Ephraim Radner on Leviticus

…the details of Leviticus, taken within the sacrificial movement of Christ, demand that we draw into a direct relationship of responsibility with God the range of elements upon which our love, ordered to God, is to be exercised. These necessarily include prayer, disease, sexual relations, moral usage of money, animals, crops and plantings, the poor, civic life, and accountability. Thus, Leviticus provides the theological underpinnings…for understanding the material world of creation in which and through which and for which our Christian lives are to be led: the environment, labor, the use of the human body, property, and so on. It does so by naming these things, but also by placing them particularistically in a relationship to the incorporating love of God—in the character of giving/offering rather than of taking; in the character of cherishing for the sake of God alone rather than for our own sake or for the end of their own denial. That all these things are bound up with the sacrificial acts of the people of God before God means simply that they cannot be rendered subordinate to other ethical matters. They are unavoidable matters of faith. [295]

[…] As its Hebrew title suggests, the book is a calling. The book leads us back into the world—which may seem a strange thing to emphasize as a peculiarly Christian calling. But since that world has, for so long at the hands of Christians, been forgotten, manipulated, or abused simply for lack of love of God, that is, for the negligence of sacrifice, the call is absolutely essential. [299]

[…] So Jesus’s response to the sacrificial calling of the law is to present his own body: “Lo, I have come do to thy will,” something accomplished “through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.” [288]

from Leviticus, Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible (2008)

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