Let me pray for us and then we'll jump into the overview. Gracious Father, we want to thank you. We pray, Father, that your word that we've studied would continue to resonate in our hearts. Help us, Lord, that it would be more than just knowledge to be able to say that we know what's in here.

But we ask, Lord God, that your very heart, your redemptive plan, Father, that you've been preparing the nation of Israel to establish a foundation that would cause them to yearn and long for Christ, that that would have the same effect in our hearts, that there would be a burning and greater desire for him as a result of all that we know.

And so we ask, Lord God, that you would help us to review and that this review would cause us, Lord God, to seek you more. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. All right. All right, so as you guys know, as we were studying the book of Leviticus, Leviticus is one of those books that my guess is if you were to meet other, you know, friends who are Christians, I mean, very few people have any knowledge about what's in this book.

But I think most of you will agree if you were with us for the duration of the study that not only is it important, it is essential. It is essential for us to understand the things that are taught in the New Testament. If you have a vague knowledge of what Christ was doing through the book of Leviticus, when Christ shows a lot of the terminology, whether it's atonement, cleansing, pure, impure, tabernacle, like all of these stuff, atonement, all of these things are embedded in the book of Leviticus.

And so without it, we start to add our own understanding, our own meaning behind it. So again, scripture makes it clear. Part of the reason why I'm going to be jumping into the book of Hebrews is for that reason. I think once we're done with Romans, probably at the end of this year and sometime next year, early next year, we're going to jump into the book of Hebrews.

And Hebrews is what connects the Old Testament and the New Testament. And so much of the teaching of Hebrews is the fulfillment of Christ, all of this stuff. It's not going to go into all the details, but so much of what's taught in the book of Leviticus and how ultimately it was pointing to Christ and how it was fulfilled in Christ.

And so that's what book of Hebrews is. And so we're going to jump into that on Sundays. And then most likely on weekdays, we're going to be doing inductive Bible studies. So some of you guys who are new to the church, has only been here for maybe last, maybe two to three years.

You may or may not have done that, but that's sort of what we've been doing in the church. And we're going to be jumping back into that to kind of, and it's going to require a lot more of your participation. It's not going to be just me standing up here teaching you what it says.

We're going to kind of work through passage to passage, asking you guys to go and do your study and you're going to do a lot of time discussing what you studied in your small groups. And then I'm going to be guiding that process. Okay. So I'm leaning more toward Colossians.

I said Thessalonians last time, but I'm leaning toward Colossians. It's not a hundred percent. If tomorrow something happens and then, you know, supernaturally I'm directed toward another path I might, but I'm leaning toward Colossians just to give you a heads up. And so in our next Bible study session, it was going to start second week of January, I believe most likely we're going to get into that.

And again, the format is going to be a little bit different because I'm not just going to be standing here lecturing. I'm going to give you study questions and show you how to do that kind of study so that you can do that and then participate in your small group.

Okay. So that's where we're headed. Just to kind of give us a introduction, Hebrews 8, 3 to 5, it says, "For every high priest is appointed to offer both gifts and sacrifices. So it is necessary that this high priest also have something to offer." And again, part of the Leviticus study teaches us that the priests themselves have to be constantly cleansed, right?

And they constantly had to be consecrated, you know, for them to even serve. And that's what he's referring to. Now, if he were on earth, he would not be a priest at all since there are those who offer the gifts according to the law, referring to Christ, who serve a copy of the shadow of the heavenly things.

So everything that we studied in the book of Leviticus, he calls it a shadow. It's a reflection of what is actually happening up in heaven, right? And so Moses, he goes up and he sees the heavenly things and God tells them in the book of Exodus to make a copy of this down on earth.

So everything that we're doing here in the book of Leviticus was, again, a shadow of the reality that was in heaven. Hebrews chapter 10, verse 1, "For the law, since it has only shadowed the good things to come and not the very form of things," right? The law was never intended to be the end in and of itself.

The law ultimately pointed to something, which is obviously fulfilled in Christ. It can never, by the same sacrifices, offer continually year after year, make perfect those who draw near. So God's intent was never through these sacrifices to bring them any closer to God in reality, because it was just a shadow that was going to point to Christ.

So that is made very clear in the book of Hebrews, right? And then finally, Colossians 2, 16 to 17, "Therefore, no one is to act as your judge in regard to food or drink or in respect to festivals or new moon or Sabbath day." He's referring to Jews who couldn't let go of the Levitical teachings, because they didn't understand that Christ came and fulfilled all of that.

He said, "Let no one judge you. Even though this is the way you were taught, now we're in a new covenant." And he said, "The things which are mere shadow of what is to come, but the substance belongs to Christ." So now that Christ is here, all that is fulfilled.

So we're no longer bound to these laws. That's clear. So if we don't understand that, we said that from the very beginning, if you study the book of Leviticus detached from how it is fulfilled in Christ, you can't understand what it says. And it is not relevant, right? The teaching of certain kind of animals and women in menstrual cycles and the value of a human being, all of these things aren't going to make sense if you don't understand how it points to Christ.

How it points to him, how it points to eternity, how it points to the gospel. And so that's what we've been doing through the studies, right? So some of you who jumped in in the middle, if you were confused as to what we were doing in this study, all of it, ultimately, every study, like what does this teach us about Christ?

Exodus concluded the tabernacles constructed in glory of the Lord. So if you look at that, Moses goes up the mountain and the teaching is don't let the people come. So in the book of Exodus, when God draws near, the immediate teaching is they cannot come. If they come, they will surely die because this is a holy mountain.

So in verse 35, Moses was not able to enter the tent of meeting because the cloud had settled on it. And so again, so Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers is three consecutive sections of Israel's history. Exodus is the beginning of Israel's relationship as a nation to God. And so Exodus begins by establishing that God wants to draw near, but he can't draw near in the state that they're in.

So Exodus 20, 19, "Then they said to Moses, 'Speak to us yourself and we will listen, but let not God speak to us or we will die.'" So not only did God tell them to stay, but people understood that even just hearing his voice would instill terror in them.

So they're begging Moses that don't let him speak to us. Let speak through, through you, right? So there was an understanding of his holiness that people just didn't run to God. You know, here's our living water and we want to be restored to the Father. Immediately they understood. And that's the first thing that we understand about our relationship with God.

The beginning of our relationship with God always begins with a deeper, more sensitive awareness of our own sins. There's nobody that can come to God until he genuinely and actually repents of his sins. Right? That's where justification happens. Repentance isn't just, "Yeah, yeah, you know, there's things that I've done that those are no good." Right?

That real encounter with God causes that individual to recognize his sins. And repentance isn't just verbal. It's everything that you recognized before you met Christ was sinful. And that's what happens in Exodus. God draws near, they recognize he's holy, and terror falls upon them. That's Exodus. But God doesn't want to stay distant.

He wants to draw near. So Leviticus, the book that we're studying, God draws near, "Then the Lord called to Moses and spoke to him from the tent of meeting." In other words, he didn't just come in their midst. He was hidden at the tent of meeting, behind the veil.

So his intent was, "I'm going to come live among you, but the only way that you can come is through this sacrificial system. You have to be covered by the blood." Right? So he's inviting them to come, but before they come, all these sacrifices needed to be made. They need to be able to distinguish between what is and isn't from God, what is clean, what is unclean.

Basically, the whole system had to be set up to teach them that as a sinner, that you'd have to go through this system to come to me. Now, all of this ultimately is to point to what Christ was going to do in reality. So the very beginning of the book of Leviticus, the very first word, "Wakra," which means "he called," that's the very first word in Leviticus is "he called." And that's the whole theme of the book of Leviticus.

It's about his holiness, but it's him calling his people to himself. And then the book of Numbers, where after the sacrificial system is started, it's going, and then now he begins to meet people in the tent. So the theme of the book of Numbers is God dwelling in their midst.

So that's the introduction. Again, this is nothing new to you. This is kind of like the picture of the tabernacle. Remember I shared with you, I think it was at, it was a church nearby here where they actually set up a life-size version of the tabernacle. And I was expecting a much bigger, I thought it was going to be maybe a couple football field length, and considering how much sacrifice and how many people it served.

And when I actually went and saw the actual size, it was pretty darn small. The size would have been probably maybe from pole to pole, maybe about that length, and then maybe that width. And then I thought, "Wow, this served over a million people?" But you could see the wisdom behind that because this was not meant to be permanent.

Every time that they needed to move, they needed to tear it down and put it back up. So imagine if it was the size of two football fields and they had to carry that around. So practically speaking, God wanted the tabernacle to be like a tent that they could tear down and move out.

And so that's a picture of the tabernacle. I don't know if you can see it, but the color here is supposed to be bright red. We don't have good, you know, you can't see it well, but this bright red. So in that tabernacle, if you look at the previous picture, it's all pristine and clean, but you can imagine if there was sacrifice taking place morning and night, every single day, all the time, you can imagine how bloody this place was.

They probably dried it up and cleaned it up when they were moving out, but when they set up and it was actually working, you could probably smell the sacrifice and see the blood all over the place all the time. Because remember, they didn't just sacrifice, they took the blood and they sprinkled it all over the altar, all over the curtain, all the time.

So you could imagine how bloody this scene was, right? And there's a reason for that. Because scripture clearly teaches us without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sins. And we learned that later in the book of Hebrews. And so Israelite had a visual presentation of that constantly in their myths.

That in order for us to be in the midst of a holy God, there must be shedding of blood. So there was a visual presentation of this blood and the sacrifice constantly in their myths. And this is the only way that they can get to God. So that was embedded into their culture.

This is the picture of the way that the tabernacle would have been set up. So here's the tabernacle. These four are the tribes of Levites who kind of stood in between. And these are the 12 tribes. And this is how God tells them in the book of Numbers to set up.

Meaning that the tabernacle was at the center of the camp. It wasn't like at the bottom of the mountain and then everybody else camped on the other side. God's holy presence was in their myths constantly. So the sacrifice, the smell, the dying animals was a constant part of this society.

And again, what did it teach them? Because the beginning of Leviticus is, "Come. In order for you to come, sinful people, to come to me, this must take place." We've gone through this several times, so I'm not going to go through it in too detail. But the book of Leviticus, again, remember it's divided into a chiasm.

And in the chiasm, where's the main thrust? In the middle. So if you were writing a paper, you want to say, "This is my thesis and here's my five points to support the thesis." Or sometimes you would give the story and say, "This is the main point." But in a chiasm, it's in the middle.

And what's in the middle? Day of Atonement. The Day of Atonement. So the whole point of a chiasm is to highlight what they're trying to say. So up to chapter 16, it builds up to the Day of Atonement. You are in need of these sacrifices, that you need to have blood sacrificed, the priest needs to be this way, and then they give the first sacrifice and then the two men die because they don't follow the rules.

And then it points to the Day of Atonement, meaning that you can't come to the holy God without the Day of Atonement. We'll talk about that later. And then the other part of it is, again, to point back to that. It's kind of like the Bible. The Bible kind of prepares us to the New Testament, the Gospels.

And then we have Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and then the rest of the New Testament points back to the Gospel. So you can kind of say that four Gospels is kind of like the Day of Atonement. So the whole Bible is in this chiastic form, right? Kind of.

But that's how human redemptive history is organized. Everything leads up to the Gospel, and everything points back to the Gospel. So the difference between the first chiastic structure and the second chiastic structure is, the first chiastic structure is about the tabernacle, the system, the priesthood, the sacrifices, the altar, and all of that.

The second part of it points to the life of the believers in the camp, right? So holiness in the tabernacle, which leads to the holiness in the camp. And that's the two big divisions in Leviticus. And all of it possible because of what the Day of Atonement represents. So what is that a picture of?

The Day of Atonement, clearly, right? The tabernacle. So one gets sacrificed, the other one, called the scapegoat, where the priest would put his hand, the high priest, representing the sins of the nations, to be cast out. And that was something that they did every year. Now, why did they do this when they were constantly sacrificing all year?

What did this teach? I mean, they had those five major sacrifices every single day. The burnt offering was happening morning and night every single day. What was the need for the Day of Atonement? Remember what it taught the nation of Israel? That even with the sacrifices, the sins of Israel would pile up.

It was kind of like spring cleaning, right? So in other words, that even with the daily rituals, that the sin would never depart from Israel, right? It was constant. It was a constant reminder of need for atonement. Remember the five major sacrifices? What are they? To yell it out, what's the first one?

Burnt offering. What's the significance of that? It's burnt, right? Or what's another word for that? Whole offering. Why do they call it whole offering? Right, because the whole thing is burnt, right? And so it signified, right, and that was the most common, most important of the offerings because it was for general atonement.

And so that was the offering that was burnt morning and night all the time, constantly, for general atonement. Okay, grain offering. What did the grain offering do? It was for dedication, for tithing, the first fruits, right? And then peace offering. And what did the peace offering symbolize? What was unique about the peace offering?

It was a picnic. So that's the offering where they burnt up the parts that they wouldn't eat and the parts that were edible, they kept and then they had a picnic. And symbolizing that peace with God established peace with man. And what was the fourth offering? Sin offering. Sin offering is when you defiled something, right?

It was set apart for God, you shouldn't have touched it, or it was an offering that was his and you shouldn't have, or you became defiled, right? Because you touched something you shouldn't have or you ate something you shouldn't have eaten and so you gave the sin offering for that.

And then the fifth one is guilt offering. What is that for? When you wrong somebody, maybe somebody was giving an offering and you touch it and you defile it and as a result of that you pay them back plus, right, one fifth, right? So remember when I was starting to, Leviticus, where they would often, God would require that they would give one fifth, remember?

That was all pointing back to the guilt offering, okay? The reason why these five major offerings are important is because it's the fundamental teaching in the New Testament how we understand offering, right? What was given to God? Like when we talk about worship, right, when we're talking about atonement, tithing, giving, sacrifice, like what does it point to in the book of Leviticus?

So a lot of these things that when we study Hebrews and other parts of the New Testament and Jesus' teaching, when you understand these five offerings, you'll oftentimes be doing quiet times like, "Oh, this sounds a lot like the peace offering." Or you'll be doing quiet times like, "Oh, this sounds a lot like the guilt offering." So when you damage someone else or you wrong somebody, you don't just say, "Hey, I'm sorry," and then you move on, right?

God made it so that in the sacrifice, you have to compensate, right? The damage is done. So again, this is kind of embedded into Israel's history. That's chapters one through seven. Chapter eight and nine is the ordination of Aaron and his children to prepare them to begin to offer sacrifices, and then what happens in chapter 10?

Very first offering that's given after the instruction, they didn't follow the rules. It wasn't like they were blaspheming God. It wasn't like they gave some, you know, like did idol worship. They gave strange, they didn't follow instruction, and it was enough to get them consumed, capital punishment. So what do you think this taught the nation of Israel?

Take it very, very seriously, right? When I say don't touch, don't touch. When I say move, move. When I say to put on the proper garment, put on the proper garment, because God is holy, right? God is holy, and so whatever he says is very, very weighty. That's why he says repeatedly over and over to the nation of Israel, "Do not turn from my word to the left or to the right.

Don't tweak it to make it fit you. Do exactly as I say," right? So the nation of Israel, they were already afraid of God, right? Remember, they were telling Moses like, "Don't have him speak to us directly because we're afraid." So imagine how afraid they were after this, right?

So Nadab and Nevih, who through their example, saying, "Exact, follow exactly as I say because you cannot come to a holy God on your own terms," right? That's what he was trying to teach them. Chapter 11, we had the distinction between clean and unclean. Do you guys remember? I'm not going to ask you to remember all of it.

There's different theories as to why these distinctions were made, but the one that I thought made the most sense, and this is probably the most popular view, some have like a hygienic view. So if you talk to, I think, the Seventh-day Adventists, they'll say, you know, the things that God said was unclean is because it's not healthy for us.

It could be, right? But remember what we talked about? Maybe that it pointed to something pagan that we don't know of. That was another view. The view that made the most sense, there were four views, I gave two, but the view that made the most sense is that every animal that he points out is some kind of a deviance of what God originally intended.

Now I'm not going to go too deep into that. You can go look at your own notes. In other words, everything that he considered clean or unclean was directly linked to what God originally intended and what kind of went astray. So I'm not going to go too deep into that.

You can go back and look at your notes. And so that applies even to human beings, even to land, even to the use of land. Everything that God intended, that's been tainted, and it's not being used the way God intended. So that's why a human being who was defected in any way was considered unclean.

He couldn't serve as a priest. So, well, that doesn't sound fair. All of that was to teach that sin has caused all these deviance. Even if it is not a moral failure, physically it wasn't what God intended and considered unclean. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, go back to your notes and look it up.

Remember the purification law for the childbearing? What we would consider probably the most sacred time between a mother and son in the book of Leviticus, it says she becomes unclean. And then if she has a daughter, she becomes twice unclean. Right? There's a lot of things that would very much offend the world if they don't understand.

Remember while we talked about that? All of this again points to the original sin. Right? So all of this, again, like if you don't understand it in the larger context of the gospel, it's like, "What? How can he possibly say this?" But again, all of this is to point to the fulfillment ultimately in Christ.

So the childbirth represents not a beautiful life coming into the world, but another sinner coming into the world. Right? Chapter 13 to 15 talks about leprosy. Remember what we talked about with leprosy? A visual presentation of sin. Now there's nothing in the Bible that says leprosy equals sin, but it is often referred to like leprosy, like sin like leprosy.

And so it went into the details of the devastation of sin or leprosy and how they were isolated, and there was no cure for it. They were just put outside and then the priest would come to check to see if they get healed. Right? The majority of the time it was not, but that's all, they just had to wait for God's mercy.

And that's what leprosy pointed to. So all of this was a setup for what? What comes after chapter 15? All of this is a setup for the day of atonement. Right? And that's the first chiastic side. Then after that, chapter 17 is where it says, "Without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sin.

Life is in the blood." And then so chapter 17 is again for the sacredness of the blood. So chapter 16 and 17 oftentimes is lumped together in the outline. Remember what chapter 18 was and why those two figurines are up there? Those are pictures of Baal and Asherah, and they both represent what kind of fertility.

It's the male/female version, right? Baal is the male and Asherah is the female of the fertility idols. And remember chapter 18, what it was about? Sexual morality. And it detailed all kinds of sexual deviance, right? Between mother and child, between aunt and uncle, between sisters. I mean, it just goes into perversion after perversion.

And so it's interesting that after the day of atonement, in application, the very first thing that it mentions about deviance in our sins is sexual morality, right? And that's true even in the New Testament. There's one sin where we are told not to fight. It says to do what?

To flee sexual morality. So if you look at all the different sins that are listed, almost always the first on that list is sexual morality. So it is not by accident that after the day of atonement, in application, that you need to be holy, and the first thing that comes out is sexual morality.

That if we practice sexuality by our own standards, and we justify sexual morality by what we think is right or by the standard of this world, that's the first thing that the Bible tackles. Because that's where perversion happens. What God intended between husband and wife, when that gets perverted, it perverts everything else.

It perverts every other relationship when the marriage is perverted. Okay? And then he says to be holy. Remember we talked about that in verse, chapter 19? He says to be holy and then not practice sexual morality, and then chapter 19, he talks about being holy, but what does that holiness look like in verse chapter 19?

Compassion. Even to the aliens and strangers. Remember we talked about that, how we typically think of holiness as refraining from something that is filthy, but in chapter 19, holiness means to practice godliness. Holiness literally means to be set apart. Set apart for what purpose? For God's use. To be like God.

That's what it means to be holy, to be like God. And so God has two things that was represented on the cross, his righteousness and his compassion. Right? And so holiness isn't simply refraining, so it's not like, "Oh, you guys emphasize holiness, we're about grace." Holiness encompasses both. You practice one without the other, you don't have the cross.

If you're righteous without grace, what are you? Self-righteous? Judgmental? If you practice grace without righteousness, what are you? Worldly? Lawless? Right? You can't have one without the other. So holiness represents both. Grace and righteousness without compromise. And that's what the cross represents, where the perfect union of God's righteousness and God's mercy was displayed for the world to see.

Right? And that's the day of atonement. That wrath that should have gone onto that animal, God placed on him and then cast out. So God's holy judgment and God's holy compassion displayed at the day of atonement, which is the cross. And then it goes into the regulations, who can and cannot serve as a priest.

Just like prior, it's about clean and unclean animals, and then we come to this side of the kiosk about who can and cannot serve as a priest, and that happens... I should have made it a different color. The chapter, I think, 20, and then chapter 21. Chapter 23 is about the different Jewish feasts and all of these, right?

We're going to spend time with every single one of them and how it ultimately is fulfilled in Christ. So if you know these festivals well, it'll help you to understand the gospels much better. Right? If you know these well. The Feast of Booth, when Jesus says, "I am the light," it is connected to that because he says that in the context of the Feast of Booth.

And the Feast of Booth was in the context of waiting for the Messiah to come and deliver them. They lit candles everywhere, right? Thinking that the light is going to come into the world, and Jesus looks at that and he says, "I am the light of the world." The light that you're waiting for, he's here.

So when you understand these feasts, it helps you to understand what Jesus was saying in the context of the gospels. Again, all of this fulfilled in Christ. Chapter 24 is where the Israelites make a commitment. We are going to follow you. They commit. And then, remember, this is in the holy of...

Right before the room, the holy room, they lit a candle, which represented the prayers. And then they have the... Again, this is as far as they were able to go before they entered. So this was a constant reminder to them of the presence of God, chapter 24. Chapter 25, if you remember, about the year of Jubilee, right?

Remember we talked about that, so you guys may remember how God punished the nation of Israel for not practicing the Sabbath year, right? Every seventh year that they were supposed to give the land rest. And as a result of that, later on in Israel's history, that they are taken into captivity how many years?

70 years, right? And for 70 years, they didn't practice. It was supposed to happen every seventh year. So seven times 70 is 490 years. Where was that brought up in the New Testament? When Peter asked, "How many times should I forgive my brother?" Seven times, and then he said, "Seven times 70," meaning 490 years.

So it wasn't just a random number. This was how long God was patient with the nation of Israel. And that's where that comes in. Remember the blessings and curses? The blessings were, the curses were twice as long. In the book of Deuteronomy, it's actually even longer than that. So if you don't obey my commandment, these things are going to happen.

And so this was foretelling of the nation of Israel and all sinners, right? So if you were careful and you were paying attention, by the time you get to the end of the book of Malachi, all of these curses that are mentioned have been piled up year after year, king after king, generation after generation, right?

So when Paul says in Romans chapter 7, "Oh, what a wretched sinner I am. Who will deliver me from this body of sin?" That that's what it was supposed to lead the Jew to, to that point, right? "Oh, what a wretched sinner I am." Because it wasn't, the law wasn't going to make them righteous.

The law was going to reveal their unrighteousness. So what I do, I want, you know, I don't do what I don't want to do. I keep on doing, "Oh, what a wretched man that I am." So all of this was to lead to that, right? And remember, we talked about it and I mentioned it last Sunday, the blessings, all the blessings of God is just to restore what God originally intended, right?

It wasn't anything supernatural, right? Or at least we think it's supernatural, but it's what God intended from the beginning in creation. And then it ended with chapter 27, chapter 27, evaluation and all of this pointing to redemption, right? So we can easily get caught up into the details, but the whole point of all of this is God ends with redemption.

It is an assumption that man is sinful and in his need of redemption, right? And that's how the book ends. So it doesn't end with, you know, "God is so gracious, he's going to deliver us." It ends with, you're going to make a vow and you're not going to be able to keep it.

And then when you don't keep it, this is what you need to do. God's going to give you an opportunity to be redeemed and that's how it ends. And it points to the one who's going to come who's going to redeem, okay? So that's the whole point of Leviticus.

My hope is, even if you don't know every detail of the book of Leviticus, when you read the New Testament, that certain things that you'll read is going to be highlighted and you're going to remember and at least go back to this chapter and read because it'll help you to really understand at another level what God was doing through the nation of Israel, okay?

All right, so the rest of the time, I'm going to have you guys...these are the study questions that I gave. And you're not bound to this in your small group. If you want to take some time more to pray, that's up to you. But this is just kind of in summary.

And you've already discussed this before, but since today is an overview study, if you can take some time to just ask, you know, what did you learn about God in the study of Leviticus? This is something that you should be asking in every study, right? But since this is kind of an end summary study, what did it reveal about yourself?

And my hope is that every study you do, that you would be reflective and ask, like, what is it that I need to be changing in my thought, in my life, right? And how should I be applying this? We don't just become hearers of the Word, but doers, okay?

So take some time to discuss these questions and take some time to pray. And then, again, right after I pray, Pastor Mark, do you have an announcement? Okay. The new people? Okay. All right. So let me pray for us, and then Pastor Mark's going to do that. And then if some of you, okay, can help us out, just take the chairs and put these chairs on this side and this chair on this side.

Okay. Let's pray. Gracious Father, we want to thank you, Lord God, for our study in the book of Leviticus. And we pray, Father, that the insights that we were able to glean, and we know there's still so much in there, Lord God, that we still don't fully understand. Help us, Lord, that the study of Leviticus would open up the New Testament for us.

And let me understand the depth of your love, the depth of your grace, Lord God, that you've prepared for so many years, that we would see the gospel in a completely different light, that we would understand, Lord, not only your word, but your very heart. So we pray for your blessing over the time of our study, and we pray, Father God, that our discussion time will be fruitful.

Help us to be open. Help us to truly experience fellowship during this time. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.