 Okay, we're going, we're on. I think we're done. Okay, here we are for week three. And as you can tell, we're going to be talking about sacrificial system tonight. We're not going, I'm going to spare you the exhilaration of going through all the sacrifices and all the rituals and all that stuff. So we're not going to be tracking through everything. We are going to hit some sort of conceptual aspects of this. Again, just to help us, if possible, kind of get our heads wrapped around the whole logic of some of the things that they're doing. In this case, more broadly, what are they thinking when it comes to what priests actually do? Why they do what they do procedurally, methodologically, and all that. Now, if you were here the first week, we talked about two kinds of impurity. Also, again, the terminology in some translations would be uncleanness. There's ritual impurity and there's moral impurity. Ritual impurity, again, that these were, this was temporary. You basically couldn't avoid it. Again, there were procedures that would take care of your ritual uncleanness, your ritual impurity. And it really referred to either you doing something or something happening to you that made you unfit for sacred space. And again, most of the time these are very natural, unavoidable, normal things. Moral impurity was a little bit different because it doesn't exclusively but it largely revolved around committing certain abominable acts. And this was more enduring. There weren't necessarily any sacrifices to take care of the way committing a moral abomination infected you, infected the land, infected sacred space. The remedy, if you want to call it that, for moral impurity was either the death penalty, exile from the community or again, you know, corporately exile from the land. If moral impurity was broad enough and significant enough. There are certain moral violations that involved restitution. So in that respect, again, if you weren't exiled, if it wasn't a death penalty offense, there was a sacrifice that was made, but it was made to, again, be part of a restitution process. So there are some of those. We talked about both types of impurity, sacred space, again, was last week. Again, the ritual or the ritual uncleanness, again, contact with any number of natural processes and substances we talked about. Examples were these, again, just to give you a few specifics here. Childbirth, genital discharges, touching something dead, skin disease, whatnot. And again, the reason we covered this was that there's a disconnect and it's intentional. Between being rendered unfit for sacred space in a ritual sense, in a sense where we have to sort of quarantine you, to teach the principle of this is God's space, this is not God's space. All these different rituals would reinforce that difference. Some of the things that would put you in that state would reinforce that difference. It had nothing to do with morality, whereas moral violation, of course, did. Moral transgressions of this nature. This isn't an exclusive list, it's just a few. The word abomination typically gets associated with these things. Various sexual transgressions, idolatry was a big one, bloodshed, taking a innocent life was another one. But they were different. So we put this little chart up into sort of quickly encapsulate the differences between the two. Between the two there was the type, the source, again, how you get it, what involves, what the effect is, temporary versus, again, something more serious, and then resolution. So this is mostly what we talked about in the first week. Last week we talked about sacred space, and again, that has to do with this God-like place. Sacred space was about, this is where God lives, this is why God owns, this is why God occupies again all of these concepts. And that was where God comes to meet humans. We went through a whole sort of litany last time about how these places were marked. Could be a tree, could be a tabernacle or a tent, could be a temple. There were places that were, again, conceptually associated with God's dwelling place, gardens and mountains we talked about last time. Again, to telegraph God's otherness, His remoteness, His transcendence, all these different ideas. And when God comes to earth, there are places on earth that by virtue of God's presence become sanctified, they become sacred spots. And so this is why you would have all testament people build an altar there, maybe build a tabernacle there, put up a tent, plant a tree, all these different acts that we talked about last time. Again, a quick overview. We also talked about the rationale not only for sacred space, and in this case, again, some of these impurities. Let me flip close here. There were three of them. One was, again, going back here, this life and death kind of situation, that's the first one here. But why the different rationale? Why these procedures, both to make you fit for sacred space and why do certain things affect you and other things not? And again, we just summarized it by saying there's basically kind of three approaches that the do's and don'ts, the impurity versus impurity, clean versus unclean lists that you get, whether it's behaviors or things you eat or things you touch, all that. It was either due to teach you sort of a binary opposition of things that are associated with life, those stuff that God's associated with, things that are associated with death, that God is not associated with death because he's the life giver. Again, the sexual stuff was, again, you have to be like God, God is eternal, he doesn't need to reproduce, and so there's this underlying logic. Again, to be fit for sacred space, you have to sort of be like God in this particular way. So your sexual behavior was circumscribed in particular ways. And then there was the controllable versus uncontrollable idea, things that you control behaviorally. Now, having said all that, you've got this sort of weird system that, again, there's no sort of one explanation for why things are in this category and why things are in that category. There's actually two or three ways to approach it. But if you get these two categories, and the two categories affect your fitness or your non-fitness for sacred space, where you're allowed to go versus not go, what you're allowed to touch in terms of sacred objects or not, then if you wind up in a situation where something happens to you, how do you fix that? Again, that takes you into the sacrificial system. So if you think about it, even if we could wrap our heads around why we're in a pure or impure condition. Okay, I understand, I got it. Well then, how do these ritual acts, how does it actually deal with anything? What does it matter? I mean, how does killing an animal take care of this problem? You know, just questions like that. In other words, what's the logic to that? So we have kind of a worldview logic gap to how we wind up in this situation. And then we've got another question of how does this fix this? Is it just, well, we do this because God told us to do that. We sort of let God noodle that one, figure that out. I mean, there's some of that. But along with it, again, the sacrifices were kind of aimed at teaching certain things. Again, procedurally. And there's also going to be sort of an effect of the sacrifices in the way they're talked about. And that's the part. The ritual part is sort of, you know, there's kind of a living object lesson sort of situation going on. Where again, the priest is going to be doing certain things. And because the priest is sort of like a God proxy, he's allowed on sacred space. He's allowed to hold this or that object. He's allowed to penetrate into the tabernacle so far and all that kind of stuff. Since the priest is kind of a God proxy, what he does, as we're going to see tonight, would have mined or mimicked certain things that God wants people to know about him. So there's part of it's kind of a visual object lesson, conceptual object lesson. The other part, what the actual ritual does is kind of where we have to say, well, if God says it does that, in other words, if you do that and God said, do that to take care of this problem and we're good, well, that's a little bit of a face statement. It doesn't have to make biological sense or human sense. If God told you to do this, yes, there's going to be something you're supposed to think and something you're supposed to learn here. But if you do this, you're obedient and then you and God are okay. God will allow you to visit him. In other words, you're not under threat. You don't have to worry. You're fit for sacred space. So there's two sides to the sacrifices. These are other questions. Why don't the sacrifices take care of all kinds of impurity? Why not? Why are the moral ones sort of left out? Why are they an exception? Why is that treated so severely? If ritual impurity requires keeping death out of the sanctuary, you can remember certain things associated with death, like touching a dead car, because that made you ritually impure. Well, good grief, there's a lot of death going on in the sacrificial system. What's the logic to that? Why am I impure for touching this cow that killed over? But then I take a lamb or something, I give it to the priest, the priest kills it. And the sacred space is okay with that, because I'm supposed to take the animal into a sacred area, and then the priest will do the ritual. There's death on holy ground there, so how does that make any sense? So that's the question that is kind of obvious. And then how does the whole process sort of imitate God? Let's talk about the steps. We don't often think about kind of navigating through a book like Leviticus or something else that has ritual procedure in it. But it's kind of instructive in certain ways, in broad conceptual ways. So the priests had to ritually purify themselves before any of this starts, and they wash and so forth. They make sure, again, in terms of their sexual behavior, have I abstained X number of days? Am I okay? We've got to sort of go through the whole check-down list, make sure they fit themselves, and then they've got to wash according to the ritual procedure. And once they get done with all that, then they're allowed to go on to turf that God occupies. So there's sort of a preparatory set of procedures and things that they have to think about to get ready. And then there's a selection of a ritually clean animal. The animal has to be pure, clean, again, according to the rules of clean and unclean animals. And the reason for that is you are going to take that animal into sacred space. So you can't have any blemishes, you can't have any diseases, you can't be in one of these forbidden animals or anything like that. So they have to make sure of that. Then the animal is going to be killed or sacrificed. And on this, I came across that, again, I like clowns as work on this, and I've put it into form. I think this is kind of an interesting observation. He says sacrifice is frequently described or derided as violent. And it certainly is deadly and bloody, but the violence of sacrifice is not random or indiscriminate. Animal sacrifice in ancient Israel precedes only in a very orderly and controlled way. In ancient Israel, sacrifice is very little like hunting. You don't have this sort of, I'm not a hunter, but it has me wondering, when I see discussions of hunting versus sacrifice, well, the animals end up dead, so what's the difference? There could be a lot of difference. There could be a lot of savagery involved. Beyond competition, the thrill of the hunt, there could be a lot of savagery involved in a hunting situation. You would not find in a sacrifice. The animal is bound, it's going to be sort of under submission already. So there are things like that, and what clowns is saying is this is very methodical. It's very procedure-driven. In ancient Israel, sacrifice involved the controlled exercise of complete power over an animal's life and death. Hold on to that point. This is precisely one of the powers that Israel's God exercises over human beings. So the fact that you have an animal for sacrifice, and you as the priest, are in complete control of the animal's life or death. And conceptually, that was one little point of this that was supposed to make you realize, that the priest is the God proxy here. That God has complete control over life and death. It's not a situation, it's not chaotic, violently chaotic, but it's the Lord who kills and brings to life. The life giver gave life, he can take away life. Exercising control over the death of a subordinate being is not the only aspect of sacrificial ritual that can be understood in light of imitatio de, the imitation of God. So again, the God proxy is supposed to make you think that God has complete control over life and death. In a sacrificial situation, why would that matter? Why would it matter? Why would it be sort of either interesting or important for you to think that way about what you're seeing the priest do to this animal that you brought? Because it could be you. God has complete control over life and death. You are on his turf. You could very well be the one at risk here, but you're not. And these are simple straightforward concepts. And God has empowered this person to essentially be him in this situation. This person is not only chosen by God, but he is fit to do what he's going to do here. He's playing by God's rules. He is fit for sacred space. And this animal that you have brought, because the priest is who he is, and because the priest is playing by God's rules, and because you're playing by God's rules, you are not under threat. It could very well be you. And sometimes, as you read through your Old Testament, it is people. I mean, sometimes people do violate sacred space and they pay a price for that. They become living object lessons. Well, this time it was you. That shouldn't be the way it is. And it's not going to be the way it is if you, again, do what we're asking you to do. The animal is, after it's sacrificed, it's dismembered. This is scholars like to refer to it this way. The priest de-creates it. As the maker put it together, the priest disassembles it. Again, the priest is the God proxy. It's a de-creation of life. The blood is applied to the altar or the sanctuary. And I want to camp here a little bit. Do you realize that in the Old Testament sacrificial system, we as Christians are taught, not wrongly, but I think imprecisely, we're taught that the sacrificial system was a typology or typified, the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. On some conceptual level, that makes sense. But it doesn't take very long if you're actually reading through the sacrificial passages that are supposed to typify the cross, that you notice the blood never gets applied to people. And you get all this New Testament language where the blood is applied to the center in some way. Just the concept of having your sins taken away by the blood or covered by the blood. These phrases that we're used to thinking about with the cross. That the blood has some sort of washing impact on you. You would think, well if it does that shouldn't it be applied to me in some way? Shouldn't the priest dab the blood on the person if the person is the one being made clean? You would think that, but that never actually happens. The only time that you have blood applied to a human is when the priests are initially sanctified, when the whole priesthood system gets set up in the Torah. The first time they get ready to use it, the priests are set apart by that. They put the blood on the earlobes and the toes and the thumbs and all that stuff. And a similar ritual that's sort of like an annual re-sacralization of the priesthood. It's really unusual. You also had one other occasion when the first time that they received the law and the community, Israel, enters into the Sinai covenant with God at Sinai. They offer a sacrifice and part of that procedure is sprinkling the blood on the congregation. Now it's not like they ran around and everybody getting along here and getting a little drop here. It's just, it was a symbolic gesture, signifying that it's a serious thing to enter into this covenant. Because again, here you are at the foot of God's mountain where God had just told everybody, don't bother to touch it. Don't touch the mountain, lest you die. And then we have this ceremony. Only Moses and the elders, we looked a little bit at it last week, are allowed to go up there. But the effect is that this agreement we're making here, you've come to my mountain. I have come to earth, you're my people, you've come to my mountain. I've brought you out of Egypt and done some pretty spectacular things on the way to getting you here. That this covenant is sealed with blood. It's made and sealed with blood. Because again, it could be you. I could have left you in Egypt. I could have destroyed you. Any number of places here, you should realize that if you break this covenant, sort of may it be done unto you, that kind of situation. There's a cost. But this animal, or these animals again, are in your place. It's the only time you've seen the congregation get blood sprinkled on them or anything like that. So you look at the sacrificial system and you think, that one element that kind of, it would make sense to have that do that, have that happen in the Old Testament if the analogy to that was Jesus. But it doesn't. We'll talk about kind of some of the language that's used there. But the blood is actually applied to objects. It's applied to the altar, some of the frames of the sanctuary. Of course in the day of Atonement it's sprinkled where? The lid of the Ark, the Ark of the Covenant there. The seed of propitiation as some translations have. The blood is actually applied to objects on sacred space. The reason is because, let's just take the day of Atonement. It's the only time when blood penetrates that far into the holy place. Why does blood need to penetrate that far into the holy area? Because you've got a guy going in there. You have to disinfect sacred space. This guy can walk in there and not end up dead. It's, again, it's like the blood is supposed to have this purgative effect to insulate God's space in his objects from you. It doesn't clean you up. It protects this stuff from you, from infection, from defilement by human occupation. It's really to illustrate that one idea that God is only going to be okay with you visiting his living room or whatever. If he, you know, he tells you how to prepare yourself. And the reason is not so that, you know, it's not really about you, it's really about God. It's really about his space. And the whole idea is that, well, we must be kind of eggy. Like we can just really mess this up. And again, it's not that God doesn't love his people. He does. But the whole point is that this space is different than any other place you go. That's common. This is not. There's something different here. And so you do these kind of bizarre things that have these bizarre kind of maybe even offensive ideas attached to them. But the whole idea is designed to teach you that you don't just come here when you want under your own terms. That's not the way this works. We have to do something here to make it a little strange so that you understand that God's presence is not like your presence or any other presence. It's different. It's other. So you have these trappings. You get parts of the animal consumed in flames. Other parts are eaten. Again, the fire brings, you know, it harkens, you know, back to the God as a consuming fire, you know, and it's Sinai, and the whole Sinai event. And so when this is repeated, you know, again, the Tabernacle is mobile. The temple's going to be somewhere in Jerusalem later on. When parts of the sacrifice are consumed in fire. Again, in theological theory, that was supposed to jar the mind of the person into thinking, yeah, God really could have incinerated us back there at Sinai. But he didn't. He entered into a covenant with us instead. This, I could have been toast. We could have been toast. But instead, again, the sacrifice takes our place. It's parts of it are a bottom meal. And this is again, this, I don't want to use the, you know, the C word in the New Testament sense, but this is communion. This is about fellowship with God. God invites the elders up. They see the God of Israel in Exodus 24. They have a meal. And this is about you're a member of the family. And one of the things that, again, in this culture and lots of cultures that people do to promote family unity, family time is to have a meal together. And it's a symbolic act. You're a God's in God's house on His property. He's inviting you over for a meal. It's a communal act. So, Clown says, again, with that as backdrop, God also God too selects, kills and appears on earth as a consuming fire. Sacrifice that ought to be understood metaphorically. The offer and priest play the part of God. The domesticated animals from the herd and the flock play the part of the people, particularly Israel. As God is to people so too during the process of sacrifice are the people of Israel to the sacrificed animals. God has power over life and death. Even the act of selecting, and yeah, you have clean and unclean rules here, but even the act of selection tells you something. It harkens back again to Deuteronomy 4, Deuteronomy 32, Deuteronomy 7. Why did the Lord choose Israel? Because they were just awesome? No, it's like you're just the lowest of the lot here. You're the smallest. There's really nothing spectacular here. Deuteronomy 7, 7, 8. God loved you because He loved you. Doesn't have to sound logical. That's just the way it is. Even the act of selection, this animal and not that animal, is designed again to bring some of these concepts back to memory. God could have chosen somebody else. He really could have. What's to prevent him? It didn't have to be us. The imitation idea again recognizes God's lordship over creation and this life and death. His lordship over Israel, this people, not that people, this animal, not that animal, and of course His presence in the sacred space. Rituals reinforce the principle of sacred space, common versus uncommon, common versus sacred. The blood is not applied to the people who bring the sacrifices. Here are your exceptions, we just mentioned those. Again, none of the above in these situations was about sin. It was about predation. Now, again, we could talk about the day of atonement here a little bit. Time is a little, you could ride a trail over. But even the day of atonement, which I like to refer to as the reset button. Okay, that's basically what it is. The reboot. Even the day of atonement, again, the blood is not applied to people, but the sanctuary. So if you think about the day of atonement, this is Leviticus 16, there are two goats taken. Okay, the goat that is about the sins of the people, is that one killed or left alive? Which one is it? Leviticus, Jeopardy. Which one? Right, the goat that isn't killed is the one where the sins of the nation are laid upon. Again, you would think, well, that's the one we're supposed to kill now, because Jesus died for our sins. That's actually the opposite of what actually goes on. The one that's killed, blood is taken and put again on, at the ark there, the mercy scene. The parts of the inner sanctum there, again, to insulate it, to decontaminate sacred space, all that stuff. And it goes all the way again into the most holy place. The one that's left alive is the one where the priest will lay his hands on it. And then it gets sent out into the desert. If you have ESVs here, it's not going to say scapegoat there. If you ever go to look at Leviticus 16. You'll find your devotions as you're reading through Leviticus 16. On your way to reading through the entire of Leviticus, of course. Great devotional work that it is. It'll say that the goat that gets sacrificed is the goat that is Lattonaid for the Lord, for Yahweh. And the goat that isn't killed, hands are put upon it and it gets sent into the desert, is the goat for Azazel. Now that can be translated scapegoat, the goat that goes away. But the parallelism there, one is a proper name, goat for the Lord, goat for a proper name, goat for Azazel. Azazel in Jewish literature later on. And it has a history, even in the Israelite period. This was a name used of a demon. So the idea is that our camp in Israel is sacred space. It is the place where we as God's children occupy. Everywhere else is nasty. This is cosmic geography thinking. The wilderness is the place of chaos and disorder and darkness and death. It's the place where God isn't. It's the bad place. And so we naturally send this goat out there because that's where sin belongs. It doesn't belong in the camp, it belongs outside the camp. You can read actually some, I guess to them it wasn't funny, but to us it might be funny. There are actually episodes where they would assign a person to follow the goat to make sure it didn't turn around and come back. And they would even get to the point where they would drive it over a cliff to make sure it died so that it doesn't come back. Because it was like, it's unholy now. It's spooky, it's creepy. You know, sin belongs out there, we don't want it to find its way back. This is the logic, by the way, for 1 Corinthians 5. In the church discipline passage that the unrepentant sinner, you deliver him unto Satan. The church is what? Holy ground. This is where God dwells now in the presence of believers corporately and individually. So when you have an unrepentant person, you put them outside the camp. Now they may stay out there and then they'll be destroyed, the destruction of the flesh kind of thing. That's where Satan is. Satan isn't in church, he's out there. Satan isn't where believers are, he's out there, at least he's supposed to be. So it was the same kind of thinking, just applied to the church situation instead of the camp of Israel. The same sort of thinking. But again, it's kind of an odd passage, but there's a certain logic to it where the place where evil is, the place where God is opposite, God is with us in our camp, where he isn't, something else is. His enemies are out there, our enemies are out there in a spiritual sense. And so that is where that goat needs to go. You know, Ozzazelle was just a Semitic Satan figure, if you want to put it that way. What's achieved by the sacrifice then? David Talmud was the time where basically you sort of hit the reset button. Any sins that we're not aware of that are in the camp are going to be symbolically transferred to the goat, but the one we kill, wouldn't that be bad? Oh, we killed the wrong one by accident, wrong hour. You've got to get rid of the sin. So you symbolically transfer through the laying on of hands, you send it away, and you do what you need to do to make sure it never comes back. Why don't we just shoot an arrow out, I think it's about 100 yards. Who's a good shot, you know? And then the next time the camp moves, we don't walk over that spot. But you send it out there, and so now in theory, again, this is the theological theory behind it, in theory, all of the sins of the nation are now out there. We sort of have a time where we're all clean at the same time now. That's why I call it the reset button. The conditions are just like they were at the beginning when God started the whole priesthood system, when he told us to build this tabernacle thing, when he gave us all these procedures. This is like it was then, it was all new. Nobody messed it up. That's what the day of Atoma was supposed to do. You hit the reset button, you reboot, and then you start into your new year. It was associated with the new year in the Jewish town. So it was an important day because it covered so much else. Let's see here. Again, the goal is to protect sacred space. We talked about that. Let's hit Leviticus 4. This is called in our translations. It's kind of both okay and unfortunate. The sin offering. Hebrew, it's katat, comes from katah, which is one of the words for sin. It means to this, the mark, to have some deficiency. This is the sin offering. It's really better understood as taking care of things that are deficient, things that have been rendered impure or unclean. See, what misses the mark isn't your moral behavior. If your moral behavior again is bad enough, this isn't going to take care of you. If your moral behavior is bad enough, you're either going to be exiled or you've got a death sentence hanging over you, and there is no sacrifice for that stuff. This is where we blemish ourselves, other people, objects, sacred space. That's what misses the mark. That's what needs to be decontaminated. If you do that, Leviticus 4 and it says in other places, if you do these things to decontaminate yourselves in sacred space, then that blemish, that sin, is forgiven. You're okay. Things are okay between you and God. You're allowed back into God's presence. The sin offering, again, doesn't take care of moral violation. It takes care of the fact that there's something about you that is between you and God, your state of impurity. You take care of that. So it's decontamination to protect a sacred space. Guilt offer. The term used here, asham, also refers to restitution. If you actually read through the passage, this is going to be involved with restoring something lost to someone. It could be through theft, it could be through accident, something like that. You have, again, a sacrificial ritual, plus, again, there is some reparation that needs to be made. And once restitution is made, the guilty party is a purged compare. This is another term. We typically say compare means to cover. To atone means to cover. There are passages where that doesn't work. A better English term would be purging, purgation, kind of like. You're not covering up a blemish, you're getting rid of it, really. You're purging, you're eliminating it. And so, in the context, restitution is part of making things whole again. Kind of, again, resetting them. And moral defilement, what about that, committing abominations? Again, for a lot of these, there was no sacrifice. Again, you have a short list of punishments. And this is why, again, when, I don't know if that's the last one, it's not. This is why, you know, when the writer of Hebrews says, hey, by the shedding of the blood of bulls and goats, you're not going to have your forgiveness of sins. Now, he knows his old testament. He knows there's this forgiveness language there. But if you read through Hebrews, there's actually a number of places where sins that are not taken care of in the sacrificial system actually show up in the book of Hebrews. And they are covered by the superior offer, which is Christ. So when he gets to that point, and he's telling you, and people who know the system, you know, they're Jewish believers, you know, the blood of bulls and goats, you know how limited that was. It didn't, it's not going to take care of you in terms of your conscience, for instance. You know that you did this and God knows that you did this. And we don't have a temple anymore. So, like, what good are these offerings, even if we were doing them? What, you know, we not only can't do most of this, but even if we did, most of this stuff's about purifying some building or some object or whatever. It doesn't take away my guilt. My guilt before a holy God. In the Old Testament, God would have just eliminated me. Okay, you're out of my mind now. You're dead, okay? It's like, you're just removed from the picture or you're exiled from the community. You are forgotten. You are divorced from the only people on earth who have the orphans of God. They are the only people on earth who have the truth about who the true God is and how to be rightly related to Him by covenant. If you're kicked out, if you're exiled out, you know, good luck, you know. It was a serious thing. Even if you're not killed. So what does that system solve? Well, the answer is, well, it didn't solve a whole lot. And that's the whole point of the book of Hebrews, that now we have a great High Priest who offered himself as a sacrifice. He's eternal. You know, once he was finished with that, he rose from the dead, he sits down at the right hand of God, the God who sent him to do that. They had this conversation in Hebrews 10. Okay, I'm going to be prepared for a body for me and I'm willing to go down and do this and everybody knows what it means. Okay, this is why the writer of Hebrews says what he says. Because there's none of this going on with Jesus. But which ones does it cover and which ones does it doesn't? Like, how bad is it going to hurt? There's none of that talk. None of that. Clowns, again, back to the old system. The problem with these sins and these categories, the ones that aren't covered, idolatry, sexual transgression, murder, the reason that they bring about exiles is that God so abhors them that God cannot and will not abide in the land saturated with the residue left by their performance. What would things be like if God looked at us the same way now? You know, honestly, God's going to be pretty lonely. Okay, you know, idolatries, you go through the New Testament and some of Paul's letters to Gentiles, and one of those they've done, you know, and lots more. I mean, he has these whole lists, these vice lists, okay? And here you have, you know, Paul talking about these things. Just adds another dimension to why Jews would have been a little ticked off. It's like, well, how do these guys get in now? Well, the reason is because of Christ. Because we're not under that system. So we can start there with our discussion. But, you know, back in the Old Testament, God's like, I'm just not going to live with you people. Just not going to do it. When the lands defiled, God will move or move you. Ritual defilement concerns those things which threaten the status of defiled individuals vis-a-vis the sacred. Those who are ritually defiled, those whom they ritually defiled, those animals which went dead are considered ritually defiling are banned from the sanctuary. But again, you can take care of these problems. You just can't take care of the other stuff. The moral ones work very differently. They threaten not only the status of the individuals in question, but the very fabric of the society, the whole fabric of the community. Unlike the ritual impurities, the moral impurities bring with them not only the danger that sacred precincts might be violated, they might step in the wrong place. But they bring with them the threat that God will leave. Or remove you. The typical understanding of the relationship between daily sacrifice and grave sin is, I believe, backwards. It is not that the daily sacrifice undoes the damage done by a grave transgression. Quite the contrary, a grave transgression undoes what the daily sacrifice accomplishes. I threw this in here because this is kind of interesting. Every day they have to do a couple sacrifices. What are they for? They're kind of like to kickstart the day. They all start off on the right foot. Sacred space is okay. We're starting out our day now and nothing's blemished. We don't have any of these problems with people being infected. If you had a problem five days ago, you might be in day five, you get two days left. Okay, we got that. But we all kind of start off on the right foot here every day. And what he's saying is, look, the really grave transgressions, the daily sacrifices can't fix that. The land is infected. It is by definition and pure. And so God has a decision to make. I either leave or you do. And of course in the exile, these choice was actually a little bit above. God left, the glory left the temple, and they were just annihilated and driven out of the line. That's what I wanted to cover tonight. Again, it's just a little bit of the conceptual logic to it. And I think for us again, what Ryan is talking about, Ryan is Hebrews, when the writer of Hebrews is talking about the superiority of what Christ does, he's not only talking about things like, oh, we don't need to keep repeating this. I mean, that's great. That's great, especially like Phil and the Temple. That's good. We don't have to do this endless repetition. But he's also talking about coverage. And not only even beyond coverage, but also talking about the fact that you as a sinner can look at that sacrifice and know that it does more than just protect God's turf. It actually results in God looking at you as though you had not sinned. Looking at you like you are Christ, because you are in Christ. The result of that sacrifice is much wider in its ramifications than any of these were, even on their best day. So it's not just a repetition. Oh, we're saving lots of time here by doing the Jesus thing. It's a whole lot wider than that. There's an internal dimension to it of knowing that God knows you thoroughly and God and you are good because you are in Christ. It's not just about protecting God from making sinners and their sin. It's about cleaning you. That wasn't true in the Old Testament. So again, the dimensions are quite a bit different. We have tendons or so. I had two quick questions. The first one is, so this concept of sanctification or holiness that was the building there, I know that we grow as Christians, but where does the idea of growing in holiness come from? Is there space for that in the Hebrew mindset or getting more holy? I think all these conversations, whether they're Old Testament because Old Testament people were not... I'm going to go back to the word I always used, that's merit. An Old Testament person knows that I can do all this stuff. I can jump through every hoop and I can be like, you know, to use a baseball thing, cow ripped it. I've got a streak going. I've been pure. They know that even if they do that, they do not merit God's favor because God could have chosen someone else. God can do what he wants. He could have done what he wants then. He could, you know, look at you and bring out something out of your own life because he knows you perfectly. The Old Testament person knows that God is never in their debt. So the idea of progressing in sanctification I think is consistent and that is you progressively get a grasp of that idea. God is never in your debt. You do not merit God's favor. You know, again, why do we feel that we've got to do all these things to make God like us? Hey, he chose you. How many thousand years ago? I mean, God made the decision back then to love you. Why would you think that, well, I got to do this thing now today so that God has a nice disposition toward me? It doesn't make any sense. And again, an Old Testament person is going to know that. So it's really about, you know, progressing in holiness and sanctification is I understand who I am. I understand who God is. I really have that fixed in my mind. And I'm going to humble myself as much as I possibly can, not just to do these things, but to, you know, tell God or show God that I understand who I am and who he is. And I understand my dependence on him. And my hope is in him. And my hope grows stronger throughout my life that if there's going to be, you know, a happy outcome to this, happy afterlife, it is only through the grace of this God right here. And I'm not going to earn it. It's not. I'm building up brownie points so that God owes me something. A lot of these things are just thought patterns. They're just, they're recognitions of our status versus God's status. Now, there's a performance, you know, element to this because you can't just, you can't fake it. You can't say that you understand who you are and God is and say, oh, I'm not going to have a circumcision. I'm not going to be at the max, kid. I mean, you can't just pick and choose all this stuff. You have to realize when you do it, you're not doing it so that God owes you something. You're doing it because you're glad that he's given you the opportunity to be called his own. He made that decision. And now your response to that is to be loyal to him. It's, again, another little phrase I like, believing loyalty. There's the adjective, the other's the noun. Believing loyalty. But I don't really understand how I'm going to, like, live, I'm speaking as an Israelite. I don't understand, like, when I die, how I'm going to be with Lord, I don't know how that works. But I believe that Yahweh of Israel is the God of God and that he chose our ancestors and I'm part of that. And if he says, because I've chosen you, I want to teach you some things. Do this, don't do that. Go here, don't go here. So that you learn who I am and who you are. And I'm going to do those things because I'm just glad to even have the opportunity to survive death and be with the Lord, as opposed to just somewhere else or the alternative. And I'm never going to get to the point where God owes this to me. What I do, I'm going to do because I'm grateful. And I'm going to show what I believe by what I do. So my other esoteric question is the idea of the system and the sacrifices, and one of them was that God doesn't procreate a sexuality out of stuff. So why do you think, like, like, for example, Genesis 6 where there's kind of these Elohim who are recreating their own creed but they're using sexuality to do it. Is that because that's the only way they can? Or how do you say that? It depends how you take the passage. They're either assuming flesh or it's the Abraham and Sarah analogy, they're doing something to create their own seed here. Their own people. Their own mimicry of Israel. You kind of get the picture that we want ours too. You know that kind of thing. So I think when they do that they're transgressing things like they're trying to be what they're not. They're trying to be the God of the universe when they're not. They're acting in autonomy and they're using the means at their disposal to do so. Because they can't sort of step out of the relationship and make their own rules and be unaffected by that. They are still subservient. They're still subordinate. By virtue of the fact that they're created beings and there's only one uncreated being. They're never going to get out of that relationship. But again too in sort of a I don't want to call it sad because it's awful but in sort of a pathetic sort of a pathetic way to be more than they are. They're doing stuff like this they're transgressing these boundaries in different contexts from Exodus when they have to hate the adult posts with love. Do you see any connection with what you're describing today? The Passover it's not a ritual to it's not part of the sacrificial system. It is a festival to commemorate the deliverance from Egypt. So I do think it's different even though it's part of the sacred calendar I think it's different than the sacrificial system and by the way the rules for Passover are also changeable because they change prior to when they're in the land and when they're in the land that kind of thing. Again it's part of the sacred calendar it's not part of the sacrificial system again it was about sacred space and decontamination So is there some particular aspect of it? Well it just seems that the blood seems to be denied with life which it is. Life and death because sees the blood passes over you and you know the substitute so that much is true it's just we don't have again I'm real cautious when it comes to typology but I'm going to say this I tend to only call things types when the New Testament calls them