(This is the 2nd in a series dedicated to the most boring Scriptures in the Bible. At least… the things many people regard as boring)
For some people, there’s nothing more boring than the tedious, almost unending regulations that God gave His people in Leviticus. In fact, when most people attempt to read through the Bible, they tend to just skip over Leviticus because there is only one interesting story in the entire book (the story of Nadab and Abihu). Everything is stuff like sacrifices and lists of clean and unclean things.
I did a search on Sermoncentral (an internet website where I put all my sermons) to see how many sermons other preachers had preached on this book. There are 1000s of preachers who’ve preached 1000s upon 1000s of sermons on that site. Out of all 1000s upon 1000s of sermons on that site guess how many sermons were on Sermoncentral? (268… and 2 of them are mine).
I even looked to see how many times the New Testament quoted Leviticus. And guess what – nobody in the NT quoted from this book. Even Jesus didn’t quote from Leviticus. They would quote from Genesis, Exodus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, but nothing out of Leviticus.
Leviticus would appear to be the boringest book in the Bible… except it isn’t really boring.
2 Timothy 3:16-17 tells us “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work..” And that includes Leviticus. Which means there are powerful lessons to be learned about God’s will for our lives even in this book.
Hold that thought.
OPEN: In my files I have the story of an elderly woman named Adele Gaboury of Worcester, Massachusetts. One of her brother’s told police he believed she had gone to a nursing home, and her neighbors – believing that - began watching her property.
• One neighbor started paying her grandson $10 twice a month to mow the lawn.
• Another neighbor noticed the mail wasn’t fitting in the mail slot, so he opened her door, and 100s of pieces of mail fell out. He notified police, and the deliveries were stopped.
• Later someone else noticed that the house’s pipes had frozen and water was spilling out the door The utility company was called to shut off the water.
After 4 years, the police finally investigated the house as a health hazard and they were shocked to find (pause for effect) Adele’s body inside. The Washington Post reported police now believe she’d died of natural causes 4 years previously. (The Washington Post 10/27/93)
APPLY: Nobody knew that she’d died.
Everything seemed so “normal”.
Death lay inside the house… but nobody knew.
By contrast Leviticus 14 tells us of a disease that literally turned people into the walking dead. You couldn’t miss the fact. Those who had leprosy were dying – inside and out. It was obvious from the disfigurement of their bodies.
Leprosy would start with specks on the eyelids and on the palms, gradually spreading over the body. One of the effects of the disease was that it destroy the nerve endings, and the victim couldn’t feel pain or realize when they’d burned themselves, or if they’d broken a bone. Thus they’d end up damaging and destroying parts of their bodies without realizing it.
Faucet’s Bible Dictionary said that the most common form of leprosy…
* inflamed the skin,
* distorted the face and joints,
* and caused the hair of the head or eyebrows to fall off or else turn white, {#Le 13:3-6}
It would often begin in the forehead {#2Ch 26:19-21} with shining white patches which would burst.
And from the skin, the disease would eat inward to the bones, rotting the whole body piecemeal. Bone after bone would drop off; and the skin would be mummy-like; the lips hang down from the mouth exposing the teeth and gums.
It was horrible way to die.
And although leprosy wasn’t excessively contagious… there was some possibility of infection. And so Lepers were social outcasts required to live outside the camp and unable to take part in the sacrifices offered at the Tabernacle.
Now there were other diseases a person could have, but no other disease was treated like leprosy. You could catch your death of cold. You could suffer the indignities of the flu. You could have an infection or be paralyzed, have cancer or heart disease. But none of those diseases would require you to go the priest to be offer sacrifices for your cleansing. Only Lepers were required to do this.
Only Leprosy called for the person who was healed to present themselves to the priests
o shave their head
o bathe their bodies
o and make sacrifices before their God
Leprosy was the ONLY disease that called for the sufferer to come into God’s presence and ask for cleansing.
But why? Why would God make such an elaborate ceremony just for THIS disease.
Well, God was using Leprosy as an object lesson . He wanted us to understand what Sin looked like to Him. That was because sin - like leprosy - was a terrible way to die
• Like leprosy, sin deadens us to the pain of our iniquities.
Ephesians 4 describes people who get caught up sin
“They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts. Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, with a continual lust for more.” Eph 4:18-19
• Like leprosy, sin starts out like a small spot in our lives and spreads throughout our being.
People will say things like "This isn’t really an addiction. I just want to use this for the small amount of pleasure it can bring me. I can handle the alcohol/drugs"
He’ll say "She and I are just friends. It’s just a little innocent flirtation."
A salesman will say "It’s just a small thing I have to do, but I have to play this way to survive in the business world."
And it goes on and on.
The little compromises grow into big sins, until they deaden our consciences.
• And like leprosy, sin spreads in our lives – it begins to “uglify” us.
Back in 1999, Time Magazine carried an article about the R-rated movie “American Pie” It had actually started out as an NC-17 (that nobody would have attended). One of the producers recognized it was a vulgar film and said “I’m proud of our film’s vulgarity.”
He was proud of its ugliness, and apparently enough Americans agreed to make it a cult hit.
Just like the lepers of old people caught up in sin are dying, and they often don’t even know it because their hearts become hardened and they lose all sensitivity to the pain of what they’re doing.
Their sin starts out small and grows to the point that dominates their entire lives. Their sin disfigures them and causes the image of God within them… to die!
It’s a horrible way to die.
(PAUSE…)
To reinforce the connection of how leprosy resembles sin God often used leprosy as a way of punishing sinners.
o In the desert, as the people were making their way to the Promised Land, Miriam insulted her brother Moses, and God struck her with Leprosy
o King Uzziah was brought down with the disease after he forced his way into the Temple and offered a sacrifice he had no right to give.
o In the days of the prophet Elisha a man named Naaman came to him to be healed of his disease. Elisha sent him down to the Jordan River to dip himself 7 times and be healed of his Leprosy. When he was healed, he returned and gratefully offered to give Elisha a substantial reward for his help, but Elisha refused the his offer and sent him on his way. However, Elisha’s servant Gehazi hurried after Naaman and lied to him saying that his master had reconsidered the gift and wished to accept it now so that it could be given to 2 other prophets who were in need. When he returned to Elisha, the prophet rebuked him and said that since he desired to have the gift from Naaman, he could also fall heir to the man’s disease. And Gehazi was struck with leprosy.
Again and again and again, throughout the Old Testament, God identified leprosy with sin because both were terrible ways to die.
But Leviticus 14 held out a ray of hope
The Leper could be HEALED!!!
And if he were healed, then there was an opportunity to be cleansed.
This possibility was common enough that in the Jewish Temple had a specific area in the Court of women dedicated for healed lepers to come and meet with the Priests and bathe in a mikveh (similar to what we call a baptistery).
Now remember – God often used leprosy as an object lesson about sin’s effect in our lives and the message God was sending us in Leviticus 14 was this:
Sin may disfigure you.
It may have destroyed so much of your life.
But you can be healed
You can be cleansed.
But you have to come to God to get it done.
(pause)
One of the oddities of this text is that the Leper would be “healed” of his leprosy - but he wasn’t “cleansed” of his disease until he came to God and did what He asked.
As I puzzled over this, it occurred to me that there are people in this world who recognize the harm they’ve done to themselves and others. So they decide to change their lives, try to undo the damage of their past and become nicer people. And they’ll actually succeed in undoing much of what they’d done to their lives.
But on the inside, there’s still a filthy residue.
Their souls are still soiled by the reminders of their past.
The guilt is still there. The shame is still there. The pain.
When David had sinned with Bathsheba, he cried out to God:
“Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so that you are proved right when you speak and justified when you judge…. Cleanse me with hyssop, and I will be clean; wash me, and I will be whiter than snow…. Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.” Psalm 51:4; 7; 10
David had sinned and he was still overwhelmed by the filthiness of his soul. He recognized that God would be righteous if He destroyed him. BUT then David asked God to do something for him, what he couldn’t do for himself:
Cleanse me!
Create in me a clean heart!
Renew a right spirit within me!
God do for me that which I cannot do for myself!!!
And so – when the Leper was healed – he couldn’t do enough to remove the filth of his leprosy he STILL had to come to God and receive cleansing.
What did the Leper have to do?
Well, he had to…
1. shave off all of his hair.
The Leper’s hair had all turned white. It was the mark of the decay and death of his illness. It was the sign that he had been a walking dead man. He was called upon to remove all connections with the deadness of his disease. In the same way, when we become Christians, we need to decide to remove all connections with our dead past.
As Paul wrote the Ephesians in his day “I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking.” Eph 4:17
2. He was to wash his body and clothes in water.
According to “Jesus and His Times:” by Reader’s Digest (P. 132 ff)
“Each of the four corners of the Court of the Women was a separate walled enclosure that served a special purpose. (And in one of those corners was an area that) reserved for lepers who believed themselves cured; here they were inspected by priests, and if they were found to be cured, they would purify themselves in a mikveh.”
A mikveh was a baptistery (show picture of mikveh)
According to one Jewish internet site I visited, the Temple of Jesus day had several mikvehs
“Because of the demanding laws regarding purity before entering holy places, demand for mikvot was high and many have been discovered from first century Jerusalem”
In essence, in order to be cleansed of their leprosy, the leper had to be baptized.
And you can see this truth born out in the cleansing of Naaman the Leper in 2 Kings
When Naaman came to the prophet Elisha seeking to be healed of his leprosy…
Elisha instructed him to go down to the Jordan river and immerse himself 7 times.
2 Kings 5:14 tells us “So he went down and dipped himself in the Jordan seven times, as the man of God had told him, and his flesh was restored and became clean like that of a young boy.”
So a leper who wanted to come to God…
• cut himself off from the things of his past
• and immersed himself in water to be cleansed of his disease.
• and then he was to offer a sacrifice to God that symbolized the surrender of his life to God.
BUT before all of this… before the shaving, and the cleansing and the sacrifices, God had the Lepers take part in a most unusual ceremony. It was a unique sacrifice that performed ONLY for those who had had Leprosy. No other sacrifice in all of the Old Testament was quite like it. And this ceremony set the stage for everything that was to follow.
What they’d do is take two birds. One of these birds was killed over a clay pot filled with fresh water and the blood of the dead bird fell into the water in of the pot.
Then the priest took the 2nd bird… and dipped this live bird (together with the cedar wood, the scarlet yarn and the hyssop) into the blood of the bird that was killed over the fresh water.
He would lift the bird up out of the water and release it into the sky where it would fly away.
This is reminiscent of the passage from Romans 6 that says “We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life. If we have been united with him like this in his death, we will certainly also be united with him in his resurrection. Romans 6:4-5
Rising up from the waters of baptism, we are set free from our sins by the blood of Jesus
At that point they came in contact with Jesus’ blood.
As Galatians 3:27 says “…all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ”
Someone once explained ”If I could take a bowl of red dye and put a white cloth into it then the cloth would be immersed in the dye, but the dye would be in the cloth. There would no longer be a white cloth; there would be a red cloth.
The white cloth is in the dye, but the dye is in the cloth.
In the same way in baptism we become in Christ and Christ is in us.
Thus, in what many consider to be the most boring of books in the Bible, God reveals the ugliness of our sin and the power of His blood to and heal and cleanse us of the damage our sins has brought to our lives.
(There are some other great observations by Bill Burnett in his sermon on this chapter on Sermoncentral dealing with the sacrifices and the importance of the oil in the Leper’s cleansing. I wasn’t able to incorporate those ideas into this sermon, but I would suggest you take the time to visit his sermon and – if his thoughts are helpful – encourage him by voting for it).
