Clean and Unclean - Part Two

Studies in Leviticus
Clean and Unclean – Part 2
Lev. 11 - 15

I‟d like you to turn in your Bible this morning to Lev. 11:44. Two weeks ago we were in Lev. 11 – 15, and we started to consider the concepts of “clean” and “unclean” in the life of Israel. We saw that things that were “clean” were acceptable to God, and the things that were “unclean” were unacceptable to God. It really is a very simple concept. Sometimes you had control over being clean or unclean, and sometimes you didn‟t. These five chapters deal with food, skin disease, bodily discharges, mildew, and procreation. We ended our survey of these chapters here in Lev. 11:44 where I shared with you God’s rationale and Israel’s response. The thinking behind these guidelines, stated generally, is that the God who created the nation of Israel and delivered them from bondage in Egypt had the unequivocal right to regulate their lives as He saw fit. When you are the creator and deliverer, that is your prerogative! We see this in the phrase, “For I am the Lord your God.” The response on the part of Israel is seen in the next phrase, “Consecrate yourselves therefore and be holy, for I am holy.” They were to separate themselves from their surroundings (the concept behind “consecration”) so they could be in fellowship with God.

This concept of separation from our surroundings lies at the heart of our memory passage, so let‟s say it again before we start to make some practical application from these five chapters.

“Then the LORD spoke to Moses, saying, „Speak to the sons of Israel and say to them, „I am the LORD your God. You shall not do what is done in the land of Egypt where you lived, nor are you to do what is done in the land of Canaan where I am bringing you; you shall not walk in their statutes. You are to perform My judgments and keep My statutes, to live in accord with them; I am the LORD your God. So you shall keep My statutes and My judgments, by which a man may live if he does them; I am the LORD.‟”

What I want to do this morning is go a little further and show you that there is more going on here than God simply doing whatever He wants to with His people. There is more here than some autocrat exercising the whims of his power. So let me give you four secondary purposes behind the laws of the clean and the unclean.

1. God was building a barrier between His people and the surrounding cultures.

As I mentioned several weeks ago, if a person practiced these stipulations rigorously, it would be impossible for him to have any significant level of relationship with the surrounding nations. Why?

A. Because of the very limited diet. The nations around Israel did not have such a structured diet, so an Israelite was running the risk of contaminating himself any time he accepted an invitation to have a meal with someone of the surrounding nations. Take for instance the coney, or rock badger. It was a delicacy in that part of the world, and could easily be a meat the Canaanites would serve if they were having a guest over for a meal. But the Israelites couldn‟t eat them. Their limited diet served as a barrier between them and their surrounding cultures.

B. Because their cleanliness could so easily be compromised. Any time an Israelite touched something that had been touched by something unclean, he himself became unclean. Remember the point I made about how uncleanliness could be spread to inanimate objects as well as other people. If you had an open sore on your body and were under observation by the priest, if you sat on a stool, that stool became unclean. And if someone in your family came along and sat on that stool, he himself became unclean for the rest of the day. So the chances are very high that if you visited the home of your Canaanite neighbor or spent time shopping in their marketplace, you would become unclean.

C. Because of the public nature of being unclean. When you were unclean, basically everybody around you knew it. It was hard to keep it a secret. You were forbidden from tabernacle activities. In some cases you had to verbally announce your uncleanness. In some cases you were physically separated from the entire nation for observation. If you were sensitive to those around you were very cautious not to spread your state of being unclean. Do you see how this point would restrict your contact with the nations around you?

So the first thing God was doing with these guidelines was creating a barrier between His people and the surrounding nations. The next thing God was doing, which is very significant, maybe even the most significant, is that He was demonstrating the impossibility of holiness through human effort.

2. God was demonstrating the impossibility of holiness through human effort.

Probably the most startling dimension of this concept of cleanliness is the reality that the people of Israel were incapable of maintaining lasting fellowship with God. Look with me at 14:33 where we see a very interesting verse that illustrates this. “The Lord spoke to Moses and Aaron, saying, „When you come into the land of Canaan, which I give you for a possession and I put a case of leprous disease in a house in the land of your possession, then he who owns the house shall come and tell the priest, „There seems to me to be some case of disease in my house.‟” Did you catch the significance of that? It was possible for you to be doing everything you were supposed to to maintain fellowship with God, and then bam! Here‟s mildew in the house, everything in the house is unclean, and because I have touched it, now I‟m unclean. And my separation from God is not because of something I have done, it is because God has put a case of the leprous disease in my house.

Last week I shared with you that normal, bodily functions made you unclean. In certain instances, obedience to God‟s expectations made you unclean. I want us to appreciate the reality of this situation because if you disobey, you are separated from God, and if you obey, you are separated as well. What‟s the deal with that? God was sending a very powerful message, and then illustrating it physically, that holiness by human effort is impossible. The nation of Israel couldn‟t do it 4,000 years ago no matter how hard they tried, and we can‟t do it today either!

So we see that God is doing some very important things with these rules for cleanliness and uncleanliness. He is building a barrier between His people and the cultures around them, and He was showing them that holiness through human effort was impossible. The third thing I want to show you this morning is that God was instilling in his people a profound reverence for human life.

3. God was instilling in His people a profound reverence for human life.

I‟ve spent quite a bit of time over the last month meditating on Lev. 12 which deals with childbirth, and Lev. 15, which in part deals with procreation. As I expressed several weeks ago, I was struggling with why something that was created by God, and ordained by God as holy, and blessed by God - would put you into a state of dis-fellowship with God. The immediate answer that came to me I shared with you – conception and birth brings another sinner into the world. So I understood the childbirth part, but what about the other parts in chapter 15 that deal with male emissions and female cycles and the consequences of marital intimacy?

To understand what is going on here, we need to contrast the culture of Lev. 15 with the culture of the evangelical church. From our perspective, marital intimacy is viewed primarily from the perspective of pleasure. It is a God ordained activity that is the pinnacle of the human sensory experience, and we need to appreciate that God created us this way deliberately. He could have created us in such a way that the female of the species went into estrus, and the male of the species could sense that. But we aren‟t animals, God created us differently, and we are right to perceive this as God‟s gracious gift to us as humans. But what we evangelicals have lost, though, is the procreative potential that accompanies that intimacy. By embracing the concept of contraception, we have inadvertently downplayed the primary purpose of our sexuality. We like the idea of conception, but only on our terms! In other words, if the mother‟s health is conducive to it, or if the house is large enough, or if the family income is sufficient, or if the father has health insurance, or if we don‟t already have several children – then we like the idea of conception.

Contrast that perspective with Lev. 15. In Israel‟s culture, every single dimension of conception, both male and female, both married and single, was marked by one day of being unclean! Why? Because it is a God thing. Every single month, each woman of childbearing age spent a week reflecting on God‟s role in conception. Every time a husband and wife were intimate, they both spent a day contemplating the spiritual dimension of conception. It was impossible in Israel‟s culture to separate marital intimacy from the potential for human life. This is why Judaism as a culture has a profound respect for life, as these statistics show. In the US,

 Women identifying themselves as Protestants obtain 37.4% of all abortions,

 Catholic women account for 31.3%,

 Women with no religious affiliation obtain 23.7%,

 18% of all abortions are performed on women who identify themselves as "Born-again/Evangelical," and

 Jewish women account for 1.3% of all abortions.

This is why I say that the rules of clean and unclean created in Israel a profound reverence for human life.

The final thing I want to show you about these rules guiding what is clean and unclean I am saving for last on purpose, because it really is the least significant of these four points. And that is that God was protecting the physical well-being of His people.

4. God was protecting the physical well-being of His people.

As you read these chapters, you can‟t help but notice that something in the physical realm was taking place. What kind of animals were they prohibited from eating? Generally speaking, bottom feeding, scavenging, and predatory animals. In other words, those animals who were at risk for disease because of their own diets. And if you eat a diseased animal, guess who gets that disease?

We see more of this practical dimension in that infectious skin diseases were very closely regulated or even quarantined. Why? Because of how easily they can spread throughout the family and even an entire community. The same is true for how mildew or mold was to be treated. In addition, it makes sense not to touch dead animals because of the possibility of contracting disease yourself. So its easy to see that God had built into His nation some basic rules for the prevention and containment of disease.

But I mention this last because I want you to see it in its proper perspective. I think it is very unfortunate that some people come to these chapters and all they see is this last point. Or maybe they see a little more, but they hold this last point up as being the focal point of the entire passage. How do we know that this point is the least significant of the four? Because Jesus himself rescinded it! Out of these four points, three are still in effect today. God still wants a barrier between His people and the world. God still wants us to realize that holiness by human effort is impossible. God still wants his people to have a profound respect for human life. But when it comes to mildew in my closet, or my wife not being able to go to church for 40 days after the birth of a child, or picking up a dead cat and burying it, or eating bacon wrapped, cheese stuffed jalapenos – those things don‟t separate me from God like they used to.

I want to remind you of one of the first messages I brought from this book of Leviticus. I shared with you that one of the dangers of the book was to focus on the particulars and miss the big picture. Do you remember the illustration of the huge picture window that looks out over the ocean and the person standing there was preoccupied with the woodwork around it? This warning is especially true for these laws of the clean and unclean.

I want us to close by looking at 1 Peter 2:9. “But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.” Can you appreciate this morning that you are holy, not because of your human effort to maintain your holiness but because God has declared you as such (Jn. 15:3). What the Israelite struggled for his entire lifetime, you obtained with a single declarative statement on God‟s part. And it is all because of Jesus.

Prayer: Father, thank you for Jesus. Where would we be with Him? We‟d be locked in a depressing, endless cycle of trying to maintain our own holiness. Thank you for your Son who made it possible for us to be in fellowship with You in this lifetime as well as the next. Amen.