Leviticus, Holiness, and Using the Commentary for Discipleship | Fall 2026 Update

0:00All right, hey there friends and welcome to this special fall 2026 update of the listeners commentary. We just recently wrapped up the book of Leviticus and so it makes a good chance to give a wee bit of an update before we start the book of numbers which I have been actively working on pretty hard in preparation to start that and so we'll jump into numbers next week and but I wanted to give a little bit of an update here just before we do that and the first thing I want to say is that I love hearing from those of you who are listening to the commentary and every now and then I'll get an email with a question or somebody will send an email with a thought or a reaction to something and I just love hearing from you all, hearing

1:00how you're using the commentary. In fact, I'll have a suggestion a little later this update about that or interacting with you via email because of a question you had or a thought you had and so really appreciate that when I get to hear from you. So thanks for reaching out. Thanks for sending me emails. Sometimes the questions you ask turn into something that's like, man, that's worth my time and I'll take the time to answer those questions as they podcast on my other podcast, the Bible and Life podcast, or I weekly just offer some reflections or explore a topic or occasionally answer questions. So if you haven't checked out the Bible in life, you might want to do that as well there. But anyhow, I just wanted to say thanks for reaching out. Thanks for being a part of the listeners commentary family. Thanks for the questions, comments, thoughts, the interaction. It's encouraging to me to hear how you're using the commentary and how God is using the commentary in your lives.

2:00So thanks for reaching out and sharing some of those thoughts with me. It's hit me that we started the Old Testament almost a year ago. The first episodes were released early in October of 2025. So it's been almost a year and we have gotten Genesis, Exodus and Leviticus complete in that year. We should wrap up numbers later this year, first part of next year and then Deuteronomy from there. And so I suspect by late spring, early summer next year of 2027, we should have the entire penitent, the first five books of the Bible complete. And that will be a major accomplishment, excited about that. And since we just wrapped up Leviticus, I just wanted to offer a brief little reflection from Leviticus. I spent an immense amount of time studying Leviticus as well as recording Leviticus.

3:02And part of that is because Leviticus is just challenging, it's hard. It has sort of a stereotypical reputation for being the Bible book that puts people to sleep. There's all sorts of rituals and rules and it's challenging. And we should be honest about that. But also I spent a lot of time on Leviticus because the theology of Leviticus culminates in Christ and the coming of Christ as the Book of Hebrews so regularly and frequently portrays. In fact, I referenced the Book of Hebrews several times and our study through Leviticus because of that. So, and Leviticus seemed pretty foundational and central as a book that foreshadows Christ in a lot of ways that deals with sort of preliminary atonement for the people of God in and through the Tabernacle and the Tabernacle worship and services.

4:03And so it really seemed like it required a lot of study and thinking to make sure I was understanding it accurately, listening to the latest work of scholars on the topic. And even though some of those technical details don't always show up in the commentary as it stands because my audience isn't primarily scholars. I'm not trying to, you know, be a scholar, talking to scholars about scholars, technical little debates. I want to make sure I understand the book. I do want if an Old Testament scholar happened to listen to my commentary on Leviticus, you know, I don't want him to think, man, this guy hasn't actually been reading the latest scholarship. I want him to think, oh, this guy knows this stuff. And so, spend a lot of time reading scholarly articles and commentaries and just making sure you're on some of the technical points. I was grasping what was actually being said. So I just spent immense amount of time in Leviticus. And having done so, you know, the thing that really stands out to me by way of reflection

5:05from Leviticus is one, just a sort of a deeper and richer understanding of the whole idea of ritual purity and impurity, clean and unclean, and how that shaped the Jewish thought world so that when I read the gospels about Jesus and ritual purity and clean and unclean, I feel like I have a deeper and more insight and more powerful understanding of the gospels because I've spent so much time in Leviticus. And so that's been incredibly helpful. But the personal reflection out of all of that is the whole idea of consecration, sanctification, and holiness that in Leviticus, not exclusively, but probably the majority of the times we talk about holiness in Leviticus, we're talking about this idea of being set apart as

6:05richually holy that the priests alone were in this category of holy, having been consecrated and dedicated to God. And as a result of that, they alone were the ones who could draw near to God in the tabernacle. And then the high priest himself was in this highest state of consecration and dedication so that he alone could go beyond the veil once a year, the day of atonement and sprinkle the blood on the ark of the covenant behind the veil. And that whole category of holy to the Lord that enabled them to draw near to God finds it seems to me when you read through the New Testament, and particularly most clear perhaps in the book of Hebrews, this idea that now in Christ we all have been designated as holy. And thus we all have the freedom of access to draw near like the priests did in the book of Leviticus. And that is, I just think really important for us to understand that there is a kind of

7:09positional holiness, a status of holy that's granted simply by virtue of the consecration of the Lord that puts us into a position where we have this freedom of access to God. And under the old covenant, the Sinai covenant that is detailed in the rituals and rules of Leviticus, only the priests had that status. But in the Messiah's covenant, our covenant in Christ, the new covenant, we all are granted that status and we all now get to draw near to God and have access to the Father. I think Ephesians chapter 3 that uses that phrase, having access to the Father and the Greek word that's used for access there is the word that's regularly translated for the priest drawing near to God when the Hebrews translated into Greek in the Septuagint. And so we have this unique ability, this status that was exclusive to the priests in Leviticus.

8:13It's been granted to us simply by the fact that God has consecrated us holy, given us this Holy Spirit and invited all of us in Christ to draw near. And I find that to be understanding that more fully and more deeply, I find that to be really helpful, really powerful and a cause of great gratitude. But though Israel was set apart from the nations as God's holy people and a royal priesthood, within the nation of Israel only the priests were allowed to draw near. But for us, we all can draw near to the throne of grace to find mercy and for help in our time of need as the author of Hebrews puts it. So praise God for that, I thank God for that and for this status. And then you think about the responsibility of the priests to live up to their status.

9:14And I think that emphasizes for us since we all have that status, the call to holiness be holy as I am holy says the Lord God Almighty that gets quoted in 1 Peter 1. So we have this responsibility as well to live out our holy status in a way that befits this consecration that we've been given as those people in Christ now deemed holy so that we can draw near to God. And all of that grows out of just really I think deepening my understanding of some of that through our study of Leviticus. So I hope that's encouraging to you as it is to me and wanted to share some of those thoughts with you on this update. And here's a couple other things just by way of update. We know that numbers come next. I'm excited to walk through the book of numbers on the commentary. A lot of our familiar wilderness wandering stories in the Old Testament come out of the book of numbers. So some of the stories, if you grew up going to church and went to Sunday school and

10:17you heard about some of the stories where Moses gets water from a rock or the 12 spies who were unfaithful to were faithful and 40 years of wilderness wandering and all of that. A lot of these kind of stories, Baelicms, Donkeys, right? These stories all show up in the book of numbers. And so it'll be fun to walk through some of those stories, hear them in their context in the narrative of the book of numbers. And one little kind of teaser spoiler alert for the book of numbers. One of the things that I think you cannot miss if you read numbers is the fact that there is death everywhere in the book of numbers. There are plagues, there are consequences, there are punishments and people are dying left and right. Obviously the entire first generation that came out of the Egypt and the Exodus, they all die in the wilderness and states that in the book of numbers. And when you read that in the overarching narrative flow of the Pentateuch, Exodus,

11:22Leviticus, numbers, the fact that there is death everywhere is powerfully insightful for the weakness of the law and for the need for a Messiah. And we'll explore that a little bit more as we jump then into the book of numbers starting next week. We made during the time we were walk into the book of Leviticus, the app developers made an important update on the app. And previously the app was localized so that if you wanted to listen in Spanish, your phone had to be set to Spanish. And then one day I was in a Mexican restaurant here in town, bumped into a fella who goes to church with me, Hispanic fella, and he wanted to listen in Spanish, but his phone was in English.

12:23And it just hit me. We made a mistake in not making it optional to be able to choose that language. We made that update to the app, both the Android version and the iOS version of the app. Now if you go to the app and you go to resources under resources, it's set up a little bit different between whether your phone is an iPhone or an Android, but under resources, you can choose the Spanish version of the commentary even if your phone is set to English. So I just wanted to let you know that if you are a Spanish speaker and you would prefer to listen in Spanish, do have that available. And now you can find the Spanish version through the app and you can choose the language you want. So just open up the app, go to resources, and you should be able through resources or more. There's a couple of different ways to do it, but if you explore under resources, you

13:25should get to a point where it says language and you can choose language there, the Spanish language. Note that. Also this has kind of grown out of just some time with various churches and the way they're getting people in their churches to utilize the commentary. And some of my other resources as well, they actually have in their church app under resources in their church app. They actually have the listeners commentary placed into their church app where someone in their church can simply very easily find the commentary right there through their church app. And so if you are a pastor or your church has an app and you think this would be a great resource for them to add to their church apps, you might think about including the listeners commentary. I know a whole other church actually has my online courses there where you just click what's inside the app and redirects the person to links them away to a web page where

14:29they can create an account for my online courses because the church pays a little monthly subscription so that people have access, all the people of the church have access to the courses. So just might be a way for you to help people in your church find and utilize the resources a little bit easier if you put them inside your church app. Just thought I would point that out to you based on how I'm hearing other people, other churches using the commentary and the courses. And then one last other little update and that's this. I have been encouraged by the number of churches that are using the commentary as part of their overall discipleship process. So I know a number of you listen to the commentary just on your own as part of your own personal Bible study and that's fantastic. Thank God for that. But there are some churches that are using the commentary as part of their discipleship process and the way they're doing that is maybe in small group Bible studies or in one

15:33on one discipleship meetings or in some places it's more like groups of two or three where two or three guys get together or two or three gals get together and they're all working through a Bible book together. And so they'll read the passage, listen to the commentary, get together and discuss it. And I think that's just really helpful so that the commentary becomes a means of ministry and facilitating ministry as well. There is a church that I'm familiar with in Oregon that uses it as part of their even in their celebrate recovery program and they have some residential discipleship houses for people that come through their recovery program, need a place to stay as they get back on their feet. And they use the commentary as part of their discipleship process to get people reading the Bible regularly, listening to the commentary and a lot of these people brand new to the Bible, listening to the commentary to understand it and then meeting with a disciple or a mentor to kind of talk through what they're learning and think about how they can put that into practice in their life. So I think that's great to hear that churches are finding ways to utilize the commentary

16:38as part of discipling other people, both people who are new to the faith, people maybe who are well established in the faith, but haven't really dug in and studied or read the scriptures much. So just throw that out there to you as another way to use the commentary. Use it for your own growth but also use it to help other people grow as well. So all right, that's what I got for this fall update and next week we'll jump into the book of numbers and I look forward to walking through that with you. So God bless. So if you're being a part of the listeners commentary family, if you want to join the team of supporters that makes this ministry possible, you can do so by going to listenerscommentary.com, clicking the give button, it'll read a record to a page, my page at world family mission. You can give a one time donation there. You can set up a monthly recurring donation by clicking that little box as make this monthly. All those funds will come this way to help more and more people learn and live the Bible. Thanks a ton. God bless you guys. I look forward to talking with you again next week.