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| > Sermon Archive > Sermons by Author > Dr. Wes Bredenhof > See how God uses the dietary laws to train his people for holiness | Previous Next Print |
| Order Of Worship (Liturgy) All songs from the CanRC/FRCA Book of Praise Hymn 5 Psalm 25:3 (after the law of God) Psalm 99:1-3 Psalm 93:1,4 Hymn 77 Scripture readings: Leviticus 11:1-8, 44-47; Acts 10:1-16 Text: Leviticus 11:1-8 |
Beloved congregation of Christ,
Leviticus 11 is one of those sections of the Bible that create mixed reactions. For some unbelievers, this is one of their favourite Bible chapters. It’s their favourite because to them it shows how Christians are so stupid and inconsistent. Christians claim to believe what the Bible says. They say they believe the whole Bible is the Word of God, taken literally and meant to be believed and lived. But yet Leviticus 11 says people shouldn’t eat pork, and yet so many Christians love to eat bacon. To unbelievers it just proves Christianity is a fraud. Christians say they believe the Bible, but they don’t really follow it. That’s why some unbelievers love this chapter.
For believers, this chapter can be confusing. It has all these laws about clean and unclean animals on the land, in the air, and in the sea. We somehow know that these dietary laws don’t apply to us anymore – no Christians follow them. But yet we don’t know whether they have any relevance for us today. So, if you were reading through the Bible with your family, you might be tempted to skip a section like this. You might want to skip it because it’s a bit tedious and you don’t know what to do with it. Yes, it’s the Word of God, inspired, inerrant, and infallible. It meant something for the people of Israel, but what can it mean for us?
So we already have two good reasons to look closer at this part of God’s Word. One is to be able to answer unbelievers if they accuse us of hypocrisy and inconsistency. Another is to understand for ourselves how these dietary laws still have something to teach us as Christians today.
The key here is to understand that the Bible has one primary author: the Holy Spirit. When we want to understand a difficult part of the Bible, we turn to other parts of the Bible to help us. We do that because the whole thing has one author and if we want to know his meaning, the context of the whole work will lead us there.
So when it comes to Leviticus 11 and the dietary laws, it’s important to note what the Holy Spirit says about the law in Galatians 3:24. In our ESV translation, it says the law was a “guardian” until Christ came. Other translations will say “schoolmaster,” or “tutor,” or “teacher.” The idea is that the Old Testament ceremonial laws, including the dietary laws, those laws were in place for God to train or teach his people some key spiritual truths that would prepare them for the coming of Christ.
If we want to understand these dietary laws and the spiritual truths they’re teaching, we just have to look at the end of chapter 11. God told his people explicitly, “…be holy, for I am holy.” It’s all about holiness. It’s all about “making a distinction” as it says in verse 47, being set apart. So in this morning’s sermon we’re going to see how God uses the dietary laws to train his people for holiness. We’ll see:
- What these laws meant for God’s people then
- What these laws mean for God’s people now
The whole chapter contains dietary laws around various animals from the land, the sky, and the sea. We’re just focussing our attention on the first category of land animals. There are two groups: clean and unclean.
You might think that these laws just appear out of the blue in Leviticus. However, if we go back to Genesis 7, God commanded Noah to take seven pairs of clean animals and two pairs of unclean animals on the ark. So already in the days of Noah, God had taught some distinction between clean and unclean. But there is a difference. There is a development. After Noah got off the ark, God told him that animals were now food. That implied that prior to the Flood, people didn’t eat meat. So the idea of clean and unclean animals wasn’t tied to diet. Instead, it was tied to sacrifice. Some animals were clean for sacrifices and others not. But in Leviticus, God now reveals that a distinction between clean and unclean is going to apply to the types of animal meat his people can eat. So there’s a development already from Genesis to Leviticus.
Verse 3 gives the general rule for clean land animals. If it chews the cud and parts the hoof and is cloven-footed, then the animal is clean and fit for eating. What does it mean to chew the cud? I think most of the adults will know what that means, but the kids here might not, so let me quickly explain it. An animal like a cow chews its cud. We only have one stomach, but a cow has four. When a cow eats some grass, the grass gets slightly chewed and swallowed and goes down to the first stomach. Later the grass comes up again into the cow’s mouth and it chews it some more – we call that chewing the cud. After the cud has been chewed, then it goes down into the second stomach, then eventually to the third and fourth stomachs. Parting the hoof and being cloven-footed – that refers to the feet of the animal. An animal like a cow has a hoof that divides in two. So if you have an animal that has both of these things, chewing the cud and a hoof that divides in two, that animal could be eaten by the Israelites.
There were some animals that had one or the other, but because they didn’t have both, they were regarded as unclean. There are four specific animals mentioned: the camel, the rock badger, the hare, and the pig. Most of these we’re familiar with. The only one you might not know is the rock badger. This is also known as the hyrax. It’s a small animal that lives high up in the mountains. It has the face of a quokka, one of those small marsupials you find on Rottnest Island in WA. But it’s not a marsupial.
Now if you do any research on hyraxes or rock badgers, you’ll find out that they don’t chew their cud like cows do. They only have one stomach, and the same is true of hares and rabbits. So why does the Bible describe them as animals that chew the cud? The answer is simply that the Bible isn’t a biology textbook giving us all kinds of technical details about animals. It just presents things the way they appear. To ancient people like the Israelites, animals like hyraxes and hares sometimes appeared to be doing the same thing as cud-chewers like cows. So they’re lumped in with them. It’s sort of like the way we talk about the sun rising and the sun setting. The sun isn’t actually moving, but it appears that way and that’s why we speak the way we do. So don’t get hung up on this detail.
The important thing to focus on is the fact that there is a distinction. God declares some animals clean and some animals unclean. And the Israelites were commanded to respect that distinction. The big question is why. Everyone wants to know why some animals were declared by God to be unclean and therefore off-limits for food.
Any good commentary or study Bible will tell you this is a huge matter of debate. I’m not going into all the different ideas and their pros and cons. You can research that for yourself if you’re so inclined. I’ll just touch on one proposal.
Some have argued that hygiene is the reason for these dietary laws. So, for example, pigs are unclean because they live in the muck. They’re dirty animals. You can catch various diseases from eating uncooked pork, diseases like trichinosis. So God wanted to protect the health of his people and therefore declared certain animals unclean.
Let me mention two big problems with this explanation. The first is that you can also get various diseases from eating uncooked beef or lamb. There’s e.coli, salmonella, and listeria, just to mention three. Even cooked beef has health risks. Red meat is classed as a Group 2A carcinogen. A second big problem is that if these laws were really in place to protect health, wouldn’t it make sense for them to remain in place after the coming of Christ? Why would God suddenly stop caring about the health of his people after the cross?
You can bring similar objections to just about every proposed explanation of these laws. The only one that works is the one given in the Bible. It’s the one at the end of the chapter, the explanation of holiness. God is holy and he wants his people to reflect his holiness. He wants his people to be holy as he is, to be separate and set apart. So he gave them these laws to teach them that they were to be distinct from the nations around them. These laws were a daily reminder for the Israelites that they were different. They were called to be holy, reserved for God’s service. Every time they ate, it was like they had a living illustration of what holiness meant. You ate some things and you did not eat others. You were different, distinct from the world around you.
Now we have to remember that these laws didn’t exist in isolation. They were part of a bigger group of laws that taught holiness to the people of Israel. And all those laws taken together were an impossible requirement to meet. You might be able to eat only clean animals, but you’d never be able to avoid becoming unclean in other ways. For example, people became unclean by various bodily emissions. You couldn’t avoid it. So the whole group of laws taken together taught that there was a need for a greater holiness. These laws together taught that the people of Israel needed God’s holiness so they could dwell with him in perfect fellowship. God provided that holiness in his Son Jesus Christ. Through Christ and in Christ, people could be holy, just like God is holy. If you believe in Christ, God can look at you and see the holiness of his own Son shining back. He’ll see someone distinct from the sinful world and therefore able to dwell in his presence forever.
We live on the other side of the cross, so how we understand these laws is going to be vastly different to how ancient Israelites understood them. The coming of Christ has transformed our understanding of these laws. In Mark 7, Christ was speaking to his disciples about what really makes a person unclean. He taught that it’s not what comes into you that makes you unclean, but what comes out of you. It’s what comes out of your heart, your evil thoughts, that make you unclean. He mentions “sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness.” Jesus then says, “All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.” And in the middle of that teaching, the Holy Spirit inspires Mark to say this in verse 19, “Thus he declared all foods clean.” The dietary laws were meant to train people for holiness, to prepare them for the coming of Christ. These laws were intended to lead the people to cry out for the coming of Christ. But now that Christ has come, they fall away, at least in terms of their literal application. Christ declared all foods to be clean. You can now have bacon with your eggs, you can eat rabbit if you want, or even camel. All these foods are fitting for a Christian because Christ said so. That’s our answer to the unbeliever who says we’re stupid hypocrites when we say we follow the Bible, but don’t follow the dietary laws. The coming of Christ and the teaching of Christ shows how we’re free now to eat what we like.
Now even though Christ taught this to his disciples in Mark 7, it appears from our reading in Acts 10 that Peter didn’t understand it right away. He has this vision of all kinds of animals coming down from heaven on something like a great sheet. Some of the animals were unclean according to the Levitical dietary laws. So when he was commanded to eat, Peter refused. He was a good Jewish person. He said, “By no means, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is common or unclean.” But he heard the voice from heaven say, “What God has made clean, do not call common.” God had made all foods clean through the teaching of Jesus in Mark 7. Peter didn’t understand it at first, but now he was finally going to understand.
He’d understand that the dietary laws had to do with keeping the Israelites distinct and separate from the nations. But now that Christ has come, the dividing wall has been broken down. Now God’s plan for the church includes the Gentiles, the non-Jewish nations. So once he understands this, Peter goes to the house of Cornelius when he invites him. He shares the gospel of Christ with him. Cornelius and others believed and were baptized, the first Gentiles to be included in the New Testament church. This was all part of God’s plan. In the Old Testament, the people had to be trained for holiness with all these laws. Part of that was keeping God’s people distinct and separate from the nations. But in the New Testament, God’s people includes the nations and so these dietary laws no longer have a place in the church.
But that doesn’t mean they’re now irrelevant. The main spiritual lesson of these laws still applies. What I mean is that God still calls for his people to be holy, to be set apart. God says in 1 Peter 1:15-16, “…but as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, since it is written, ‘You shall be holy, for I am holy.’” Similarly, 1 Thessalonians 4:7 says “For God has not called us for impurity, but in holiness.”
This call comes to us now with the cross in the rear-view mirror. God’s gracious gift of salvation is in the background. We’re to be holy in response to what God has done through Christ. If we’re in Christ through faith, we’re holy in God’s eyes, but we’re also to be holy in all our conduct as we live here on this earth.
Now what does that look like? If we take the principle of holiness taught in Leviticus 11 and work with it in terms of the teaching of the New Testament, we see there is still a call to be distinct from the world. Romans 12:2 teaches us how we’re not to conform to the world. We’re not supposed to fit in. In his High Priestly Prayer in John 17, Christ prayed that we would be in the world, but not of the world. That’s an important difference with the Israelites in Leviticus. They were not supposed to be anywhere near the world, but totally separate as much as possible. But for Christians, we’re supposed to be in the world, living next to unbelievers and interacting with them. We do that because God wants us to love them and share the gospel with them, witness to them. But we’re still not supposed to be like them.
But then we also have to keep in mind the teaching of Jesus in Mark 7. For an Old Testament believer, meat could be unclean, what might go into you could be defiled. But for a New Testament believer, our focus needs to be on holiness with regard to what comes out of us. Our distinctiveness, our holiness, has to be reflected in how we think, how we speak, and how we act.
You might think our holiness comes out merely in the fact that we’re here in church this morning. You have chosen to come to church, while your neighbours are sleeping in or doing whatever else. That makes you separate and distinct from the world. While that’s true, our passage from Leviticus 11 wants us to think about more.
Food is a matter of the everyday. Under normal circumstances, we have to eat every day. As I mentioned before, every day the Israelites were reminded of their call to holiness with their food. For us as New Testament Christians, holiness is still to be a matter for every day. It’s not just for Sunday when we attend church. It’s to be with regard to everything that comes out of us every single day.
How do you sanctify or make holy your thoughts every day? Well, it starts with just thinking about God and the reality that he is there in your life every day. A lot of us have constant noise in our lives. When we’re driving, there’s always something playing on the radio through Bluetooth or whatever. Sometimes it can be helpful just to turn off the noise and think about God. Think about him and how he is really there with you as you’re driving or doing whatever else. Just thinking about God in the everyday would be a way to apply the spiritual lesson in Leviticus 11.
How do you sanctify or make holy your words every day? Scripture teaches us to acknowledge God in all our ways. That includes having the courage and conviction to speak about him and his presence in your life. For example, let’s say you were almost in an accident that could have ended your life. It was so close. Remember now: you’re in the world, but not of it. So when you tell others about the near-miss, you don’t talk about how lucky you were, but about how blessed you were and how God protected your life. You could even take the opportunity to introduce the word “providence” to someone. Talking about God in the everyday shows how we have been trained for holiness. We’re not the same as the world in which we live.
And what about our actions? How do we sanctify those every day? God teaches us in his Word that we’re to aim to follow God’s commandments in all we do. If we just think about business, people in the world will often do something crooked if they can make some extra money and if they think they can get away with it. Maybe it’s cheating on your taxes, not declaring all your income or something like that, or maybe it’s cutting corners in products you sell or services you provide. As Christians, we’re called to be holy in our every day walk, and that includes how we do business. We’re to be set apart from the world, different, known for our consistent integrity and honesty.
I want to be clear about something. This living holy lives in the world but not being of the world, all this is the response of a Christian who has been saved by grace. This has nothing to do with how we’re saved. This has nothing to do with somehow measuring up for God, as if that were possible. No, for Christians, when we hear the call to holiness, we feel love for God in our hearts and that’s what compels us to listen. When we hear the call to be holy in everyday life, we feel gratitude in our hearts for the grace we’ve been shown, and that’s what drives us to aim to put it into practice.
As Christians we don’t eat foods different to our unbelieving neighbours. Unlike the Israelites, we’re free to eat whatever we like. But we’re still to be radically different in everyday life. God has made a distinction. In his grace he set us apart in his Son Jesus Christ. In his grace he set us apart by giving us his Holy Spirit. It’s now our calling to honour the distinction God has made by living it out in prayerful reliance upon his strength. AMEN.
PRAYER
O Holy God in heaven,
You are infinitely more holy than we can understand. You have made us holy in your Son Jesus Christ. You have made us holy through your gift of the Spirit. You have shown so much grace to us, undeserving sinners. Now we hear your call for us to be holy in our everyday lives. We hear your call for us to be holy as you are holy. Father, we want it to be so. We’re so weak and sinful, so we ask for your help. Please help us to love holiness, help us to pursue holiness, and help us to live holiness. Whether it’s with our thoughts, words, or deeds, please help us every day as we live in the world, but try not to be of the world. May we always acknowledge and honour you with our minds, our lips, and our lives. Whether in business or at home, at school or at play, wherever we are, please teach and lead us with your Holy Spirit to be more holy in how we live.
* As a matter of courtesy please advise Dr. Wes Bredenhof, if you plan to use this sermon in a worship service. Thank-you.
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