(Transcribed by TurboScribe. Go Unlimited to remove this message.)

Hey, you're listening to Cut For Time, a podcast from Faith Church, located on the north side of Indianapolis. My name is Claire Kingsley. And I'm Dan Breitwieser. 

Each week, one of us will sit down with the person who gave Sunday's sermon to discuss their message. Cut For Time is a look behind the scenes of sermon preparation, and they'll share with us a few things that we didn't hear from the sermon on Sunday. Thanks for listening.

All right. Hey, Nick, thank you so much for recording Cut For Time with us without coffee, before you've had coffee. Before my coffee for the day. 

So this is the uncaffeinated Nick Carter. What's that like? Is there a difference? Oh, yeah. These were the first words I've spoken today. 

I'm in a hotel in Springfield at our national tournament, and had to, you know, sneakily get out of the hotel room while everyone else is still asleep. So. Thank you for doing that for us. 

All right. So, Nick, before we jump into your recap from your sermon, we have a question that somebody texted in that has reference to a passage outside of your sermon passage context. And so we're going to start with that before we jump into Sunday.

This person writes, in Leviticus 21.9, it says to burn a priest's daughter who becomes a prostitute. This seems excessive and cruel. I don't like that. 

Could someone, could you address that in Cut For Time? What do you have to say to this very easy question? Yeah, there's a lot of layers to it. So the first one I'll lead off with is that we should not assume that the burning is the means of execution. Okay. 

So we have a picture in our mind of middle ages, burning witches, right? St. Joan of Arc and the like. And that is not what's in view here. The reason it says the burn, it is a capital crime. 

We can talk about that. But the burning has to do with really just a desecration of the body. She won't receive a burial. 

There won't be a place where she can go be visited. She needs to be cut off from human history. It's not the means of execution. 

The reason I can say that is because it's the same language that's used to describe offerings. And we know that they didn't take a live lamb, throw it on the altar and light it on fire. They were burning up the offering, but the offering was the dispatch of the animal. 

Dispatch is the technical term we use in the animal slaughter industry. The dispatch of the animal was not the fire. So this is not the picture of burning at the stake. 

It is a postmortem desecration of the body so that it shows the shame and the disrespect that needs to come on that person for what they did. The reason it's a capital crime is pretty simple. It's very serious to draw God's people away to worshiping foreign gods. 

And so to become a prostitute, this was not an act of desperation out of the world's first industry to try and make ends meet. We think of prostitutes today, oftentimes they're victims or in extreme poverty. This was a cultic prostitution. 

It's taking the worship of Yahweh, twisting it, and turning it into something that's a sex ritual, which combines ideas of ecstasy as well as fertility in a way to incite your God to do something that you want them to do. That's what's in view here. And that is a very, very perverse way to worship.

And it is disordered. It is not a part of God's original design. And so it's a capital crime.

If you draw God's people away to doing things like that, you need to be cut off. And so it's a capital crime, but we should not view this as the fire being the means of execution. It's a post-mortem desecration of the body to say, there won't be a body left to come in and commemorate in any way. 

It'll be gone and turned to dust. Okay. That's really helpful. 

Thank you for that context. All right. So jumping to Sunday, could you give us a recap from your sermon, please? Yeah. 

The recap, I guess, could be pretty short. We combined leprosy with justice. And the big idea, I had a lot of people asking me, how does this connect at all? Well, it's pretty simple.

Leprosy is infectious. It spreads. And so you have to keep it out of the camp. 

And then justice is the same way. It's that simple. That leprosy can spread from person to person, it can by contact, right? And so it's dangerous and you have to keep it out of the camp. 

And the same for an unjust person for the vile behaviors that we all do. We talked about that. We're all guilty of injustice in many different ways. 

But the beautiful picture is that in Mark 1, Jesus touches the leper and makes him clean. And that's just a perfect picture of the gospel. We all have to recognize we are lepers. 

It's not physically like we have flaturious ads on primetime all the time, but definitely spiritually. And we are people who propagate. We infect others with our injustice, but with just short tempers and harsh words, and also inequity in all kinds of ways. 

And God, because of his grace and forgiveness, that interrupts that pattern. It disrupts that selfishness with grace that can transform us to no longer be unjust to everyone around us. And that stops the spread. 

Okay. Thank you so much. So in your sermon, you already gave us a hint at what you had to cut for time. 

Why don't you talk more about the wrinkle of chapter 12? Yeah. So I said that there's a wrinkle here. There's a missing chapter, if you look at it that way, the way that we're doing our Kayah. 

So chapter 11 was dietary laws, paired neatly on the back half. And then we skipped to leprosy and 19. Okay. 

Well, the chapter 20, the first half or the middle of chapter 20 is actually related to the punishments for sexual sins, which are laid out in chapter 18. So you have chapter 18, it laid out all these sexual sins or adulterous sins, perversions of the marriage covenant, a little look at it. And then you have 19, which is all on social justice and some religious piety in there. 

And then you get back into chapter 20. And it's going to go through what the punishments were for those things we talked about in 18. So that wraps this justice chapter, kind of envelops it with the topic of defiling the marriage covenant. 

Well, on the front half, we also skip chapter 12. Chapter 12 is about childbirth. And it's just basically stating that you're unclean after childbirth. 

You're not sinful. We've covered that in our sermon series. And then it goes into leprosy, which as we've said, paired with 19 on justice and the spread of leprosy. 

And then chapter 15 is our uncleanliness, ritual impurity that comes from all kinds of other bodily functions related to human reproduction, menstruation, nocturnal emission, and other things are mentioned in there. And most of them are related to reproductive organs or reproductive processes, which is clearly connected in concept to childbirth and chapter 12. You've enveloped this leprosy, two chapters on leprosy with topics of the things that are disordered today in our world, results of the fall related to human reproduction. 

That's just maybe the cleanest way to put that. And so with that sort of braid, if you will, in this structure where inside of the chiasm, there's still layers to those chapters and how they layer on one another, what it's doing is it's intentionally stating that the idea of a just society and justice in general are intricately interwoven into the way we use our marriage covenant. When you think about that, it is also centered on justice and forming a good society and a good order for human flourishing as God has designed it. 

So we can't separate those two things. Okay. And didn't you say that that's something that Jeff is going to be talking a little bit more about next week? Yeah. 

Yeah. So the sermon next week is the chiasmic pair of chapter 15 and 18. But you can also layer into that. 

And in May, chapters 12 and the end of chapter 20, where I go into the punishments for the same sins that are listed in 18. But yeah, next week, that'll be the sermon series. So we got in the car and my daughter said to me, you know, there weren't as many jokes in that sermon. 

And I said, well, honey, they say it was a little heavier. As you start talking about the impact of the sin and the fall on the world, it's dark and it's heavy. And I think it's going to continue to progress. 

It'll be my guess. I'm not preaching Jeff's sermon next week, but it's a heavy subject. And it deserves that kind of weight. 

Yeah. So it gets real because the impact of sin and the way that it's disordered our world, it's not a light problem. Okay. 

Okay. So at the beginning of the series, you introduced Leviticus as an instruction manual for the people of Israel. And then you also made sure to remind us that this is not written to us, but it can still be for us. 

And then what we've read this past Sunday was just how Israel can be a light to the world, which is what the church should also be now. And so is there anything from what we've read on Sunday as an instruction manual that could still be in an instruction manual for us today or not at all? I wouldn't say not at all, but if you're thinking of instruction manual as follow this law, the letter of the law at the Christian, this side of the redirection, I wouldn't look at it that well. So a couple of points. 

One is Leviticus isn't, when I said it's an instruction manual, the front half anyway, leading up to the day of atonement is an instruction manual, not just for all of Israel, but specifically for the tabernacle. So when we actually, when we're looking at all of these things, the majority of the, not entirely, but a lot of the interest there has to do with who was able to enter into the tabernacle. It really is a matter of tabernacle purity, not just general population. 

To that point, a lot of the instructions are really for the priests. It's their job to maintain the tabernacle and keep it pure. So this was their instruction manual. 

As for Leviticus 19 though, this is about harvest and giving and generosity and loving your neighbor and not doing injustice and not being inequitable. I'm not a just person in society, not forming an unjust society. So that's not tabernacle specific. 

However, the way that the law they're written, number one, it's not exhaustive. So the law, if you look through the Torah, there's a whole stretch of them in Exodus. There's a lot of them restated again in Deuteronomy. 

We have this section here in Leviticus. They are what we would think of more, if you're a lawyer, it's case law, not legislative law. So when you're writing legislative law, you have to think of every way that it can be done. 

You have all of your caveats, all of your if this, then that sort of closet. When you are writing case law, you just describe a case. If a person's ox falls into your pit and you didn't put a parapet around it, then you're responsible for it.

Okay, well, what if it was a turkey that fell in the pit? You don't have to have an exhaustive law. You created a principle. And so a lot of people actually call this wisdom literature or it's designed to be meditated on. 

And I think that's a good way to think of this is to meditate on, okay, well, I don't have a vineyard and I don't have day laborers, but how is my life like a venue? And how are the relationships that I have with other people who are in need going to be, you know, should be shaped by that, that concept. So it is, I guess, theoretical in a sense. That's actually very true. 

It's theoretical because most of us are not living in an agrarian society centered around a tabernacle where we worship. But the principles can be applied. And so we have to do the hard work of saying, well, this is what was a just case law or a just principle for God's people then. 

It is still a just principle for us today. And how is that true? You know, what is it that we need to learn about that? How did Jesus, we need to look to Christ's teaching. We look at the leopard, right? He no longer shunned, you know, he touched and he made him clean. 

And so how did he give us a deeper meaning? He didn't repeal it. He gave a deeper meaning to loving your neighbor amid all of this truth about there being an infectious disease, for example. So I don't know if that's helpful, but I was thinking about as case law as principle and then we have to do the hard work of saying how to apply that today, not as an instruction manual verbatim, but as case law if you will.

Mm-hmm. Okay. That's great. 

Thank you, Nick. I appreciate you challenging us this Sunday, considering our own selves, asking ourselves, like, am I spreading injustice in different ways? Or am I, how am I helping to stop the spread that I am witnessing around me? And I was wondering if you could just tie up our time together here, just reminding us the season that we're in, we're in Lent and sometimes it's feels long because it's like compared to Advent, like Advent is like Christmas in your face all the time. You're preparing for this, the birth of the King and it's only four weeks, right? But Lent is drawn out and sometimes much more subtle.

And so how would you encourage us to just like steward the hearts of our people to remember the season that we're in and combining it with like what we're still studying every Sunday? It's not that Easter is on our face the whole time because that's not, I mean, once we get to December or once we get to Thanksgiving, we're all excited about Christmas. You're right. But the cross is always not in our face. 

I mean, it should always be in view. You know, I ended our sermon this Sunday on just saying, like, what we have to keep in view is an honest realization of who we are or really more accurately saying what we've been rescued from and even in ourselves, but keeping the cross in view at all times. And so, and the resurrection and the empty tomb. 

So when we become really weighed down by the realization of the weight of sin, our emphasis, our focus should not wallow in, oh, how terrible I am. It goes, it springboards down how terrible I am and He was willing to touch me and make me clean. And so we constantly have to be reminded of that, even at a season right now when, yeah, it's not Easter in your face all the time. 

Well, maybe it should be. I love to preach the gospel as many times as you can in any way from anywhere in the text, even if it's a heavy text to remind people that, yeah, sin is heavy, the impacts are heavy, and you may have pain in your life because of the injustice that you know you've wrought. And that hurts. 

But Jesus was willing to have you at His camp and touch you, make you clean. So that itself should be the motivator and the transformative power in our lives, not necessarily a constant recounting of our own guilt. We humans like to use guilt to drive motivation. 

We do that when our kids sometimes. We do that. It just seems to be a negative motivation sort of instinct. 

But I find that the gospel is much more a compelling transformative power than constantly focusing on how bad I am and what inspired and transformational came from the Spirit. Okay. Thank you so much, Nick. 

We appreciate your time and just all of your preparation for your teachings and then afterwards with Cut for Time. Thank you so much. Thanks for listening to this week's episode of Cut for Time. 

If you wish to submit questions to our pastors following Sunday's sermon, you can email them to podcast at faithchurchindy.com or text them in to our Faith Church texting number, and we'll do our best to cover them in next week's episode. If this conversation blessed you in any way, we encourage you to share it with others. We'll be back again next week.

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