Scripture
Leviticus
22 sermons
The Requirements for Priesthood and Sacrifice
Leviticus 21–22 sets out strict requirements for both the priests who offer sacrifice and the animals brought to the altar: wholeness, purity, and freedom from defect. These ceremonial regulations are not arbitrary exclusions but typological anticipations of the one perfect High Priest and the one perfect sacrifice that God himself would provide in the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ. The sermon works through the four sections of the passage — practical restrictions on priests, physical requirements for priests, regulations concerning priestly food, and physical requirements for sacrificial animals — before turning to Hebrews 7–10 to show how Christ fulfills and surpasses everything the Levitical system could only shadow. The conclusion calls the congregation to the Lord's Supper with eyes fixed not on themselves but on the one who offered himself once for all and sat down.
The Lawful Use of Vows in Israel
Leviticus 27 addresses the Israelite practice of making vows to God — acts of religious zeal, often rash or imprudent, by which persons consecrated people, animals, houses, or land to the Lord. The chapter does not license vow-breaking but rather underscores the gravity of vowing by legislating a costly redemption mechanism, warning the would-be vower to count the cost before speaking. The sermon situates the passage within the 1689 LBCF chapter 23 framework distinguishing oaths from vows, then draws three applications against popish monastical vows, Protestant legalistic vows, and pietistic circumventions of God's law — all forms of man-made religion condemned repeatedly in Scripture.
The Promise of Blessings and Cursing, Part 2
Leviticus 26:14–46 sets forth the covenant curses God threatened against Israel for breaking the Mosaic Covenant — a covenant of works — escalating through drought, wild animals, war, cannibalism, wholesale destruction, and exile. These curses came to historical fulfillment in the fall of the Northern Kingdom to Assyria in 722 BC, the fall of the Southern Kingdom to Babylon in 586 BC, and the destruction of Jerusalem by Rome in AD 70 — events prophesied in the Olivet Discourse and confirmed by Paul in 1 Thessalonians 2. The chapter closes with a promise of restoration conditioned on Israel's humble repentance and God's fidelity to the Abrahamic covenant. Believers under the New Covenant are freed from these covenant curses because Christ bore them fully, fulfilling the demands of the law and standing as the surety of a better covenant.
The Promise of Blessings and Curses (Part 1)
Leviticus 26:1–13 opens with a promise of blessing conditioned on Israel's obedience — a structure that raises the question of how the Old Covenant relates to the New. This study expounds the covenantal framework underlying Leviticus 26, arguing that the Old Covenant operated as a covenant of works at the national level, distinct from the covenant of grace realized in Christ. The blessings of rain, peace, and God's presence promised to Israel find their fulfillment in the New Covenant, where the obedience that secures blessing is Christ's own, imputed to his people by faith alone.
The Year of Jubilee
Leviticus 25 sets forth the sabbatical year and the Year of Jubilee as divine legislation governing the rhythms of rest, property redemption, and the release of indentured servants within Old Covenant Israel. The laws are grounded in the theological principle that the land belongs to God, who allotted it as gift to his people and therefore retains final authority over how it is held and transferred. The chapter points typologically beyond itself: the Jubilee's proclamation of liberty, initiated on the Day of Atonement, finds its antitype in Christ, who fulfills Isaiah 61 by proclaiming the acceptable year of the Lord through his atoning work. The practical summons of the passage is to express the fear of God in concrete generosity toward covenant members who fall into poverty, resisting every form of oppression.
The Penalty for Blasphemy
Leviticus 24 addresses both the daily obligations of tabernacle worship and the capital penalty for blasphemy, grounding each in the direct speech of God to Moses. The chapter's narrative pivot — an incident in which a man of mixed Israelite and Egyptian descent blasphemes the name of Yahweh — becomes the occasion for case-law application of the third commandment, surrounded by reminders of the lex talionis and the equal accountability of stranger and native-born alike. The typological furniture of the holy place (lampstand and showbread) points forward to Christ as the true light and bread of life, while the blasphemy legislation, with its witness requirements and retributive principle, reveals a God who guards his own honour and structures justice with both severity and safeguard. The sermon exhorts hearers to put away every profane use of the divine name and to cultivate a reverent, wholehearted employment of it in thought, word, and worship.
The Feasts of the Lord
Leviticus 23 sets before Israel a calendar of holy convocations — the weekly Sabbath, the spring feasts of Passover, Unleavened Bread, and Weeks, and the fall feasts of Trumpets, Atonement, and Tabernacles — all commanded by God as the covenant head of his people. These feasts served to remind Israel of their redemptive history, promote joy and community, encourage charity, deter idolatry, and provide rest. As ceremonial law, they were typological ordinances pointing forward to Christ, and their perpetuity was covenantally conditioned: with the inauguration of the New Covenant, Christ abrogated them. The weekly Sabbath, however, rests on moral law grounded in creation and redemption and remains binding on the New Covenant people of God, who are called to observe the Lord's Day — not the Old Covenant feasts — as the appointed time for corporate worship.
Restrictions on Levitical Priesthood
Leviticus 21–22 sets out restrictions governing the Levitical priesthood: whom priests may mourn, whom they may marry, what physical conditions disqualify them from service, who may eat from their food, and what animals are acceptable for sacrifice. The underlying logic in every category is the same — the holy God who dwells among his people demands a priesthood, a sacrifice, and a manner of worship that reflect his holiness and are not corrupted by defilement or defect. These chapters point typologically beyond themselves to the Lord Jesus Christ, who alone fulfils what the Levitical order only approximated: the perfect high priest who is holy, harmless, and undefiled, and the perfect sacrifice offered once for all. The superiority of the new covenant is seen precisely here — the exclusions of the old order (eunuchs, the maimed, the lame) give way to the great invitation of Christ to the broken and outcast to come to the wedding feast.
Leviticus 20 - the Death Penalty
Leviticus 20 catalogues capital offenses under the Mosaic law — idolatry, witchcraft, adultery, incest, homosexuality, and bestiality — and provides the occasion for a sustained biblical-theological treatment of the death penalty across the covenants. The study traces the authorization of capital punishment from the Noahic Covenant in Genesis 9 through the Mosaic legislation and into the New Covenant via Acts 25 and Romans 13, arguing that the death penalty remains a binding obligation upon civil magistrates. Romans 13 is read as the New Testament's clearest statement that the sword entrusted to the civil magistrate is God's instrument for executing wrath upon evildoers in history, not merely a sign of general authority. Hearers are called to think biblically about the proper and limited role of civil government, to resist the conflation of civil submission with capitulation to tyranny, and to uphold the abiding moral normativity of capital punishment for murder and other heinous crimes.
Holiness in the daily lives of Old Covenant Israel
Leviticus 19:19–37 presents a series of miscellaneous laws governing mixed breeding, pagan practices, sacred prostitution, necromancy, care for the elderly and the stranger, and fair trade — all set within the covenant calling of Israel to be holy as God is holy. These laws are classified under the threefold Reformed distinction of moral, ceremonial, and judicial law, with the ceremonial portions fulfilled and abrogated in Christ while their embedded moral duties remain, traceable to the Ten Commandments. The passage is expounded to show that Israel's separation from surrounding nations was not arbitrary but theologically grounded in God's own act of separating Israel as his covenant people. The enduring application is that the law's pedagogical function — exposing sin and driving the people to the Lamb of God — is as operative for the New Covenant believer as it was for ancient Israel.
Love your neighbour
Leviticus 19:9–18 sets out the concrete shape of neighborly love within the covenant community of Israel — not as sentiment, but as law. Working through gleaning regulations, prohibitions against theft, lying, exploitation, and a corrupt judiciary, the passage demonstrates that to love one's neighbor is to refrain from every breach of the second table of the Decalogue. The sermon shows that Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount and Paul in Romans 13 do not improve upon Moses but confirm what the moral law of God has always demanded: that love is the fulfilment of the law, and hatred of a brother is always a sixth-commandment violation.
Laws concerning sexual relations
Leviticus 18 regulates sexual morality within the structure of a covenant document, moving from preamble to prohibition to sanction. The chapter forbids incest, adultery, child sacrifice, homosexuality, and bestiality — not as arbitrary decrees but as God's just response to the documented wickedness of Egypt and Canaan, with the land itself serving as the instrument of covenantal judgment. Paul's invocations of Leviticus 18:5 in Romans 10 and Galatians 3 reveal that the chapter's 'do this and live' principle exposes the impossibility of law-keeping as a ground of justification, driving the reader to salvation by grace through faith in Christ alone. The abominations condemned here are not confined to the Mosaic code but are binding legislation upon all people at all times, as their reappearance in the New Testament epistles confirms.
The Day of Atonement
Leviticus 16 stands at the structural center of the Pentateuch, and its legislation governing the Day of Atonement reveals both the absolute holiness of God and the total sinfulness of man. The two goats — one slaughtered as a sin offering and one driven into the wilderness as the scapegoat — together signify substitutionary atonement and the definite removal of guilt from a specific covenant people. The high priest's own need for sacrifice before he could minister for Israel exposes the inadequacy of the Levitical priesthood and anticipates the once-for-all, self-sufficient sacrifice of Christ, whose blood retroactively atoned for Old Covenant believers and finally accomplished what the annual rite could only shadow. Believers in the New Covenant era need no further Day of Atonement ceremony; every observance of the Lord's Supper recalls the same removal of guilt that the scapegoat ceremony made visible to Israel.
The Problem of Uncleanness and Its Treatment
Leviticus 11–15 addresses a crisis of ritual uncleanness that threatens Israel's access to the holy God dwelling in the tabernacle. The death of Nadab and Abihu in Leviticus 10 creates a double tension — a defiled sanctuary and a compromised priesthood — and these five chapters lay out the categories of uncleanness (diet, childbirth, skin disease, bodily discharge) along with their remedies, all grounded in the repeated divine declaration, 'Be holy, for I am holy.' The laws of clean and unclean are not arbitrary ritual hygiene but theological instruction: to be unclean is to be excluded from the presence of Yahweh, and to be made clean is to be made fit for that presence, a pattern that finds its ultimate fulfilment in the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.
The Installation of the Priesthood
Leviticus 8–10 records the ordination, ministry, and judgment of Israel's priesthood, tracing the way sinful man may approach a thrice-holy God through divinely prescribed sacrifice. The death of Nadab and Abihu for offering that which the Lord had not commanded warns that worship is regulated by God alone, not by the worshiper's innovation. Christ fulfills every type embedded in this system — as the holy, harmless, and undefiled High Priest who satisfies divine justice once for all. The sermon calls new-covenant worshipers to approach the Lord's Supper with the same reverence and eager joy that the priestly fire of Leviticus 9 ought to have kindled.
The Installation of the Priesthood
Leviticus 8–10 presents the ordination, ministry, and judgment of the Aaronic priesthood as a unified theological unit — the resolution of the tension left at the end of Exodus 40, where the glory of God filled the tabernacle but no one could enter. The divine approval signaled by fire consuming the sacrifice in Leviticus 9 stands in sharp contrast to the lethal fire that devours Nadab and Abihu in Leviticus 10, grounding the regulative principle of worship in the character of God himself: He must be regarded as holy, and He alone determines the manner of approach. The detailed legislation of chapters 1–7 is not merely ceremonial scaffolding but the appointed means by which a holy God draws near to an unclean people, typifying the better access secured by Christ in the New Covenant. The sermon calls the congregation to receive New Covenant worship as an advancement of — not a departure from — the principle that God's people must come to Him on His terms.
The Other Offerings
Leviticus 2–7 presents the grain, peace, sin, guilt, and trespass offerings alongside the burnt offering already treated in chapter 1, and the cumulative weight of this sacrificial legislation presses the reader toward two convictions: the absolute holiness of God and the radical sinfulness of man. Each offering — the substitutionary death of an unblemished animal, the sprinkling of blood, the atonement language repeated in nearly every pericope — functions as typology pointing forward to the one Lamb of God who would fulfill all that the system signified. The final summary verse of chapter 7 frames the entire system as divine law, not human suggestion, which carries direct implications for how the church must approach God in the new covenant era under the regulative principle of worship.
The Burnt Offering
Leviticus 1 presents the burnt offering as the paradigmatic Old Covenant sacrifice, establishing the pattern of how sinful man may approach a holy God. The chapter addresses the costliness of sacrifice, the worshiper's heart disposition, the laying on of hands as substitutionary transference, and the meaning of atonement as the satisfaction of divine justice. The New Testament interprets this system typologically: the male without blemish, the substitutionary slaughter, and the sweet aroma of acceptance all prefigure the penal substitutionary atonement of the Lord Jesus Christ. Believers are called to read the Old Testament as a Christ-centered book and to worship God only in the manner He has prescribed.
Introduction to the Book of Leviticus
The book of Leviticus resolves a theological tension created at the close of Exodus: the tabernacle has become God's dwelling place, but no Israelite — not even Moses — can enter it. This introductory exposition surveys Leviticus 1:1 and the book as a whole, tracing three dominant theological themes: the holiness of God, the sacrificial system as God's own provision for sinful man's access to His presence, and the purity required of His covenant people. The Levitical types find their antitypes in the Lord Jesus Christ, who is simultaneously the high priest and the sacrificial victim, and whose atoning work is the substance toward which the entire ceremonial law pointed.
The Day of Atonement
Leviticus 16, the Day of Atonement, stands at the literary and theological center of the Pentateuch, resolving the tension left at the close of Exodus 40 where God dwells among Israel but cannot be approached. The ceremony instructs Israel — and the church — in four realities: the holiness of God, the pervasive power of sin, the necessity of blood for atonement, and the blessing that flows from expiation. Every element of the ritual — the high priest's own sin offering, the two goats, the blood sprinkled on the mercy seat, and the scapegoat driven into the wilderness — is a type pointing forward to the once-for-all sacrifice of Christ, whose atoning work alone renders sinful men fit for communion with a thrice-holy God.
The Day of Atonement
Leviticus 16, the legislation governing Israel's annual Day of Atonement, expounds four doctrines that find their fulfilment in the Lord Jesus Christ: the holiness of God who cannot be approached on human terms, the pervasive power of sin that contaminates even the high priest and the sanctuary itself, the absolute necessity of blood for the remission of sins, and the blessing of atonement — forgiveness, cleansing, and the removal of iniquity — that the two-goat ritual visibly enacted. The sermon presses these typological lessons into an indictment of contemporary preaching that has exchanged the blood atonement of Christ for therapeutic and social-reform substitutes, and closes by transitioning the congregation to the Lord's Supper as a new-covenant anamnesis of grace rather than guilt.
The Day of Atonement
Leviticus 16, the Day of Atonement, is not merely an obscure Mosaic ceremonial law but the Old Testament's most concentrated instruction in the holiness of God, the pervasive power of sin, and the absolute necessity of blood atonement. The passage is typological, pointing forward to Christ as the antitype who, unlike Aaron, offered no sacrifice for his own sin, shed his own blood rather than that of bulls and goats, and accomplished a once-for-all atonement rather than an annually repeated rite. The two goats together depict what Calvary accomplishes: propitiation (blood brought behind the veil) and expiation (sin carried away into the wilderness). The sermon is preached in the context of the Lord's Supper, where the anamnesis of Leviticus 16 — a yearly reminder of guilt — is transformed by the gospel into a remembrance of grace.