Hebrews Lesson 120
NKJ Proverbs 3:5 Trust in the LORD with all your
heart, And lean not on your own understanding;
NKJ Proverbs 3:6 In all your ways acknowledge Him,
And He shall direct your path
Well this morning when I woke
up and was fixing breakfast watching Fox News, I was hit with an interesting announcement
that they had on Fox News. It’s been the
tradition at
The thing is that the people
who sit under that kind of teaching (whoever they may be) are going to be influenced
that in the same way that those of you who sit under my teaching are influenced
by what I teach. I can tell you that if
you sit under my teaching for 5 years I can almost 100% tell you what your
views are on economics, politics and social issues. For you that will flow out of what you hear
the Bible teach. The same thing is true for
people who sit in any other kind of congregation in
As I pointed out the other
night, I think I made a comment on this sometime recently that when I was a
student at the University of St. Thomas - of course there were always one or
two nuns that were taking classes with us in the Philosophy Department there. We would get into interesting discussions. There
was another Dallas Seminary grad in the program also. We would get into some interesting
discussions.
Whenever I would try to
relate something to the Bible, the response I’d get from this one nun was – she
would kind of jokingly say, “Well you know you can’t go to the Bible with us
because we’re Roman Catholics. We don’t ever read the Bible.”
So that’s how I understand
that position. So that’s the first
contemporary issue this morning.
The second issue that comes
up is that occasionally we’ve had speakers and we’ve had things that have come
up in relationship to the Chafer Seminary Conference the past couple of years
and some of the other things have gone on.
Every now and then people hear a speaker from this pulpit say something
that they sort of wiggle their ears about or they raise an eyebrow over and they’ll
come up and ask me questions. One of the
things that I’ve sort of warned people about prior to this later winter is that
we have to treat people with a certain measure of grace. Every now and then you’re going to hear
this. You’ll hear it from people. Shoot, I say things that 5 years from now I
may go back and go, “I don’t believe that anymore.” Everybody changes and everybody grows.
But, one of the things that
So Gregory wrote:
Guilt
can be extinguished only by a penal offering to justice.
What a fabulous statement on
propitiation and the nature of the atonement.
But
it would contradict the idea of justice, if for the sin of a rational being
like man, the death of an irrational animal should be accepted as a sufficient
atonement.
In other words, animal
sacrifices can’t atone for human guilt.
Hence,
a man must be offered as a sacrifice for man; so that a rational victim may be slain for a rational criminal. But how could a man, himself stained with sin,
That’s corruption.
be
an offering for sin? Hence a sinless man
must be offered. But what man descending
in the ordinary course
That’s normal human
procreation if you didn’t figure that out.
would
be free from sin? Hence the Son of God must
be born of a virgin and become man for us.
…a clear statement approximately
600 AD that the purpose of the Virgin Birth was to block the perpetuation of
Adam’s guilt and Adam's original sin and the assigning of that to Jesus
Christ. So that is an indication that this
did not originate in the 1940’s.
Now for the third current
event. This is one that…it’s got a
little background. The background is
that back in the early 80’s Zane Hodges wrote a fabulous book, a book that
really caught people’s attention and generated a lot of controversy called The
Gospel Under Siege. Those
that didn’t agree with him thought that the title was poorly punctuated and
should have been punctuated The Gospel Under Siege by Zane Hodges. But, that really gave people a real
understanding of what the issues were between a true free grace gospel versus
what has come to be called or what was known then as Lordship salvation. It really woke a lot of people up as to what
the key passages were that were at the center of the debate and what the issues
were. There have been I would say thousands,
tens of thousands of people who have been positively impacted by his ministry and
by the ministry of the organization that developed around him called the Grace
Evangelical Society. They have produced
a journal for the last I know at least 18 maybe 20 years called the Journal
of the Grace Evangelical Society as well as a bimonthly newsletter that
comes out called Grace in Focus.
They have been very instrumental in my understanding of the issues
related to numerous problem passages on the gospel and in the lives of many
others. But in the last few years they
have begun to emphasize an aspect of the gospel that I cannot and do not agree
with. Many others who have been members
of the Grace Evangelical Society do not and cannot agree with.
We saw a glimpse of this debate
two years ago at the Chafer Seminary Conference when John Neimala
who was teaching or the seminary at the time and who follows in locked step with
the GES position delivered a paper arguing that if a person does not understand
that he is getting eternal life in sense of a life that cannot be lost, then he
is not saved. What they are
fundamentally arguing for is that faith in the gospel is essentially accepting
the free gift of eternal life from Jesus and you don’t necessarily have to
believe that Christ died on the cross for your sins. In other words, if I’m witnessing to somebody
and I simply tell them that Jesus died for your sins so that you can have forgiveness
from God; then that’s an insufficient gospel because for them the issue is accepting
the free gift of eternal life from Jesus.
That’s it and the nuance “eternal life” meaning that when you understand
eternal life to be eternal life; then you understand that it can’t be
lost. What they are actually saying is
that if you don’t have a sense of eternal security, you’re not saved. It’s not until you have that that you are
saved.
Last year I had Dave Anderson
(Dr. Dave Anderson) who’s the pastor of Faith Bible Fellowship I think it is or
Faith Bible Church or Fellowship of the Woodlands – Something like that. No, it’s not Fellowship of the
Woodlands. It’s up in the
Woodlands. I had Dave give a paper at
the Chafer Conference last year and one of the major thrusts in his paper
rather than dealing with some of the exegetical issues was the historical
reality that the whole idea of eternal security wasn’t clear in the history of
the church until the Reformation. You go
through much of the early church and they have a view that you could lose your
salvation. They’re confused. So what one of his arguments was that if the position
of GES today is true, then very few people (on the order of just dozens) got
saved for the first 1500 years of Christianity.
That’s a historical argument which is a valid argument in this
context.
Well, there have been a
number articles, questions. I you want
to read some things on this. There’s
Duluth Bible Church up in Minnesota where Dennis Rokser
is the pastor and one of the men out of that ministry named Tom Seigel has written a series that are on the internet dealing
with the cross-less gospel where he’s interacting with a number of articles
that have been published by Zane Hodges, John Neimala,
Bob Wilkin and others where they make these affirmations.
So this has been coming to a
head in a number of areas. Just this
last week I received the latest Grace in Focus newsletter. It’s volume 23, number 2. I’m sure it’s on their website because they
put most of their things on the website.
In the inside of it Bob Wilkin has written an article called “Do You Know
Our View on Assurance of Salvation?” The
background for this (and I appreciate his clarification) is that approximately
three or four years ago GES revised their doctrinal statement and they posted
it on their website. Now I didn’t know
they had revised their doctrinal statement.
A friend of mine, Fred Lbrand told me that
they had. He said he changed it and put it on the website and didn’t tell
anybody. As far as I know I was never
informed. They said that they informed
people and I’ll take them at their word; but I never knew it and I know a lot
of other people didn’t know it. When I
went back after Fred told me that last year, I looked at their website online
and looked at the doctrinal statement. I
realized I could no longer affirm their doctrinal statement. There were two or three modifications that
had been made that I didn’t think were accurate. So in this newsletter Wilkin addresses that
and he says:
Here is the key clarification that we made.
Then he quotes the statement in
the affirmations.
Assurance
is of the essence of believing in Jesus for everlasting life. That is
as long as a person believes in Jesus for everlasting life.
You have to understand what
he’s not saying. He’s not saying believing in Jesus for justification. He’s not saying believing in Jesus for forgiveness
of sin. He’s not saying believing in
Jesus for atonement or any of those things.
He’s saying unless a person believes in Jesus for everlasting life.
That
is as long a person believes in Jesus for everlasting life he knows he has
everlasting life.
In case you don’t understand
what he means by that, he tells us in the next paragraph. He says:
In
other words until a person believes that what he has received from the Lord
Jesus Christ is permanent and cannot be lost whether he understands that as
eternal life, salvation, or living forever…
See the term salvation he
throws that in. That could mean anything
to anybody.
…with
Him in His kingdom, he is not yet born again.
Now see there are vast
numbers of churches and denominations that will teach that Jesus died for your
sins, but you can lose your salvation. Now
what he is saying is none of those people are saved.
He makes an illogical shift
in the next part of the article because what we are saying is that a person can
believe Jesus died for their sins, but they may not understand eternal security.
I don’t think I did when I was 6 years old.
By trying to make this salvation…if you believe you are getting saved,
you understand eternal security. That is
just poor verbiage. What he is saying is
that until you understand you have eternal life and that it can’t be lost,
you’re not saved. So once again it seems
to me they’re adding something to the gospel.
He gives a couple illustrations
of what he means. A couple of paragraphs
later I see a serious shift in logic – a real logical fallacy. He shifts the terms. The terms are not about being a religious
Christian. There are a lot of people who
are religious and have pseudo-Christianity.
You have all kinds of different denominations and people in state church
countries that say they’re Christians and they don’t understand the gospel at
all. We’re not talking about people who
are just overtly religious. We are
talking about people who understand that Jesus died for their sins, but they may
not understand eternal security. So he
says:
Of
course this is in some ways a radical doctrine today. It means that there are lots of very religious
Christian who are unregenerate and who need to be born again.
Now the issue isn’t about
very religious Christians; it’s about Christians who believe Jesus died for
their sins. But, they haven’t understood
eternal security. That doesn’t
necessarily put you in the category of a religious Christian who really doesn’t
understand the gospel. So there’s a
logical fallacy there. He reiterates this
in the next paragraph.
This
wasn’t a radical thought in the early 70’s when I came to faith. At that time everyone I knew who was involved
in Campus Crusade was concerned for and witnessed to Roman Catholics, Eastern
orthodox and all flavors of protestants. We never assumed that because someone was
religious or a member of a church that they were born again.
Well, that’s an accurate
statement. I never assume that just
because somebody is part of a religious, has a lot of religious activity in
their lives that they are truly regenerate.
But that’s not the subject of the doctrinal statement. The way he should say that is, “We never
assumed that because someone didn’t believe in eternal security that they
weren’t born again.” That’s what they’re
talking about. So he shifts the whole terms of the argument
in the latter part of this particular newsletter.
So the interesting thing is that
in this article….Bob was a debater in college so he knows what he is doing
debate wise. He mentions two people in
the article and both people he mentions in the article Fred Lybrand who is pastor
of
So that brings us up with
some little contemporary things that are going on. It’s really sad to watch this because it’s
going to have a lot of long-range consequences for a lot of different
people. This is an organization that has
had a great impact for a lot of years. But they are majoring in a very minor hermeneutical
decision that they have made and they want everybody within the organization to
affirm their little gnat’s hair.
In organizations that go
through things where you have a doctrinal change there should be a procedure
where there is a lengthy period of time (more that four or five years). Of course they would say that they had held
this view for decades. Actually many of
us who have researched this and gone back…A year ago I took several of Zane
Hodges books with me when I went to Kiev and read through them and realized
that he had been stating the gospel this way for a long time, over 20
years. You could see it in his first
book. But he never really came out and
said this. It wasn’t in black and
white. It wasn’t clear that this was all
there was to the gospel and if you don’t believe in eternal security you’re not
saved. But he has always articulated the
gospel in this way believing in Jesus, accepting the gift of eternal life from Jesus,
believing in Christ for eternal life. He had always expressed it that way. In and of itself, it doesn’t sound
wrong. Your radar is not going to go
off. It’s not until you get in the context
of a distortion and you hear someone clarify something the way Bob Wilkin did
in that article that suddenly you begin to read that phrase in a different
light. That’s what happens all through
church history.
Those who are coming to the
history of Doctrine class on Monday nights are seeing that. One of the things that happens throughout the
course of church history is that when error comes, often it is not clearly seen
and understood as to just why it is wrong for awhile. And, most people at first don’t want to say
it’s wrong because there’s a tendency to want to avoid conflict and
division. But, sooner or later people
begin to see what is truly and actually being said. Then you have to make an issue out of it. It’s unfortunate that we do. So I
thought I would enlighten you on these issues.
Now let’s get back into our
text in Ezekiel - Ezekiel 36 where we are continuing our study on the New
Covenant. Just to remind you of what we
were doing last week I emphasized the fact that in Ezekiel 36 we have once
again a clear statement on the nature of the New Covenant. It’s very important for us to understand
this.
I know it seems to me sometimes
like, “Well, am I just boring everybody to death going through all these
passages and taking forever to look at all these facets of the New Covenant
that are in the Old Testament.”
But it is so crucial to do
this because there are things that just aren’t clear. We read in numerous works by good men, good
theologians who are dispensationalists.
In three sentences or two paragraphs they explain the New Covenant, and
they’ll cite these verses as references.
You go back and you read them and you begin to ask some questions and
need some clarification and to see how things are put together.
One of the things I pointed
out last time in Ezekiel 36 is that in the core passage that begins in verse 25,
God says that at the time the covenant is enacted, the time it is enacted, He
is going to cleanse
NKJ Ezekiel 36:25 "Then I will sprinkle clean
water on you, and you shall be clean; I will cleanse you from all your
filthiness and from all your idols.
He uses a word for cleansing that
relates to ceremonial or ritual cleansing.
We’ll look at these words a little bit in a chart I have. This is the Hebrew word taher
and it is used predominantly for ritual or ceremonial cleansing. That
is when someone is going to go to the temple to worship, come before God under
the Levitical laws, the Mosaic Laws that in order to come into God’s presence
they must be cleansed of ritual impurities.
If a woman gives birth, then she has to be cleansed 7 days later or 8
days later. She has to go through the
proper cleansing ritual and sacrifices.
The same thing if you touch a dead body.
Then you have to wait so many days and there has to be cleansing
ritual.
These are not sins, but there
are elements in both of these. For
example, the giving of birth for a woman is now in pain and suffering because
of the curse. So there is something
about giving birth that is different because of the judgment on sin. So it’s used as a picture of sin and what has
to happen because of sin - the same thing with touching a dead body. The reason that there is physical death is
because of sin. It’s a reminder of the
curse so there is ceremonial cleansing that has to take place. But these things are not sin in and of
themselves.
So the whole idea of
cleansing isn’t related to confession of sin and forgiveness of sins. These are two different things. If you are out in the fields of up in the
What I am arguing here is
this cleansing terminology that is in this chapter and it will be made so clear
to you when we get into Ezekiel 37 - this cleansing takes place nationally at
the time of the Second Advent when Jesus Christ sets up His kingdom because He
is going to reestablish His physical presence on the earth in the millennial
temple. Because there once again will be
a physical reality of physical presence of God on the earth, then we go back to
certain ceremonial ritual cleansing that must take place. First the nation has to be cleansed after all
the war and everything that takes place during the tribulation period. There has to be a cleansing because of their
past history of idolatry and their rejection of Jesus as Messiah. So it’s a national cleansing.
Then what goes beyond that,
in addition to that God says:
NKJ Ezekiel 36:26 "I will give you a new heart
and put a new spirit within you;
The way that that’s
punctuated in the English, you have a semicolon indicating that it’s one
independent clause and you have two things that are stated there. This is I believe a topical sentence and should
be punctuated as a topical sentence.
What God is saying is, “I’m
going to do things for you. One involves
a new heart and one involves a new spirit.”
Then the second sentence
which should begin with the second half of verse 26:
I will take
the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.
See that relates to the
giving of a new heart.
So He is saying, “I’m going
to do two things for you, A and B.”
The next sentence describes
more fully what He says about how He is going to do A. Then the third sentence is going to tell you
more about how he is going to do B. If
that’s true, then that means that the “s” in spirit in the topical sentence isn’t
a lower case s. It’s an upper case “S” because
the key of this whole thing is God put His Spirit into every Jewish person
under the New Covenant.
So I pointed this out last
time that the new Spirit here is not a reference to the human spirit which
would be simple regeneration. It is
talking about something beyond that in terms of the personal indwelling of the
Holy Spirit in every Jew in the millennial period. It has features associated with it that go
far beyond the features that we see related to the indwelling of the Holy
Spirit in the Church Age. It has a different purpose and different
manifestation. This is why in Joel 2
when Joel says:
NKJ Joel 2:28 " And it shall come to pass
afterward That I will pour out My Spirit on all flesh; Your sons and your
daughters shall prophesy, Your old men shall dream dreams, Your young men shall
see visions.
All of this is a different
manifestation that occurs in the spiritual life of the Jewish believer in the
Church Age. So that means that we should
translate this differently. It results
in a radical transformation of the spiritual life.
NKJ Ezekiel 36:27 "I will put My Spirit within
you and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will keep My judgments and do
them.
I pointed out last time (and
this is so crucial) that if this took place in 33 AD on the Day of Pentecost (if
the New Covenant was enacted in 33), then this would mean that if you are truly
regenerate; then you can’t apostatize the faith. See, that is the core principle in Lordship
salvation and the fifth “P” in the Calvinistic system of TULIP – the perseverance
of the saints - that the person who is truly regenerate cannot fully apostatize
and deny Christ as Savior.
So the reason I point that out
is because in both a-millennial systems of interpretation and in the neo-dispensational
view of progressive dispensationalism, they want the quotation of Joel 2 in
Acts 2 (When Peter says, “This is what the prophet Joel spoke of.”; they want
that) to mean that we are now living under an enacted New Covenant. It’s only partial, but it’s here.
That’s why theology makes a
difference. If that’s true, then all the
charismatic gifts should still be in operation because your young men should
see visions and your old men dream dreams and daughters prophesy and everything
in Joel should be happening today. What
I’m saying is that no, we should not understand Joel 2 to be enacted in Acts 2. All Peter is saying is that what is happening
now (the coming of the Holy Spirit, the speaking in languages that these men
didn’t learn) that is just a manifestation of the Spirit that is like what will
happen when Joel 2 is fulfilled.
So the key to understand this
is the whole concept of cleanings. So
we’re going to have two things happen. A new heart will take place where their
heart is changed. The deceptive heart (Jeremiah
said: NKJ Jeremiah 17:9 " The heart is deceitful
above all things, And desperately wicked; Who can know it?) is changed.
See I remember a few years
ago I read an article by a classmate of mine when I was in a doctrinal program at
Dallas who was critiquing an old debate that in 1918 Louis Sperry Chafer wrote
a book called He that is Spiritual.
At the time one of the greatest reformed theologians Calvinistic
theologians at Princeton Seminary was Benjamin Breckenridge Warfield. Warfield had some great things to say and he
is worth reading in certain areas. But Warfield took Chafer to task for that
book. I think in some ways he
misunderstood it.
This article that this friend
of mine wrote criticized Chafer. This is
such a telling comment. At the end of
the article he says, “The weakness with Chafer is that he had a low view of
regeneration. He did not realize that at
regeneration the sin nature is changed.”
That is classic. That kind of thinking is what comes out of
this - not being able to rightly understand what is happening with the New
Covenant and that it doesn’t come into effect until the Second Coming. So it
affects how the people teach the spiritual life.
It’s no wonder people get
confused. You turn on your radio now. It used to be in the old days that KHCB was
always solid and they always had men who always taught basically the same Chaferian theology. Now
you have different people from R. C. Scroll to John MacArthur to others who
teach different views of sanctification.
The average person in the pew doesn’t know that there are about 8
different models of sanctification. They
don’t know that John MacArthur teaches out of one view and R. C. Scroll teaches
another view and Chuck Swindoll teaches another
view. So they listen to these people as
if they are all teaching the same ideas on the spiritual life and they’re
not. They go home and they’re a little
confused.
Then if they continue to
listen for long they go, “Well, if these guys can’t figure it out how can I be
expected to figure it out? I’m just
going to go down and feel good at
You laugh, but there are
people who are at
It is because people think
that, “Well, all these scholars who know
all this Greek and Hebrew can’t figure it out; then I can’t figure it out so I
going to quit trying to think.”
So the key issue in here is
understanding ritual cleansing externally which is the first part is about -
that “I will sprinkle clean water on you and you will be clean.”
Then verses 26 through 27
talk about the inner transformation that will occur for every Jewish believer
in the
So let’s talk a little bit about
this whole concept of cleansing. This is so important to understand and it’s
good background for us right now because when we finish Hebrews 8 and the New
Covenant (when we get into Hebrews 9 and Hebrews 10), those chapters are built on
an understanding of the ritual system in the tabernacle and temple and Levitical
sacrifices and offerings. So we’re going
to have to spend a lot of time in the Old Testament to understand the backdrop for
Hebrews 9 and 10. We may not understand it
as well as the original recipients of Hebrews understood it, but we have to
understand it so that these chapters even make sense to us. The writer is assuming that you understand
it.
So the first word is “cleansing”. Cleansing is the Hebrew word taher. It
always refers to ritual cleansing, ceremonial cleansing and it’s not the same
as inner spiritual cleansing or transformation.
It is contrasted with the word tame which is translated in the
Greek with the word akatharsia which has to do
with that which is unclean. Katharizo is the Greek verb you’ve heard me talk
about before that is the verb for cleansing.
(When you put the alpha privative in front of it, it’s like putting the
English “un” in front of it. It negates
the word.) So it’s translated “unclean”
or sometimes the Greek word miano which has to
do with being defiled. These are
ceremonial terms, ritual terms. They’re
not talking about sin per say. So we
have to understand that particular word group.
As I pointed out last time as
we got into the introduction to Ezekiel 36, I pointed out that earlier in the
chapter there was a contrast between holy and profane. I believe that started in about verse 20.
NKJ Ezekiel 36:20 "When they came to the
nations, wherever they went, they profaned My holy name
God is the speaker here.
-- when
they said of them, 'These are the people of the LORD, and yet
they have gone out of His land.'
NKJ Ezekiel 36:21 "But I had concern for My holy
name, which the house of
The word profane doesn’t mean
you’re uttering certain curse words. It
means that which is common. It’s
contrasted to holy which means that which is “set apart” or distinct. These
are the two opposite terms. So you have
on the one side, holy and profane. See
the priest is holy because he had been consecrated and set apart to the service
of God. The people are common or
profane. That doesn’t mean that they are...it’s
not a derogatory term. It’s just that they
haven’t gone through that process of being set apart ceremonially or
ritually. Neither of those terms…and most
contexts have to do with whether a person is saved or unsaved. So a priest is holy because he has been set apart
to God and he can commit certain acts that render him ceremonially
unclean. So he can be holy and unclean and
when he performs the ritual he can be holy and clean. But he can be holy and clean and unsaved because
the only requirement for being a priest is genetic relationship to Aaron and
the tribe of Levi. If you read through
all the qualification for priest it never once talks about his spiritual life
or the fact that he trusts in God. It
has to do with the fact that he is simply in that genetic relationship.
I wouldn’t be surprised if
the two sons of Eli… Eli was a High
Priest at the time of Samuel in the first part of the book of Samuel. His two sons were Phinehas
and Hophni.
They were rebellious and they used the sacrificial system to rob the
people. There’s nothing good said of
them. It’s very likely that they were
not saved. So here you have two cases of
priests, who aren’t saved, but they’re holy and they could be holy and
clean. So we have to understand that
this terminology is related to ritual terminology and it’s not related to
eternal soteriological conditions.
A place in the Old Testament
where you see these words used together is in Leviticus 10:9 through 11. I want you to turn with me to Leviticus
10. I am going to cross reference a
couple of passages and then we’ll look at the events of Leviticus 10.
NKJ Leviticus 10:9 "Do not drink wine or
intoxicating drink, you,
God is addressing the
requirements for the priesthood.
nor your
sons with you, when you go into the tabernacle of meeting, lest you die.
In other words if you profane
the Holy of Holies, there is the death penalty which is what had just happened
to two of Aaron’s sons. God says:
It shall
be a statute
forever throughout your generations,
NKJ Leviticus
See the priests were to teach
this distinction between the holy and the profane and between the unclean and
the clean. I’ve highlighted that verse because
if you read it in Leviticus 10 it looks as if holy and profane (that word group)
and unclean and clean (that second word group) - that those two word groups are
synonymous. But they’re not. I will show you why in just a minute. But the role of the priesthood according to verse
11 was to teach the sons of
Their role was to teach the
law to the people part of which was the distinction between holy and profane on
the one hand and unclean and clean on the other hand. We see that in Ezekiel 22:26. There it is very clear from the grammar that
these are two separate categories. This
is his indictment of the priesthood and why
NKJ Ezekiel
So the way the grammar is
structured these are two separate categories.
and they
have hidden their eyes from My Sabbaths, so that I am profaned among them.
So we have a chart here that
I’ve developed to try to show this – the difference between holy and clean. “Holy” means to be set apart. So the priests were set apart in the service
of God at the beginning of their service.
For the High Priest there was a complete bath that took place which was
a type of the complete positional cleansing of the believer at the instant of
salvation. He is set apart therefore to
the service of God. That’s the key idea
in holiness. It doesn’t mean being
morally pure or perfect or righteous. It
means to be set apart to the service of a god.
That’s the core semantic meaning.
When it’s applied here set apart to the service of the God of Abraham,
Isaac and Jacob.
The temple itself is holy.
The furniture is holy. Furniture can’t
be moral or immoral. Those qualities
just can’t fit a piece of furniture, a piece of metal. You can’t say that the lamp stand or the
clothing of a priest is morally pure. It
doesn’t have moral qualities, but it is set apart to God.
Now when it is violated in
terms of ritual law, then it becomes profaned.
That word means common. The
people are profaned. Everyday utensils are
profane until they are ritually purified for the service of God. They are profane. So you have these two categories on one
side.
Then on the other side, we
have the word clean. That which is
cleansed ritually can enter into the
I think too many people read
Leviticus or Exodus and when they read clean and unclean what they think of is
sin and not sin. This is a physical
feature. So again in Ezekiel, the last
verse we looked at in Ezekiel was
NKJ Ezekiel 44:23 "And they shall teach My
people the difference between the holy and the unholy, and cause them to
discern between the unclean and the clean.
That’s going to be happening
during the
Alright so we understand
these particular features. Now I had you
turn to Leviticus 10. This is the
episode of a priestly rebellion that took place at the time that the temple is being
dedicated. In previous chapters, for
example if you just sort of page your way through, you have in the first 7
chapters of Leviticus the different laws and the different offerings. We’ll come back and look at those as we get
into the next chapter of Hebrews. Then
in chapter 8 Aaron and his sons are consecrated. This is when the High Priest would take his
full bath as a washing indicating a complete cleansing from sin so he is consecrated. This was also associated with various other offerings
indicating that he is set apart to the service of God.
The word consecration comes
out of another word within the qadash word
group. Qadash
is the Hebrew word for holy just as hagios is
the basic Greek noun for holy and you have various forms for that root word which
indicates consecration, sanctification, holiness – these ideas. Then if we read in chapter 9 the first verse
of Leviticus 9:
NKJ Leviticus 9:1 It came to pass on the eighth day
that Moses called Aaron and his sons and the elders of
2 And he said to Aaron, "Take
for yourself a young bull as a sin offering and a ram as a burnt offering,
without blemish, and offer them before the LORD.
3 "And to the children of
…and give various
instructions to them. So this sets the
stage and this is the 8th day after the consecration of the
priesthood.
Then skip over to the end of
the chapter, verse 23. I am setting some
chronology here for you.
NKJ Leviticus
So this is when you have the
Shekinah glory coming in and taking up residence in the Holy of Holies in the tabernacle.
NKJ Leviticus
…incredible scene. Before all of
NKJ Leviticus 10:1 Then Nadab and Abihu, the sons of
Aaron, each took his censer and put fire in it, put incense on it, and offered
profane fire before the LORD,
See this came from a source that had not been
consecrated. So it’s not holy. So they’re going to offer unauthorized
fire. It hasn’t been sanctified
yet. It hasn’t become holy.
which He
had not commanded them.
Great example of what happens
when people start trying to invent their own ideas of what gives them a
relationship with God. You can’t make up the rules on your own. You have to let God make up the rules and follow
His rules. So they are going to offer
profane fire before the Lord.
NKJ Leviticus 10:2 So fire went out from the LORD and
devoured them,
They are just incinerated on
the spot. What an object lesson!
“That’s that harsh evil God
of the Old Testament,” the liberals like to say.
Well, God is teaching the
importance of His justice and righteousness and you can’t come before God in an
unauthorized manner. There is only one
way and that’s God’s way.
and they
died before the LORD.
NKJ Leviticus 10:3 And Moses said to Aaron, "This
is what the LORD spoke, saying: 'By those who come near Me I must be regarded
as holy; And before all the people I must be glorified.' " So Aaron held
his peace.
Now I’m sure there is a lot
more that went on. We’re just given the
Holy Spirit’s abridged version of the events of that day. But I am sure that
this had quite an impact on everyone.
This is the context of the verses that I’ve just said where Aaron is
reminded that the role of the priesthood is to distinguish between holy and
unholy and between unclean and clean down in verse 10.
NKJ Leviticus
Now I want you to just stop
there and we’re going to go through a whole lot of laws that are going to be
developed in the following sections. You
have starting in verse 12 references to the grain offering, wave offering,
heave offering, peace offering. This
isn’t wave offering (Robby waves his hand). I just wanted to make sure you
understood that. I’ve been in churches
where they’ve done that. Don’t
laugh. Let’s all give a wave offering to
the Lord and they’ll wave. (I just wanted
to make sure that you were all awake.
Okay, it’s not a basketball game.)
You have wave offering, peace offering, heave offering, sin
offering. We’ll go through all of those
as we go through Hebrews.
Then in chapter 11 you get
into dietary laws. The things you can
eat and the things you can’t eat, that some animals are clean and some animals
are not clean. It doesn’t have anything
to do with health. You can’t go out and pick
up one of these diet books that says that this is the biblical diet. (There are a bunch of them out there, trust
me.) So you can’t eat shrimp and you
can’t eat catfish and you can’t eat crawdads or crawfish or anything like that
because that’s not on the Mosaic Law.
This doesn’t have anything to do with health. It had to do with that most shellfish are
scavengers that eat dead things. Why do
you have dead things? You have dead
things because of the curse of Genesis 3. So anything associated with death renders you
ceremonially unclean. That which eats
certain other things…these animals aren’t scavengers, don’t touch dead things
or not involved with dead things. You’re
okay.
In Acts 10 when God when authorized
Peter and the church to do away with the dietary laws, it wasn’t because Peter
had finally discovered that you have to cook pork to a certain temperature to
avoid trichinosis or that they had suddenly discovered how to properly cook
shellfish so you wouldn’t get any diseases.
It had nothing to do with that.
It had to do with what God was teaching through the sacrificial system
and through the dietary laws as a training aid, as a visual, physical image of
the impact of sin.
So chapter 11 in Leviticus
talks about the dietary laws. Then you
have various others laws in chapter 12.
In chapter 13 they talk about
what renders you clean and unclean. If
you just go through here and I’ve done this in these chapters, underline every
use of the word clean or unclean. That’s
what these chapters are all about.
Now what started this? This is why you have to do the big picture in
Bible study. You can’t just say let’s
hone in on three verses and spend 6 weeks on them because you lose the
context. You have to have the flow. The priests are consecrated. Seven days later God moves in to the
Then God rebukes Aaron and
says the role of the priest is to teach people the difference between the holy
and profane, and clean and unclean. Then
he proceeds to give instructions on what makes you clean and unclean and that
covers the rest of chapter 10. Chapter
11 and chapter 12 you have the woman unclean at childbirth. Then chapter 13 which is leprosy and dealing
the things related to that. Chapter 14 is
the ritual for cleansing of the leper.
The last part of that chapter deals with cleaning the ritual of
cleansing of a house where a leper has been.
Then chapter 15 you have various other types of cleansing. Then you come to chapter 16. Everything (from the second half of chapter
10 through chapter 15) talks about what makes you clean and unclean. Then chapter 16, verse one reads:
NKJ Leviticus 16:1 Now the LORD spoke to Moses after
the death of the two sons of Aaron,
Now it probably took you and
your morning Bible reading a week to get through those 5 chapters because they
are boring and you don’t like reading all those lists. People forget that chapter 16 verse 1 takes
place right after the death of Nadab and Abihu.
when they
offered profane fire before the LORD, and died;
NKJ Leviticus 16:2 and the LORD said to Moses:
"Tell Aaron your brother not to come at just any time into the
NKJ Leviticus 16:3 "Thus Aaron shall come into
the
And then it describes how he
shall dress and goes through all of this.
This is the description of what he is to do once a year on the Day of
Atonement. So Leviticus 16 describes the
Day of Atonement in the context of - what have we been talking about for 5
chapters? Cleansing.
Now the interesting thing is
that you and I were mostly taught that the word atonement, the Hebrew word kaphar,
means covering. (It isn’t bad, but it
probably isn’t right.) There has been a
lot of discussion among Hebrew scholars on the meaning of that word the last 20
years or so. Many of them believe that
the core semantic meaning of kaphar has to do with cleansing. It is a picture of ritual cleansing, of
guilt. It is a ritual cleansing and this
is backed up by the fact that 60 or 70 percent of the time that the word kaphar
is translated into the Greek Septuagint, it’s translated with a word related to
katharsis or katharizo
which means cleansing. So the idea of
the Day of Atonement isn’t primarily focusing on phase 1 salvation justification,
but the ongoing cleansing of the nation from year to year because of the blood
of bulls and goats can’t permanently take away sin. We’ll get into that in Hebrews 10.
So we tie all these things
together and we’re hit with an understanding that what Ezekiel is talking about
when he talks about the New Covenant being a covenant for cleansing is that
this has to do with the ritual cleansing of the nation because of their past
sins in preparation for the present dwelling of Jesus Christ physically in
their midst in the millennial temple.
So that wraps up what I want
to cover on Ezekiel 36. Next time we
will come back and get into Ezekiel 37 and go through that section which won’t
involve a whole lot. Most of what I’ve
said is already covered there. We’ll
summarize that and go look at three other key passages in the Old Testament and
then we will get into New Testament passages on the New Covenant.
Let’s close in prayer.