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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.

But first, if all of you would stand with me as we read scripture from today. If you have your journals, it is on page 16, and we'll be reading from chapters 13 and 19. Chapter 13.

The Lord spoke to Moses and Aaron saying, when a person has on the skin of his body a swelling or an eruption or a spot, and it turns into a case of leprous disease on the skin of his body, then he shall be brought to Aaron the priest or to one of his sons of the priests, and the priest shall examine the diseased area on the skin of his body. And if the hair in the diseased area has turned white and the disease appears to be deeper than the skin of his body, it is a case of leprous disease. When the priest has examined him, he shall pronounce him unclean.

The leprous person who has the disease shall wear torn clothes and let the hair of his head hang loose, and he shall cover his upper lip and cry out, unclean, unclean. He shall remain unclean as long as he has the disease. He is unclean.

He shall live alone. His dwelling shall be outside the camp. Chapter 19.

When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap your field right up to its edge, neither shall you gather the gleanings after your harvest, and you shall not strip your vineyard bare, neither shall you gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard. You shall leave them for the poor and for the sojourner. I am the Lord your God.

You shall not steal. You shall not deal falsely. You shall not lie to one another.

You shall not swear by my name falsely, and so profane the name of your God. I am the Lord. You shall not oppress your neighbor or rob him.

The wages of a hired worker shall not remain with you all night until the morning. You shall not curse the deaf or put a stumbling block before the blind, but you shall fear your God. I am the Lord.

You shall do no injustice in court. You shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great, but in righteousness shall you judge your neighbor. You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not stand up against the life of your neighbor.

I am the Lord. You shall not hate your brother in your heart, but you shall reason frankly with your neighbor, lest you incur sin because of him. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself.

I am the Lord. This is the word of the Lord. All right.

Well, as you go ahead and open your Bibles, turn to chapter, or sorry, Leviticus chapter 19. It helps if I tell you the book. Leviticus chapter 19.

As you flip there, I want you to listen to this commendation from a retired Dallas Theological Seminary professor, Dr. Thomas Constable. He writes, Leviticus 19 has been called the highest development of ethics in the Old Testament. This chapter, perhaps better than any other in the Bible, explains what it means or what it meant for Israel to be a holy nation.

A holy nation. Be holy as I am holy. That's where we left off last week as we were unpacking the dietary restrictions in the law.

Right? Those seemingly tedious rules that served to teach Israel in ways more profound than just their food, that they were indeed separated from the world around them. In a world where disorder is common, God's people were to live uncommon lives. And that line between unclean and clean, if you recall, it marked out whether an animal fit neatly into God's design or not.

The animals that were invasive, that were destructive, or that were associated with death, like predators or scavengers, they were unclean because they were reflections of the disorder that came into the world after the fall, not the original good creation. That delineation served to remind Israel then that they had been separated out of the disorder and the chaos and the death and the destructive forces that kind of ruled the nations around them, nations that ordered themselves in opposition to God's good design. So clean, reflective of the wholeness of God's good creation, and unclean, reflective of the disintegration that sin had brought.

But and this is key to remember as we study this week and next week, unclean is not the same thing as being sinful. We talked about that last week. Something that has been touched by or is impacted by or is reflective of the disorder that we find around us does not mean that it has sinned or that it is a sinner.

Unclean wasn't a punishment, it wasn't a sentence that was declared on somebody. It was simply a recognition that in the world we live in today, after the fall and before the resurrection, it is inevitable we are going to come into contact, we're going to be impacted by the disorder that we live amongst. And this week that point is going to get even more personal as we start to look at what it meant to examine the destructive power, the decaying, the disintegrating power of this group of diseases, these infectious diseases that the Hebrews lumped all together in one big category and called by one name, tzara'oth, which is leprosy.

If you've been following the chiastic structure that we've been using in this sermon series, where we're pairing a passage from the front half of the scroll with a corresponding passage from the back half as they emanate out from the climax, which is the day of atonement, we'll be there on Easter, these concentric rings, then you might have noticed that we skipped a chapter. After dietary laws in chapter 11, and then we go straight to chapter 13, there is a chapter 12, we didn't forget it, it's not an accident, it's this wrinkle in that structure that we've put together, it's a very intentional wrinkle, and I got really excited about telling you guys all about it this morning, and then I realized that a lecture on literary structure might not be the best material for sermons, so it has been cut for time, which means that if you want to learn about that kind of stuff, you have to tune into our midweek podcast, where we can geek out on that structure stuff, I'll just, here's the short version, Leviticus 19 is about justice, okay, we're gonna see that in a minute, and this wrinkle, as I'm calling it, this braid in the structure, it points to the fact that justice is at the heart of God's design for how we deal with the poor, for how we try court cases, for how we love our neighbors, how we deal fairly with people, but it's also, justice is also at the core of God's design for the covenant of marriage, and the act that's at the center of that covenant. Now, that's all I'm gonna say on that, because that's Jeff's sermon for next week, and I don't wanna preach his sermon for him today, I just wanted to point out two things, one, I didn't just forget about a chapter and skip it, but two, also, just how this structure and how this concept is developing in the book of Leviticus, now, I had you open to chapter 19, and if you are looking at chapter 19, you might have noticed, I don't see leprosy in here, and you're right, give me a minute, you will, but leprosy is, leprosy is the topic of the ascending text, what we're calling them on the front half, okay, and so, if I thought that a lecture on literary structure was gonna be a pretty boring sermon, I guarantee you, we all did not wanna have a lecture on chapter 13 and 14, on how to tell the color of the hair and the boil, so, I'm just, for all of our sake, gonna summarize chapters 13 and 14 for you, we're gonna do a crash course on leprosy, and then we can dive into chapter 19, sound good? So leprosy in four minutes or less.

If you're an ancient Israelite, and you come up with a rash, you got a 50-50 chance whether it's the catching kind, yeah, is this gonna spread or not, and mind you, they had no concept of microbiology, okay, so is it a bacteria, is it fungus, is it just allergies, they did not know, and the disease that we today call leprosy, it's also called Hansen's disease, would have been one of any, like a hundred different kinds of ailments that they might have lumped together in this word, leprosy, but if they couldn't take a culture, run some labs, and discover what pathogen was causing this, or even know what in the world a pathogen is, they had a very simple test, they would isolate you for seven days, come back and check, did it spread, leprosy, that's it, that's the test, they ran the same test by the way on garments and houses, now your translations when you read chapter 14 might say mold, but in Hebrew, it's just the same word that they glump all of these ideas together, so like if you had a garment, like if you didn't let the dryer finish, you know, and it was still damp when you pulled it out, if you were in a hurry and you folded it up, you put it in the bottom of the drawer, you forget about it for a couple of weeks, come back and it's got some discoloration in it, listen, you're going to isolate that garment for seven days, come back and check, did it spread, if it spreaded, that's not a word, if it spread, leprosy, your robe has leprosy, if you notice some dots on a timber in your house or on the plaster and you kind of poke at it and it's a little soft, that's not good, what you're going to do is you're going to leave that house, you have to move out for guess how long, seven days, okay, you're going to come back and you're going to check, did it spread, leprosy, your house now has leprosy, now again, did the house or the garment or the person sin, no, that's not the implication at all, okay, they're unclean, they're not guilty, they just had no concept of where these rashes would come from, was it a disease or you're just allergic to camel hair, like they didn't necessarily know but they knew that whatever it was, it was reflective of the disorder of a world after the fall, you see, it's reflective of disorder so it's unclean and this is the difficult part, this is the sad part really, if you find yourself infected, it's no fault of your own and you isolate for seven days and it's spreading and you scrub and you wash and you change your clothes and it won't go away and you don't know what you did to deserve this or how you caught this, it doesn't matter because as little as they did know about pathology and infectious diseases, they knew one thing, if it had spread on you, then it could spread from you and this would have been devastating, it could have seemed unfair but because the destructive power of the disorder in the world that we live in today cannot be allowed to continue destroying, even if it's destroying you, chapter 13 verse 45 says, he shall wear torn clothes, let the hair of his head hang loose and he shall cover his upper lip, so he has to change his appearance as a warning sign to anybody else and if that's not enough, God's word continues, he shall cry out, unclean, unclean, he'll live alone, his dwelling place is outside the camp, there, that's leprosy and the conclusion is pretty simple, the effects of the fall, the deteriorating, disintegrating effects of a world now marred by sin, they're not fair, life-altering and even life-taking diseases, they aren't spread justly, disasters and accidents that can alter life, take life, they're not distributed equitably, in fact, they are the very picture of chaos and disorder and I think that that's key to understanding God's standard for justice as we dive into chapter 19, so I had you open your Bibles to chapter 19, let's take a quick look there, see what we find, I'm gonna jump in chapter, sorry, verse 10, don't strip your vineyard bare or gather your gleanings, leave them for the poor, well, aren't those grapes rightly mine? Yeah, is their poverty rightly theirs? Hmm, not so sure, verse 13, don't oppress your neighbor or rob him, are you stronger? Great, hey, might doesn't make right and the wages of a hired servant shall not remain with you all night, okay, so look, if they're hand-to-mouth, don't hold on to their wages until the next morning to guarantee yourself that your workforce shows back up, okay, that's not just, pay them what they're owed the day that you owe it, verse 14, don't curse the deaf, don't put a stumbling block before the blind, so basically, don't kick them while they're down, also don't take advantage, preying on the weak because you're strong, that's disordered, here's how I've come to think about it, if you own vineyards that you're picking, if you own fields that you're harvesting, if you have hired servants and you owe them wages, you're in the upper half, okay, and so if you have access and control of resources, you have two choices, you can either use that power to protect or to perpetrate, you can use resources that have been given to you to restore and redeem or to extract more and more and more, and the value that someone has to offer you should not be first on your mind either, so in verse 32, you shall stand up before the gray head and honor the face of an old man, even foreigners who clearly, they have no land, they have no wealth, they have no position or status in society, foreigners, you shall love him as yourself, verse 34, show respect because it's good to do so, not because they can or they might repay you in some way, there's more, verse 15, do no injustice in court, that sounds basic, read on, don't be partial to the poor or defer to the great, so there's a twist, right, favoring the rich, that's clearly injustice, okay, but guess what, so is favoring the poor, they may have fallen into poverty and that may be unfair but you can't fix injustice with injustice, you can't correct inequity with inequity, two wrongs don't make a right, right, tilting the scales against someone because they happen to be privileged, that's not justice either according to God's design, speaking of tilting scales, verse 36, you shall have just balances and just weights, adjust ephah and adjust hin, so those are units of weight or units of measure, it's like this, you would use them when you were trading product based on weight in the marketplace, they didn't have digital scales like my yourself checkout, so to transact, you didn't just need to have like Apple Pay in your purse, you actually carried around weights, right, but the question is do you have two different weights, a heavy one for when you're buying and a light one for when you're selling, that's not justice, you should have one. If it seems like I'm bouncing around like one justice themed soundbite to another, that's because this is kind of how the chapter is written, so I opened by quoting a scholar that you probably never heard of, I decided to inject here a quote from a scholar that you've probably heard of, Dr. Chester Wood, if you don't know him, he's been a longtime faith missionary and member here, he says this, I have never been able to fathom the structure of Leviticus 19, now that's not in any of Chet's published works, that's just in an email that he and I were trading this week, and I told him I'm gonna quote you in my sermon, I don't think he thought I was telling the truth, but it was very convenient for me to do so because I'm glad I got to quote him, this chapter is laid out in such a way that it's just like hot takes on justice and I couldn't figure out how to put it all together in the right order and so I got to quote somebody smarter than me that gave me permission to just do it like this, to make it even more disjointed, amid all of these various laws on justice also happen to be laws for religious devotion, so proper sacrifices in verse 5, keep the Sabbath, oh and don't use mediums or sorcerers, verse 30 and 31, and of course do not sacrifice your children to the pagan god Molech, chapter 20 verse 3, so there's actually, there's what's happening, there's a deeper integration going on here, another commentator Mark Rooker put it this way, this chapter stresses the interactive connection between responsibility to one's fellow man, that's clear that that's in the chapter, and religious piety, he says the two dimensions of life were never meant to be separated, theology and justice are inextricably linked, undefiled worship to Yahweh and undisrupted social order, those two dimensions can't be separated, the chapter may read like a disjointed collection of laws to us, it's not entirely without some structure, there's one phrase that's repeated over and over again in chapter 19, and it gives it a little bit of scaffolding, that phrase is the same one that we saw last week, I am the Lord, keep my Sabbaths, I am the Lord, no gods of cast metal, I am the Lord, don't gather the fallen grapes, leave them for the poor in this adjoiner, I am the Lord, God's character, his design, his wisdom, that's the logic behind these laws, the source and the barometer of justice, the source and barometer of justice is not our feelings, it is not human reason, it is not enlightened thinking, it's not the will of the masses, guys, justice is not democratically determined, justice flows from the creator's design for his creation, just laws then carry his signature stamp, I am the Lord, which means that for us, the church, hear me on this, this is unpopular but it's important to discuss, that there is no model of justice, there's no model of justice that surpasses the wisdom of God, no system is more enlightened, there's no philosophy that's more humane, okay, there is no movement that's more compassionate than the laws that we find revealed in God's Word, the creator God impresses his divine authority on his design for justice, he says, I am the Lord, so it's important to say this as we're talking about justice, you cannot build the kingdom without the king, 13 times this phrase, I am the Lord, it's repeated in chapter 19 from open to close and in a list of 13, what number is smack dab in the middle, don't say six and a half, seven, the seventh occasion of this phrase, I am the Lord, is going to be the central one and if you have learned anything from our series on Leviticus, being in the middle kind of matters, so where is the seventh occurrence, it's actually in verse 18 that we read, you shall love your neighbor as yourself, I am the Lord, does that sound familiar, it should because when the King, when Jesus Christ, when our Lord, the second Adam who came to live the ordered life that Adam could not and that we have not ever since then, when Jesus Christ our King was asked which is the greatest commandment, he got them ordered rightly, the first is to love the Lord your God, that cannot be passed over in a pursuit of what we might call social justice but the second is what, it is like it, love your neighbor as yourself, theology and justice they are inextricably linked and Jesus is quoting of chapter 19 verse 18 here, wasn't accidental, it wasn't random, he knew that this is the capstone of the chapter, that to love your neighbor as yourself sums up and encapsulates the heart behind all of these various commands for justice that we talked about moments ago, all of the law and the prophets, they hang on these but most of us don't have hired servants and if we do we're probably not paying them cash every day, I would bet you'd never bought an IFA of anything, I'm not sure any of us own any vineyards, maybe, I don't know, I didn't pull but if you do own a vineyard somewhere in the north suburbs of Indianapolis, I mean the poor don't live right next door to come and take the grapes as they need them, it seems as though we live in a society where justice is just arbitrated on our behalf, the Department of Weights and Measures guys is inspecting everything from the gas that gets pumped into your car to the digital scales at the Meijer self-checkout that weighed the grapes that you didn't glean, you bought them at the supermarket, your gleanings are taken straight out of your paycheck and I mean not even kidding we were burglarized on our farm not long ago but I'm never gonna meet the criminal who did this, okay, the only witnesses are my security cameras and as we speak there's a public defender and a prosecutor who are figuring out together a plea deal to figure out what the most just punishment is for this, it'll all get decided and I'll probably never meet these criminals, Leviticus 19 was written in a time and a culture where justice was more local, right, like that burglar might have been my neighbor and I would I would get him and I'd get all the rest of the neighbors together and we would together figure out how to meet out justice but in our context it seems like justice is something someone else does, makes happen and sends us the bill, when our concept of how justice is meted out boils down to footing the bill then it can seem like our only act and justice is to place the right order or to subcontract our just works to the right person, candidate, a party but guys when the central point, the theme of Leviticus 19 of this whole chapter is to love your neighbor you can't delegate that to a representative government, love your neighbor, you cannot elect someone to do that for you, we have been trained to think of justice in terms of systems, structural, we can be grateful that the redeeming power of the gospel has so influenced the world since the cross that in Western civilization the laws in our nation today for example they are while wildly imperfect they they image much more closely the concepts that we find in Leviticus 19 than the nations around Israel that were marked by total subjugation might makes right and injustices but when justice is summed up as loving our neighbor not just distribution of resources then the outworking of justice in the Christians life it's not structural it's relational and in that sense then it's still local so then let me ask you have you brought an unjust weights to your relationship have you demanded something of someone else an apology an acknowledgement and accommodation that you yourself would never be willing to give then you are carrying around two different ethos in your purse should I mean you may think that you're far too sensitive to persons with disabilities to curse the deaf or trip a blind person but there are a lot of other ways that people in our society today can't see you doing the evil to them has social media made it all too easy for you to speak to or of somebody with total disdain and cruelty because they will never see your face and you might not see theirs a faith church we have a history of caring for the foreigner and the sojourner but have you ever made someone who's making less than our minimum wage in a call center halfway around the world where English is their second language become the object of all of the frustrations of your day have you ever had interactions where you are demanding solutions from somebody else that you don't think you really owe dignity respect or even courtesy then you might not fully love the poor most of us are never going to take the stand in a courtroom we're not we see these things in crime drama only so how can we be bearing false witness but whose reputation do you chip away at behind their back what what crimes are on trial in the private conversations that you have yeah there's a lot of ways that we can bear false witness and we can judge unjustly have you chosen your friends are the people you invest in based on what they can do for you or what they can return to you and who advances your career who increases your status who's just makes your life easier to be around Leviticus says stand up before the gray head and honor the elderly love the foreigner when we show honor to people based upon their usefulness we are not being just have you picked over every stalk and every vine of your time every ounce of your emotional energy such that there's nothing left for your spouse or your kids or your friends the people that God has put in your life to love and to serve nothing left for the people who need it your calendar is full your schedule is packed and at the end of the week you stand in a vineyard of your time that you have picked completely bare and that busyness that fullness of schedule can make us seem important like we've got the biggest vineyard on the block but of that wealth what remains for the people who are in need of it are we living with justice I don't know about you but that last one that it's pretty close to home for me I mean of the busyness braggers if you know me yeah I'm kind of like the worst and I doubt any of us could look honestly at our relationships our marriages our friendships the dealings in the community where God has placed us and say clean 100% nailed it right if we're honest we see flashes of these ugly things a sharp word we have selfish demands careless comments a week or a month that goes by a whole season that goes by in which you've picked your vines completely bare the real diagnostic question the one which even the ancient Hebrews understood with their primitive concept of disease is this is it spreading is it spreading when it comes to the ways that your words and your actions can destroy and tear down people around you in your community do you have a scab or are you a leper let me put it bluntly if we isolated you for seven days with the world around you become more clean are you a leper has the injustice you know the inequity and the imbalances in your life the wonkiness as I like to say is it retreating as God's grace and the transforming power of the Spirit make you more and more into the likeness of his holy and clean Son or is it still spreading in your life and you are not sure how to stem the tide have you had to change places switch communities have you left burned up friendships behind as you seek a new job a new school a new church only to find out that that moral rot followed you can you no longer hide the rash under your robes of your anger and your bitterness selfishness their untamed tongue you've got to wonder if there's a stench on you that makes other people turn away do you fear maybe that you have are already outside the camp you've hurt too many too deeply too often you're not sure how to maintain yourself any longer in a community where everyone else looks so neat tidy and put together are you hoping every day that nobody figures out what's really going on inside your own twisted mind are you trying to cover your disease with your robes is it spreading then you need to hear what happens when a diseased wretched outcast leper meets the only just King from Mark chapter 1 a leper came to Jesus imploring him kneeling he said to him if you will you can make me clean and moved with pity Jesus stretch out his hand and touched him he touched him he wasn't afraid that his disease would spread to him when the unclean is touched by the Holy Son of God is his holiness that spreads to him not his uncleanliness that spreads to Jesus he touched him and yeah he could

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