Now What?

Exodus ends with the tabernacle completed and the glory of the LORD filling it so completely that Moses cannot enter. The God of Israel is now present — genuinely, specifically, spatially present — in the middle of the camp. And the first word of Leviticus is a calling: the LORD called to Moses and spoke to him from the tent of meeting.

The question that the glory filling the tabernacle immediately generates is not theological. It is practical. Now what? How does a finite, mortal, sinful people live in the immediate proximity of a holy God without being consumed by the holiness they are in the presence of? Leviticus is the answer. Every sacrifice, every purity regulation, every priestly procedure, every feast and fast in its twenty-seven chapters is part of the same sustained response to the same question.

This is why the ancient rabbis considered Leviticus the most important book of the Torah — the book with which children should begin their study of Scripture rather than end it. Where modern readers experience Leviticus as an obstacle between the excitement of Exodus and the resumed narrative of Numbers, the ancient tradition experienced it as the heart of the Torah’s teaching. The relationship established in Genesis and dramatically enacted in Exodus requires, if it is to be sustained rather than merely celebrated, a way of life adequate to the character of the God with whom it has been established.

The specific instructions Leviticus contains are at once deeply strange to modern readers and more directly relevant than their strangeness initially suggests. The sacrificial system has not been practiced in nearly two thousand years. The purity codes govern conditions most modern readers encounter only in medical contexts. The Year of Jubilee has never, so far as historians can determine, been consistently practiced by any society. And yet the theological logic organizing every one of these specific instructions — holiness, atonement, restoration, the relationship between divine character and human practice — addresses the most persistent questions of human existence as directly as any text in Scripture.

Reading Leviticus well means receiving instruction as itself a form of grace — the grace of a God who does not simply set his people free and leave them to work out the implications on their own.

REFLECTION QUESTIONS

1. What does it mean to you that God’s first word to Moses from the newly completed tabernacle is instruction rather than celebration? What does that sequence — liberation, then presence, then guidance — reveal about the character of the God Leviticus describes?

2. What is your honest reaction to reading Leviticus? Do you experience its instruction as burden, as irrelevant, or as something else? What does that reaction reveal about how you understand the relationship between grace and the shape of the life it calls for?

TODAY’S PRACTICE

Read Leviticus 1:1–3 and Leviticus 26:11–13 today — the first verses and the covenant declaration near the end. The book opens with instruction for approaching God and closes with this: “I will walk among you and be your God, and you will be my people.” Hold those two moments together. The instruction in between is the specification of what that walking-with looks like in practice.