expense of others, sometimes with others. 

We're talking about slavery and injustice. And God looks at that way of ordering society and he likens it to the disgust that we have for rats that infest and destroy and eat. God says, I am the Lord your God who has separated you from the peoples, you shall therefore separate the clean beast from the unclean. 

And you'd be right to wonder, okay, food, the world, you just told me that the world's disintegrating into war, famine, and slavery, and God is going to concern himself first with how we eat? This seems a little bit trivial. This seems mundane. It seems like he may have more important things to focus on. 

We're not always keen on the idea of God getting involved in the minutia of our lives, are we? I think that actually may have been the point. One of the commentators that I've looked at, his name's Derek John Tidball, and he puts it like this, a God whose presence was felt in the kitchen was not a God you could marginalize, keep confined to a compartment of life marked spiritual, or serve only at special times designated for worship. He was a God who reigned over the totality of life and was to be served at all times and in all places. 

It's here with food of all things that God begins this other refrain that I know you've heard before. It's repeated again and again throughout Leviticus, be holy for I am holy. This phrase is used throughout Leviticus, it's used throughout the New Testament as well, and it's here in this context where it appears for the first time in Scripture. 

In chapter 11, it's repeated twice at the end of chapter 11 as the purpose behind these laws, and in this corresponding passage later in chapter 20, it's repeated, you shall be holy to me for I the Lord am holy and have separated you from the peoples that you should be mine. In a world where disorder is common, live an uncommon life, live a holy life, even in the mundane things like food, except we eat bacon now. We still don't use toilet plungers in the kitchen, I'm told, that's a timeless truth, but bacon, lobster, cheeseburgers, all of these things are fair game, so what happened, and what, if anything, can we still apply out of this text? Well, what happened is somewhat simple. 

1,500 years after God had originally given these laws to Israel, they sort of lost the plot, they forgot the main point that they were supposed to learn. They forgot that they were set apart as holy to, as Nathan taught us last week from last week's text, to mediate God's holiness to the rest of his creation. No, Israel forgot, and they missed the point, they thought then that the ultimate point, the end, was to be clean. 

They thought that the cleanliness and the separation was the end in and of itself, and so when they convinced themselves of that, then they saw, look, getting associated with anything that's unclean, right, like outside of God's people, would be bad, could take away their cleanliness, so they were creating barriers to the very people that God wanted to reach to coming and knowing his grace. That was never the point, so Jesus brought them back to the original spirit behind the letter of the law. In Matthew 15, Jesus said, it's not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out. 

And before we think like, oh good, we're really glad those laws are gone now, I just want you to realize that Jesus' words make this harder, not easier. Alright, the dietary laws as a way of being separate are no longer enforced, but Peter, in his first letter, he quotes Leviticus, be holy as I am holy. He takes that and he directly applies that to the church after Jesus. 

He calls us today to live holy as God is holy, which begs the question, if not food, then what are the distinctives that still mark Christians as separated? Each generation seems to have had their own lists, haven't they? And each next generation tends to disagree. A few generations back, maybe you'd heard the old adage of, don't drink, dance, or chew, or go with girls who do. I can still remember the wrath that befell me the day that I brought a deck of cards to youth group. 

Yeah, I just wanted to play euchre, I wasn't like setting up a casino in the church, but that was taboo, that was unclean to a different generation. After first hour, somebody actually reminded me, in jest, they weren't upset, but like, you realize, Nick, you're on stage with no tie, no jacket, and your shirt's not even tucked in. Thanks, that's a great reminder. 

There have been in recent decades distinctly Christian approaches to things like education, finance, courtship, household debt, entertainment, and of course we can't forget the Christian taboos on things like tattoos, piercing, hairstyles, clothing styles. These have all been at one time or another proxies for the kind of cultural distinctive that would signal to the world we are separated. And I can tell you're nervous. 

You're like, all right, great, the conservative dad on stage, he probably has a K-love preset on his radio, he's about to give us his list. Relax, I'm not. I'm just going to ask you this. 

Let's say I did. Would that bother you? Why? In a world where disorder is common, living an uncommon life means a life submitted and aligned to God's order, what is it in us that doesn't want to conform to the kind but define the kind? Why do I not want to align to God's order? Why do I want to define my own order? Clean animals, remember, are those that their lives reflected a peaceful fit into the role that God had designed for them? Are we unable to trust that it is indeed good to submit ourselves to God's design? Or do we want God's grace to be ordered around our desires and our wishes? So much so that if a deck of cards or if a bottle of bourbon or if your favorite

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