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Foreign.
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You are listening to A Year in the Bible with Daily Grace. I'm Shelby and I'm here with CJ and today we're in Leviticus chapters 11 and 12. And these chapters are not for someone with a weak stomach. I'm someone with a weak stomach. Whenever there's blood or anything that has to do with injuries or anything that might make me squeamish, I'm always asking someone else to help me out. But we're going to talk through these. We're going to understand these things, and we're going to even see how this scripture can apply to our lives today. So we talked yesterday about the death of Aaron's sons, and you kind of teed up for us that there's this idea of common and holy and clean and unclean. And so would you want to explain that just a little bit more for us before we get into chapters 11 and 12?
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Yeah. So. So, again, as you said perfectly, Shelby, Moses, at the end of that episode with Nadav and Avi, who, when they died and they had to be carried out, he said, priests, you guys need to be able to distinguish between the holy and the common, the clean and the unclean, or the pure and the impure, depending on which translation you're reading. And Leviticus 11, 15, the section we're about to enter here for these next few episodes, deals with clean and unclean, and we'll deal with holy in common later on in Leviticus. But again, right now, we're going to deal with clean and unclean.
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B
All right, perfect. So then chapters 11 and 12 specifically. And as a woman, chapter 11 can be hard to understand. So I would just love for you to break down what's happening here with these clean and unclean laws.
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Right? So clean and unclean is not about sinful and not sinful impurity. In Leviticus are things that are marked by death. So the example we just saw with Nadav and Avihu and their corpses, corpses are literally just dead things. So you can't get much more dead than that. So that is. Well, that would be impure. And that's why they have to be carried out and shuffled away from God's presence immediately. Okay, so we have death. We also have skin, Skin diseases and skin ailments that we're going to see here in the next episode, I believe. And if you have ever seen, like, skin diseases or maybe you have even, like, psoriasis, we know that it has nothing to do with death, but it does look like decaying flesh. It is marked by Death or a disordered skin condition. Right. We have discharges of sexual reproductive systems. So that would be exactly what you're thinking of right now. And those things represent life. So when they don't result in the creation of a child, it actually is like the loss of life. You didn't produce a child. And that's what happens with some of those things. And then we have blood, which is what we're going to deal with here in this chapter in a second. But first, I'll start with Leviticus 11 and the clean and unclean animals. And I want us to understand that these were animals that Israel was not supposed to eat because God is a God of order. If you remember in Genesis 1, he created everything in a certain environment. And there was the sky, there's the land, there's the seas. And these unclean animals are those animals that don't quite fit. So an ostrich, for instance, is an unclean animal. In Leviticus 11. It's a bird, but it doesn't fly. Or you have a hawk. A hawk flies. It's a bird. It flies in the sky where it belongs. But it eats flesh and dead flesh sometimes. So again, it's disordered. It doesn't work. And now we're going to talk about Leviticus 12. In Leviticus 12, we see that a woman, after giving birth, needs to offer a sin offering or a purification offering. And I want us to remember for a second back in Leviticus 4 and 5, that a sin offering or a purification offering doesn't always have something to do with sin. Again, you have to think of impurity. You have to think of that white sheet. Anything that is related to death is going to mar that white sheet. It needs to be scrubbed away. So just the way it works is that when a. When a woman gives birth, she does lose blood. And blood is life. In Leviticus, Even in the Christian world, right, the Christian imagination, the blood of Jesus is life. So when you lose blood, you are coming up against your own mortality, you're coming up against death. And that is antithetical to God because God is life itself. So that is why you need a cleansing offering or purification offering after childbirth.
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B
Yeah, I think that's really helpful to hear it explained in that way, that impurity doesn't necessarily equal sin, but it does have to do with death. And that's gonna be really important to remember as we continue throughout Leviticus. Okay, so let's talk about these chapters and what they mean for us today, because we don't live under these same laws today, but we can still learn from them. Right?
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Right. So again, I think we need to recognize that God is the source of life. Anything that is not of life, anything that's related to death is not of God. God is the God of life. So of course this is going to remind us of the death and resurrection of our Lord. Jesus came face to face with death. He spilled his blood, but he also took back up his life and he was resurrected. And Hebrews talks about how his priesthood, he's our intermediary now between us and God. And his priesthood is marked by an indestructible, an indestructible life. Excuse me, a life that can't be touched by decay, that can't be touched by death. And we too can partake of that life when we put our faith in Christ and follow him. And it's promised to us too, that we'll conquer death and that we won't be touched by decay.
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B
Yeah, man, I think that's so good. I think my takeaway from today one is, as we're describing, like our own mortality. I'm aware of how different I am to God, that He is life, that he is eternal, and that I am very much a human who is living temporarily on this earth. But then at the same time, through Jesus, I have this gift of eternal life in Him. And so seeing and remembering that eternal life in the face of remembering your own mortality is just like this moment of realization. And I think this passage helps bring that to light. Really thankful for the way you've explained it. And I'm thankful for the way even the tricky parts of God's word can encourage us. So. Okay, thank you for walking us through those chapters. C.J. we're going to walk through a couple more chapters tomorrow.