During the Second Missionary Journey, the Apostle Paul and Silas stayed briefly in the city of Berea, having fled persecution in Thessalonica after having been there for only a few weeks. Luke, writing the account of the stay, singles out the Bereans for particular commendation, saying: “These [Bereans] were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so” (Acts 17:11). Paul’s commendation is not just that the Bereans were receptive to the Gospel, which they were, but that they evaluated his claims by searching the Scriptures. This is serious dedication to being “Bible believing.”
A key hallmarks of historic Protestantism is a commitment to the preeminent authority of the Bible. However, many—perhaps most—people, if they read the Bible at all, read it devotionally: a few verses or a short passage with some inspirational thoughts by the devotional writer. Such an approach reveals more about the mind of the devotion writer than that of the Lord, who inspired all Scripture. If we are to be truly “Bible believing,” then we need an approach that understands the Bible comprehensively and holistically.
Books explaining how to study the Bible typically focus on two things: exegesis and hermeneutics. Exegesis looks where a passage is situated in the overall context of a book, analyzes the logical organization and flow, and observes key words in the passage. Knowing the original languages can be an asset in this regard. Exegesis aims to understand what a text is saying. Hermeneuticstries to get at what a text means. Hermeneutics includes understanding the historical context behind the passage, assessing what the author intended, what the original readers understood it to mean, and what it can mean to us today. Exegesis and hermeneutics go together. Most books on how to study the Bible, however, do not go beyond this, and as a result, Christians are left to fend for themselves in reckoning how different parts of the Bible relate to one another. What Christians need is a framework to see how the Bible fits together.
(For a fuller discussion of this issue, see the attached file)
Understanding the Ceremonial Law of Exodus and Leviticus
For any Bible reading plan, the latter part of Exodus (chs. 25-40) and all of Leviticus (chs. 1-27) is the desert. There are a few narrative oases (i.e., Exodus chs. 32-34, 40, and Leviticus chs. 8-10), but by and large, these chapters are a slog. If you invest the time to pay attention to what is being described in these chapters, it will tremendously boost your subsequent reading of Scripture–but you do have to make it through them, and the likelihood of derailing one’s effort to read through the Bible is quite high.
Moses Breaking the Commandments
So, how do we make it through this desert? Well, first of all, some perspective is in order. It is common to think that in the Old Testament people were saved by keeping the Law, but in the New Testament, they were saved by Christ. That was never the case. Looking back in retrospect, God’s people in both the Old and the New Testaments were only ever saved by God’s grace in Christ Jesus. In the Old Testament, though the great salvific event was God’ drawing His people out of the bondage of slavery in the Exodus from Egypt. This would be a type or image foreshadowing the greater salvation to come of Christ drawing His people out of the deeper bondage of sin through His death on the cross, His resurrection from the grave, and through the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. In the Old Testament, it was after God saved His people that He gave them His Law.
Having formed a people for Himself and delivered them from their bondage, it was God’s intention that His people reflect His character and image, and that image was fundamentally a moral one. So, what they needed, first, were the core principles that were to govern their moral conduct and their covenantal relationship with God. That is the Moral Law (the Ten Commandments or the Decalogue), found in Exodus ch. 20. This is still core to the ethical behavior of God’s people even under the New Covenant inaugurated by Christ. Second, as a newly freed nation, they needed civil case law applying these core principles to help them think through matters of civil justice simply to order and regulate their society. This was the Civil Law, found primarily in Exodus chs. 21-24. With the dissolution of the Israelite state as a result of the Assyrian and Babylonian invasions of the eighth and sixth centuries BC respectively, the Civil Law is no longer the formal laws of any state, but they do highlight principles of general equity that are useful for civil society, in terms of establishing justice and restraining evil. Lastly, the God’s people needed to know how to worship God rightly as part of their covenantal relationship with Him. This is the Ceremonial Law, which covers Exodus chs. 25-31, 35-40, and all of Leviticus. This pointed ultimately to the sacrificial work of Christ, whose work has subsequently superseded that the sacrificial system. The Ceremonial Law is no longer to be observed.
So, why even bother to read all this sacrificial stuff if it has already been obviated by Christ? The Apostle Paul, in Galatians 3:19-4:11 describes this Law as a schoolmaster to lead us to Christ, and the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews talks about the superiority of Christ over the sacrificial system. As a tutor, what the sacrificial system was intended to do was to make concrete for God’s people through practice and habit some concepts that would have been otherwise abstract but nevertheless central for them to understand and anticipate that greater salvation that would later come through Christ Jesus. Three concepts would have central.
Chief among these is the notion of God’s absolute holiness and the high standard of holiness that He is holding His people to. That also would have had the effect of highlighting how comprehensively and deeply entrenched sin is within us. In this regard, it would have provide a sense of conviction of guilt, but also the standard that God’s people were called to in their sanctification. Even for us under the New Covenant, we are all too inclined toward a casual attitude that does not take holiness seriously. As Christ teaches in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew chs. 5-7), however, God’s standard of holiness has only increased, to get at our motives as well as our actions.
Secondarily, the Ceremonial Law would have forced a separation between God’s people and the surrounding nations, calling them to absolute fidelity to Him. God’s people were to be a peculiar people, uniquely devoted to only Him. The incident of the apostasy with the Golden Calf (Exodus 32 and 33), the subsequent apostasies that led God to expel the people from the land and take them into Exile in Assyria and Babylonia, and even the various apostasies in the history of the Christian Church since our Lord’s ascension testify to the difficulty God’s people have had in really grasping this concept.
Lastly, a third concept would be taught through the Ceremonial Law would have been that of atonement, or how are we made right with God. Such atonement would have been costly in terms of the animal sacrifices that were entailed, but that pales in comparison to the costliness of the Son of God being crucified on a cross by mankind. Such costliness would have shown by experience that people cannot earn their way into God’s favor and that salvation, if it comes at all, would only come ultimately by God’s grace, not man’s works. Even people today need to realize this, given the all-too-common view that somehow we can be “good” people.
If this is what the Ceremonial Law was to have taught God’s People under the Old Covenant, studying these chapters in Exodus and Leviticus adds a tremendous depth in appreciating more fully what Christ Jesus has done for us in inaugurating the New Covenant. So, it is definitely still profitable for us to read this material on the Ceremonial Law. Moreover, it is probably the earliest material to have been enscripturated, coming as it were right after the Exodus, and indeed, directly from the revelation of God Himself at Sinai. That in itself makes it foundational.
Still, while it may be profitable for us to read all this material on the Ceremonial Law, that does not deny the fact that it is tedious reading. So, how can we read this to actually get through it? A few helps are provided. First is an outline of Leviticus itself. More so than even most books of the Bible, this is a necessary roadmap for navigating the terrain. Second is a compendium of charts covering most of Leviticus. In reading through the text, the charts help to summarize what you are reading. In reading through the sacrificial system of Leviticus chs. 1-7, pay particular attention to what each of the sacrifices represent, what that would have meant for you if you were in the place of the ancient Israelites, and what specific ways might Christ fulfill those sacrifices as our high priest.
The Joseph narrative is the longest in Genesis, occupying nearly a quarter of the book by itself. The length may be due to the fact that this narrative would have been the most relevant to God’s people as they came out of Egypt, connecting the covenant promises God gave to the patriarchs with the fulfillment that Moses’ generation experienced in the Exodus. For the delivered Israelites, the Joseph narrative explains why the nation went down to Egypt in the first place and the covenantal basis for God’s delivering them. It does not evidence direct revelatory engagement between God and His people, but both Joseph and his brothers come see God’s providential working in the events that unfold. In the New Testament, while the Apostle Paul does not refer to the Joseph narrative directly, his statement in his letter to the Romans is apropos of the account: “And we know that all things work together for good for those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose” (Rom. 8:28). In seeing God’s working, the discernment of divine providence requires a higher level of faith than that which comes from direct engagement, and it is this level of faith that God’s people are called to even to this day.
The Joseph narrative starts and ends in Canaan, the land of God’s covenant promise. Joseph, probably a teenager at the outset of the narrative, receives two dreams, the import of which is that he will be exalted over his brothers and parents. Joseph’s dreams and his ability to interpret them are indications that would eventually show that he is indeed a prophet of the true God, even more so than his patriarchal forefathers were. Coming as it were on the heels of being the favored son of Jacob’s favored wife, however, this caused no small degree of resentment among his brothers, who sold him into slavery in Egypt after first considering murdering him outright.
Following in the promise originally given to Abraham about making him a blessing to others, God’s covenantal blessing is definitely upon Joseph: he is a blessing to Potiphar’s house (39:3, 5), to the warden in prison (39:23), to the cupbearer, whose life was spared by Pharaoh, and then ultimately to Egypt and his own family in guiding them through the famine and preserving their lives. That Joseph has heard the covenant can be seen in his response to Potiphar’s wife in rejecting her sexual advances: it is not just that he would disgrace Potiphar if he were to lay with her, but he would sin against God (39:9). He gives glory to God in the interpretation of dreams (40:8, 41:16, 25, 28). He gives glory to God as well in the naming of his sons. He names Manasseh (“making forgetful”) that because “God has made me forget all my toil and all my father’s house.” Similarly, he names Ephraim (“fruitfulness”) because “God has caused me to be fruitful in the land of my affliction” (41:51-52). Most visibly, he gives glory to God and acknowledges God’s providence in his brothers selling him into slavery (45:5-8). Joseph is able to endure all the hardship that he went through because he looked forward to and held fast to God’s covenantal promises.
No doubt, Joseph learned of God’s covenant from his family. This is most clearly evident at the very end of Genesis when Joseph tells his brothers, “I am dying; but God will surely visit you, and bring you out of this land to the land of which He swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.” The passage then concludes by saying, “Then Joseph took an oath from the children of Israel, saying, ‘God will surely visit you, and you shall carry up my bones from here’” (Gen. 50:24-25). In this, Joseph follows the example of Jacob. On the eve of Jacob and his family going to Egypt, God appears to him and says, “I am God, the God of your father; do not fear to go down to Egypt, for I will make of you a great nation there. I will go down with you to Egypt, and I will also surely bring you up again; and Joseph will put his hand on your eyes” (46:3-4). Why would Jacob have been afraid to go to Egypt? Because the promise of the covenant was in Canaan. Jacob remembered that God’s covenantal promises were tied to the Promised Land, and for this reason he made Joseph solemnly swear to him that when he died, he was not be buried in Egypt but where his fathers are buried (47:29-30). Joseph honored this vow (50:4-9), and expected fulfillment of God’s covenantal promise to Abraham (ch. 15) that He would bring the nation out of Egypt to the land of promise. The people fulfilled this in the Exodus and they in turn brought Joseph’s bones with them when they came out of Egypt (Exod. 13:39). In the New Testament, Stephen recounted this how Israel brought Joseph’s bones with them in the Exodus as part of his description of the covenantal expectations of God’s people (Acts 7:4-16).
In this overarching account of Joseph, the narrative takes a seemingly odd diversion in chapter 38, with the story of Judah and Tamar, and this requires some explanation. Judah marries a Canaanite woman, something previously discouraged in the history of God’s people to this point (see Gen. 24:3-4, 27:46-28:2 & 6), and has three sons by her. Two of his sons are killed, and he tells his widowed daughter-in-law, Tamar, to wait until his third son comes of age before he will give him to her as a husband. Yet when Shelah is grown, Judah effectively reneges on his promise. Since marriage and child-bearing would have provided for Tamar’s security, to have been denied this was an injustice to her. She responds by disguising herself as a prostitute, having intercourse with Judah, and conceiving a son by him, without him realizing that it was with her that he had sex. When she becomes pregnant, he is ready to kill her for harlotry until she confronts him with evidence that it was by him that she became pregnant. At that point, he acknowledges his sin and her righteousness (38:26).
Tawdry as this account is, it serves a few different purposes in the Joseph narrative. First, it highlights by way of contrast, the godliness of Joseph in subsequent chapters. Where Judah had sex with who he thought was a harlot by the roadside, Joseph rejected the lustful advances of his master’s wife, only to be falsely accused of rape and thrown into prison; he would only be delivered from this by rightly interpreting Pharaoh’s dream about the impending famine. Second, it marks a turning point in Judah’s life and the emergence of his leadership of the family. When reference to Judah resumes in chapter 43, it is Judah who exhibits leadership in saying that he and his brothers needed to return to Egypt for food and it was Judah himself who was willing to be a surety for the life of Benjamin, to fulfill the stipulation that the vizier (actually Joseph in disguise) laid down during their first trip to Egypt. Moreover, it is Judah that acts as an intercessory mediator between his family and Pharaoh’s court in chapter 44. This change in Judah lays the basis for the extensive blessing he receives from Jacob on his deathbed in 49:8-12, becoming the leader of the nation, since Reuben, Simeon, and Levi disqualified themselves by disgrace. Looking forward, it is from Judah’s line by Tamar that David, Israel’s greatest earthly king, would come, and from that same line that humanity’s ultimate king, Christ Jesus, also would come. Repentant and redeemed Judah foreshadowed the mediatorial role Christ Himself would exhibit in fullness.
God’s covenantal love is also manifest in the Joseph narrative. Joseph himself recognized this, both when he revealed his true identity to his brothers (45:3-8) and after his father died (50:15-21). In both cases, his brothers repented of the evil they had done to him in selling him into slavery, but he saw their actions in the broader context of God’s providential working to save people—and specifically the covenant people—through the famine. Moreover, this recognition of God’s overarching grace enabled Joseph to extend forgiveness to his brothers who had truly wronged him. Although in the early chapters of the narrative, there was much evidence of sibling rivalry, jealously, and strife, by the narrative’s conclusion self-sacrificial (covenantal) love can be seen in in the attitude of Judah towards Jacob, and in the reconciliation, grace, forgiveness, and covenantal solidarity between Joseph and his brothers. Such love was to be marks of God’s people and were to mark God’s people. This fact would have been particularly poignant as the Israelites came out of Egypt, but subsequent Israelite history shows they often failed at this. As a New Covenant people, such love is to mark us as well.
Joseph Makes Himself Known to His Brothers (Gen. 45:1)
The Jacob narrative is bookended by his time in Bethel. It is in Bethel, when he is fleeing from his brother Esau that he receives a vision of a ladder between Heaven and Earth on which angels of God were ascending and descending (Gen. 28:12). Most commentators understand this not as a ladder as we would typically think of it today, but rather as a ziggurat, like the people of Babel tried to build. Christ would later use such an image to describe Himself when He says, “Most assuredly, I say to you, hereafter you shall see Heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man” (John 1:51). This is a curious image, but its meaning is straightforward: It is the sole gateway between Heaven and Earth, the sole connection between God and Man. Jacob did not realize it when he first came to the place, but he was in the presence of the Holy; we often do not think about it, but in coming to Christ we too are coming into the presence of the Holy. Such a realization should spur one to fear, awe, and worship, just as it did Jacob.
It is at Bethel where the LORD reiterates His covenant promise to Jacob: “I am the LORD God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and your descendants. Also your descendants shall be as the dust of the earth; you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east, to the north and to the south; and in you and in your seed all the families of the earth shall be blessed. Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have spoken to you” (Gen. 28:13-15). Notice the similarities here with God’s promise to Abraham in Gen. 12:1-3. There is not only the land promise and the promise of numerous descendants, but also the promise that God will be with Jacob wherever he goes. It is God’s presence that is the final fruit of the covenant relationship. Jacob responds by setting up and consecrating a memorial pillar and taking a vow that if God does indeed stay with him, provides for him, and brings him home safely, then he will make the LORD his God (28:20-21).
Commentators make much of the fact that Jacob is turning an unconditional promise on God’s part to a conditional bargain, but the fact of the matter is that God works with His people where they are at; the chapters that follow show how God fulfilled Jacob’s vow. While there is strife in Jacob’s family between his wives and concubines, God nonetheless blesses Jacob with twelve sons and a daughter and makes him successful in his work in Laban’s household. God’s protection is manifest in three incidents after Jacob and his family flee from Laban. First, God intervenes directly with Laban who is in hot pursuit of Jacob and his family and warns Laban in a dream not to harm Jacob (31:24). The subsequent covenant Jacob makes with Laban secures his freedom from Laban’s household (31:43-58). Second, as Jacob returns to the Promised Land, he is met by the same angels he saw earlier at Bethel (32:1), and God protects him from the wrath of his brother Esau (ch. 33). Third, once Jacob returns to Canaan, the LORD protects the covenant family from assimilation with the surrounding peoples through the incident with the rape of Dinah. In that case, Simeon and Levi wrought brutal vengeance on Shechem for their sister’s rape placed God’s people at enmity with the inhabitants of the land, yet Jacob’s fears that they would be killed did not materialize (34:30, 35:5).
Jacob learned hesed, covenantal love during his sojourn in Padan Aram. Laban’s deceitfulness was not only a rebuke to Jacob’s own earlier deceitfulness, but became the means by which he came to develop covenantal faithfulness to the LORD. That Jacob has indeed learned hesed can be seen in how he attributed blessings and protection he has received to the LORD in his argument with Laban (31:41-42), in his confession of faith to the LORD and prayer for deliverance (32:9-12), and in his wrestling with God (32:22-32). Moreover, Jacob’s faithfulness to God is based not only on what he has seen God do, but also who he has learned that the LORD is. One way ancient kings exercised authority was to rename their vassals, and here we Jacob renamed Israel (“Prince with God”) in 32:28. The LORD is sovereign. In addition, the LORD possesses real power, unlike Laban’s household gods impotent to do anything and sat upon by a deceitful, menstruating woman (31:19, 26-35). The fact that Laban could not find his household gods was God’s protection to his covenant people. The LORD is superior to all other gods. It should not be surprising then to see Jacob return to Bethel, where he made his original vow, build an altar to the LORD, and bury the idols among his family and entourage (35:2-4). God’s fulfillment of Jacob’s vow is confirmed by God’s covenant renewal: “Your name shall not be called Jacob anymore, but Israel shall be your name… I am God Almighty. Be fruitful and multiply; a nation and a company of nations shall proceed from you, and kings shall come from your body. The land which I gave to Abraham and Isaac I give to you; and to your descendants after you I give this land” (35:10-12). The LORD would be known henceforth as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
The Prayer of Jacob by the Jabbock River (Gen. 32:11)
Covenantide 