Current culture promotes self-esteem. The Bible does not. Modern philosophy says that success comes when people feel good about themselves. Leviticus does not.
Truth be told, my very first attempt at reading this third book of the Bible was largely unsuccessful. It wasn’t because I found it boring or repetitive. Frankly, it was because I found its content hard to swallow. This was the case during my years as a non-Christian and as a new believer.
The evangelical Christianity in which I was immersed at the time emphasized God’s love, friendship, acceptance, and imminence. God was supposed to be easily accessible–a divine buddy who, as one worship leader told a number of us, “Is a daddy who wants to play with us.” That’s what a lot of contemporary Christian music seemed to portray. That’s what the, “There’s-a-God-shaped-hole-in- your-heart-that-God-desperately-wants-to-fill” teaching seemed to indicate. Christianity, I was told, was about a God who was easy to please, easy to access, and safe to be around.
But that wasn’t the God my eyes recognized when they read carefully the words of Leviticus. So much for a chicken-soup-for-the-soul-esque quiet time.
How is it that a God who was supposed to be easy to access would require His people to offer up multitudes of sacrifices to remove the guilt for infractions? How is it that a God who was supposed to be easy to please would strike down Aaron’s teenage boys for offering the wrong kind of sacrifice? How is it that a God who was safe to be around would require me to adhere to so many laws and statues, and punish me for disobedience? How is it that a God who simply is knocking on my door and wants to befriend me would demand that blood be shed to atone for my wrongdoings, in order that I be for- given?
No matter how I may have tried to convince myself otherwise, it dawned on me like a cloudless summer morning that the God who the modern American evangelical culture described was not, at least in his full portrait, the God who was revealed in his inspired Word.
God, as revealed by Leviticus, is infinitely righteous and transcendent in his holiness. So righteous is he, that the way to Him requires a substitutionary atonement for every transgression that I’ve committed: “For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it to you on the alter to make atonement for your souls; for it is the blood by reason of the life that makes atonement” (Lev 17:11). So righteous and holy is God, that to walk with him requires total sanctity and utter purity: “You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy” (Lev 19:2).
The student who understands Leviticus correctly, and studies its hundreds of commandments intently, uncovers a sobering and unchanging reality: This–THIS–is what it takes to be right with God. It terrified my soul, because I knew that I was simply not capable of producing such holiness or providing atonement for my lack of it.
The self-esteem movement has it dead wrong. Leviticus unveils a God who is unreachable and unappeasable by man’s ability alone. To be in a right relationship with this mighty, holy, wrathful, and righteous God is utterly impossible.
Impossible, that is, unless another came and offered himself as a perfect sacrifice–whose blood shed could atone once-and-for-all atone for all of your sins. Impossible, unless another came and walked a life of total, undefiled holiness with which you are credited. It is impossible to be right with the God who called you, unless Jesus Christ–the Son of God Himself–met all of Leviticus’ hundreds of requirements by living the perfect life for which you could not walk and giving himself up as the perfect sacrifice to open the way that you could not pave.
This article was adapted from J. R. Cueves’ book, Skillfully Surveying the Scriptures: Genesis through Esther (Xulon and With All Wisdom, 2018).