Leviticus 26: 3-45: ‘Coram Deo: Life in God’s Sight #6’

This year, the Boston Public Library opened a new exhibit to commemorate the 85th anniversary of Boston's "Great Molasses Flood”.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boston_Molasses_Disaster

On January 15, 1919, an enormous steel vat, containing 2.3 million gallons of molten molasses, burst. Hot, sticky waves of syrup thirty feet tall, destroyed buildings, crushed freight cars, wagons, automobiles, and drowned people. 21 people died and 150 people were injured. One author called it the "Dark Tide."

The enormous tank, 50 feet high and 240 feet around had been poorly designed. Company officials reacted to the constant leaks by repainting the tank to match the leaking molasses. "Out of sight, out of mind."

These people knew the molasses vat was dangerous but didn't do anything about it. What we ignore today may drown us tomorrow.

Leviticus 26 is the final chapter in the fifth and longest division of the book. Section 1 dealt with sacrifices (and taught us that we need a substitute). Section 2 dealt with priests (and taught us that we need a mediator). Section three dealt with ritual purity (reminding us of the duty of holiness) and section four dealt with the Day of Atonement (spelling out the nature and meaning of Atonement more clearly). The fifth section running from chapter 17-26 looks at holiness once more in more detail. In these chapters the focus is on the response we should make to God’s grace in providing the means of forgiveness and cleansing. And chapter 26 is the climax of this penultimate section dealing with the subject of consequences.

Sin has consequences. And we are being taught here that like the Boston molasses vat, if we do not deal with sin properly, however seemingly insignificant it may be, may result in disaster. What we ignore today may drown us tomorrow!

In order to reinforce the duty of careful obedience to God’s law Moses was given these blessings and curses to pronounce on the people so that no one should stand ignorant of the consequences of their actions:

1^st. in vs. 3-12 the results of obedience to the covenant of God are outlined: Covenant Blessings

And secondly in vs. 13-39 the consequences of disobedience God’s covenant are spelled out: Covenant Curses

Then thirdly in vs. 40-45 we have a section that explains that there remains the possibility of forgiveness for any who have fallen under the Lord’s judgment: Covenant Mercy

So let’s look at verses 3-12 and the Covenant Blessings of God.

And the first thing I want you to see is the basis for the Covenant Blessings God gives, vs.1-3.

The chapter opens with two laws that are concerned with worship. The first, in vs.1, is concerned with false worship (not making idols), and the second, in vs. 2, is all about true worship, at the required time (God’s Sabbaths), and in the required place (the sanctuary). And really, they are the concluding summary for the chapters previous to this one, that deal with the prescribed holy days and festivals of Israel, and their connection with the material now before us is designed to help Israel see that there is a link between careful obedience to God’s law and His blessings and curses.

And so verse three begins, ‘if you follow my decrees and are careful to obey my commands….’ The ground of all the blessings that God will lavish upon Israel is their obedience to His law.

And if today you will not keep God’s covenant you cannot enjoy its benefits. God has given his Law. If you do not obey it you have no grounds for hope that God will do anything other than condemn you. Without holiness no one shall see the Lord!

You are commanded to believe. That is law. You are commanded to repent your sin. That is law. You are commanded to love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your mind and all your strength and love your neighbor as yourself. That is the Law of God.  You are commanded to be holy as the LORD is Holy. That is God’s Law.

And unless you obey God’s law you will be lost to the curses of God’s wrath.

That is the universal pattern of Holy Scripture. There is a direct link between covenant keeping and covenant blessing. 

Then notice the blessings themselves in verses 4-12.

The blessings God promised to give Israel come in four cycles. First in verses 4-5 is the blessing of a fertile land. Then in verses 6-8 there is the blessing of peace and military stability. Thirdly, there is the blessing of fruitfulness in verses 9-10, and finally there is the blessing of God’s dwelling with his people, making them his people and being their God, in verses 11-12.

And notice that in this list of blessings there is a kind of movement upwards, towards God, and paradoxically that movement is established by taking up images that remind Israel of its roots as they are outlined in the history of Genesis 1-3 and the covenant God made with Abraham in Genesis chapters 12, 15, 17, and 22.

Look at the passage again. It’s hard not to read these verses without being struck by the centrality of the land God was to give to Israel. God was going to lead them into a land of plenty, a land flowing with milk and honey. And in these verses he was promising the blessings that would come on obedient covenant keepers in that land. Agricultural plenty, fruitfulness, peace, savage beasts are removed. It all sounds like the curses of Genesis 3, only now in reverse!

Where God had told covenant breaking Adam, that the ground would be cursed because of him, that “it will produce thorns and thistles for you…by the sweat of your brow you will eat your food” now God was promising covenant keeping Israel that the land would produce a ripe and rich harvest and that they would prosper.

Instead of enmity between humanity and their environment God was now promising a healed land.

In other words, Eden is being restored. God’s plan for Eden before the fall of Adam was that it should expand and grow until it covered the earth. And now that God’s redemptive purposes are being fulfilled, that remains his plan. Not just that Eden should be restored, but that it should grow to cover the earth. The land God was giving Israel was to be a sample of a new world wide Eden restored, and still to come, and it all rested on the covenant keeping of Israel.

And notice too that the blessings here connect, not only with Eden, but also with the covenant God made with Abraham. The language of verse 9 is directly drawn from the language of the covenant promise to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

God said to Abraham in Genesis 17, “I will confirm my covenant between me and you, and will greatly increase your numbers”. And when God reaffirmed this covenant with Isaac in Genesis 26:1-6, he said, “to you and your descendants I will give all these lands, and will confirm the oath I swore to your father Abraham. I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and will give them all these lands, and through your offspring all the nations of the earth shall be blessed, because Abraham obeyed me and kept my commands decrees and my laws.” And again in vs. 24 he said, “I will bless you and greatly increase the number of your descendants for the sake of my father Abraham.”

Now, the words there ‘I will greatly increase your number’ which are used as a central promise in God’s covenant, are used only once in the whole book of Leviticus, and that’s here in verse 9 of chapter 26, “I will make you fruitful and increase your numbers, and I will keep my covenant with you.” Moses want us to be clear that the blessings promised to Abraham are the blessings Israel will enjoy in the land because they have kept the covenant.

And the other crucial element in the Abrahamic covenant, the climactic promise of the covenant, is here as well, in verses 11-12, “I will put my dwelling place among you, and I will not abhor you. I will walk among you and be your God, and you will be my people.”

In Genesis 17:7-8 God declares, “I will establish my covenant between me and you and your descendants after you for the generations to come, to be your God and the God of your descendants….and I will be their God.” And when God sent Moses to rescue Israel from Egypt he reaffirmed this covenant promise in Exodus 6:7, “I will take you as my own people, and I will be your God.”

The blessing of God for covenant faithfulness is the covenant presence of God himself dwelling among and in the midst of his people.

And is clear that these covenant blessings of God come to Israel, not simply because they obeyed, but because they obeyed, leaning on the prior grace of God towards them in redemption. Obedience is not a matter of personal effort to live up to an external standard God sets us, it is a matter of receiving the grace of God in his saving love and out of the resources that supplies obeying His law. The only real obedience acceptable to God of which we are capable as sinner, is obedience that arises out of God’s prior grace in saving us from our sins. The only obedience God blesses is an obedience he enables in us.

Look at verse 13. The Lord concludes this list of promised blessings with a reminder of all that it ultimately rests upon, “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt so that you would no longer be slaves to the Egyptians; I broke the bars of your yoke and enabled you to walk with head held high.” God set them free from slavery and bondage. He redeemed them. Because he set them free, because he enabled them to walk with heads held high, because he was gracious in saving His people, they can live their lives in faithfulness to Him, resting on His grace.

Now I want us to be clear here. The teaching of this passage is simple and straight forward. If you will keep the law of God you will enjoy the blessing of God. And the way to keep the covenant is to rest on the saving grace of the covenant Lord by faith.

The blessings of God remain the same today as they were then. Covenant keepers, God will bring you to enjoy a restored Eden, and through you He will enlarge its boundaries until all the earth is the possession of the Lord, and his glory covers it as the waters cover the sea. All nations will be brought to know him, and the kingdoms “of this world will become the kingdoms of God and of His Christ, and He shall reign forever.” (Rev. 11:15) God will keep covenant with you and your descendants, for as the Apostle Peter said, “the promise is to you and your children, and those who are far off, as many as the Lord you God shall call.”  And finally he will walk with you in the midst of His people. Like he did in the Garden of Eden in the cool of the Day, like He did in the tabernacle in the heart of the camp of Israel in the wilderness, God who tabernacled amongst us, having become flesh, and walked with us, as one of us in Jesus Christ, will walk with you each day by His Spirit. And at the last, for all covenant keepers the promise, always in the future tense in scripture, (I will be with them) will be spoken once again, only now in the present tense. When the apostle John saw the holy City the New Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God a voice declared, ‘Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes and there will be no more mourning or crying or pain for the old order of things has passed away’. And He who sat on the throne said, “I am making everything new”’.

On that day covenant keepers, Christians obedient to God’s covenant standards, will receive in fullest measure what they only taste here, for then they will take possession of Eden restored in the New Heaven and the New Earth, and dwell in the new Jerusalem, in the presence of God in Jesus Christ.

But not one of us here will enter into the enjoyment of any of these blessings who live lives of covenant breaking and disobedience.  Faith without works is dead. We are not saved by works, but we are not saved without them.

If today you claim to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, in whom all these covenant blessings are available to us, but you live, at the deepest level of your being, just like the world lives, you have no grounds for eternal hope.

“What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such a faith save him?” asks James. “Faith by itself, if not accompanied by action, is dead.” “Show me your faith without works and I’ll show you my faith by what I do”.

Faith has fruit, and that fruit is a growing, instinctive appetite for obedience. “Live by the Spirit” says Paul in Galatians 5:16 “and you will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature. “

Saving faith in Christ always leads to a life devoted to Christ. The faith that receives the covenant blessings is a faith that keeps the covenant law. 

Heaven is given to no-one because they are holy. But no one ever came to heaven who was not holy.

Then notice secondly the covenant curses in verse 14-39.

Like the blessings, these curses are listed in cycles, each one building on the one previous and so building up to a climactic declaration of judgment.

The first curse cycle is there in verse 14-15. God’s judgment will fall on His people if they “will not listen to me and carry out all these commands, and if you reject my decrees an abhor my laws and fail to carry out all my commands and so violate my covenant.”

This is not a picture of individual Israelites falling into occasional sin. This is a picture of the systematic, wholesale, rejection of God’s law, and a willful violation of God’s covenant. The result is that God will cause plagues and military defeat to befall the nation (vs. 16-17).

The second cycle begins with another affirmation that if they will not repent and listen to God he will continue to punish Israel for its sin (vs. 18) the curse will now escalate to involve an unproductive land and drought. (19-20)

The third again says “if you refuse to listen to me and remain hostile to me I will multiply your afflictions seven times over” (vs. 21) resulting in wild animals invading the land.

The fourth cycle of judgments declares once more that if even after all this “you do not accept my correction but remain hostile to me” war, pestilence and famine will result.  (vs. 23-26)

Then finally, the fifth cycle, which is the longest of the five, declares that continued rebellion after all these corrective acts of God, will result in the famine being so severe that cannibalism will break out, the land will be utterly desolated, and eventually the people will be ripped from the land of promise, and dragged away into exile. (27-39)

So it begins with general hardship, and progress to eventual catastrophe, to conclude ultimately in the nation being led away captive into exile.

Now to get a sense of the force of the passage, it’s important for us to try and hear these curses as though we were the people of Israel in the wilderness. Try for a moment to put yourself in the position of the first hearers of these blessings and curses.

Israel had not yet arrived in the Promised Land.  Nothing more horrific could be imagined for this nomadic group of wanderers in the wilderness of Sinai. They had been rescued from Egypt by Moses, and promised a land of plenty, where the reign of God will be enjoyed, and prosperity and plenty will be their lot. And they were making their way towards this land, even as Moses spoke these words to them. They had faced failure, and drought, and desperation, and mutiny, and opposition to get to this Promised Land. Many of them had suffered, and many had died just to get them this far.

And now Moses is declaring to them the consequences of disobedience and it is shattering in its effect. God will systematically reverse every one of the blessings that He has promised, so that the very land which should be so powerful an image of God’s covenant love,  with its  plentiful harvests and abundant crops, will now become a desolate dry and unyielding wilderness. The land that was to be a physical emblem of the relationship between Israel and the Lord,  will now be stripped of all that makes it desirable, wild animals will prowl it, and enemies will invade it. ‘Then, when you are at your lowest, Israel, you yourselves will be torn from the land’.

What a potent image of the results of covenant breaking! Just as they would be dragged from the land of covenant promise, so too they would be separated from the God who had promised the land to them in His covenant.

 And remember that the goal of God in speaking of all these judgments, with their powerful shock factor was remedial. The Lord was out to correct and restore and move the people to repentance. If they met his rebuke with obstinacy his chastisement grew more fierce. God was telling Israel that the rebukes of providence were God’s mega phone to call the nation back to faithfulness. The more they listened to the enticements of sin, the louder providence would shout for them to repent. At the beginning of each cycle of judgment the lord says ‘if you still will not listen to me then…’ His purpose and objective in all the rebukes he sent them was to awaken them to their sin and need of mercy.

And when you look at the history of Israel as a nation you can see in a remarkable fashion these precise markers of the providential covenant rebukes of God being poured out on Israel when in time after time the nation forsook its covenant responsibilities.

Again and again, in the books of Judges, Chronicles and Kings, for example we read of famines in the land, we read of foreign invasions and the judgment of God all falling upon the people as they turned to other gods. Ultimately we know that Israel and then Judah were led away captive in Babylonian and Persian invasions. The invaders destroyed the cities and laid waste to Jerusalem.

In Tampa, Florida, Antonio Valdez Jr. was charged with driving without wearing his glasses. A few weeks later, on his way to court to face the charges, Antonio crashed his car ... because he wasn't wearing his glasses. Poor Antonio Valdez was rather like Israel. They seemed pathologically unable to learn their lesson. The mistakes of the past kept on recurring and in the end they met with God’s judgment.

The whole history of God’s ancient people is a history that reinforces one great point; God means what he says.

Do not think to play fast and loose with the law of God. Do not think you can reread His standards for your life without there being serious consequences before the Holy Lord of the covenant. That is what the history of Israel should tell us all. As Hebrews 10:31 reminds us, even in the New Covenant, it remains a “dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”

This is the picture that these verses give us: If we sin God will chastise us and discipline us, in order to awaken us to our sin and restore us, if we persist in sin so God will persist in his chastisement and rebukes.

 In the end, we, like ancient Israel, will be faced with a choice repentance will lead to restoration continued rebellion will lead to final rejection by the Lord. And that brings us to the third section of the passage. Look at verses 40-45.

The Lord is holding out the possibility of forgiveness. “If they will confess their sins and the sins of their fathers….I will remember my covenant with Jacob, and my covenant with Isaac, and my covenant with Abraham, and I will remember the land.”

And here is the amazing point. God’s wrath burns hotly against covenant breaking rebels but in the heat of his wrath he remembers mercy. ‘Repent and I will forgive’. That is the message. ‘Persist in rebellion and the judgment of God will persist, ultimately on into eternity itself.’

Again and again we know Israel could not keep God’s law as they ought. Often they sought to do away with the Lord and turn to false gods. At times they sought to obey the Lord without resting upon his help and grace to make and keep them obedient, somehow thinking that they could merit or earn God’s favor and blessing.  All these were met with sharp rebuke from the Lord.

And yet according to the prophet Ezekiel a day would come when God’s people will be given new hearts to enable them to obey. Ezekiel was writing for a nation still in exile, living under the curses of Leviticus 26, and he said that a day will soon come when the Lord will “take away your hearts of stone and give you hearts of flesh. I will put my Spirit within you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws. You will live in the land I gave your forefathers; you will be my people and I will be your God….On that day I cleanse you from your sins I will resettle your towns and the ruins will be rebuilt. The desolate land will be cultivated instead of lying desolate in the sight of all who pass through it. They will say, ‘this land that was laid waste has become like the Garden of Eden” (Ezekiel 36:24-35)

The plan of God to restore Eden by exercising his reign in the world through his people, seemed to have failed forever, when instead of Israel becoming a second Eden it was laid waste and its people taken captive into exile because of their sin. Now says Ezekiel, to exiled Israel, now when it looks as through the plan of God for the restoration of Eden, his great goal to bring salvation to the ends of the earth through the land of Israel was an impossible dream and nothing more, now when everything looks bleakest, be assured that God’s promises cannot fail, He will not abandon His covenant , a day will come when he will make his people able to obey, so that their obedience will result in the restoration of Eden, and all the nations will look at God’s people and say ‘the land that was laid waste has become a second Eden after all.

Now that day dawned when the Lord Jesus Christ came. We could not obey God’s law; we could not remove our guilt. We needed new hearts. We were under the curses of Leviticus 26; we were hell bound, outcasts from Eden, and exiles from the land of covenant plenty. We were lost.

But the Lord Jesus did for Israel what it failed again and again to do for itself. He did for us what we cannot do. He was perfectly obedient to the covenant law of God. All the blessings of the covenant were lavished upon him and in turn he pours them out upon all who trust in him by faith.

And at Pentecost the promise of Ezekiel rolled down on the heads of the New Israel, all who believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. He put his spirit within us and gave us new hearts to move us to obey his decrees, and be careful to keep his laws.

Now let me point out some of the implications of all of that for you:

1. I f you are a Christian, rest on the prior grace towards you in Jesus Christ who has redeemed you from slavery to sin, and you will keep God’s covenant law. To the degree to which you cling to the grace of God, to that same degree you will work to keep the law of God.

2. Think of the awesome benefits that come to all who keep the covenant. Eden restored, the curse removed, the bliss and joy of heaven itself, a place in the New Jerusalem. What better motive for careful obedience.

3. Listen to the discipline of the Lord. Hebrews 12 reminds us to endure hardship as discipline God is treating you as sons. No discipline seemed pleasant to us at the time…later on however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.

God’s discipline can produce in you a harvest of righteousness and peace. But only, says the writer, if you are trained by it, only if you learn to listen to his rebukes. Fail to hear the chastisement of God, and you may well make shipwreck of your soul, however sincere your Christian profession.

4. If today you are not a Christian, realize that Eden restored is no place for rebels. God will admit no one into his presence that is not holy. The only path to holiness available to you is to be found not in yourself but in Jesus Christ the covenant keeper. He has obeyed where you cannot. Trust in Him and his obedience will overwrite your sin, and by His power he will enable you each day to become like him in a new obedience of you own.

So first God blesses covenant keeping, second God judges covenant breaking, and finally, repent of your sin, and God will shower on you covenant mercy.

Amen.