The Words of Leviticus

Let’s be honest. Leviticus can be a tough book to get through. There are a lot of detailed rules about sacrifices, ceremonies, and priests which are not part of our lives today. Yet, the words of Leviticus have power to reshape the way we think.

There are many ways to study a book of the Bible. One interesting tool is a “word cloud”. A word cloud is a computer generated image based on text. You enter the text and the computer makes a “word cloud” where the words which are used the most are the biggest and words that are used less often are shown in smaller font. Words like “the”, “to”, and “it” are not included since they don’t really help you see what the text is about.

I used an online program to generate a word cloud for the entire book of Leviticus, which you may see above. What can we learn from it? Let’s think about a few of the most common words.

LORD

The most common word is “LORD”, used 298 times in the book of Leviticus. The Bible teaches us to focus on God. God, His will and His ways and His love, is far more important than ourselves or other people. Through God’s Word we learn to love Him with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength. We learn to trust Him. We learn to obey Him. Recentering our lives on God changes everything.

Holy, Sin, Unclean

Some other very common words are “holy”, “sin”, and “unclean”. God is holy. He is entirely separate from all sin. He is pure. He is 100% good. There is not even a tiny bit of anything bad in Him. But we are not holy. That is because we have sinned. Sin makes us unclean, which is a visual image of not being holy. It’s like we are filthy. This has created a problem. God loves us and wants to be with us but He can’t tolerate sin. We should be glad God can’t tolerate sin. Can you imagine how it would ruin eternity if God didn’t mind having some sin around? But the problem is that we have sin in our lives. Unless God has a way to fix this it will mean that we have to be destroyed to cleanse creation from sin. Praise God, in Leviticus He shows us a solution for our sin that does not require our destruction.

Priest, Offering, Blood

Leviticus shows us God’s solution for our sin. The exact phrase “sin offering” occurs 57 times in the book of Leviticus! These sin offerings involve a priest shedding the blood of animals. We now understand that all those thousands of sin offerings were a picture of the One sin offering which would truly wash away our sins and make us holy again. All those priests were merely foreshadowing what Jesus would do as our great High Priest when He offered up Himself as the blood sacrifice for our sins.

So the whole book of Leviticus provides a massive picture of how the Lord who is holy makes a way to cleanse us from our sins which make us unclean. He does this through the blood offering of Jesus Christ our Lord.

Hebrews 13:16 And do not forget to do good and to share with others . . .