📖 Old Testament Survey — Unit 2: Redemption and Holiness (Exodus & Leviticus)

I. Out of Egypt: The Book of Exodus

Genesis is the book that exposes our need; Exodus is the book in which God acts. The family of seventy that came down to Egypt at the close of Genesis has grown, by the opening verses of Exodus, into a nation of perhaps two million souls — and they are slaves. A new pharaoh sits on the throne "who did not know Joseph" (Exodus 1:8), and he means to grind the Hebrews into the brick of his empire. For four hundred years they cry. And at the burning bush God speaks a sentence that has carried His people ever since: "I have surely seen the affliction of My people who are in Egypt, and have heard their cry" (Exodus 3:7). Heaven is not deaf, and never has been. If Genesis told us what we needed, Exodus tells us what God does.

A. Moses: The Reluctant Voice

Moses' story begins where every redemption story begins — in a place where life is not supposed to survive. Pharaoh has decreed the death of every Hebrew baby boy, and Moses' mother sets him in a basket on the Nile. The princess of Egypt finds him, draws him out of the water, and (this is one of the great quiet jokes of Scripture) hires Moses' own mother to nurse him on Pharaoh's payroll. If you have not yet noticed that God has a sense of humor, you have not been reading carefully.

Moses lived for one hundred and twenty years, and his life divides neatly into three equal blocks of forty. In the first forty, as Pharaoh's adopted son, he learned how to be SOMEBODY. In the second forty, on the back side of Midian's desert tending sheep, he learned how to be a NOBODY. And in the third forty, as the leader of the LORD's redeemed people, he learned that GOD WAS EVERYBODY — the One he would speak to face to face, as a man speaks to his friend. God spent eighty years getting Moses ready for forty. Some of us are still in our second forty, wondering why nothing is happening. Nothing is wasted.

At eighty Moses meets the LORD in a bush that burns without burning up. God reveals His name: "I AM WHO I AM" (Exodus 3:14). Yahweh — self-existent, eternal, faithful, dependent on no one for His being, the same yesterday, today, and forever. Moses, characteristically, looks for the exit. "Who am I?" God answers: I will be with you. "What if they don't believe me?" God answers with the serpent and the leprous hand. "I am not eloquent." God answers: Who made man's mouth? Finally Moses says, in effect, "Lord, You had better get someone else." That is the line where God's anger kindles (Exodus 4:14). The Lord is never troubled when you draw back at first. He made you to feel inadequate, so that you would lean on Him. But after He has answered every objection and you still say "find someone else," you have insulted Him by saying, "I do not think You can do it either."

B. The Plagues and the Passover Lamb

Pharaoh refuses to let Israel go, and God goes to war — not against Egypt's army but against Egypt's gods. Each of the ten plagues lands on a specific deity in the Egyptian pantheon. The Nile (Hapi) becomes blood. The frogs (Heqet) overrun the land. The sun (Ra) is darkened at noon. By the time the tenth plague is announced, the gods of Egypt lie in pieces.

Four times the Bible says God hardened Pharaoh's heart; three times it says Pharaoh hardened his own heart. Which was it? It was both. The same sun that will melt a ball of wax will harden a ball of clay. The sun is the same; the nature of each object is different. Pharaoh's heart was hard before God ever spoke to him, and every word from the LORD only set what was already there.

The tenth plague is different. It will fall on every house — Egyptian and Hebrew alike — unless a lamb is slain in place of the firstborn. The lamb must be without blemish. Its blood is to be brushed on the doorposts and lintel of the home. When the angel of death sees the blood, he passes over. The Hebrews did not eat the blood; they did not feel the blood; they applied the blood, then sat down inside the house and trusted that it was enough. That is what saving faith has always looked like. The lamb stood in the firstborn's place — a substitute, dying so the family might live. "Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness" (Hebrews 9:22).

We are picking up the thread we began to trace in Unit 1. Eden's garments of skin, Abel's slaughtered firstborn, Noah's altar, Moriah's ram — and now the lamb on the doorpost. The Scarlet Thread runs straight from the garden into Egyptian streets that night, and it will not stop until Calvary. The Passover lamb without blemish, slain so the firstborn might live, is the first corporate, public, liturgical portrait of "the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world" (John 1:29). What God did privately in Eden when He killed the first animal to clothe Adam and Eve, He now does for a whole nation in one night — and what He did for a whole nation in one night, He will one day do for the whole world on one Friday afternoon.

C. The Red Sea: The Way Out Was Through

Israel leaves Egypt in haste, and Pharaoh — having lost a son — decides he would rather lose an army than lose his slaves. He pursues. The people find themselves caught between the sea in front and the chariots behind, which happens to be the classic position of every soul that has begun to follow God seriously. Moses speaks one of the great lines of the Old Testament: "The LORD will fight for you, and you have only to be silent" (Exodus 14:14). And then, in the very next breath, the LORD says to Moses, "Tell the people of Israel to go forward" (Exodus 14:15). Faith is not folded arms.

The waters part, the people walk through on dry ground, the army is drowned, and Israel — who entered the sea a slave-mob — comes out the other side a nation. Paul will read this scene as the Old Testament's portrait of Christian baptism: "Our fathers were all… baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea" (1 Corinthians 10:1–2). Salvation here is by grace alone — God parts the water, God closes the water, God fights the battle — and yet the people had to walk. There is a Red Sea place in many believers' lives, where the only way out really is through. And notice — Israel does not sing in Egypt. Egypt has no songs. The first song in the Bible after Genesis is sung on the far shore of the sea, in Exodus 15. Real deliverance always finds a song.

D. Sinai: A God Who Cannot Be Talked Out of His Holiness

Three months out of Egypt, Israel arrives at Mount Sinai, and the mountain itself begins to shake. Lightning, smoke, the blast of a trumpet that grows louder rather than fading. Out of that thunder God speaks ten words. The first four govern the vertical relationship — no other gods, no images, no taking the Name in vain, remember the Sabbath. The last six govern the horizontal — honor parents, do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not bear false witness, do not covet (Exodus 20). Love God; love neighbor. Jesus will later compress all ten back to those two (Matthew 22:37–40). The Decalogue is the constitution of the redeemed.

The Law was never a ladder up to heaven. "Through the law comes knowledge of sin" (Romans 3:20). It is a mirror, not a ladder. But the mirror tells the truth, and the truth at Sinai is that the God you and I have to deal with is unchangeable. He cannot be flattered into looking the other way. He cannot be bargained down. He cannot be talked out of His holiness. That is terrifying when you stand in front of Him with your sins, and it is the deepest comfort in the world when you stand in front of Him under the blood of His own Son. The same unchangeable God who will not lower the bar will also never retract the promise.

E. The Tabernacle: God Comes Down to Live Among Us

If Sinai shows us how high heaven is, the tabernacle shows us how far heaven is willing to come down. "Let them make Me a sanctuary, that I may dwell in their midst" (Exodus 25:8). The instructions for the tabernacle take up the last third of Exodus — far more space than the plagues and Passover combined — because the goal of redemption was never simply out of Egypt; the goal was into the presence of God.

The tabernacle had three zones: the outer court, where the people could come; the Holy Place, where the priests served daily; and the Holy of Holies, where God Himself was enthroned and only the high priest could enter, only once a year, and never without blood. Inside the Holy of Holies stood the ark of the covenant, a gold-overlaid chest containing the tablets of the Law. On its lid sat the mercy seat, flanked by two cherubim with their wings stretched out over it. On the Day of Atonement, blood was sprinkled on that mercy seat — blood standing between the broken Law inside the ark and the holy God enthroned above it. That is the gospel preached in furniture. The Law condemns; the blood covers; God meets His people there. And the writer of Hebrews tells us we now have something Israel could only watch from a distance: "we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus" (Hebrews 10:19).

II. The Book of Leviticus: Living with Holy Fire

Most Christians who set out to read the Bible cover to cover are stopped somewhere in Leviticus. The book seems an endless catalogue of sacrifices, skin diseases, and dietary laws. But Leviticus is not a list. It is the answer to a problem that Exodus has just created. God has come down to dwell with Israel in the tabernacle. So how does a sinful people live next door to a holy God without being consumed?

The whole book turns on one sentence, and the New Testament will quote it back to the church without changing a word: "You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy" (Leviticus 19:2; cf. 1 Peter 1:16). Holiness is not, at root, moral perfection. It is separation — being set apart unto God — and out of that separation, moral conduct flows. Israel was to be holy because she belonged to a holy God; she was to imitate Him among the nations.

The five main offerings — burnt, grain, peace, sin, and trespass — are five different angles on the one cross still to come. The dietary and purity codes teach Israel, by daily reminder, that her God is not like the gods of the nations. And the heart of the book is a single verse on which all the rest of the sacrificial system hangs: "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). Atonement requires a life given in the place of another. A life for a life. The blood is the proof that the substitute has died.

The Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur)

The book climaxes in chapter sixteen, on the Day of Atonement. Once a year, the high priest entered the Holy of Holies with the blood of a bull and a goat, and made atonement for the nation at the mercy seat. Then a second goat was brought forward. The priest laid both hands on its head, confessing over it the sins of the people, and the goat — the scapegoat — was led far out into the wilderness, carrying away what no one in Israel could carry himself. Two goats, one truth: sin must die, and sin must be sent away. The blood and the substitute. The death and the imputation — for the priest's hands transferred the people's guilt onto the goat the way our guilt was transferred to Christ at the cross.

The Day of Atonement is the next great station on the Scarlet Thread. What was prefigured at Eden, Abel, Noah's altar, Moriah, and the doorposts of Egypt now becomes a national, annual liturgy — and points to one final Day still to come. The writer of Hebrews stands at the door of that tabernacle and tells us what really happened on the day all those rituals pointed to: Christ entered "once for all into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves but by means of His own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption" (Hebrews 9:12). Every animal that ever died on an Israelite altar was a promissory note. The Lamb of God paid the bill in full.

III. Christ in Exodus and Leviticus — Two Convictions

Trace the line through these two books and you find Him on every page. He is the Passover Lamb whose blood makes the angel of death pass us by. He is the Red Sea through which we pass out of bondage and into a new life. He is the Rock in the wilderness from which living water flows (1 Corinthians 10:4). He is the Mercy Seat where the Law's accusation is silenced by blood. He is the scapegoat who carries our sins where they will never be found again. He is the Great High Priest who has entered the holy place not once a year but once for all, and who lives forever to make intercession for those who come to God through Him (Hebrews 7:25).

Two convictions to take from this unit. First, grace comes before law. God did not give Israel the Ten Commandments and then deliver them out of Egypt if they kept them. He delivered them out of Egypt by the blood of a lamb, and then gave them the Law as the family code of a people already redeemed. Salvation is by grace; obedience is the response of the saved. Exodus comes first; Sinai second. The order is the gospel. Second, the same God who cannot lower His holiness also cannot retract His mercy. The Law in the ark, the mercy seat above it, the blood between them — that is the architecture of the gospel, and the books of Exodus and Leviticus are where you and I learn to read it.

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