This sermon was originally delivered on June 22nd, 2025 at Red Door Church. The main passage is Leviticus chapters 13 through 15 and because of its length does not appear here.
We are not in Kansas anymore
Some of you will be familiar with the American musical film called “The Wizard of Oz.” One of the most famous lines from that film is “Toto, I have a feeling we are not in Kansas anymore.”
Dorothy is knocked unconscious during a tornado that hit her uncle’s home in Kansas. She begins dreaming and her home is lifted into the air and carried somewhere unknown. It lands in a place called Oz.
One of the lessons of the movie is the importance of the place where you are. At the start of the movie, Dorothy is shown on the family farm encountering all of the challenges of farm life and she wishes she were somewhere else—somewhere over the rainbow. After going to Oz and encountering of the strangeness there she begins to long for home and eventually realizes that there is “no place like home.”
Many of us feel that way in the book of Leviticus. It is like Oz, a strange unfamiliar place—a place that few of us have traveled before—and we long for home. We might liken the Gospels to home where we are more comfortable and familiar. Just get us back to the Gospels, we think.
I can understand that feeling too. Just get us back to the Gospels, even just the New Testament would do. But like Dorothy’s exploits in Oz, spending time there actually gives a greater appreciation and understanding of Kansas, so to speak. For example, just last week when we looked at Leviticus 12 we saw that Mary and Joseph had to go to the temple after Jesus was born so that Mary could offer the proper purification sacrifice. That comes out of Leviticus—or Oz—as we might call it.
Earlier in the service this morning we had a reading from Matthew 8 about Jesus healing a man with leprosy and then going to make an offering. None of this would make much sense if we did not take some time to understand Leviticus. You see, there is a little of Oz in Kansas, so to speak. Or, to be clear, there is some of Leviticus in the Gospels (and the Gospel in Leviticus!). We need to take time in one to better understand the other.
Last week we dug into the passage on childbirth and we found some treasure. I think we will find the same today. However, given that today’s passage is significantly longer, I am just going to summarize certain parts. My hope today is that our passage will help us to more deeply understand the significance of Christ coming into our world. That Jesus was not just showing compassion on people by healing them of their afflictions, like leprosy, but he was removing every impurity from us for the purpose of being with God.
Jesus removed the outward impurities from the people he encountered in his day to prove that he could remove the inward impurities as well. The bottom line is that Jesus is the one who makes us fit (clean) for God’s presence. But before we get into all of that, let’s remember where we are in the book of Leviticus.
Background
We find ourselves today in the third major block of material in Leviticus. The first seven chapters dealt with the five major sacrifices. Chapters 8 through 10 looked at the priests and now in this section, chapters 11 through 15 we are looking at things that make one unclean, or what is called ritual impurity.
Chapter 11 looked at kinds of impurities that were most avoidable, dietary uncleanness and touching of dead bodies, etc. Chapters 12 through 15 are looking at kinds of impurities that were unavoidable, and that is where we are today.
Now by way of review, remember that the concept of “clean” in Leviticus is not a moral judgment. It’s not about what is good or bad per se, at least not here in this section. Because God is holy and set apart, His people also need to be in a state of holiness when they enter into His presence. This includes being ritually clean.
Last Sunday some of you will remember me talking about my grandmother’s sitting room which was kept impeccably clean and was strictly off limits to little boys like me who had been outside playing tackle football with the cousins. I could not enter in that dirty state unless I cleaned up.
Now for Israelites, one did not get unclean by playing football. Uncleanness happened in a few instances. Last week we talked about a couple of those, menstruation and childbirth. Today we are going to look at a couple of others, skin diseases and some bodily discharges. Again, none of these things were sinful, they were just an everyday part of life so God had a process of dealing with them so that a person can become clean again and rejoin the worshipping community. However, these things reveal something about our world. It is broken and distorted.
This leads to our first point this morning.
Point #1: Death and disease are intruders into God’s good world.
I remember one of my first gardening experiences here in Vermont. Naive as I was, I just began planting things in the open yard, without any regard for critters or intruders. Only to find the leaves on virtually every plant decimated before even the fruit could be born on the vine. I learned my lesson and put up a makeshift fence around the garden only to find that some critters will go under the fence. Once I finally got that figured out, the next year parts my garden were hit with some kind of blight. It just never ended—one challenge after another.
It doesn’t take long to realize that this world is not what it should be. There is this sense that we all have that something is wrong with the world. We can imagine, to some degree, what a garden that is not pillaged by woodchucks, birds, beetles would be like. We can imagine what a garden without disease and drought or flood would be like, to some degree.
That awareness comes from somewhere. We have a concept of what wholeness is. That innate sense comes from a longing for Eden—for paradise. We not only have a conception of these things but we long for them—we long for things to be whole and good and right.
Each of us knows, deep down that all of these things, not just in our gardens but in our bodies are not right. Cancer, Parkinson’s Disease, Dementia, and a thousand other problems are intruders into God’s good world.
Chapters 13 and 14 looks at a condition known as tsara’at, in the Hebrew. Translations bring it into English in different ways. The NIV translates this word “defiling skin disease” or as “mold,” giving the impression that these sections are dealing with different problems or words. However, the Hebrew word remains the same throughout these chapters. Some, like the ESV, just call it a “leprous disease.” They consistently translate it that way all the way through chapters 13 and 14 but it is confusing because in what sense can a house contract leprosy? Tsara’at can afflict persons, fabrics or buildings (see Harper, Teaching Leviticus, 194.)
Chapter 13 deals with seven instances of this “skin disease.” They are all distinct but related. The chapter outlines a specific protocol for dealing with each disease:
1. Observable symptoms.
2. Ritual examination by the priest.
3. Identification of symptoms.
4. Confirmation (or not) of bodily disease.
5. And, pronouncement of ritual status by the priest.
(List comes from the ESV Expository Commentary [Leviticus by Christine Palmer])
One question that arises as you read this is: why is so much space dedicated to skin diseases?
Let’s ponder this for a moment together. The major thing about this disease—tsara’at—is its spreading nature. It not only spreads on the body but can spread to others as well. The book of Numbers describes the person afflicted with the disease as “as one who is dead, whose flesh is half eaten away…” (Numbers 12:12). This description gives us a glimpse of why there is a great deal of attention given to it.
One reason is because it is an outward emblem of death and stands in stark contrast to God’s holiness and purity. As such, it is a great example of the underlying principle that God wants his people to understand. What is that principle? To be near God requires perfection, wholeness, and purity. We even see this in how Leviticus describes the differences between the unclean and the holies of people like the priests. Look with me at verses 45 and 46 from chapter 13:
“The leprous person who has the disease shall wear torn clothes and let the hair of his head hang loose, and he shall cover his upper lip and cry out, ‘Unclean, unclean.’ 46 He shall remain unclean as long as he has the disease. He is unclean. He shall live alone. His dwelling shall be outside the camp.”
This stands in complete contrast to the high priest, who was the model and standard of holiness. One scholar writes:
“The high priest is the closest person to the divine presence and consecrated to share in the sanctuary’s holiness through ceremonial investiture and anointing with sacral oil. The skin diseased person is the furthest from the divine presence and must announce his pollution by crying out “Unclean! Unclean!” (Palmer, Leviticus: ESV Expository Commentary, 933)
Skin diseases served as a clear picture of the principle God wants his people to understand: God is holy and one must be holy to approach him.
And because all of us are plagued with some of these troubles listed in chapters 11 through 15 from time to time we are confronted with the reality that every single one of us is unfit, unwhole, impure and unable to come into the presence of a holy God. And not only outwardly but inwardly as well—not only on the skin but in the heart.
Death is a great intruder and it has invaded all of our lives. Death came through sin and all have sinned so now all of us face the reality of death. As I’ve heard many of you say, “Getting old isn’t for wimps.” The decay of this world is not just something over there, it is right here inside of us, right here at home.
At the same time, all of us are aware that it is not supposed to be this way. That all of this is a kind of invasion—an intrusion—not a part of the original beautiful utopia God designed for his creatures.
And that leads us to our second point this morning.
Point #2: Starting with the Jewish people, God is restoring and remaking the world.
So we’ve seen that death has intruded and invaded our world and there are all kinds of evidences of that fact, skin diseases being one clear example of that fact. But what is God going to do about it? Does God have a plan to address what ills our world? How will he respond?
Chapter 14 reveals a number of things to us. First, in the words of one theologian:
“In the laws concerning skin disease God gave the priests no ritual for healing the disease. Healing was in God’s hands. People with a skin disease would get well or they would get worse, and that was according to the sovereign providence of God.” (Moseley, Exalting Jesus in Leviticus, 145.)
What is outlined here in Leviticus 14 is how a person who is healed of the disease can be restored to fellowship with the community and with God. And what we find is that there is a gradual process. The previous section in 13 showed us how a person would be diagnosed and separated from the community for a temporary period of time. Here we have outlined the purification rites of restoration when a person is healed of the disease.
It is a gradual process of restoration that transitions through various stages which you can read about in the verses in chapter 14. The priests served as the Lord’s agents of restoration, helping those that had been separated from God’s presence be restored.
Notice in verses 1 through 3 what happens:
The Lord spoke to Moses, saying, 2 “This shall be the law of the leprous person for the day of his cleansing. He shall be brought to the priest, 3 and the priest shall go out of the camp, and the priest shall look.
The priest went outside of the camp. Remember in Exodus, and Numbers, the imagery of being outside the camp. This is the place where the refuse is taken. This is the place where those who commit grievous sins are taken and stoned. This is the place of the Gentiles, those without God. And as we are seeing in these chapters, this is the place where the lepers and those with certain diseases remain for a time. (It is also the place where the New Testament says Jesus was crucified; see Heb. 13:12.) So outside the camp becomes a place of danger and sin and separation.
Yet, here the priest goes out. God requires, in this instance, that he go out to meet the afflicted person where they are and to perform the things that God has asked.
In the New Testament, as we’ve seen in other sermons, you and I are called priests (see 1 Peter 2:9). All of us, in differing ways and with different roles, are called to be agents of reconciliation. We go out into the world, outside the camp, as God’s priests.
Now notice in verses 4 through 6, that various elements are taken with him. Cedarwood is fragrant and durable and resists decay. Hyssop is a bushy shrub that was tied together in bunches and used as a kind of brush to paint the doorposts with lamb’s blood during the Passover event in Egypt. And then scarlet yarn. All of these in their color or their use have a connection with blood.
Taking these things and also two live birds, he goes out and is to do various rituals that are outlined in the following verses. Scholars believe that the wood and the hyssop were tied together with the scarlet yarn and dipped in the blood of the slain bird and then used as a brush for sprinkling. The blood is sprinkled on the person.
All of this is how God tells us how the person who was once outside the community and declared unclean can be declared clean and brought back inside the community. This “purification rite enabled an Israelite to cross the boundary from exile into the camp,” writes one scholar (Palmer, Leviticus: ESV Expository Commentary).
What is God doing about the intrusion of death into our world? Here in Leviticus he is beginning to reveal that there is a plan to deal with it. Even way back when, the message is clear: death does not have the final word. God is making a way for sinners to be brought back into his presence. There is separation and there is estrangement but it is not final and it is not ultimate. God is healing and God is reconciling.
But it all started with the Jewish people, the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Through this people God was beginning to reconcile the world back to himself. He was beginning to deal with the sin problem and all of its effects, little by little.
Yesterday, about 40 of us went to see a monument over in Williamstown, Massachusetts. It’s called the Haystack Prayer Monument because there a group of five met for discussion and a storm broke out so they sought shelter in a haystack. What were they discussing? They were discussing how they could help reach the world for Christ. They had been reading William Carey’s little booklet about missions and were convicted that they needed to do something.
That they needed to go outside the camp, outside the safety and comforts of home and go out into the lost world if people were to be saved. Some of them ended up going to places like Africa some to India and some to Burma or China and many other places. But they did not go with Cedarwood and Hyssop, scarlet yarn and birds, they went with a message.
And that leads us to our third point this morning.
Point #3: Everyone who comes to Jesus by faith will be fit for the presence of God.
The message has two basic parts. First, you and I are all like these lepers, we are all like these people here in Leviticus 13, 14 and 15. Our diseases only reveal that death is not something outside of us but something that is also inside of us. We have been infected, we are not whole, we are all unfit to be in God’s holy and perfect presence. We must first declare that we, liike the person in our passage today is “unclean, unclean!” That’s the first part of the message.
The second part of the message is that God has made a way for all of us sinners to be brought back into the presence of God—and that way is through faith in Jesus Christ and his shed. Jesus gives us access into the very presence of God by His blood. No need any more for birds and lambs or any of these sacrifices, all of those were preparing the world for a greater sacrifice that has now happened—Jesus.
Jesus makes us fit for God’s presence.
The New Testament picks all of this up when we see Jesus healing the lepers, making them clean. When people with unclean discharges like the woman in Luke 8 (read earlier in the service) who had been bleeding for years and because of it could not worship and come near the temple.
All she had to do was touch the fringe of his garment and she was healed. Normally, touching someone when you had a discharge, would make them clean also—as taught in Leviticus 15.
But Jesus is not defiled by her touching him. Instead, she is cleansed, she is purified and healed. This is telling us something.
Jesus is the one who heals and cleanses. Not only can he do that for our physical ailments, though at times he chooses not to, more importantly, he can cleanse us from inward defilement—from sin.
This is the gospel. Are you a sinner? Are you unclean? Come to Jesus today and find your healing. Come and find your forgiveness. Come to Jesus and he will make you clean and fit God’s presence. That you one day may live with God forever and ever.
Amen.
