Biblical Overview: Pentateuch

Greetings and welcome to the Faith Chapel podcast.

My name is Jason and I am the pastor of Faith Chapel.

Today we are starting our fifth season in the podcast.

We will be breaking the Bible into six sections and showing how these books

point to the flow of the entire Bible.

Join us in our discussion today as we tackle the foundational Pentateuch texts

of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

Thanks for joining us today.

To start out tonight, we're going to be discussing why it's important to read Scripture.

Why should we engage with Scripture at all? And to answer that question,

we're going to look at Psalm chapter 1, which says these words.

Psalms 1 · chapter mention

Or stand around with sinners, or join in with mockers. But they delight in the

law of the Lord, meditating on it day and night.

They are like trees planted along the riverbank, bearing fruit each season.

Their leaves never wither, and they prosper in all they do.

But not the wicked. They are like worthless chaff, scattered by the wind.

They will be condemned at the time of judgment. sinners will have no place among

the godly, for the Lord watches over the path of the godly, but the path of

the wicked leads to destruction.

In this psalm, we have a couple of different reasons why we should study scripture.

The first one is this picture of a tree, and this tree is planted by a flowing river.

And what this means for the tree is that it never is thirsty.

It's always pulling all of the water it needs to thrive.

Its leaves are not impacted when drought conditions come because it constantly

has this source of water.

And us as followers of Jesus, we need a constant source of water.

And to us, that is scripture.

We need to prosper in all that we do.

And so we need the source of this river.

We need the scriptures to teach us and to inform us about who we are.

The second reason is that when we do that, we will prosper.

We are like this tree that is planted by this river, we are always prospering.

When we continually put God's word in front of us to understand,

to know him better, our goal and objective is to obey his teachings.

The law of the Lord, as it calls it here, is what we need to abide by.

And that's what the word of God gives to us, this river of nourishment that

allows us to always be flourishing because we are doing what God wants us to do.

The reason we need to engage with Scripture, at least one of them,

and we'll go over several in the beginning of each of these lessons,

is that when we obey God's words, we will flourish.

So in order for us to flourish, we need to understand God's words and then put

it into practice and to do what it's going to do.

And there's no better place to start in scripture than the foundation passages

of what is called the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, the books of Moses.

Out of Genesis is where we get our basic understanding of who we are as human beings.

Now, there are later revelations that the Pentateuch, the first five books of

the Bible, will point us to.

And that's why the rest of scripture is important. but these are the building

blocks. These are the foundational stones that we are going to need to understand.

We're going to begin with the first book of the Bible, the book of Genesis.

The first verse of the Bible tells us something very important.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And so for us, there was a beginning.

For our material world, there was a start.

There was a finite date in place where everything began.

That's when God created everything that we know.

Out of nothing, God brought forth all that we perceive, all that we can study, all that we know.

Out of nothing, he created it all.

And this is important for us to know that God is outside of creation.

He is not a part of creation. He is supernatural.

He is outside of nature.

Then the Bible takes us on a kaleidoscope of the things he created. He created light.

He said, let there be waters and a space to separate the waters.

He created the stars and the sun, the moon, and everything in the universe.

He created the trees that were inhabiting the ground of the earth.

He created the sea creatures, and he created the land creatures and all of the

plants. And in this world,

of creation, this six days, and there's debate about whether it's six literal

24-hour periods or whether it is six eras of God's creation,

and that's a debate for another day.

But what we are going to talk about is in this six days of creation,

he brought order out of chaos.

That's what the Genesis account is telling us. The penultimate creation day is day six.

Up until day six, every time that God sees at what he's done,

he's created light. It was good.

He's created the separation of the waters.

He saw that that was good. He created the land and brought that out of the waters.

He saw that that was good.

The sun, moon, stars, all of those were good. The animals that he created in the sea were good.

But when he gets to humanity...

All of his creation is complete, that's when he declares it not being good, but it being very good.

God's creation is very good.

Humanity completes his creation. And this, for us, leans to a very important

passage in Genesis 1, 26 and 27, where it says, Then God said,

let us make human beings in our image to be like us.

They will reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky,

the livestock, all the wild animals on the earth, and the small animals that

scurry along the ground. So God created human beings in his own image.

In the image of God, he created them male and female. He created them.

What we have here is human beings being made in the image and likeness of God.

And what that means at the core is we are like God in a way that other animals

and other plants are not like.

We have creative juices inside of us, and so we can take things and make other things out of it.

Humanity discovered how And so God put that creative juices inside of us.

We are created beings who are sentient and we can talk and we can learn and

we can grow and develop and all of those different characteristics.

You and I are like him. Humanity is special, and it's not just one type of humanity that is special.

It is all kinds of humanity that God has created special. If you are a human

being, you are in God's image and likeness, and you deserve to be treated with dignity and respect.

That finishes chapter 1 of Genesis and the proclamation of that cosmic creation.

And then when we get to Genesis 2, the idea is much a more zoomed-in version

of creation, and where God makes a garden and puts man in that garden,

and he creates a helper for the man.

And so we have Adam, and we have Eve, and they have dominion over every animal

and every being and their goal is to cultivate it and to live forever because in the Garden of Eden,

there is a tree of life that God does not restrict their use for.

And the idea here is that God is creating them to live in this place of perfection

that is very good for eternity.

His desire is to have fellowship with them forever.

And so this is an awesome story of how we were created and what our role here is on this planet.

We are God's representatives being in his image, being in his likeness,

and we are to take his goodness out into this world.

But unfortunately, that's not how Genesis continues.

That's not how humanity continues.

Responds to God's choice.

Because also when it's introducing the tree of life, there's another tree that

God does restrict our use of.

And that is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. We are not to eat of its fruit.

But in Genesis 3, a tempter comes.

And this tempter gets Adam and Eve to take from the tree of the knowledge of

good and evil, to eat its fruit, and eyes are opened.

The eyes that are going to look at themselves and say, hey, we're naked. We need to correct this.

And so they hide from themselves.

Shame is entering the picture.

They hide from God himself. And so this puts a divide between human beings and God.

And because this disobeying God is what happens, a division comes.

And this is what we call sin. Adam and Eve disobeyed God.

They rebelled against their creator and therefore sin entered the world through them.

And this sin has consequences.

The childbearing gets more painful for the woman.

The bringing up of the fruit of the soil.

Crops of the ground is going to be much more difficult because it's by the sweat

of humanity's brow are we going to be bringing food in.

And we have these consequences.

But the most important consequence found in Genesis chapter 3 verses 14 and 15,

Genesis 3:14

where we read, the Lord God said to the serpent, the one who tempted Adam and

Eve, God said to the serpent, because you have done this, you are cursed more

than all animals, domestic and wild.

You will crawl on your belly, groveling in the dust as long as you live.

And I will cause hostility between you and the woman and between your offspring and her offspring.

He will strike your head and you will strike his heel.

And the most important part here is this last line. The serpent,

the physical representation of evil will be defeated.

Even though temptation is in the world right now, God promises there will be

a time when God will send a descendant of Eve to stamp out evil.

And this points us to the cross and what Jesus did by dying a sacrificial death for.

This is prophecy of the defeat of Satan and the victory of God,

and this foreshadows for us that God is not done with humanity yet.

Even though we have rebelled against God, God is still going to bring restoration and healing to us.

This is good news. God is not done with us yet.

There will be victory. The representation of evil here found in the serpent,

who we also know as the devil or Satan, he will be defeated.

But sin continued to develop.

Sin continued to grow as we get further and further along the biblical narrative.

In the next chapter, chapter four, we have the story of Cain and Abel and jealousy

coming upon Cain and him striking down Abel.

But again, God was there and his goal, his objective was to bring Cain back

to a place of right relationship with him.

But in Genesis 4, 6, and 7, we read God saying, Why are you so angry, Cain?

Why do you look so dejected? You will be accepted if you do what is right,

but if you refuse to do what is right, then watch out.

Sin is crouching at the door, eager to control you, but you must subdue it and be its master.

This is the story for us today, that sin is still here and is crouching at the

door. It wants to devour us.

It wants to bring what God has given order back into chaos. And we need to master it.

And this is the way humanity lives to this day.

That sin is out there. It will tempt us and we must master it.

Then humanity continues to dive deeper and deeper into sin after Cain.

It leads all the way to the point where we read in Genesis 6, verses 5 through 8,

Genesis 6:5–8

the Lord observed the extent of human wickedness on the earth,

and he saw that everything they thought or imagined was consistently and totally evil.

So the Lord was sorry he had ever made them and put them on the earth. It broke his heart.

And the Lord said, I will wipe this human race I have created from the face of the earth.

Yes, I will destroy every living thing, all the people, the large animals,

the small animals that scurry along the ground and even the birds of the sky.

I am sorry I ever made them, but Noah found favor with the Lord.

So sin just kept growing and expanding in this world.

God was sorry that he had made humanity and he decided to destroy it.

Noah found favor with God. And so when the rains come down, when the underground

springs break forth, Noah and humanity is saved.

But even then, humanity continues to choose right and wrong for itself.

And sin is growing exponentially on this world to the point where we get to

Genesis 11 and the Tower of Babel.

Now, the Tower of Babel is a place of pride.

It's a place of arrogance. It's where people want to make their own mark on

this world and to build a tower up into the heavens to be like God.

And that arrogance and that pride is building to the point where God confuses

their language and spreads them over the face of the earth.

And so the first 11 chapters of Genesis are called primeval history,

and it's the history of the beginning.

How humanity started, where it came from, where it dissolved into.

It was a good order that God created, and then humanity dissolved it into chaos.

And so we might think that this is the end of the story.

We might think that, all right, we are hopeless in our own sin and brokenness,

but God is not done with us.

And in Genesis 12, we have a very important hinge verse between primeval history

and the rest of biblical history.

It's found in chapter 12, verses 1 and 3, and it says, The Lord had said to

Abram, Leave your native country, your relatives, and your father's family,

and go to the land that I will show you.

I will make you into a great nation. I will bless you and make you famous,

and you will be a blessing to others. I will bless those who bless you and curse

those who treat you with contempt.

All the families on earth will be blessed through you.

And so God sees, again, like he did with Noah, He sees someone and he says,

I'm going to make an agreement with this guy.

I'm going to make a covenant with him. And the covenant is simply this.

If you leave your native country, your relatives, your father's family,

and go to a land that I will show you eventually, I will make you into a great nation.

Your descendants are going to be as numerous as the stars in the sky.

I will bless those who bless you and curse those who treat you with contempt.

I will give you a nation, I will give you a land, I will give you descendants,

and all the families on earth will be blessed through.

And this is the covenant that God makes with Abram. And Abram believes God.

He is at this point 75 years old.

His wife is 65 years old and they have no descendant.

They start traveling around until they reach the land of Canaan.

And that's the land that God is going to give them. It takes a long time for

God to fulfill what he's saying.

And Abraham gets impatient, takes a servant girl as his wife,

and they have a son named Ishmael, and Abraham thinks this is how God's going

to bring through his promise, but that's not how he's going to do it.

In Genesis 17, 19, God replies, no, Sarah, your wife, will give birth to a son for you.

You will name him Isaac, and I will confirm my covenant with him and his descendants

as an everlasting covenant.

God says it's not Ishmael. It's not your firstborn son.

It's not your son from Hagar, the Egyptian servant.

It's from Sarah that I will bless this, that my covenant will be passed on to,

and his name will be Isaac.

Over the course of time, Isaac is born. Abraham is now 100 years old.

God gives them this child.

It is a blessing for them.

And through Isaac, Genesis continues to develop.

Isaac has two sons. Their names are Jacob and Esau.

Jacob is the younger one, but he is cunning and he gets the birthright and the blessing.

And he's the one who the blessing of this covenant is going to be passed down.

So we have Abraham, and he gives birth to Isaac through Sarah.

And then Isaac has two sons, but it's through the line of Jacob, who's renamed Israel.

And this is where we get the name of the nation of Israel.

And from Jacob comes 12 tribes.

So God is starting to put this plan together about the descendants of Abraham

being as numerous as the stars in the sky.

But the sons of Jacob are broken and rebellious.

And when they see their father having a favorite son by the name of Joseph, they get jealous.

And they get to a point where they will sell him into slavery.

Jacob's son, Joseph, is no longer in the family unit. He, in fact,

gets taken as a slave down into Egypt where more terrible things happen to him.

He gets thrown into prison.

And in prison, he gets to be able to interpret dreams because God is blessing him.

And in these dreams, one of them is restored to Pharaoh.

Joseph then gets to be in front of Pharaoh when Pharaoh has a dream that he needs interpreted.

And the dream foretells a seven-year period where lots and lots of crops are

being raised and grown and the harvest is very plentiful. and then a seven-year

period of absolute nothing, waste.

And so Joseph tells Pharaoh, you should save up the grain from the seven years

of plenty to feed your people in the seven years of famine.

And in the midst of this, where Jacob and his sons are in the land of Canaan,

the famine reaches and the brothers have to go down to Egypt and they appear before Joseph.

And God uses Joseph to rescue his family from the famine.

As Joseph has been elevated to the second highest position in the land of Egypt below only Pharaoh.

Joseph is able to give them food in order to give them land,

in order to give them a place where their livestock can grow and flourish. And.

Gives the people of Israel the chance to grow and develop.

And so this is where we're at when we come to the end of Genesis.

We are at a place where the descendants of Abraham, where the blessings are

one of them is kind of occurring, and it just takes time.

The descendants being as numerous as the sands on the earth,

that promise is being fulfilled by the growing and the spreading of the Israelites.

From one man, Abraham, and him being 100 years old, do we have 70 people who

are coming down to the land of Egypt to be rescued and saved by one of their own, Joseph,

who is giving them land, who is giving them food in order to continue to thrive.

They are not in the land that God has promised them. There has not been a blessing

for the entire world yet, and their population is only 70 people.

It's not a full nation yet.

And so this is how the book of Genesis ends and the book of Exodus begins.

Exodus has this important line in verses 8 through 11 that talk about a change

in the Israelite fortune.

So starting in verse 8, we read, Eventually a new king came to power in Egypt

who knew nothing about Joseph or what he had done.

He said to his people, Look, the people of Israel now outnumber us and are stronger than we are.

We must make a plan to keep them from growing even more.

If we don't and if war breaks out, they will join our enemies and fight against

us. Then they will escape from the country.

So the Egyptians made the Israelites their slaves.

They appointed brutal slave drivers over them, hoping to wear them down with crushing labor.

They forced them to build the cities.

And Ramses as supply centers for the king.

What happens at the beginning of Exodus is we have a king that arises that doesn't

know what Joseph did, how he was a rescuer of the Egyptian people as well as

his own family, the Israelites.

So they start oppressing these people because they see them growing in their

population. They see them becoming a stronger people group. And this was a threat

to the national security of Egypt.

And so they applied lots and lots of pressure.

They made them into slaves. And so this is how Exodus begins.

The Israelites are diving further and further into difficult situations where they need a rescuer.

And when we get to Exodus chapter two, we meet a baby by the name of Moses.

Moses grows up not in the Israelite people, but in the Pharaoh's own household.

But he still knows his heritage.

He still knows where he came from.

And so when he sees an Egyptian abusing a Israelite.

He overreacts and he murders that Egyptian and then he has to run away.

He has to flee. And he goes to the people of Midian and he finds a wife and

he gets a job as a shepherd.

And in Exodus chapter 3, God is going to call Moses into service.

Exodus 3 · chapter mention

God has a plan for this Moses. That's why he was rescued.

That's why he was raised up in Pharaoh's household.

And in verses 7 through 10 of Exodus 3, we read these words.

Then the Lord told him, I have certainly seen the oppression of my people in

Egypt. I have heard their cries of distress because of their harsh slave drivers.

Yes, I am aware of their suffering. So I have come down to rescue them from

the power of the Egyptians and lead them out of Egypt into their own fertile

and spacious land. It is a land flowing with milk and honey.

The land where the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites,

Hivites, and Jebusites now live.

Look, the cry of the people of Israel has reached me, and I have seen how harshly

the Egyptians abused them.

Now go, for I am sending you to Pharaoh.

You must lead my people Israel out of Egypt.

God puts this calling upon the life of Moses.

But Moses is super reluctant. So God sends his brother Aaron to him.

Moses and Aaron then go and return to Egypt, and their task is to confront the

world's most powerful man at that time,

Pharaoh, and ask for the release of the people.

Pharaoh, as you can imagine, is going to say no to this proposition. This is his workforce.

This is people he wants to remain in his country, to use them as slave labor.

And so he's not going to say, yeah, sure, you can just take them and leave.

And so God then starts to work through Moses and then Aaron into what we know

as the 10 plagues that come upon Egypt.

Each of these plagues is designed to show the Egyptians that God is more powerful than their deities.

And so the plagues in Egypt come, the Nile is turned to blood.

There are frogs then that come up out of the Nile and inhabit everywhere.

There's not a place in Egypt that doesn't have a frog croaking.

It's loud, it's slimy. It's messy.

Then we have gnats when the frogs die and then flies after the gnats.

We have a plague that infects the livestock of Egypt.

Then we have boils that appear on human beings, giant hail that is falling from the sky.

And we have locusts and darkness that is coming upon the land.

All of these plagues, God is using them to show the Egyptians the God that the

Israelites are worshiping is the God that is over all things.

He is stronger. He is mightier than any force that you could pray to outside of him.

He is stronger than any deity that you could bow down to.

Now, I'm not saying that there are other deities, but other people think there are.

And there are demonic forces in this world that parade around and get worshiped.

But none of them is stronger than God.

And so God sends these plagues and he shows them, I'm the real king.

I'm the one who's truly sovereign. And after all nine of these plagues,

the Egyptians are still holding on to the Israelites and they are not freed yet.

And then we get to the 10th and final plague.

And it's a huge moment in Israel's history and a huge moment throughout the rest of the Bible.

Everybody is going to be looking back to that 10th plague, whether it's in the

New Testament or the Old Testament, to explain how God rescues.

And this is what happens in the 10th plague.

On the first month of the year, which is starting with their exodus out of Egypt,

when you come to this time of year, there's going to be a ceremony that you're

going to do perpetually.

It's something that's year after year, after year.

This is called the feast of the Passover because on this night,

I am going to get you out of slavery.

I am going to get you out of Egypt. And he does that by letting them have this

meal of a sacrificed lamb.

And this lamb's blood is going to be spread on the doorposts of the house.

Because when the destroying angel comes, the destroying angel is going to,

in that house, if it doesn't see blood on the doorpost, the destroying angel

is going to take the life of every firstborn son.

And so they sit down and they have a meal together. They're all ready to go.

They're dressed to leave that very night.

They sit down to this meal. The destroying angel goes out. it kills all the

firstborns in houses that does not have the blood over the doorposts.

And God opens Pharaoh's eyes and then says, all right, now's the time for the Israelites to go.

Get out of here. And so this rescue...

Coincides with this sacrifice, with this meal that they will call Passover,

is the night where God rescues them.

This is a theme that's going to run throughout Scripture, and it's ultimately

going to culminate in the evening that Jesus is executed,

where blood shed on a post is going to rescue people,

not from slavery in Egypt, but slavery to sin.

This is the moment, this is the meal that Jesus celebrates with his disciples

the night he is arrested.

This is a huge event throughout the rest of the Bible.

And so the Israelites get to leave Egypt.

They are wandering and they start wandering to the east out of Egypt toward

the promised land, but God directs them to the Red Sea.

Pharaoh has a change of mind after the Israelites have left,

and so he rounds up his military, and they go and they start pursuing the Israelites again.

And as God's leading them to the Red Sea, they have the Red Sea on one side

and the Egyptian army on the other, and they are destroyed.

They're like, why did you bring us out here to die? And Moses explains to them,

you will see God's salvation again.

And so what happens at the Red Sea with God blocking the Egyptians on one side,

Moses holds up his staff and a wind blows and it drives back the Red Sea.

And the Israelites walk through the Red Sea on dry ground with walls of water on either side of them.

And when the Egyptian army comes in, and after the Israelites have made it all

the way through, the water comes down and God defeats the Egyptian army.

God is their rescuer. God is showing them his sovereignty.

God is in them and through them, working everything out for them.

Again, he is pushing forward the covenant that came to Abraham.

The covenant that his descendants, Abraham's descendants, would be as numerous

as the stars of the sky. As they are wandering out of Egypt,

there's more than a million of people there.

He's promising them a land and a blessing for the whole world through his descendants.

And so still, we have a population that has exploded and grown,

but the land is not there. That is going to be coming.

That is their goal. That is their objective.

But first, God takes them out into the wilderness.

He takes them out to a mountain called Mount Sinai. And on Mount Sinai,

God hands them down a covenant.

And the covenant basically says, if you will obey what I say,

what I hand to you here on this mountain, if you agree to it, then I will be with you.

I will be in the center of your nation.

And so at Mount Sinai in Exodus 20, we get the 10 commandments.

We get the first 10 of the covenant between Israel and God.

There are 613 total laws that are handed down, teachings that are given from

God to Moses to the Israelites, but those are the first 10.

And as Moses brings this agreement down to the people of Israel,

they hear its reading and they agree to this covenant.

The rest of the book of Exodus.

After the first part of the giving of the law at Mount Sinai,

is about building a tabernacle, tent, where the Levites,

the priests in Israel, are going to be able to perform their ritual duty.

And in the midst of this tabernacle is the Holy of Holies.

It is the place that is where the Ark of the Covenant is going to be.

It is the place where God will dwell in and amongst the Israelite nation.

This is where God is going to dwell. And so they spend the rest of the book of Exodus,

Exodus 25 · chapter mention

chapters 25 to 40, basically putting together,

getting the instructions for the tabernacle, getting all of the materials together,

and God empowering Bezalel and Oholiab to do all the work along with other people.

They are the master craftsmen that God gives his spirit to in order for them

to make everything work the way it's supposed to work.

And so the book of Exodus, it shows the Israelites in slavery.

It takes them out of slavery with the Passover and the Exodus and the Red Sea crossing.

God providing for them, and they have built this tabernacle,

and they've spent a year out in the wilderness when we get to the third book

of the Bible called Leviticus.

Now, Leviticus is going to start with an important declaration.

Leviticus 1.1 and the next book of the Bible, Numbers 1-1, have very important

nuanced differences in their beginnings.

Because what God is doing through these 613 teachings is sanctifying the people

of Israel. He's making them holy.

He's making them his people so that he can dwell with them. God cannot be near sin.

So he is the one who is making them right with himself through these teachings.

But at the very beginning of Leviticus, it hasn't gone into effect yet.

And this is how it's shown.

Leviticus 1.1, the Lord called to Moses from the tabernacle and said to him,

so God is calling to Moses.

But Moses is not able to be in the tent of meeting when God is in that place.

There's still a separation.

There's a division between humanity and God still at the beginning of Leviticus.

The tent is erected. They have agreed to the covenant, but there are things

that the Israelites must do

so that human beings can be in the tent of meeting when God is in there.

And that's how we get to the four kinds of laws that are found in the 613 teachings.

And so we'll quickly touch on each of those in specifically the book of Leviticus,

but it's also found in Exodus as well as in Numbers and Deuteronomy.

You can find teachings throughout all of those books.

The laws break down into these four categories. The first category is sacrifice.

There are sacrificial laws that need to be done.

The New Testament tells us there is no forgiveness of sins without the shedding of blood.

And so sacrifices must occur.

And so this is where we pick up in Leviticus 1, starting in verse 2,

with God's words, give the following instructions to the people of Israel.

When you present an animal as an offering to the Lord, you may take it from

the herd of cattle or your flock of sheep and goats.

If the animal you present as a burnt offering is from the herd,

it must be a male with no defects.

Bring it to the entrance of the tabernacle so you may be accepted by the Lord.

Lay your hand on the animal's head and the Lord will accept its death in your

place to purify you, making you right with him.

These are the kind of laws that we will see in the book of Leviticus, laws about sacrifice.

And it plainly says here, why we need these sacrificial laws.

Because the animal's death will be accepted in the place of the human's death.

The human will be purified, making that person right with.

So that God can dwell in and amongst them, these sacrifices have to take place

because all human beings sin and fall short of the glory of God.

We've seen that in the book of Genesis, going from Adam and Eve,

taking from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

We've seen Cain kill his brother. We've seen the pride and arrogance of the people of Babel.

God came and scrambled their languages is because of this arrogance, pride, this sin.

And this is what we experience every single day.

You and I sin. The Israelites needed sacrifices to be able to keep God in their company.

It is a really important concept here. This is why the sacrifices are in the law of Moses.

Because it makes God able to be in that holy of holies places,

to have his throne room here on earth, to have his presence there while sinful humanity is around him.

It is to purify the Israelites.

The next kind of teaching that we see is the teaching of holiness.

And to kind of discover this one, we're going to go to Leviticus chapter 11, verses 41 to 44.

Leviticus 11:41–44

It says, All small animals that scurry along the ground are detestable,

and you must never eat them.

This includes all animals that slither along on their bellies,

as well as those with four legs and those with many feet.

All such animals that scurry along the ground are detestable,

and you must never eat them.

Do not defile yourselves by touching them. You must not make yourselves ceremonially

unclean because of them, for I am the Lord your God.

You must consecrate yourselves and be holy because I am holy.

So do not defile yourselves with any of these small animals that scurry along the ground.

All right, this is one of the holiness rituals that God is handing down,

and it has to do with dietary, what they are allowed to eat and what they aren't allowed to eat.

And the concept here is that God is trying to set the Israelites apart from the rest of humanity.

They are trying to get the Israelites to a place in the promised land that when

people come and visit, because Israel is at the centerpiece of trade routes

between Europe and Africa.

Between Europe and Asia, between Asia and Africa, in the midst of all this trade

routes, The people were going to be visiting this area, and they were going

to see that the Israelites were set apart,

that they were holy, that they were different than the rest of the world.

And the goal is to let the people see that they're different and see how blessed

they are, because they are living in a land filled with milk and honey, a land of plenty.

And God's purposes here is to use this land to show the world how good he is

so that all the world will come to know him.

But the Israelites need to be set apart.

They need to be different. If they look like the world, then when the traders

come and they see what's going on, they're just going to think they're just

like all the other world. This is just a better parcel of land.

But when they're set apart, when they're different, they'll start asking questions.

Why don't you eat pork? Why don't you eat these small animals that scurry on

the ground? Why are you leaving these?

And then they'll point back because this is what our God says.

And our God is so good to us.

And this is why these holiness teachings are in scripture.

They are to set the Israelites apart. They are to be holy.

They are to be set apart, to be different than the rest of the world.

So that when the world comes and sees them being different and sees the blessings

that they have, they're going to ask questions.

So we have sacrifice rules, we have holiness rules, we also have justice rules.

In Leviticus chapter 19, verses 9 to 14, we get these rules.

Leviticus 19:9–14

When you harvest the crops of your land, do not harvest the grain along the

edges of your field, and do not pick up what the harvesters drop.

It is the same with your grape crop. Do not strip every last bunch of grapes

from the vines, and do not pick up the grapes that fall to the ground.

Leave them for the poor and the foreigners living among you.

I am the Lord your God. Do not steal.

Do not deceive or cheat one another. Do not bring shame on the name of your

God by using it to swear falsely, I am the Lord.

Do not defraud or rob your neighbor. Do not make your hired workers wait until

the next day to receive their pay.

Do not insult the deaf or cause the blind to stumble.

You must fear your God. I am the Lord.

And so what we have here, again, is teachings that resemble,

some of them at least, the Ten Commandments.

These are the justest teachings of the covenant between God and Israel.

You are to be a just people. Justice is very important to God.

And so those who are hungry don't harvest all the way to the edges of your field

because the poor and the migrants are going to need that. Take care of them by leaving them there.

Don't steal. Do what's right. If you need something, you buy it or you trade for it.

You just don't take whatever you want. And these are justice rules.

We're the ones who are supposed to be taking care of the migrants,

of those who are hungry, of the orphans, of the widows.

This is the job of the people who follow after Jesus. God cares about justice, so should God.

Then we have the fourth category, which is sacred time.

So sacred time are going to be festivals. It's going to be the weekly Sabbath.

These are the things that God is ordaining for the Israelite people.

So in Leviticus chapter 23, verses 4 to 8, we read these words.

Leviticus 23:4–8

In addition to the Sabbath, these are the Lord's appointed festivals,

the official days for holy assembly that are to be celebrated at their proper time each year.

The Lord's Passover begins at sundown on the 14th day of the first month.

On the next day, the 15th day of the month, you must begin celebrating the festival of unleavened bread.

This festival to the Lord continues for seven days, and during that time the

bread you eat must be made without yeast.

On the first day of the festival, all the peoples must stop their ordinary work

and observe an official day for holy assembly.

For seven days, you must present special gifts to the Lord.

On the seventh day, the people must again stop all their ordinary work to observe

an official day for holy assembly.

That is one of the passages that discuss sacred time as a statute,

as a teaching of the books of Moses.

So we have a Sabbath day, which is set up on the days of creation.

God takes the seventh day off. It's a day of rest.

And so he ordains that to be a day of rest one day a week for his followers.

Again, setting them apart. But it's also important to rest and to have spiritual nourishment.

So that's a part of the sacred time.

Then we got into the Passover. And the idea of this unleavened bread is because

the Israelites could not wait for the bread to rise.

They cooked unleavened bread. The meal, like I said, was all prepared for them to go.

They were dressed, everything was packed, and they were ready to go when Pharaoh

said, all right, get out of here.

And this is to remember that important day in Israelite history.

And so the narrative of the Bible pushes all of these different categories forward.

There are the sacrifices, there are the holiness teachings, there are the justice

teachings, and there are the sacred time moments that Israel needs to adhere

to throughout their week and their year.

And so with all of these, the goal is to get God to dwell in and amongst human

beings where it's not deadly for the human beings to be there.

Again, God cannot be around sin.

These teachings were designed to get the Israelite people to be near God's earthly

throne room, this holy of holies place inside the tabernacle.

The goal was to get them to that place.

Where they could be in the presence of God. And when we get to Numbers 1-1,

these teachings worked.

Numbers 1-1 says, a year after Israel's departure from Egypt,

the Lord spoke to Moses in the tabernacle, in the wilderness of Sinai.

It's no longer from the tabernacle. It is in the tabernacle,

meaning Moses is actually in there too.

The book of Leviticus pushes forward these rules to sanctify,

to purify the Israelite nation.

So that the priests could be in this tent of meeting and perform their ritual

duties, and so that God's presence on earth would not destroy the people of Israel.

And that leads us into the book of Numbers.

So in the book of Numbers, it starts out with a census.

In the midst of this census, we find out that there are 600,000 men of fighting age there,

which pushes the population of the Israelites over a million people,

considering those who are of retirement age,

those who are too young to fight, and the women,

it pushes that number well over a million.

And so this census is how the book of Numbers begins.

But then it goes into stories of the Israelites complaining against God.

They get hungry for food, and so God provides them with this bread-like substance,

more like a wafer or cracker-like substance called manna.

Then they complain about the manna, and so God brings them quail.

They're always complaining about thirst, and God miraculously provides water for them.

Should Moses be their leader? Why can't Miriam, his sister, or Aaron,

the high priest, why can't they be the rulers? What's up with this Moses guy?

And then other people in their tribe of Levi start to think about,

all right, why can't I be the one that's leading?

And so there's rebellion after rebellion in Moses.

Of Numbers. So the Israelites have left the Mount Sinai.

They've packed up the tabernacle and they packed up their own belongings and

they are heading toward the promised land, the land that God had told Abraham

that his descendants would inherit.

And as they approach this land, they send 12 spies out into the promised land

to just explore it, to see what they're getting themselves into.

And they come back with these huge clumps of grapes.

They come back with amazing looking fruit. And the report is that it is a land

flowing with milk and honey.

But it's also a land that has fortified cities. It's also a land that has well-equipped soldiers there.

And so the report is mixed.

And 10 of the 12 spies do not want to go into the land. This is how it is reported

in Numbers 13, verses 30 to 33.

Numbers 13:30–33

But Caleb tried to quiet the people as they stood before Moses.

Let's go at once to take the land, he said.

We can certainly conquer it. But the other men who had explored the land with him disagreed.

We can't go up against them.

They are stronger than we are. So they spread this bad report about the land among the Israelites.

The land we traveled through and explored will devour anyone who goes to live there.

All the people we saw were huge. We even saw giants there, the descendants of Anak.

Next to them, we felt like grasshoppers. And that's what they thought too.

So the Israelites were basically on the precipice of entering into the promised

land. and these 12 spies bring back this amazing fruit, but they also bring

back terrifying stories.

Stories that they are in no way going to be able to take the land from the inhabitants

that are there. They're not strong enough.

They don't have the best technique in military fighting.

And so they refuse to go in. And this bad report spreads throughout the people of Israel.

And so they rebel against God here.

They disagree with Caleb and his assessment, and they say, no, we're not going in.

In fact, a few of them even pack their bags and say, we're going back to Egypt.

We would rather be slaves.

Here begins a 40-year period where the Israelites are not allowed to go into the promised land.

God will not take them there, but they have to remain in the wilderness,

eating the manna, eating the quail, having water come supernaturally to them.

And that's where the Israelites spend the next 40 years complaining,

grumbling, and not remembering that God is the God who brought the plagues upon Egypt.

He's the God who opened up the Red Sea and allowed them to walk through and

then swallowed up the Egyptian army.

He's the one that's been providing them with this wafer-like substance called

manna and the quail and the water.

And not going to obey God.

And so they stay out in the wilderness until that generation dies and the young

generation who did not rebel against God comes to age.

That takes us through the book of Numbers and onto the book of Deuteronomy.

The book of Deuteronomy means second or repeated law.

And it is named this way because the Israelite people who made the agreement

with God at Mount Sinai have mostly passed away. Almost all of them have died.

And only the next couple of generations have been raised up.

And so what Moses does is he.

Repeats the law to them in a series of speeches over the course of a couple

of days. He repeats the law to them as they are getting ready to go into the promised land.

And in this repeating, he repeats many of the laws that have been already stated

in the books of Numbers, Leviticus, and Exodus.

And he is again going to bring them to a place where they need to make a covenant with God.

And he plainly says to them, if you obey the terms of the covenant that God

has laid before you, that I have spoken to you again today, blessings will come upon you.

But if you do not obey what God has said, then curses will come upon you.

Obedience equals blessing.

Disobedience equals curses. And he wants the Israelites to know that God will

be there. God will be true to his covenant.

They need to be true to theirs. And that's really where the book of Deuteronomy takes us.

It is a repeating of the law to get the new generation to understand the terms of the covenant.

It is a renewing of that covenant, and it is a pronouncement of blessings for

obedience and curses for disobedience.

And at the very end of the book, Moses is going up on Mount Nebo to die.

And so Moses enlists the help of the Israelite nation, and they raise up a successor for Moses.

This is going to be Joshua. He was one of the 12 spies that went out into Canaan.

And he, along with Caleb, were the two that said, God's with us.

Nothing can stop us. Let's go and take this land.

And this is the Joshua who then becomes the successor to Moses.

And so Moses ceremonially hands over to him the care of the Israelite nation.

Joshua becomes its leader. and Moses goes up on top of Mount Nebo and passes away.

Just to recap where we've been, these first five books known as the Pentateuch

or the Torah or the books of Moses, these set the foundation for understanding the rest of the Bible.

We need to understand how God created us in perfection.

We need to understand how we rebelled against God in the Garden of Eden and

how sin has cursed this land, we need to know about the promises of Abraham

that the descendants of Israel would be as numerous as the stars in the sky,

that they would have their own land, that they would possess their own nation,

and that there would be a blessing that comes to the entire world through them.

At the end of these five books, none of those have really come to fruition.

There are many, many descendants of Abraham, more than a million,

but it's not as numerous as the stars in the sky.

There is no land yet, even though they're on the precipice and Moses has elected

Joshua as their leader to go in and take the land.

There still is not land and there's no blessing for the entire world yet.

And so the rest of the biblical narrative will push forward these three promises of God.

Humanity has shown itself to be a grumbling nation who is like,

what have you done for me lately?

Humanity is broken and sinful, and humanity needs God to purify us,

to cleanse us, to help us to be in his presence.

Because in our current state, we are unable to do that without the sacrifice of sheep and goats.

And so that's where these first five books lead us to, and that sets the foundation

and the stage for where we're going next, into the historical books of the Bible.

Thank you again for joining us in our discussion of how the Pentateuch sets

the foundation for the entire Bible.

There are so many foundational stories and theological themes found in these books of Moses.

They set the stage of sin and redemption and the human condition found throughout the rest of the Bible.

For more information about Faith Chapel, please visit the website gofaithchapel.org.

Next week, we will look at the historical books of the Old Testament. Have a great week.