Leviticus 4:1–12
The Bible4Jesus.com Podcast
About this episode
We live in a sentimental age, an age that has tried to domesticate God. We want a God who is a celestial therapist, a divine affirmation machine, a God who is always nice and never dangerous. But the book of Leviticus will not allow for such a tame and manageable deity. Leviticus, and particularly a chapter like this one, is a bucket of ice water to the face of our therapeutic, low-cost, casual Christianity. It forces us to confront the staggering reality of God's holiness and the lethal gravity of our sin. Many modern Christians, when they bother to read Leviticus at all, treat it like a dusty museum of bizarre and bloody rituals. The sacrificial system is not an embarrassing relic; it is the picture book that teaches us the grammar of our salvation. Without the vocabulary of Leviticus, words like atonement, propitiation, sacrifice, and holiness become hollowed out and sentimentalized.