Okay, so lesson four is entitled The Holiness Good, as I just said before prayer. What I want to do actually is, this is the last fourth and final lesson of this Bible study, which of course could be much, much longer. I think next time I do this, Leviticus 2.0, it probably be around 10 hours, 10 lessons, because it's so rich, and this lesson has so much amazing stuff in it. When we talk about holiness, holiness of persons and relations and holiness of time, it's great stuff.
I can't wait to have been looking forward to recording this here, not to cap off our Bible study, but what I want to do is to give really quickly a just a snapshot of where we've been, so we have the context of this series of laws that we're going to be talking about right now. So of course, the whole book of Leviticus opens up with sacrifices, and sacrifices both are given by priests, and so we had a little bit of a section there, a chakras 8 through 10 about the ordination of Aaron, and his sons as priests and all the various Levites are basically deacons who help serve the priests and the worship of Israel. But you got sacrifices that do two things, sacrifices purify or cleanse, and they also sanctify. So last lesson, lesson three was the cleanliness laws, the cleanliness code, and we saw how the sacrifices leaves the first part of what they're supposed to accomplish, which is to purify, so if Israel is unclean or impure, sacrifices can help purify them.
And so we look at all the various laws in this cleanliness code, last lesson that led up to the great center, the great feast of a whole book, which is Yom Kippur, right? Because Yom Kippur is, and we'll see a little bit of that actually in chapter 25 of this lesson. But anyways, Yom Kippur we talked about in a little bit more depth, is the great feasts and the great sacrifice of Israel that both cleanses and sanctifies. And that brings us to this lesson, right?
Because the holiness code, if the people are unholy, they need to be sanctified, sacrifices are going to help accomplish that too. So Yom Kippur was right in between these two codes. In chapter 16, it looks backwards on the cleanliness code in laws because Yom Kippur is cleansing the people, but it looks forward to what we're going to talk about now, which is the holiness laws because Yom Kippur sanctifies. So there is a great organizational structure in this book, and many people don't realize that first off because it's Leviticus, and who reads Leviticus anymore?
But I hope if you have made it this far with me, four lessons in this thorough introduction, you see just how phenomenal it is, and how much it helps us understand our life in Christ as Christians, because Christ cleanses us and sanctifies us, purifies us, for our relationship with God, for us to be a holy people. So with that, I also want to really quickly review the definitions that we saw at the beginning of the last lesson. Because the cleanliness code is really concerned with what we would call right worship, while the holiness code deals with right living. Both are essential to be God's people.
Cleanliness code is right worship, holiness code is right living, and you get this concept in various commentators, have a footnote for you. I'm actually going to read it for you. It's from the handbook on the Pentateuch by Victor Hamilton, a great little source of heaven, your still a bit of suggested reading. So this is what he says.
He says, the primary focus of chapters one through 16 is on how the people have got our two worship. At God's holy sanctuary through the ministry of God's holy and consecrated servants. So really quickly, I'm going to interject and say, that's exactly what we've covered so far. The sacrifices, the priesthood that give sacrifices to cleanse the people.
How are they to worship God? Well, now it goes on to say that chapters 17 through 27, the primary focus is not so much on how God's people are to worship as on how they are to live. Those who worship a holy God will aspire to live holy lives and appropriate the resources that a holy God makes available to them in order to so order their lives. So I think that's another great way of looking at all this.
So cleanliness, how to worship. Chapters one through 16, how to worship God, right worship. Then this last half of the book is right living, how we are to live in God's presence and united to God. So I really, really like that.
So now let me just refresh your memory in terms of the definitions that we saw from the Catholic introduction to the Old Testament here. So it says, quote, on the one hand, cleanliness is a measure of the suitability of something to be in the presence of God. Unclean things are not suitable to be in the vine presence, whereas clean things are. And that was the essence of lesson three, right?
We looked at this, quote, and unpacked it a lot more. It's the suitability of something to be in God's presence. On the other hand, it goes on to say, holiness is a measure of the presence of God itself. A holy thing is somehow imbued with or mediates the divine presence, whereas a common thing does not.
So a measure in the presence of God itself. And what I want to tell you right now right off of that is the interpretive key word for the measure of the presence of God itself really is love. We're gonna look at a lot of holiness. I mean, the word is used 150 some odd times in the book of Leviticus.
But I think to understand the presence of God itself is the word love because later on in John will tell us, God is love. And that's why you find so many of these laws that are in relation to a sexual purity or social purity, social laws, how we are to live and write relationship with each other as friends or parents or children or whatever it might be, and how we're to love one another and love our enemy and love the foreigner. I think that is a clear indication of how we're to look at this entire section of the book. And it's gonna be, the theme is gonna be taken up in the New Testament, the Gospels and the Epistles of Peter, for example, and Paul so many times.
We are to live a holy and virtuous life in God's love. That's what it means to be holy. In fact, I'll just go on here and look at the notes and I'm getting ahead of myself a little bit here. This is a phenomenal section of Leviticus.
I absolutely love it. But holiness is a measure of the presence of God itself. And what that means is to be set apart from the world, to be with God and to be for God, right? You're set apart from the world that is tainted by sin, that is corrupted by sin.
You're set apart to be with God and to participate in God's presence. That makes sense, that's what we're talking about here. And so this quote from the commentary will go on and say, prior to the grant of the covenant about Sinai, God promised that obedience to the covenant would result in Israel becoming a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. Every Israelite therefore was called to be holy, that is Kedosh.
Set apart from sin and uncleanliness, and set apart for the presence of God. End quote. And that is a really good connection, like it mentions here Exodus 19, 5, and 6, right when Israel gets to Mount Sinai. That's what God says here to be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.
You are to be my own special possession. Shagulah is the Hebrew word. We're talking about all of that in the Bible study on Exodus. And that's the whole theme of Exodus, to be set apart from sin for God.
And to be set apart for God, that is what Kedosh really means. We have an expression probably heard of, comes of course from this biblical. We are in the world, but we're not of the world. We're not of the world because we're of God now, we're being set apart.
God alone is intrinsically holy. He is holiness itself. Isaiah chapter 6, 3 comes into a liberal revelation as well. God is holy, holy, holy.
He is the source of all holiness. Nothing in holy can enter into his presence, but yet he wants to communicate that holiness to us, his creatures. And that I mean like all creatures, of course, that's a whole other topic for another time. But we creatures that have immortal souls, and we have the spiritual faculties of an intellect and a will, mainly with angels and human beings.
He wants to communicate his own divine presence to us. So that way again, we're set apart with him and for him, and we live a life of love. That's what's going on here, okay? It's really profound.
We kind of take this for granted, I think. It's kind of a cliche, you know, God is love, and you know, we're called to be disciples of Christ, but really a participation in the presence of God itself, and that presence of God is love. It's truly phenomenal. So I encourage you, take that to prayer.
Think about it. Don't let it become cliche, right? Don't take it for granted. Israel is called in Israel, and we as the Church of the New Israel, we must be holy for God to dwell with us and for us to dwell with God, for that relationship between us to be real, because God is holy, holy, holy, right?
So what we're gonna be looking at here is these various laws in chapter 17 through 22, they're all related to the themes that we discussed in the previous chapters, right? We talked about sacrifice and laws for the cleanliness code and the requirement of holiness we're gonna look at right now, but they're all related here, because how, again, it's the title of the whole Bible study, a holy people for a holy God, okay? So I just wanted to do that little introduction there, kind of like cleanliness is next to godliness. These two major sections of the book are very much related, and they all really hinge upon the fact that God wants to dwell with us and dwell in our presence, but we must be pure, we must be holy.
Okay, so with that, I think that's enough introductory remarks. Let's jump into this. Let's go to straight to chapter 17, which discusses holy sacrifices, and that might seem a little bit out of place because if you go to chapters one through seven, you've got all these discussions and laws, instructions about sacrifices, but it makes sense because here you have further laws about holy sacrifices because it really does follow the holiest sacrifice of the year, which is Yom Kippur, okay? That is the flow there.
So Yom Kippur is chapter 16, holy sacrifice of the year, it cleanses, it purifies, and now you've got laws about sacrifice, so it totally makes sense. But what you find in this chapter, and again, there's, we're talking about 10 chapters here in this lesson, I'm gonna have to zoom in on particular themes, but the biggest theme in chapter 17 is the prohibition of drinking blood. We've heard this many times, let's just look at this really quickly. Let's read verse 10 through 12, that'll be sufficient.
It says, If any man of the house of Israel, or of the strangers that's adorn among them eats any blood, I will set my face against that person who eats blood, and will cut him off from among his people. For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have gotten it for you upon the altar to make a tome it for your souls. For it is the blood that makes a tome it by reason of the life. Therefore, I have said to the sons of Israel, no person among you shall eat blood, and neither shall any stranger because you're among you shall eat blood.
Okay, so really, that central part here, that's so famous, verse 11, the life of the flesh is in the blood. I've given it to you upon the altar and make a tome it for your souls for the blood, that makes a tome it by reason of the life. Okay, so we've heard this a lot before, you can sacrifice and eat animals, okay, that's fine, we talked about all of the dietary restrictions in the last lesson, I can't get back into all that. But you got this prohibition of not drinking blood, not eating blood, why?
Because life is in the blood. You actually find this, if you go back to chapter nine of Genesis, nine four, God gives Noah permission to eat any of the animals, except you couldn't eat blood, right? So if you wanna go back to lesson three, you could review some of the comments I made about why, you could eat anything in Noah's time, but now all of a sudden, Israel is not allowed to eat certain animals, whole discussion we looked at in the last lesson. But right now here, let's zoom in on this command, we find a Genesis as well here in Leviticus and elsewhere, life is in the blood, so you couldn't drink or eat the blood, why?
Because life was intuitively thought to be in the blood, and that makes a lot of sense. If you get wounded or you bleed out, what do you do, you die, right? So there's this concept like you need blood in order to live, and that's just common sense, just basic observation teaches us that. But hematology, I, this is a little personal note here, but a long time ago, I actually thought about becoming a doctor.
That was a while ago, I did become a doctor of a certain source, a book doctor of an actual medical doctor, what really attracted me in the field is hematology. Hematology, if you really study blood, healthy blood, the blood reveals everything, right? It reveals everything about a person's health. I always found that really, really interesting.
So, you know, I'm not a medical doctor now, so I can't really say much about hematology, but it always fascinated me that life is in the blood. And if you have healthy blood, you have healthy life, and it's just, it's phenomenal to look at how modern science seems to validate what the ancient world kind of took for granted. We see that true, and I even if you look at the very spiritual laws, what we're into a person unclean, the loss of life, the loss of blood renders you unclean, because death has no place in the presence of God, all this stuff we talk about in lesson three. It's interesting how modern science seems to validate their instincts there.
So, life was thought to be in the blood that's definitely true, and so they weren't supposed to eat of the blood or drink of the blood, because that blood is shed, that life is shed in a toment for their souls. Okay, so that was one aspect of it, a toment. The offering and the shedding of blood, the giving of a life, was made in a toment for a person's soul, and that is in connection with everything we saw with sacrifices in chapters one through seven. However, there's another really important point about this, and that was drinking blood in the ancient world, was often associated with pagan idolatry.
And I got a great quote for you from the Navarre commentary. It says, this commandment helped to keep Jews away from pagan cults, in which the blood of an animal was sometimes drunk in the belief that the life of the victim thereby passed into the person who drank the blood. So, that's really interesting here. So, it's actually very much in continuity of what we've seen before, the rationale and the reasoning of offering sacrifices as a repudiation of pagan idolatry, those dietary laws and restrictions were to keep people away from pagan idolatry and table fellowship.
Well, the same thing is kind of going on here. The Israelites were forbidden to drink blood, because it was often associated with pagan idolatry. So, people today would be like, well, can I eat a steak? You know, there's always the joke.
We always know somebody who likes to eat their steak when it's mooing, right? Pardon me if you're a part of your vegetarian, that might seem gross, but there are people who like to eat their steak really rare, and you can't do that because there's blood in there, and so there's a lot of confusion that it's unnecessary. So, this is a really big point. God wants to keep people from pagan idolatry.
So, this commandment, well, number one, we know it's true. The life is in the blood that makes sense on the basic level, leading out, but it makes sense from a hemological point of view as well, I think. So, it's true. And so, God wants to keep the Israelites and really anybody of ritualizing the drinking of blood to somehow have the life of the animal, and related to that, the God associated with the animal into their lives, into their souls.
So, then this brings us to everyone mentions this all the time. You're talking about the mystery and the beauty of the Eucharist. And Jesus will say in John, chapter 6, 53. Let me just read this.
I want to read John, chapter 6, verses 53 through 56, because Jesus seems to be directly contradicting this particular command. So, this is what it says, 53 and following. Jesus said to them, truly, truly I say to you, unless you eat the flesh, the Son of Man, and drink his blood, you have no life in you. He eats my flesh and drinks my blood, as he turned a life, and I'll raise him up on the last day.
For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood, abides in me and I in him. And it goes on, the whole trap is amazing, right? It's called the Bread of Life Discourse, and it flows right into the Eucharistic discourse.
It's phenomenal. So, why does Jesus say this? And if you go on, you read on it, like everybody scandalize. Like, how can this man give us his flesh to eat and his blood to drink, and everyone leaves him, and then Peter says very famously, Lord, to whom shall we go?
You have the words of eternal life, guaranteed that no, what Jesus was talking about. But this is all about the Eucharist. We must eat his flesh and drink his blood in the non-bloody manner of the Eucharist. And there's a lot to say there, but I want to address the objection.
A lot of people will say, Jesus couldn't have been referring to his actual body and blood, because of this command in Leviticus, you're forbidden to eat the blood. And so, people say, well, what is going on here? Catholics have a very, not Catholics alone, but again, the Eastern churches would say the same thing. I think the reason is because the Old Testament prohibition explains the New Testament command.
You don't want to be drink, there's truth in the statement that life is in the blood, right? So, you don't want to be taking the life of an immortal brute beast, and even worse than that, you don't want to be associating yourself with pagan idolatry. Paul will address this in 1 Corinthians, right? To have communion with the false gods.
Paul says, I don't want you to have communion with the devils. So, you don't want to be taking the blood and the life of the animals. You do want to be taking the life of Jesus Christ, true God and true man. The Old Testament prohibition explains precisely why we're supposed to take the body and blood of Jesus Christ.
In order to have his life, his divine eternal life within ourselves. And of course, the Eucharist unites all the mysteries that we've seen so far in Exodus in the Pentateuch in our study so far with the Passover, the sacrifices, everything. So, that's really the answer for it. Jesus is not breaking Leviticus, he's clarifying it.
It says, as if God had said to the Israelites, for all of those years, you need to save yourself for something better. Do not take the blood of animals and the pagan gods that are associated with them, save yourself for true drink, right? For true life, which is Jesus Christ's body and blood. So, I hope that makes sense here.
We are what we eat. You really want to, you want to, that's true from a nutritional point of view, and in a spiritual point of view, to take the body and blood of Jesus Christ is to become divinized, right? Is to be strengthened in the identity as a child of God.