What does Tribe teach about leviticus explained?

At Tribe, the teaching on Leviticus starts with a reframe. Brian Hunter opens the series by pushing back on the assumption most people bring to the book, that it is a foreign, repetitive slog full of arbitrary rules. His frame is different: Leviticus is a divine blueprint for holiness, a record of the extraordinary lengths God goes to in order to have relationship with his people. The series moves back and forth between Leviticus and Galatians, using Paul's letter as the interpretive lens and Leviticus as the territory, with the Bible Project's idea that the whole Bible is a unified story leading to Jesus held alongside it.

The blood sacrifice at the center of Leviticus is not, Brian argues, about appeasing an angry God. The ancient pagan world sacrificed out of fear, trying to hold back gods who might otherwise destroy crops or kill children, and that fear-based picture is easy to carry straight into Christianity without realizing it. Leviticus tells a different story. The laying on of hands in the fellowship offering is about appointing a representative, binding the worshiper's life to an unblemished animal that qualifies to stand before a holy God. Brian says, "For a life giving relationship with God, something has to die." The blood, then, is not what satisfies an angry God's temper. It is God's own provision, the bridge he designed so that people could draw close to him.

Justin picks up that thread in week six by tracing the tribe of Levi from its troubled beginnings in Genesis all the way through to what Malachi and then the New Testament make of it. The Levitical priesthood was meant to carry the tabernacle, protect the sacrificial system, and speak the law to every tribe. By Malachi's time it had become corrupt, and the indictment ran deep. But Malachi also carried a promise: a refiner would come to purify the sons of Levi. Justin connects that refining work to Jesus, who is described in Hebrews as the great high priest who has been through what his people go through and who entered the most holy place not with the blood of animals but with his own. The image that held the message together was of a refiner knowing the work is finished when he can see his own reflection in the metal. The refining continues, the teaching goes, until Christ sees himself reflected in us.

Taught from Leviticus 1:1-17 · Leviticus 3:1-17 · Leviticus 17:11 · Malachi 3:1-4 · Galatians 2:15-21