Hardly prophetic and rarely profound! That is the best description of most “famous last words.”  We tend to give “last words” more credence because of the finality of their utterance, but they are often clouded by pain or confusion.   We expect them to be a benediction breathed out in the final moments of someone’s life, like dramatic portrayals in literature and film.  Yet often “famous last words” are uninspiring. 

A cursory review of the top Google results of the most memorable “famous last words” of notable notables is remarkably unnoteworthy.  While some, like those of Reformer Hugh Latimer, burned at the stake with fellow reformer, Nicholas Ridley, are galvanizing. “Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace in England, as I trust shall never be put out.”  Others like those of Karl Marx, who said, “Last words are for fools who haven’t said enough,” breathe out contempt and cynicism.

“Famous last words” are so infamous that the phrase has become an English idiom meaning “to make a statement that is shown very soon, and often in an embarrassing way, to be wrong.”  Yet we are ever optimistic that last words will be the last word, an apt conclusion and bring all the words that went before into focus. 

And while this is occasionally true of men’s words, it is always true of God’s Word.   God who was the first to speak always has the last word.  And time and time again in the Scriptures when he speaks of sin, righteousness, and judgement His last word is always ‘grace.’   Even though God’s people provoke Him time and time again, God’s famous last words are always ‘grace.’

Leviticus, with all its law and ceremony, brims with the grace of God.  Hardly a primer on empty, outward religion, it’s types and shadows “prefigure Christ, His graces, actions, sufferings, and benefits.”  It repeatedly answers the question, “how can unholy people dwell with a Holy God?” 

And it ends by pronouncing the blessings for those who trust in God’s grace, the curses experienced by those who reject it, and the promise to all that God will be gracious to those who turn to Him.   Far from espousing a meritocracy, Leviticus 26, points to the “grace upon grace” believers are offered in Christ (John 1:16)

What about you?  Have you heard all the Bible’s words of sin, righteousness, and judgement, but failed to hear the famous last word of grace?  Are you seeking God’s approval by relying on works of the law?  This is not only impossible, but it is accursed as Paul noted. 

For all who rely on works of the law are under a curse; for it is written, “Cursed be everyone who does not abide by all things written in the Book of the Law, and do them.” Now it is evident that no one is justified before God by the law, for “The righteous shall live by faith.” But the law is not of faith, rather “The one who does them shall live by them.” Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us.  Galatians 3:10-13

When the Lord speaks the best, last word, the word of grace, will you let that be the last word?  As God concludes the Mosaic administration of the Covenant of Grace with the people of Israel, he concludes it with the blessings of grace received, the curses for grace rejected, and the abiding promise of grace extended.   Join us as we examine Leviticus 26 and consider God’s gracious last words from the Mosaic covenant.  We meet Sundays at 10:30 am on the square in Pottsville, Arkansas right next to historic Potts’ Inn for worship. Get directions here or contact us for more info.  Or join us on Facebook Live @PottsvilleARP or YouTube. 

Nothing disorients like a long, late afternoon nap.  Wakening at twilight is unsettling.  Is it nighttime or morning?  What day is it?  What did we miss?  Where is everyone?  When the normal markers of time are out of place, we are easily untethered.  This is why every hospital room has a clock and a whiteboard with date, day of the week, and the names of current staff placed in front of the patient’s bed.  Without this, life as a patient has no rhythm to distinguish one day from another.

We are made for eternity.  But birthed in time.  The Teacher of Ecclesiastes noted that God has “set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.”  In creation, God made not only the physical world, but in a sense, he created time.  Though light is spoken into being on the first day of creation, it is on the fourth day the Lord said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night. And let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years…”

Throughout history time has been reckoned in celestial terms.  The movement of the sun, moon, and stars and the seasons created by these movements have become the rhythm of life.  Yet nothing governs this rhythm more than the one unit of time that has no celestial analog, the week.  The concept of the week arises purely from the example and command of our God.  And includes one day in seven set aside for rest, worship, and fellowship.   Following that paradigm, we are reminded that all our times and seasons should point us to the goodness, mercy, and grace of our God, who though eternal is the only true Lord of Time.

The rhythm of weeks, days, months, years, and seasons are all indexed to God’s providence.  And their repetition and, as we get older, their apparent acceleration, awakens in the believers heart an increasing longing for the eternal.  Scripture commands us to, “redeem the times, because the days are evil” and to pray that the Lord would “teach us to number our days aright that we may get a heart of wisdom.”  And yet it calls us to long for that “imperishable, undefiled, and unfading inheritance kept in heaven for those who are guarded by faith.” 

Pastor Phillip Doddridge expressed this longing well.

Your earthly Sabbaths, Lord, we love,
but there’s a nobler rest above;
to that our lab’ring souls aspire
with ardent hope and strong desire.

In thy blest kingdom we shall be
from ev’ry mortal trouble free;
no sighs shall mingle with the songs
Resounding from immortal tongues;

No rude alarms of raging foes;
no cares to break the long repose;
no midnight shade, no waning moon,
but sacred, high, eternal noon.

O long-expected day, begin,
dawn on these realms of woe and sin!
Break, morn of God, upon our eyes;
and let the world’s true Sun arise!

Time is not our tyrant.  It should be, for the believer, the great reminder of God’s abiding faithfulness and of all his gracious promises.   This is why when the people of Israel are brought out of the “iron furnace, out of Egypt, to be a people of his own inheritance,” God establishes a cycle of weekly, monthly, and yearly sacred feasts.  He does this to imprint on every year reminders of his abiding faithfulness and point them through faith to the fulfillment of all his gracious promises in Christ.

In Leviticus 23 we encounter this calendar which includes the Sabbath, the Passover, the Feast of Unleavened Bread, the Firstfruits, Pentecost, the Feast of Trumpets, the Day of Atonement, and the Feast of Booths.  Feasts that both remember and anticipate God’s redemptive faithfulness and promises.  Feasts which are to become the loom on which the fabric of daily life in Israel is to be woven.  Feasts to be repeated as types and shadows, year by year, to instruct the people to have faith in the Christ who will come to fulfill them.

And so, while we have the realities of Christ’s finished work and no longer keep these feasts as types and shadows, the manner in which the people are told to celebrate is, as Paul notes, “written for our instruction” and is “profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction and training in righteousness.”  For indeed, if the people are called to joy and celebration in the Christ to come, how much more are we to rejoice and celebrate his finished work and promised return.

Is time a tyrant for you?  Or a joyful reminder of the grace of God?   Does the fleeting nature of time and the repetition of weeks, days, months, years and seasons make you anxious or expectant?   This week we examine Leviticus 23 and consider how the Lord’s appointed Feasts call God’s people to remember God’s abiding faithfulness and live in expectation of all his gracious promises in Christ. We meet on the square in Pottsville, Arkansas right next to historic Potts’ Inn for worship.  Get directions here or contact us for more info.  Or join us on Facebook Live @PottsvilleARP or YouTube. 

Leviticus 15 is challenging. It speaks of intimate relationships & afflictions. Unobservable yet the most contagious of ritual impurities. An apt picture of the dangers of secret sin. How concerned are you for holiness in your inward being? Join us as we examine Leviticus 15 and consider the dangers of harboring secret sin.

Daddy was the ultimate utilitarian. I know he appreciated beauty.  The beauty of my mother’s sacrificial love for a man often hard to love.  The beauty of growing things.  But the beauty he admired most was order, efficiency, usefulness.  And so, when we gave him gifts, the criteria were clear.  Gifts must be eminently useful.  Shaving supplies, tobacco for his pipe, and dress shirts for his work.

The shaving supplies and tobacco were immediately used.  But the shirts he would put away, in their original packaging, in the top of his chest of drawers.  “When are you going to wear your new shirt, Daddy?” we would ask.  And he would say, “I’m saving that one for my funeral!”   It was a poor joke for children eager to see him enjoy what we had carefully chosen.  But until my father’s current dress shirts were unwearable, the new shirt was not worn.  While not saving it for his funeral, he was saving it.  Setting it apart, preserving it, waiting to use it. But not using it.

The Bible speaks a lot about ‘holiness.’  The words for holiness in the Bible’s original languages speak of something “set apart for special use.”  Holy things were not to be used for common purposes.  In Israel’s ceremonial law, things related to worship: the furnishings of the tabernacle, the priests and their garments, and the sacrifices of the people, were all called holy.  They were special, set apart. 

But they were to be used.  Used every day to teach the people of the depth of sin and the even deeper grace of God to provide atonement by faith in the One to whom they all pointed.  The blood of bulls and goats and the pageantry of the Day of Atonement could not forgive sin.  No, forgiveness came only by faith in the true Day of Atonement that was coming.  That day would occur at Calvary as Jesus bore away our sins once-for-all, the only true sacrifice and high priest.  All the holy things for worship in ancient Israel “prefigured Christ, his graces, actions, sufferings and benefits.”  And so, the Psalmist rightly notes that worship is in the “beauty of holiness.” 

Not only does the Lord, speaking in the Old Testament, call worship ‘holy,’ but he also calls for his people to be “holy ones.”  The beating drum of Leviticus is “You shall be holy [ones], for I the Lord your God am holy.”  Leviticus beautifully describes God’s gracious provision of atonement and forgiveness for his people.  This promised redemption enables them to live graciously and gratefully in his presence.  And in response they are called to glorify and enjoy the Lord by living lives that imitate Him and not the world around them.  Lives that reflect wholehearted love for the Lord and wholehearted love for neighbors and strangers.

Their holiness is not something attained, achieved, earned, or maintained by their efforts.  It is offered to the people graciously.  It is the holiness of another that makes them holy.  Walking in holiness is a work of God’s free grace by which those who are regenerated “grow in grace, perfecting holiness in the fear of God.”  For the unbeliever, the call to “be holy” is an impossible, hateful, burdensome command.  It exhausts and frustrates and embitters the unbelieving soul. 

But to the believer, the call to “be holy” is a beautiful and joyful, “sweeter than honey from the honeycomb, more to be desired than the purest gold.”  It is peace, rest, and beauty.  And yes, sometimes a war within.   But the believer desires to imitate and reflect the beauty of God’s holiness.  Not as the root of God’s favor, but as its fruit.  Walking in holiness is an expression of our chief end to “glorify God and enjoy Him forever.” 

The opening half of Leviticus points to the graciousness of God to forgive sin and cleanse from unrighteousness.  The remainder instructs the people in what it looks like to live as redeemed people.   They are to be holy [ones] because their redeeming God is Holy.   God calls them to love him and to love one another.   Leviticus 19 is an effusive call to walk in this holiness.  Sixteen times they are reminded to be holy because their God is Holy.  They are to imitate, reflect, and reveal God’s grace and glory to the nations. 

While some of the specific commands in Leviticus 19 no longer apply to us because they are part of the ceremonies which pointed to Christ’s finished work this passage is referred to many times in the New Testament.  Jesus quotes this passage when responding to the lawyer’s question about the greatest commandment.  Peter quotes this passage when exhorting believers under fire from a world hostile to the gospel.  And Paul refers often to this passage as does the anonymous author of Hebrews. 

Holiness is a gracious gift, but not to be put away in a drawer saved for some future day.  It is not like my father’s new shirts.  It is a gift to be put on and worn.  Indeed, Paul exhorts us to “put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.” (Ephesians 4:24)  And the author of Hebrews instructs us to “strive for peace with everyone, and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord.” (Hebrews 12:14)

Leviticus 19 paints a beautiful picture of the call for God’s people to walk in holiness, glorifying and enjoying their God, loving and caring for one another, and reflecting and revealing God’s grace to a watching world.  What does the word holiness evoke for you? Impossible demands? Hypocrisy? Nit-picking moralism? Or beauty, love, community, and grace?

The Bible teaches that holiness is a gracious gift that teaches us to love God, love neighbors, and love strangers. Join us as we examine Leviticus 19 and consider the gift of holiness.  We meet on the square in Pottsville, Arkansas right next to historic Potts’ Inn for worship.  Get directions here or contact us for more info.  Or join us on Facebook Live @PottsvilleARP or YouTube. 

Chickens attack it.  Parent’s panic at it.  A surprising number of people faint when they see it.  And Lady MacBeth fixated on it.  Few are indifferent to the sight of blood.  Unless you are a surgeon or a butcher, the sight of blood makes a strong impression.  Bleeding is serious.  It is not to be ignored.  Unstaunched, blood loss has serious consequences.

Blood is an absolute necessity for living creatures.  Your blood keeps you alive.  It supplies oxygen to your cells and cleanses your body of toxins.  The relentless pumping of your heart pushes every blood cell through a complete circuit of your body every 30 seconds.  And those cells circulate for over 100 days before they die and are replaced by new ones.  During your life, your heart will pump over a million barrels of blood.  Blood accounts for 8% of your body weight.  Adults average between 1.2 and 1.5 gallons (10 units) of blood at any given time. And pregnant women have roughly 50% more blood by week 20 of their pregnancy than at conception.

Blood is precious.  It consists mostly of water but cannot be created artificially.   The only source of blood is living bodies.  According to the Red Cross, 36,000 units of blood are needed every day for everything from surgeries to traumatic injuries to cancer treatment.  One unit equals roughly a pint.  Approximately 13.6 million units are collected each year.  And more blood products are provided through plasma donations.  Without blood donations, many of the routine medical procedures we rely on would be impossible.   It is indisputable that life is in the blood.

But blood is more precious than science can observe.  Its life-giving power to our bodies was designed by our Creator to illustrate something much more profound.  Our peace, our forgiveness, our redemption, our eternal lives depend entirely upon the life-giving power of Jesus’ blood, shed for us.  The New Testament reflects continually upon the power of the shed blood of Christ to save.  But it is the Old Testament that first taught God’s people to understand the necessity of blood-sacrifice. 

As Noah and his family emerge from the Ark, the Lord renews covenant with Noah and gives specific instructions about blood.

And God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth and upon every bird of the heavens, upon everything that creeps on the ground and all the fish of the sea. Into your hand they are delivered. Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. And as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything. But you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood. And for your lifeblood I will require a reckoning: from every beast I will require it and from man. From his fellow man I will require a reckoning for the life of man.

Whoever sheds the blood of man,
    by man shall his blood be shed,
for God made man in his own image.

And you, be fruitful and multiply, increase greatly on the earth and multiply in it.  Genesis 9:1-7

And after the Exodus as the people of Israel prepare to leave Sinai, the Lord gives them laws regarding worship, sacrifice, and holiness.  Laws which “prefigure Christ, His graces, actions, sufferings, and benefits.”  In Leviticus 17, the Lord explains the real power of blood.

“For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it for you on the altar to make atonement for your souls, for it is the blood that makes atonement by the life.”  Leviticus 17:11

Interestingly, this is one of the few ceremonial laws reaffirmed in the New Testament by the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15.   However, Jesus shocks and offends many of his disciples in John 6 when he commands them, by faith, to partake of his blood.

So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever feeds on me, he also will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like the bread the fathers ate, and died. Whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.” John 6:53-58

Blood is precious.  The author of Hebrews reminds us that “without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.”  How precious is this blood to you?  Leviticus 17 opens the final section of Leviticus, often called the “Holiness Code,” with a poignant reminder that the Christian life is all of grace.   The call to holiness and obedience is empowered and animated by the grace of God.  By blood we abide, experience at-one-ment, and receive peace and life.

Blood is indeed precious.  Join us as we examine Leviticus 17 and consider the life-giving power of blood.  We meet on the square in Pottsville, Arkansas right next to historic Potts’ Inn for worship.  Get directions here or contact us for more info.  Or join us on Facebook Live @PottsvilleARP or YouTube. 

Who is more hopeful than a farmer? If anyone had cause to be pessimistic it is the farmer.  A thousand enemies of his hope for a harvest lurk in storm clouds, soaring mercury, invasive tares, broken and breaking equipment, infertile seed or crop land, floods, droughts, pests, broken supply chains, and sheer exhaustion.  Old-timers say, “the farmer must plant three times more than he hopes to harvest.  A third for the pests, a third for the weather, and a third for himself.”   And recently I heard a local farmer comment that “in Arkansas you are always two weeks from a drought.”

Who is more hopeful than the farmer?  Who year after year prepares the ground, plants the seeds, attempts to cultivate and irrigate then waits for a process to unfold in the depths of the ground over which he has absolutely no power.  It is a mystery to us that a crop ever makes it to harvest.  Jesus compared this mystery to the kingdom of God, saying, “The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground. He sleeps and rises night and day, and the seed sprouts and grows; he knows not how.”  Yet the farmer lives by the Scripture that commands “the plowman should plow in hope.”

Yet there is one whose hope is even more radical, more enduring, and more consuming than the farmer.  And that is the believer in Jesus Christ.   Compared to the adversity faced by the farmer, the condition of a totally depraved man, living in a fallen world with a fallen nature, dead in sins and transgressions seems indisputably hopeless.  Like Jesus’ disciples we are tempted to say, “who then can be saved?”  And the cry of Paul resonates.

For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing….  Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?

Romans 7:18-19, 24

Indeed who, or what, can deliver us from our enslavement to sin and misery?  From brokenness, sorrow, weariness, fear, and futility?  But Paul’s existential question does not go unanswered.  The hopeless condition Paul described is followed with an unshakable hope that our sin and misery need not be terminal.  

Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!.. There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.  Romans 7:25-8:1

The Christian is even more hopeful than the farmer because all the promises of God are “Yes and Amen” in Jesus Christ.  Promises of forgiveness, redemption, reconciliation, and relationship with our God.  Promises accessed through faith in Christ.  Promises made and kept by our faithful God.  

Nowhere in the Old Testament is the saving work of Christ promised more clearly than in the instructions regarding the Day of Atonement in Leviticus 16.  The Westminster Confession of Faith declares that the ceremonial laws “prefigured Christ, His graces, actions, sufferings, and benefits.”   And though they are “now abrogated under the New Testament,” Paul reminds us that these were written for our instruction.

Christ is preached in the Old Testament.  He himself declared this in John 5:39 when he told the Pharisees, “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me.”   Leviticus 16 prefigures Christ, His graces, actions, sufferings, and benefits with remarkable clarity both by way of explanation and contrast.  And in Hebrews 9, the inspired author gives us a clear exposition of the work of Christ based on an explanation and contrast with Leviticus 16. 

All our hope is rooted in the finished work of Christ as our redeemer.  A sufficient and finished work pictured vividly by the Day of Atonement.  Are you struggling with hope?  Are you drowning in sin and misery, sure there is no hope for you?  Has your sin, brokenness, fear, sorrow, or futility plunged you into despair?  If so, you need to know that there has been a Day of Atonement.  A day on which “for our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” A day on which “a fountain [was] opened… to cleanse them from sin and uncleanness.”  A day on which Christ declared, “it is finished.”

Join us as we examine Leviticus 16 and consider the Day of Atonement, why it was needed, what it involved, when it would be fulfilled. We meet on the square in Pottsville, Arkansas right next to historic Potts’ Inn for worship.  Get directions here or contact us for more info.  Or join us on Facebook Live @PottsvilleARP or YouTube. 

A young child’s strategy is simple.  “If I can’t see you, then I can’t be seen.”  Standing in a corner with hands over their eyes.  Or out of the way with a sheet over their head.  Underneath an open table or forming a toddler-shaped lump behind the curtains.   All these seem effective to the three-year-old playing hide-and-seek.   But as we grow, we get better at concealment.  Hide-and-seek with older children often ends in a stalemate.  As darkness falls and bedtimes approach, we call them to declare the game over and their hiding victorious.

We all learn to conceal what we don’t want others to see or know.  Often this is important and appropriate.  We conceal our passwords.  We secure our valuables. We protect our health information.  We guard our thoughts, feelings, and history from those who have no right to access them.  Or who would misuse them.  And the scripture even warns us that there is a time to withhold words.  Ecclesiastes tells us there is a “time to keep silence.”  And the proverb exhorts us “answer not a fool according to his folly, lest you be like him yourself.”  Even Jesus instructed us, “do not throw your pearls before pigs, lest they trample them underfoot and turn to attack you.”

Concealment is often right and necessary in some earthly relationships.   But concealment never has a place in our relationship with our Heavenly Father.  Attempts to ignore or conceal our sin are of course futile since we live our lives Coram Deo, before the face of God.  But more than that confession and repentance are gracious gifts provided for our healing and cleansing from the soul-crushing weight of sin that clings so easily and entangles us.  

The Proverb reminds us.

 Whoever conceals his transgressions will not prosper,
    but he who confesses and forsakes them will obtain mercy. Prov 28:13

And the Psalmist speaks of the blessing of confession and forgiveness.

Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven,
    whose sin is covered.
Blessed is the man against whom the Lord counts no iniquity,
    and in whose spirit there is no deceit. Psalm 32:1-2

We are given a great promise in 1 John 1:9, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”

While it is hard to conceal the sinfulness of our words and actions, the secret sins of our hidden lives, concealed from others often remain unadressed and unconfessed.  Yet we are instructed in 2 Corinthians 10:5 to take every thought captive.   How careful are you to address the sin in your life that no one sees but the Lord?   How concerned are you for holiness in your thought life and in the intimate details of your private life?

Leviticus 15 is a challenging passage.  It speaks of bodily processes that flow from the most intimate of our relationships as well as private afflictions.   Hidden actions and conditions which, though not sinful, are yet declared ritually unclean.  They are unobserved and unobservable by others.  Yet they are the most contagious forms of all the ritual impurities described in Leviticus 11-15.  Impurities no one knows about or sees.  But the Lord knows and sees.   And so ritual, washings, and sacrifices are prescribed to restore the unclean to fellowship and to celebrate the grace of God.  While these ceremonial, ritual purity laws are no longer binding instructions for believers, the Westminster Confession of Faith rightly notes their continuing value for us.

God was pleased to give to the people of Israel, as a church under age, ceremonial laws, containing several typical ordinances, partly of worship, prefiguring Christ, His graces, actions, sufferings, and benefits; and partly holding forth divers instructions of moral duties. All which ceremonial laws are now abrogated under the New Testament.

– Westminster Confession of Faith 19.3

The purity laws illustrate powerfully the extent of depravity yet even more the “graces, actions, sufferings, and benefits of Christ.”  And as Pastor Andrew Bonar noted these purity laws exhibit, “the subject of sin – its existence in the world all around us… its transmission, its vileness, original sin in all its deformity and the mode of putting away this loathsome evil.”

Join us as we examine Leviticus 15 and consider the dangers of harboring secret sin. We meet on the square in Pottsville, Arkansas right next to historic Potts’ Inn for worship.  Get directions here or contact us for more info.  Or join us on Facebook Live @PottsvilleARP or YouTube.