Dr. Manny Arango (0:00)

Hey, Bible nerds. This is Dr. Manny Arango and I'm your host for the Bible department podcast powered by Arma. This podcast follows a Bible reading plan we created to help you read the entire Bible in a year. You can head to the show notes or thebibledepartment.com to download our reading plan and join the journey. To all my fellow pastors, I've got a question for you. Does your city know that your church exists? Listen, I get it. You're preaching, you're leading, you're discipling, you're doing ministry. We are in the same boat. And let's be honest, social media and marketing, not your strong suit. Not mine either. And that's probably the last thing on your mind. And that's why we chose to partner with Church Candy Marketing for our church Plant the garden. We out here, y'all. They help churches get more actual guests walking through the doors on Sunday without your eye having to stress over ads or algorithms or trying to crack the social media code. Right now, Church Candy is helping nearly 400 churches reach their communities with simple invite ads. And it works. It's super effective. I can tell you from firsthand experience. So if you're tired of being your city's best kept secret, how about you do this? Go to churchcandy.com Manny and book a free consultation book a discovery call. Their team will break it all down and show you how to start seeing new faces at your church this Sunday. I'm in the trenches with you trying to grow the church. And how about we just start a whole campaign? No more empty churches. So let's partner with Church Candy and get our churches full. The glory of Jesus. Let's go. We got a couple of chapters of Leviticus to get through. And I want to remind you that Leviticus is a chiasm and we are almost towards the center of that chiasm. The day of atonement is going to be the center of that chiasm. And the big, big, big theme of the book is how are sinful people going to dwell amongst the holy God? Or how is it that a holy God is going to dwell amongst sinful people? How is it that we are going to get back into cohabitation? Okay, Humans and God have not cohabitated since the Garden of Eden. Ever since God has expelled Adam and Eve from his presence, man and God have not cohabitated in Leviticus is like this roadmap for navigating the world of living with God and not dying. Okay? That's the goal to live with God and not die. So today we're going to Explore Leviticus chapters 11, 12, 13, 14, and 15. We didn't want to break up this unified section of the book, so we got more reading today than normal. 11, 12, 13, 14, and 15. We got five chapters, but I bet nobody's complaining about less spending less days in Leviticus. So I think we made a good decision. So if you haven't done the reading, go do the reading. Read these five chapters. If you've done the reading, then let's dive in. All right. Just gonna give, like, really, really a. A broad overview in terms of our context clues. Okay. Chapter 11 is gonna be all about food restrictions. Remember, there are three ways that the people of Israel are going to be holy. In order to live with God, they have to be holy. Holy doesn't mean sinless. Holy means set apart. In order to be in the presence of a holy God, the people also have to be holy. That's not about their morality, simply about being set apart. You have to think, there's no way for a bowl to be morally, you know, good. It's just a bowl. It's an inanimate object. But it can't be holy because it'd be set apart for sacred use. Set apart to be used by God in or for God's purposes and for God alone. Okay, so there are three ways that the people are going to maintain holiness so they can dwell amongst the holy God. Okay, number one is through rituals, so sacrifices. And we talked about the five sacrifices that the people are going to make. Okay, so rituals. They're going to take part in ritual, rituals so that they can maintain purity. That's at the beginning of the chiasm. At the beginning of the book, it's also going to be the end of the chiasm. And the second way that the people are going to maintain purity is through a mediator. So they're going to have priests. So they have to get a priestly system in place so that the people can have mediators who are going to help them to remain pure. And third laws, okay, they're going to have to have purity laws, laws that are going to set them apart in terms of their behavior, in terms of their lifestyles. Okay, this section, Leviticus, chapter 11 through 15, is that third way in which the people are going to be pure in the way, sorry, be holy, like God is holy. Okay, Rituals, priests, and now purity laws. Chapter 11 are laws surrounding food, food consumption. Chapter 12, law surrounding childbirth. Chapter 13, laws surrounding defiling skin Diseases. The broad overview umbrella term for this is going to be leprosy. Okay, number 14 is instructions on how to cleanse said skin diseases. And then chapter 15 is all about discharges, baby, if you ever want to read a whole chapter about discharges, you got it. Leviticus, chapter 15, is it. Okay, Every kind of bodily fluid you can imagine is going to be talked about in Leviticus chapter 15. God ain't about to discharge. Okay, discharges, discharge. I'm from Boston, Massachusetts, if you can't tell. So those are the five chapters. Food, childbirth, skin diseases, cleansing those skin diseases, and then discharge are the five things that we're going to cover. Okay, so let's give just even a little bit more context. Why is this stuff important? Well, Israel is, is designed to be a contrast community. They are supposed to live in contrast to the Canaanite tribes or people that they live amongst. Hey, they're supposed to live different than pagans. And actually, even in excavations, anytime archeologists go to excavate and they find no pig bones, that's like a clear sign that they're excavating an Israelite community or a place where Jews lived. When they excavate, that layer of soil has absolutely no pig bones. Whereas all the neighboring towns around the people of Israel always, always eat pork. So it's stuff like that, like people start to be known for. Oh, those are the people who practice the Sabbath. Yeah, those are the people who don't eat pork. Like, those things may seem minor to us, but really they go a long ways into setting people apart. So God's heart in all of this is for the people to be set apart, is for the people to act different, look different, that they are different, that they don't blend in with the Canaanites, they don't blend in with pagans. But there's this secondary thing that I think God also cares about. I'm going to start saying this more and more because it's just a true statement. God is pro life, okay? God is for life. God loves life, okay? And I remember my missionist professor used to say, if you take the book of Leviticus, just the book of Leviticus, and you go to any third world country where people are dying of malaria, where people are dying of diseases that are curable, stuff that we have vaccines for in the developed world, okay, if you just take the book of Leviticus and apply it in a third world country, over 85% of diseases would disappear overnight. Okay? Just take the book of Leviticus and just apply it. So, yes, God Wants the people to be holy. He wants them to be set apart, but God also just wants them to live. God wants them to have life. God wants them to do things that are healthy, okay? And so he's going to separate certain kinds of food. And when we get down to the skin diseases, your skin is the largest organ that you have in your body. There are very, very, very damaging effects in terms of things like mold, mildew. And when we. When you get into chapter 13, you realize that these aren't just leprosy of the skin, but this is leprosy of, like, clothing. It could be in your house, which is probably talking about mold. And mold can really do a number on. On an individual. And so God's pro life, okay? Everything that's being talked about actually in Leviticus is really, really, really practical for somebody who's living in the wilderness. In an ancient context with. With no modern medicine and no vaccines, you take the book of Leviticus and you apply it in a third world, and you actually would begin to realize how much of a gift this is. This book doesn't feel like a gift to us because we have the gift of modern medicine and doctors and hospitals and science. But you give Leviticus to ancient people who are wandering through the wilderness, and the quality of their life drastically upticks. The last little bit of context that we need to know is, is that leprosy is really an umbrella term in the ancient world. Okay, so this section of Leviticus is gonna use the word leprosy a lot, but it doesn't mean leprosy in the modern understanding of the word leprosy. In this context, leprosy really could mean mildew, mold, ingrown hairs, boils, psoriasis. Like, there's all kinds of things that will qualify as leprosy based on the descriptions that we have in Leviticus, chapters 13 and 14. That would not be leprosy in today's culture. Okay, so that's our context. The context. The context behind food laws and childbirth and skin diseases and discharges. The context behind all that a. Is that God wants his people to be different. He wants them to be a contrast community. He wants them to be set apart. But also second, that God is pro life. He cares about the health and wellness and the wholeness. He doesn't just care about his people spiritually. He cares about every aspect of their life, cares that they are healthy and whole and alive. He wants. He wants life. Bible department, family. It's Dr. Manny Arango, and first thing I want to say is that I'm proud of you for completing the New Testament. You did it. And now that we're in the Old Testament, I hope that looking at Genesis and Exodus from an ancient perspective and worldview has kind of like opened your eyes. Well, I got news for you. If you've enjoyed some of the interpretations that I've brought to the table from Genesis, then that's just the tip of the iceberg. This entire book, Crushing Chaos was, was written from an ancient hermeneutic. I'm looking at stories like the Flood, Adam and Eve from the perspective of an ancient person. And we've got an event coming up on April 26th where I'll take a lot of the content from this book and I'll turn that content into live lectures. You don't want to miss it. You can actually register for that event right now. The link is in the description. And more, more than content. I think what you'll find as we gather together in Nashville are like minded believers and friends in a community of people that you don't just watch content with online, but you can get to know in person. I'd love to see you in Nashville. I'd love to hug you, high five you, and I'd love to nerd out together for one day as we come together in Nashville to learn about how to crush chaos. I'll see you in Nashville. Peace. Let's get into some nerdy nuggets. Our first nerdy nugget actually comes From Leviticus, chapter 11, verses 34 to 36, where water from a pot is going to get compared to water from a spring. Now this is really, really important because this is the background for living water. So in the, in an Old Testament context or in the book of Leviticus, there's two kinds of water. There's still water and there's living water. You can't purify something in still water because when you drop, let's say a bowl needs to be purified. You drop the bowl into the pot that has water and you take it out. The, the, the water that would have cleaned it is still there. It's not moving. Whereas you go down to a river and you put the bowl into the river. Now the. Because the river is moving, it's pulling the impurity away from the object. Okay? So the water's traveling. And because the water's traveling, that makes the water living water. So when Jesus says that from your belly will flow rivers of living water, he's. That's not just like poetic language. He's actually saying, no Water that actually brings purification, water that actually brings cleanliness or cleanness, water that brings holiness, water that actually sets you apart. That is what is going to flow from the inside of you, okay? And of course, you need a river for that. Okay? So from your belly will flow rivers of living water. Of course it's a river, because living water always came from, not always rivers, but rivers are always a form of living water. But not all living water is rivers. This is also going to give us context for knowing that Mary and Joseph were not financially wealthy because they. They sacrificed birds. And really, we get the command here about circumcision happening on the eighth day. Now, again, this is God giving his people something to do that has massive health implications. So for the people of Israel, they did not know that vitamin K kicks in on day eight, which allows blood to clot. They don't know that. They're just obeying God. But what we now know from science is that prior to day eight, okay, children, boys in particularly, do not have vitamin K, which means their blood does not clot, which means circumcising them would be fatal. Okay? I remember when my son was born, literally, the doctors asked us immediately, do you want to circumcise your son? I said, yeah, because he's devoted to God. Okay, snip, snip. I'm just playing. So I said, yes, okay. And they immediately had to give him a vitamin K shot. They gave him a vitamin K shot when he was born so that his blood would clot. Okay? Now, what's fascinating is that Jews for hundreds, thousands of years circumcised their children on the eighth day not knowing any of this science. But when you got God, you don't need science. Not just playing. I don't actually believe that that's actually. But in this case, it's great. I guess when you don't got. When. When you're living in the book of Leviticus and you got God, you don't need science. But over and over and over again, what we see throughout the book of Leviticus is this running theme that the people, they don't know which foods would cause disease. Like, for instance, they were not allowed to eat animals that had just died on their own. Why? Because those animals would be. Would be more likely to cause disease. They can only eat animals that have been killed, that have been butchered, that have. That have been killed for the purpose of eating. Now, the average person wouldn't know that that is astronomically more healthy, right? But God gives his people this instruction because God is pro life. He cares about life, cares about the quality of life. Waiting for the eighth day in order to circumcise vitamin K, blood clotting. This is, this is God in His sovereignty and his foreknowledge. He knows what his people don't know. He. He knows things and commands things that science finds out thousands of years later. Next, what we're going to see in Leviticus chapter 15 as it relates to discharges is that a woman on her menstrual cycle is falls under the umbrella of a discharge. Okay? And Leviticus chapter 15 actually gives us the background context from Matthew 9, Mark 5 and Luke 8 where a woman with an issue of blood approaches Jesus. And what's supposed to happen in Matthew 9, Mark 5 and Luke 8 is that Jesus is supposed to be defiled. Jesus is supposed to be impure. But that's not what happens. What happens is that Jesus's holiness is stronger than the woman's uncleanness. And so when she touches Jesus, she doesn't transfer her problem, but Jesus transfers his holiness, his righteousness, his power. And the power that Jesus has within him is able to heal this woman and then our timeless truth. Actually, when I was studying Leviticus with our good friend Andy Thomas all the way in the UK for the whole week that we studied the book of Leviticus, we had to keep track of certain people who had leprosy or were unclean. And I mean, there were only maybe like 30 of us in the class. And it just spread like wildfire. And you know, if you sat on someone's chair, if you touch something they touch, you would end up getting unclean as well. A leprosy as well. And it was a fun little game. It was a social experiment. But what it did is it showed everybody how fast sin spreads, that sin is like a contagion. Sin is like mold. It's like leprosy. The reason it's like mold is because mold could be in your walls or it could be like in your house, but it could like disappear for years and you don't even know you're breathing it in until you begin to have major, major, major issues. Same with sin. Sin can just kind of be in the background. It won't always create these massive problems. But if you leave it alone long enough and you don't confront it, sin full grown leads to all kinds of issues. Sin is like leprosy. That day in the classroom where we all kind of. Well, certain people had leprosy and they could spread it through touch. I mean, we didn't even make it a couple of hours. I mean, everyone had been turned into people with leprosy because we got to see the reality of how impossible it is to to live Leviticus out and what seems impossible to us. It's totally possible with God. This is the beauty of Jesus. Jesus A uses the power of holiness to heal is that Jesus makes sure that sin stops spreading by becoming an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Okay, timeless truth. Even though Jesus is a reality, that does not mean that sin doesn't still spread. Sin still spreads, but we are not hopeless. Although sin spreads, holiness spreads as well. And the presence of God spreads as well. And faith spreads in the same way that things like sin are contagious. Things like holiness and a passion for God, those things are contagious as well. All right, I gave you a context clue. I gave you nerdy nuggets. I gave you a timeless truth. That's everything for Leviticus, chapters 11, 12, 13, 14, and 15. I'll see you right here for day 112 tomorrow as we finally look at the the Day of Atonement. It's been a long time. If you are on a streak, don't mess it up. I'll see you right here tomorrow. Love you. Thanks so much for joining us on the Bible Department podcast. You can find us online and learn more about the show at thebibledepartment.com, and on Instagram hebibledepartment. If you enjoyed this episode and want to dive deeper into the Bible, you can get free access to our library of courses@thebibledepartment.com we'll see you back here tomorrow.