Love and the Body
Last week in Leviticus 16 — which is the exact center of the first five books of the Old Testament — we looked the why and what of the Day of Atonement:
We saw that God, through blood sacrifice and the scapegoat, by means of the high priest, forgives, cleanses, and removes sin and its defilement from his people.
God makes a way for atonement in Leviticus 16, and it’s all pointing to the person and work of Jesus Christ. The New Testament book of Hebrews tells us that Jesus is both our High Priest and our atoning sacrifice: in his death, Jesus bore all our iniquities and transgressions and sins; and by his resurrection, Jesus ascended into the heavenly most holy place to live as our High Priest forever — and he lives there right now to make intercession for us by the power of his indestructible life. We, in Jesus, have actually entered with him “behind the veil.” We, in Jesus, right now, live in fellowship with God.
Spiritually speaking, in Jesus, we have more access to God today than was ever realized in the old covenant. Jesus has secured our eternal redemption, and though now we see in a mirror dimly, though our current spiritual experience is invisible, one day it will be sight and we will know Jesus face to face. That’s where we’re going! We have a great salvation.
Thank you, Leviticus 1 to 16!
And now you might be wondering: If Chapter 16 is the center (if that’s the high point that the first half of this book was getting to), what do we do with the second half? What about Chapters 17–27?
This is how it fits: the first half of Leviticus, culminating in chapter 16, is about how Israel is to be clean. God forgives them, cleanses them, removes their sins. God establishes and maintains his nearness to his people. The second half of the book is about how God perfects that nearness. It’s about how his forgiven people move further up and further in to life with God by becoming holy. And that’s important to remember.
Holiness is what this section of Leviticus is all about. It’s not just that the people be clean, but they are to be holy. And there’s a lot here. These chapters are an absolute gold mine, but we’re not going to be able to get into it all. So here’s what I’d like to do for this sermon:
Three Timeless Truths
Rather than get into all the details, I want to focus on three lessons we find here that are extremely relevant for us today.
There are at least three interconnected, timeless truths in these chapters that are repeated and echoed in the New Testament, and I believe that if we can understand these truths it will help us make more sense of the life that God calls us to.
So let me tell you these three truths, and listen to how they’re connected:
To live holy is to love your neighbor.
To love your neighbor is to honor the body.
To honor the body orders sexual relations.
We’re looking at these. Let’s pray:
Father, you tell us that the unfolding of your word gives light and imparts understanding to the simple. By the power of your Spirit, give us the understanding that can only come from you, in Jesus’s name, amen.
To live holy is to love your neighbor.
Now to explain this point, I need to show you the whole context of Chapters 17–20. Remember the theme is God telling his people how to live holy.
Chapter 17 comes first and it directs the people’s worship. They can only make sacrifices the way that God prescribes. There’s to be no false worship, no rival pop-up shrines, and no misuse of blood because God has designated it for atonement. That comes first.
And then Chapters 18, 19, and 20 fit together as a bundle. And you’ll notice that both 18 and 20 are the same. They’re like bookends. Both are about sexual relations and they’re almost identical. Chapter 18 is prohibitions against sexual immorality, and Chapter 20 is punishments for sexual immorality.
And that leaves Chapter 19 right in the middle. And look at how Chapter 19 begins. If you can, look at Chapter 19, verse 2, God tells Moses:
"Speak to all the congregation of the people of Israel and say to them, You shall be holy, for I Yahweh your God am holy."
So again, what are these chapters about? It’s about living holy. God wants his people to be close to him, and progressive closeness requires progressive holiness. That’s the purpose for all these commands. And again we’re not going to read them all, but each of these commands in Chapter 19 are repeating or elaborating the Ten Commandments. They’re spelling out what being holy looks like in everyday life.
Decalogue Cameo
Now think back to the Ten Commandments, Exodus 20. Remember there are two parts, and the easiest way to think about it is vertical and horizontal. The first part of the Ten Commandments is vertical — they’re commandments about how we relate to God:
1. You shall have no gods before me
2. You shall not make carved images to worship
3. You shall not take Yahweh’s name in vain
4. Keep the Sabbath
It’s vertical.
Then the second part of the Ten Commandments is horizontal — these are commands about how we relate to others.
5. Honor your parents
6. You shall not murder
7. You shall not commit adultery
8. You shall not steal
9. You shall not bear false witness
10. You shall not covet
Those are the Ten Commandments and each of these show up in Leviticus Chapter 19. And verse 18 in Chapter 19 is really important. Look at verse 18:
"You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am Yahweh."
The Summary Command
Now this command is important because it’s a kind of summary-command for all the others. “Love your neighbor as yourself” ties together all of the horizontal commandments of the Ten Commandments.
And I think we can make that case from this text, but the answers are definitely in the back of the book, so let me jump to the New Testament.
You don’t have to turn there, but listen to the Book of Romans, Chapter 13. In Romans 13, verse 8, the apostle Paul, who knew a thing or two about the Old Testament, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, wrote this. He says:
"Owe no one anything, except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. For the commandments, 'You shall not commit adultery, You shall not murder, You shall not steal, You shall not covet,' and any other commandments, are summed up in this word: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law."
Did you hear that? The apostle Paul quotes Leviticus 19:18 and he says that this command — the command to love your neighbor as yourself — sums up all of the horizontal commands.
And guess what? Jesus taught us the same thing.
In Matthew Chapter 22, one of the Pharisees had asked Jesus,
“Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?”
And do you remember what Jesus said? Jesus answered the Pharisee, Matthew 22:27,
"You shall love the Lord your God will all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and Prophets."
So Jesus basically summarizes the Ten Commandments as just two commandments: the vertical part is Love God with all that you are; the horizontal part is Love your neighbor as yourself.
Jesus, like Paul, quotes Leviticus 19:18 and says this is a big deal. This is it. This is the summary.
Which means that “love your neighbor as yourself” is not just central to Leviticus Chapter 19, but according to Jesus, this commandment is the second greatest commandment in the entire Bible!
Putting It Together
And here’s the thing: Remember what all these commands in Leviticus 19 are about. God is telling us how to live holy! That’s the purpose. So put it together:
If the purpose of these commands is to live holy, and the summary of all these commands is to love your neighbor as yourself, then to live holy means love your neighbor.
This makes sense! We can connect the dots here. What’s more difficult though is training our imagination to really get this.
See I think a lot of times when we imagine a very holy person, we imagine someone who is maybe a little stuffy, maybe someone who is socially out of touch. We have this idea of a monk isolated and removed from everyday life. We imagine that’s a really holy person. But that is not the Bible’s vision!
According to what Leviticus teaches us, the holiest people are the most loving people — and in order to love people it means you gotta get in there, you gotta be on the ground, you gotta know people, you gotta talk to people, you gotta keep your head up.
That’s why the word “neighbor” is important. Our horizontal love is not a vague love for people in general, but it’s for real people with faces who live in proximity to us.
And see, if the people are not generic, then the love can’t be generic either. The love is demonstrated in particular, tangible ways. This is where the second truth comes in.
We’ve seen that to live holy is to love your neighbor, now …
2. To love your neighbor is to honor the body.
Look at Leviticus 19:18 again:
"… you shall love your neighbor as yourself …"
And that last part there, “as yourself,” is obviously vital to this command. How we love others has to do with how we love ourselves — but what does that mean? When God says “as yourself” what is he talking about?
What Is the Self?
Well, my guess is that when most of us think about ourself we think in terms of the psychological.
My hunch is that when we hear the phrase “love yourself” we think it means to think well of yourself. We think love yourself means to have self-esteem. It means to have a positive self-image.
And the reason we think this way is because we’ve been shaped by the world to think this way. I wrote a letter to you about this yesterday, in your email, because it’s too much to get into now, but our 21st century American culture has a very low view of the body. It’s actually body-hatred.
The way our world conceives of selfhood is that it’s all about whatever we think and feel — and the body is just an appendage that we despise, exploit, or manipulate to fit whatever we think and feel.
The world hates the body, and that’s a problem when it comes to understanding the second most important command in the Bible, because when God says to “love your neighbor as yourself” the “as yourself” means your body.
Now “yourself” doesn’t mean only your body — it includes your mind — but your body is primary. “Yourself” always means your physical existence with your physical, tangible needs.
And that matters for how we love others.
Jesus taught us this.
Love in Action
In the Gospel of Luke, Chapter 10, Jesus tells us a parable to illustrate Leviticus 19:18. This is a story about how to love your neighbor as yourself. It’s the story of the Good Samaritan.
One day there was a man traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho, and as he was walking down the road he was ambushed by robbers who beat him, took everything he had, and left him half dead. So there’s this wounded man laying on the side of the road as three different people walked past him — a priest, and then a Levite, and then a Samaritan. They each saw the man laying there in need, but Jesus says it was only the Samaritan who proved to be the true neighbor because he loved the wounded man. How’d he do it? Jesus said that the Samaritan showed mercy to the man.
The Samaritan moved toward this wounded man, physically, and he bound up his wounds and he carried him to an inn and he paid for his stay. The Samaritan loved the wounded man as himself — as if the wounded man was his own body.
He loved him not by thinking good thoughts about him, not by wishing him the best, not by changing his avatar on social media, but he loved the man by bending down, discovering his needs, and then meeting those needs in physical existence.
See, the problem we’re facing today in our culture is that we have such a low view of the body that we think it’s actually possible to love our neighbor without any physical contact at all. And what’s happened is that we’ve become so concerned about all the people and all the stuff going on way out there in virtual-space that we’ve almost forgotten the people right beside us.
That is not the vision here.
Leviticus 19 is about how to love the person next to you. This is about how we live together as a people growing in holiness. It’s about day-to-day, life-on-the-ground, rubbing-shoulders-with-real-people kind of love — and as Christians, if we are going to truly love our neighbor as ourselves it means that we must appreciate our physical, integrated existence created by God. He has made us embodied souls. Honor the body. To love our neighbor as ourselves means we must honor the body.
Now the third truth.
3. To honor the body orders sexual relations.
Let’s look again at these three chapters of Leviticus: 18, 19, 20.
Chapter 19 is the center of this unit, and the central command in Chapter 19 is to love your neighbor as yourself. We’ve established that.
Then on both sides here, in Chapter 18 and Chapter 20, there are laws about sexual relations. And these two chapters are, again, almost identical — 18 is prohibitions and 20 is punishments — but the same six forms of sexual immorality are mentioned twice. And the question is:
How is this topic of sex related to the central command to love your neighbor as yourself?
And the answer is that sexual immorality is fundamentally a dishonoring of the body and therefore a failure to love your neighbor as yourself.
If you were to look at each of these things in Chapters 18 and 20, the one thing they all have in common is that they exploit the body in rebellion against God. That is what sexual immorality does.
Sexual immorality says: It is my body, I can do whatever I want!
Or it says: it’s just bodies, we do however we feel.
Do you see that? That’s what each of these things in Chapter 18 and 20 are saying. It is shaking the fist at God by despising his design, and it makes whatever the person thinks or feels to be the authority.
See, this is “anything goes” kind of sexuality where the only thing that matters is consent — “it’s our bodies, we do whatever we want” — which means we make ourselves God.
Not Like Other Sins
This is why sexual immorality is not like other sins. It’s different. And I’m not the one who says that. The apostle Paul says that in 1 Corinthians Chapter 6.
In the context of that letter, there had been a situation of sexual immorality in the church — it was one of blatant disobedience to Leviticus 18:8 — and Paul addresses that, and he teaches us about sexuality. And he gets right to the issue, and guess what it is? He says that sexuality all has to do with how we understand the body. Listen to Paul’s argument:
1 Corinthians 6:13, Paul writes:
"The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. And God [the Father] raised the Lord [Jesus] and will also raise us up by his power."
Which means this — our bodies, as much as we may not like them — God cares about them. He’s going to raise them from the dead and restore them. We should honor our bodies. Now listen to what else Paul says. Verse 18. He says:
"Flee from sexual immorality."
That’s a straightforward command, but now Paul tells us why. He says:
"Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body."
How?
Verse 19:
"Don’t you know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own."
“It’s my body, I can do whatever I want!”
No it’s not. And no you can’t. 1 Corinthians 6:19,
"You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body."
Do you see it?
Our bodies are created by God. They are designed by him, for his glory. Therefore, our bodies have intrinsic value and we must honor them, which is why we flee sexual immorality.
And as the people of God, to know this about the body, and to live this way, sets us apart from everybody else.
Not Like Other People
That is very clear in Leviticus 18 and 20. The way God reveals his moral will about sexuality begins and ends with him saying: My people must not do what the other people of the world do.
He says that in Chapter 18, verse 3:
"You shall not do as they do in the land of Egypt, where you lived, and you shall not do as they do in the land of Canaan, to which I am bringing you."
So the place I took you from, and the place I’m leading you to, don’t listen to what they say about sex.
God says it again in Chapter 20, verse 23. He says the nations around Israel do all of these sexually immoral things, and therefore he detests them. That’s a strong Hebrew word that means to loathe, or feel disgust toward. And in fact, the sexual immorality of the Canaanites was so repulsive that even the land itself could not “stomach” it. And God says the land vomited them out, so don’t be like them (Lev. 20:22). There is a right way to do this, and it’s better.
Human sexuality is a big deal. It’s the first building block of whole societies, and it has always been “top of the list” in rebellion against God.
There is nothing the enemy wants to do more than to distort our understanding of sex, because where sexuality is distorted, it leads to macro-destruction.
Overall, sexual immorality is really a failure to love our neighbor as ourselves — because sexual immorality is the extreme dishonoring of the body, and where the body is dishonored, we don’t truly love our neighbor — and when we don’t truly love our neighbor, we don’t grow in holiness.
And when we’re not growing in holiness, we’re not living close to God.
That’s how it’s all connected.
Holiness comes by truly loving others, which means we honor the body, which means we obey what God teaches us about human sexuality.
Those are just a few truths we find here in the Book of Leviticus, and I can’t imagine something more relevant for us today. From Leviticus of all places!
Vision for Life with God
We are discovering a vision here for what it means to be the people of God growing together in holiness as we are surrounded by a fallen world of death.
But what if we’ve really messed this up? What if we’ve lived like the “Canaanites” and we’ve dishonored our bodies? What if you’ve rebelled against God’s design?
The apostle Paul actually speaks to you — to us — about this in 1 Corinthians 6. He tells us that the unrighteous — wrongdoers who persist in rebellion against God — will not inherit the kingdom of God. And then he says:
“And such were some of you.”
But you were washed, you were sanctified, your were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.
Whatever your story is, if you come to Jesus, he will save you.
He will call you out of this fallen world, and by his atoning death for you, and by his resurrection from the dead, he will forgive you and cleanse you and bring you close to God.
And church, let us live there, close to God. Let us live there together, forgiven, loving one another, becoming holy, close to God until one day we see Jesus face to face.
Let’s pray.
Father, glorify your name! In our lives, in our church. You be glorified! By your grace, we recognize that we are not our own, but we exist because of you and for you, and we ask, by your Spirit, lead us to live in such a way that shows real love for one another and that magnifies your worth. In Jesus’s name, amen.
