Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript: Work and Holiness

Leviticus chapter 2. Our sermon topic is work in holiness. There are sermon notes provided in the foyer. Leviticus chapter 2. Please stand for the reading of God’s word.

When anyone offers a grain offering to the Lord, his offering shall be of fine flour. He shall pour oil on it and put frankincense on it. He shall bring it to Aaron’s sons, the priests, one of whom shall take from it his handful of fine flour and oil with all the frankincense.

And the priest shall burn it as a memorial on the altar, an offering made by fire, a sweet aroma to the Lord. The rest of the grain offering shall be Aaron’s and his sons. It is most holy of the offerings to the Lord made by fire. And if you bring as an offering a grain offering baked in the oven, it shall be unleavened cakes of fine flour mixed with oil or unleavened wafers anointed with oil. But if your offering is a grain offering baked in a pan, it shall be of fine flour unleavened mixed with oil.

You shall break it in pieces and pour oil on it as a grain offering. If your offering is a grain offering baked in a covered pan, it shall be made of fine flour with oil. You shall bring the grain offering that is made of these things to the Lord. And when it is presented to the priest, he shall bring it to the altar. Then the priest shall take from the grain offering a memorial portion and burn it on the altar.

It is an offering made by fire, a sweet aroma to the Lord. And what is left of the grain offering shall be Aaron’s and his sons. It is most holy of the offerings to the Lord made by fire. No grain offering which you bring to the Lord shall be made with leaven. For you shall burn no leaven nor any honey in any offering to the Lord made by fire. As for the offering of the first fruits, you shall offer them to the Lord.

But they shall not be burned on the altar for a sweet aroma. And every offering of your grain offering you shall season with salt. You shall not allow the salt of the covenant of your God to be lacking from your grain offering. With all your offerings you shall offer salt. If you offer a grain offering of your first fruits to the Lord, you shall offer for the grain offering of your first fruits green heads of grain roasted on the fire, grain beaten from full heads.

Then you shall put oil on it and lay frankincense on it. It is a grain offering. Then the priest shall burn the memorial portion, part of its beaten grain and part of its oil with all the frankincense as an offering made by fire to the Lord.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for bringing us together today. We thank you, Lord God, for the brightness of the countenance that shines upon us from on high. We thank you for the work of the Savior. We thank you for the gift of the Holy Spirit that makes all things new. We thank you for this new creation in which we walk, affected by our Savior two thousand years ago. Help us, Father, now to be transformed by the power of your word and spirit that we might indeed work in this new creation with proper motivation and with proper eschatology in mind. In Jesus’ name we ask it, and for the sake of the manifestation of his kingdom. Amen.

Please be seated.

I begin today a three-part series on work. Today, work and holiness, taken from the so-called cereal or grain offering. We’ll call it the tribute offering, and explain that in just a minute. Next week, as your announcements indicate, we’ll be looking at Proverbs chapters 22 and 23 and look at work and wisdom. And then the following week, I’ll conclude this three-part series on work by talking about work and dominion from Zechariah 1:18 to 21.

But I want to start off today by talking about work and holiness based upon the tribute offering.

Now in your version, in most translations of Leviticus 2, verse 1, when anyone offers a grain offering to the Lord, the particular word used here that’s translated grain is minka. Minka does not mean grain, doesn’t mean cereal, doesn’t mean wheat—none of those things. The translation grain offering is simply a reference to the fact that the offering is made up of grain. So the translator, not knowing what minka might mean, decided instead just to call it a grain offering because that’s what it’s made out of. Very poor translation.

I read the translation as it comes from these versions of the scriptures we use, but I think it would have been proper to have read that as tribute offering, because the word minka is used several places in the Old Testament, and that’s what it means. When Israel conquers the Moabites, the Moabites are required to bring a minka—an offering, a tribute offering—to the Israelites. Apart from the sacrificial system, minkas actually can be bloody animals, but not in the sacrificial system.

Ehud, when he kills Eglon—you know, he goes into the king Eglon and remember he stabs him—it’s a very exciting story for young boys, a great Old Testament story. Well, Ehud was supposed to bring a tribute to Eglon. Eglon, the king of Moab, was in charge of Israel at that time. And Ehud, the judge of Israel, was supposed to bring a minka, a tribute. So the idea of a minka is that it’s from an inferior to a superior. It’s a tribute that a vassal would pay to a sovereign who’s conquered them. You’d pay them tax every year to make sure they don’t come and kill you. That kind of thing.

Now in our perspective then, this cereal or grain offering is a tribute offering. It’s a loving tax, one way to think of it. God requires tribute as part of the offering system. But of course, for us it is not a fearful buying of God off. Rather, it’s a loving tax, a loving tribute paid to our sovereign.

And I want to talk today seven comments on the implications of this particular part of scripture. But we need to look at Psalm 50 first, verse 5, if you would. We did this in the question and answer period last week, but I don’t think we did it in the sermon. And you know, this has relationship. We have to understand Leviticus 2 and what it means for work. We’ve got to put it in its proper context and understand worship and the flow of worship and what we do every Lord’s day.

Psalm 50:5 says, “Gather my saints together unto me, those that have made a covenant with me by sacrifice.” The implications of the scriptures are that God comes at regularly stated intervals, once a week, to remake covenant with us, to renew the covenant with us. This covenant is renewed by sacrifice. Now, we think sacrifice and we think dead animals, but of course, this psalm goes on to talk about God saying, “I don’t need animals. Offer me the sacrifice of your praise and of your lips and of a righteous life.” Now he desired sacrifice in terms of animal death and this tribute offering at a particular stage in redemptive history. But the idea is that covenant renewal happens when the Lord comes with his people and receives their praise and worship.

So what happens here on Sunday? Every Lord’s day is what is known as covenant renewal worship. This is becoming a bit of a buzzword. Churches in the CR, the denomination in which we find ourselves, are more and more talking about covenant renewal. I spoke on covenant renewal worship in Poland when I was there two weeks ago. And so this is what we do—covenant renewal worship. And I’ve got the covenantal transformation of worship.

Now what do we do in covenant renewal worship in the New Testament? What do we do? Well, what we do is the same thing that’s happened for six thousand years. I explained this to my Proverbs class earlier today with the young teens. You know, you’re born, and then at about twelve, thirteen, fourteen, you go through puberty and you change. You’re transformed, and now you become an adult. Then you get to my age, and if you’re a woman, you go through menopause. If you’re a man, you go through whatever it is we go through—I don’t know if there’s a name for it, but big hormonal changes, and you change. You’re transformed in three major phases of your life. And we could talk about the implications of that for the offices of Christ, but understand it now as an illustration. You’re the same man, but you’re being transformed through these different changes.

And of course, there’s lots of being transformed every Lord’s day. But as a picture of this, the worship of God by his creatures is the same from the garden. We could look at the garden as an example and go right through the Bible. It’s all the same worship. It’s all God’s people renewing covenant with him and being given gifts by him and praising him. But it goes through a series of transformations in the covenantal periods of the Old Testament. Because of the fall, everything’s lost, and now it’s being recovered.

And so the transformation of worship that happens at different covenantal periods in the scriptures is a picture to us of what Christ will fully usher in and what New Testament worship will look like. Right?

So we have patriarchal worship at first. We have, you know, this worship that goes on, and then God replaces family leaders with Levites, a special tribe of people. We go from the Adamic covenant, and then we get up there to the Mosaic covenant, and now we’ve got new priests and we have to have a law for those priests in terms of what they do, and everything changes. That’s where Leviticus comes in. It’s how to worship under this new covenant administration of a particular priesthood known as Levites. And then, as we’ve talked about a lot in this church, when it gets around to David’s time—the Davidic covenant, the major renewal of covenant realities—then again, a major transformation in worship happens.

Remember the tabernacle of David is set up at Mount Zion. We just read responsively a psalm that, you know, up until you heard this teaching of the tabernacle of David, you probably thought referred to David talking about temple worship. But there was no temple worship in David’s life—that was Solomon who would build the temple. And the psalm we just read responsively is a picture of this transformation of worship, because it talks about worshiping right in the presence of God.

Where’s my responsive reading here? It is. I noticed this as we were reading this verse 13 of what we read responsively: “The Lord has chosen Zion.” And if you’ve been here long, you know that Zion was not the temple mount. Mount Moriah was very explicitly told us in the scriptures. Zion was where David set up a temple, a tabernacle for worship. And the only thing from the tabernacle that Moses had constructed that was at the tabernacle of David was the ark of the covenant. The rest was out at Gibeon—animal sacrifices going on out there. This doesn’t surprise us really. It’s a transformation of worship as the people of God in history go through different perspectives, showing us what Christ will usher in at the end of time.

Verse 7 of the responsive reading of Psalm 132: “Let us go into his tabernacle. Let us worship at his footstool. Arise, O Lord, to your resting place. You are in the ark of your strength.” What’s he talking about, going to your tabernacle? Is he talking about the tabernacle that Moses had constructed? Or maybe it’s a reference to the temple? Neither. It’s talking about another tent—the tent of worship that David established on Mount Zion.

And it says there that arise, come into your resting place. This is the entrance of the ark from the old covenant temple tabernacle system into Mount Zion, and that’s the only thing that is at that worship center, and that’s where worship happens for forty years. It’s a transformation. “Let us worship at his footstool.” Remember that in David’s transformation of worship, the middle wall, the veil between the people, the holy place, and the holy of holies is gone. The worshippers have direct access to the ark of God. They worship at his footstool. That’s what’s being described in Psalm 132.

We don’t know our Bibles. So this stuff confuses us, but it’s not hard to understand. There’s a single worship of God. The lamb of God that Abel offers will become the Lamb of God, Jesus Christ, at the end of time—or the end of the days, two thousand years ago now—that took away the sin of the world, definitively brought about the new creation. And from that single lamb of Abel, that light will come through and become—we’ll see that really what it was pointing to was the blood of Christ. It speaks better things than the blood of Abel.

In the providence of God, this single beam of light is refracted through prisms. And the Levitical system is a prism through which the worship of God is refracted. And it tells us about aspects of Christ’s work. All these things that we read in Leviticus are what Jesus will accomplish definitively through his single offering on the cross two thousand years ago. But it’s refracted out so that we have full comprehension. It is to our shame. It would be our folly. It would be to our detriment not to understand the Levitical system so we understand what Christ has accomplished for us.

So that’s the context for talking about the tribute offering and work. We’re in covenant renewal worship. What we do here is important.

Now I know that this is a message and I’m going to be speaking the rest of my days, but I will speak it regularly from this pulpit: What we do in worship is important. We have a lot of summer movies going, a lot of people going to the movies, big hit movies coming out. It is nothing for our teens to go to a movie, sit two and a half hours without going to the bathroom. Not difficult if you’re watching the Matrix Reloaded. Somehow it becomes a little more difficult in this building. I don’t know. You know, we don’t have water themes or I don’t know why it’s so difficult, but it seems to be difficult because we don’t understand the importance, the significance, of the worship of God.

We should be focused during the worship. We should understand the elements of the service and how God is ministering his grace to us, his gifts, you know, of life and glory and knowledge. We should understand what’s happening. We should be attentive to the transforming power of the word preached. We should be attentive when preparation for communion is going on. We should be thinking about it, preparing our hearts. What we do here is important. It has significance. It’s the height of our calling as redeemed humanity to praise God in the convocated host that are worshiping him in covenant renewal worship.

This is significant. If God doesn’t renew covenant with us, where are we? We’re kind of lost then. This is significant. Pay attention. Be fully present. Okay? In body certainly, but also in your mind and with your spirit. Prepare Saturday night for meeting here. Don’t go to bed late, etc. And be careful.

Psalm 50, let’s look at this verse where we read this verse about renewing covenant, verses 14 and following: “Offer unto God thanksgiving. Pay thy vows to the most high. Call upon me in the day of trouble. I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify me. But unto the wicked God says, ‘What hast thou to do to declare my statutes, so that thou shouldest take my covenant in thy mouth, seeing thou hatest instruction, and castest my words behind me? When thou sawest the thief, then thou didst consent with him, and hast been partaker with adulterers. Thou givest thy mouth to evil, and thy tongue frames deceit. Thou criest and speakest against thy brother and slanderest thine own mother’s son.’”

Okay, so I’m not a thief. I’m not an adulterer. But how did you use your tongue this past week? You see, did you use your tongue to slander your own mother’s son? These things that thou hast done, and I kept silent. Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such a one as thyself. But I will reprove thee and set them in order before thine eyes.

When in covenant renewal worship, you see, be careful before you take the covenant upon your lips. Consider this: ye that forget God, lest I tear you in pieces, and there be none to deliver you. Whoso offers praise glorifies me. To him that orderth his conversation aright will I show the salvation of God.

You’re going to take the covenant of God in your mouth here by the end of this service. Do so carefully. Do so carefully. Pay attention. Understand what’s happening. Be joyful. Glorify God. He’ll accept your praise. The last verse says, you know, he wants you to praise him, but he also wants you to order your conversation aright. You see, covenant renewal worship is not some abstract, unrelated part of your life. It is directly related to the rest of the week. Or it should be, if your elders do their jobs correctly. This service should be properly seen as preparing you for your mission to go into the world this week.

And today’s topic, I think, is very easy to make this kind of application. And if I fail, then I’ve failed miserably, because the scriptures are so clear.

Now, before we get into the implications of work—well, this is already getting into the implications of work. The second point in your outline: I referenced Leviticus 1 and 2, and Abel and Cain.

Now, I’ve talked about the transformation of worship, and Leviticus is giving us a prism, and it breaks out several aspects of Christ’s work. The very first offering in Leviticus is what’s called the whole burnt offering. Again, it’s poorly translated. The word in the Hebrew means to ascend. It’s the offering that pictures the transformation of men from one state to another. The cow represents you—lean on it. That’s you identify with it. It’s killed, but that’s not the end of the game. The purpose of the ascension offering is not the death of the bull. It’s the transformation of the bull so that he can ascend and live in God’s presence. That’s the purpose of the ascension offering. That’s offering one.

Leviticus 2 is offering two. It’s this tribute offering. Now, this is a point of transformation. I said that patriarchal worship is described for us first in the offerings of Abel and Cain.

Hopefully, remember that Abel brings a member of the flock—we could say a lamb or could be a goat, but a member of the flock, not Cain’s flock, sheep, that kind of thing. Cain brings grain products. He brings what he grows. God has regard for Abel’s offering, but not Cain’s offering. Now, that’s not the end of the story.

You came here today with a bad attitude or didn’t worship God correctly, and God comes to you this afternoon and says, “Why is your countenance fallen? If you do what’s right, you’ll be approved.” You’re able to forgive sin. The wonderful thing about sin is it can be forgiven and left behind. See, so it’s not the end of it. But God has no regard for Cain’s offering. Why?

Cain’s offering is a grain offering without an animal offering. Leviticus 1 and 2, in this transformation that it’s going to discuss for us, tells us that indeed those first two primeval offerings are the first two that are pictured in Leviticus 1 and 2 in this new system that’s being established, transforming the same worship from the beginning of the Bible to the end. There’s this relationship between Cain and Abel and between Leviticus 1 and 2. And we’ll talk a little bit more about that as we proceed.

Three: the sweet-smelling tribute offering and ascension and peace offering. So we’ve linked this offering back to Cain and Abel.

Another thing you need to know, or would be good for you to know, is that as Leviticus opens, it opens with five offerings: the ascension, the tribute, then the peace offering. And then something different happens. Look at Leviticus 4:1. Actually look at chapter 1, verse 1, first. “The Lord called unto Moses and spake unto him out of the tabernacle of the congregation, saying, ‘Speak unto the children of Israel.’” That’s chapter 1. And that’s what goes on through 1 through 3. And then in chapter 4, we read, “The Lord spake unto Moses saying, ‘Speak unto the children of Israel, saying…’”

So verse 1 says the Lord called to Moses and said. Chapter 4, for the first time in Leviticus, says, “The Lord spake unto Moses.” Well, that’s not much different, Dennis, but it is a difference, you see. And it marks chapter 4 off as the beginning of a new literary section. Chapters 4 and 5 describe the sin and trespass offerings, but they’re a separate section. Chapters 1, 2, and 3 are linked together as one section from God.

Another way that chapters 1, 2, and 3 are linked together is that each of those offerings is said to be a sweet-smelling savor unto the Lord. Chapters 4 and 5—the sin and trespass offering—are not said to be sweet-smelling savors unto the Lord. So the first three are, and then a literary break, and the next two, which we call the purification or sin and trespass offerings. These are specifically oriented to sin, things you do wrong, whether you intended or not. These chapters 4 and 5.

Chapters 1, 2, and 3 are not specifically referenced to sin. They have to do with ascension, with proper tribute offering to God, and then the peace offering. We’re familiar with those offerings in this church. At least if you’re visiting, this is not difficult. It’s real easy. You got three: ascension, the transformation of who we are; the tribute offering in chapter 2; chapter 3 is the peace offering. And they go together because those are the sweet-smelling offerings.

Now, what’s the significance of this? Well, I think the significance is that with or without the fall of Adam, and I think it’s okay to talk that way. Jesus said to Jerusalem, “Oh, I would that you would do this. I would that I would gather you like a mother gathers her chicks, but you wouldn’t have it.” I think it’s legitimate biblically to talk about things like what would have happened if this.

And I think that what this means, or can be implied to mean, is that even if Adam doesn’t sin, the ascension offering, the tribute offering, and the peace offering still represent realities in terms of covenant renewal that God would make with Adam on the Lord’s day. When he went up to meet with Adam, Adam would be transformed and mature in each of these areas. Adam was to go from glory to glory. He was to move to a discernment of good and evil. He wasn’t to be a static, Greek idea of what heaven is. No, Adam was supposed to mature in his knowledge of things. And he was to exercise dominion based on that knowledge.

With or without the fall, these first three offerings are very significant to covenant renewal worship—they’re kind of the main center. The other two get us ready to worship, but these three are placed forward and represent implications for Adam’s life. Adam would have matured. Adam would have brought tribute to God even without a fall and sin and all that stuff. He would have given God a tribute offering, I believe. And he would have been at peace with God.

When God came to be with him on the Lord’s day in that first Sabbath, God intended to have a meal with Adam. He intended to cause him to mature. He intended to give him a kingly crown to wear and go on into the future and do more good things with. He intended to receive Adam’s tribute of his work that he had done that week. And he intended to be at peace with Adam, to have a meal with him.

So these first three offerings are not taking care of sin. We take care of sin so that we can move to the application of these offerings. Okay.

Well, another text that people are talking about a lot these days, and I was in Poland, I found out that Doug Wilson had written an article on covenant renewal worship that I hadn’t read in Credenda/Agenda some time back, and they translate into Polish, and he talks about Leviticus 9:22 as the pattern for our worship.

Let’s turn to Leviticus 9:22. He talks correctly about this. We’ve talked about that here. We preached on Leviticus 9:22. And in fact, that was one of the things I was going to pull in to speak on: Leviticus 9:22 is the basic pattern of how worship is to work. Okay? So you understand that there’s worship that goes on prior to Leviticus to the patriarchs. There’s worship that’ll happen later at the tabernacle of David. There’s worship where the tabernacle of David is wedded to the temple sacrifices after David. And then there’s worship in the New Testament.

And how are we going to order New Testament worship? Well, Leviticus 9:22, by giving us a snapshot of very carefully God-regulated worship, gives us a pattern of how our worship should flow. How does it do it? Well, it says that Aaron lifted up his hand toward the people and blessed them. That’s what we all want. We ought to be blessed at the end of the service when covenant renewal is over. We want the power of God placed upon us, his blessing and benediction. Not a prayer for that, but the imposition of that by the officiant. That’s what a blessing and benediction is. That’s what we want.

Well, he does this after he comes down from offering the sin offering, the burnt offering, and the peace offering. So this tells us that the benediction is at the end after the sin offering, the burnt offering, and the peace offering. The sin offering is that chapter 4 and 5 thing where the purification for sins happens. So that’s the one where you know we’re confessing sins and God is forgiving us. The burnt offering is chapter 1. It’s this ascension offering, the transformation of the people to become a spiritual people even while on earth. And then the peace offering is correlated to the Lord’s supper. It’s a meal with God and with one another and with the priest.

So here, okay, Leviticus 1, 2, and 3 gives us the first three offerings: ascension, tribute, and peace. Now we get the order of them. The order is that chapter 4 thing happens first. We confess sins first. Then the preaching of the word that transforms us by its power, and then finally communion. This is the proper order for worship. This was the order in Leviticus. This is the order at the temple. This is the order that the tabernacle of David worship moved in the context of very easily applied to the temple later. This should be the order of New Testament worship. Kind of a logical order.

But where’s the tribute offering? If the tribute offering is so important, Dennis, one of those first three, and has such a great significance, sweet savor and all that stuff, where is it? It seems to be left out. Well, the answer to where it is found in verse 17. “He brought the meat offering.” The meat offering of the King James—that’s cereal or grain. It’s the tribute offering. Verse 17: “He brought the meat offering, took a handful thereof, and burnt it upon the altar beside the burnt sacrifice of the morning.”

So you got the ascension offering on the altar that’s going along cooking, and the tribute offering he places alongside of it on the altar. Okay. Then also in Numbers chapter 15, sorry, turn to Numbers chapter 15. Look at verses 8 to 10.

“When thou preparest a bullock for a burnt offering or for a sacrifice, and performing a vow or peace offerings unto the Lord, then shall he bring with a bull a meat offering of three-tenths of an ephah of flour mingled with half a hin of oil. And thou shalt bring for a drink offering half a hin of wine, for an offering made by fire, of a sweet savor unto the Lord.”

Okay, so the point here is that once again, just like in Leviticus chapter 9, verse 17, the tribute offering is layered on top of or alongside of the ascension offering. So that’s where it is in Leviticus 9:22 when it says sin offering relating to the confession of sin and forgiveness. Ascension offering—ah, now we know that’s where the tribute offering would have been done, right after the ascension offering, layered alongside of it on the same altar, and then finally the peace offering at the end of the service.

So this is where it’s at. That’s why it’s not listed in the order because it’s so closely associated with the ascension offering. Okay. So that’s where it is in Leviticus 9:22. It is unspoken, but it’s layered alongside of the ascension offering.

Where is the tribute offering in our service then? Where’s the cash value of this? How does this work in our service?

Well, we have a confession of sin, assurance of forgiveness. That’s the application of the sin offering of the Lord Jesus Christ affected two thousand years ago. It’s the application of the forgiveness of sins wrought by the work of Jesus Christ, the single Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world two thousand years ago. And we apply that in covenant renewal before God as he comes to be with us. That’s what we begin with, purification offering.

Then we go to the preaching of the word. It’s the word of God that has this transformative power, and the power of the Spirit that’s sharper than any two-edged sword, that cuts up the animal, puts us on the altar of God’s word, and transforms us by that word. The preaching of the word is the ascension offering. It is what transforms us. My purpose is not just to make you feel bad or bring conviction of sin. My purpose is to bring you through that to hear the gospel, the tremendous news that Jesus Christ has forgiven your sin and is maturing you and causing you to go from glory to glory. It’s transforming men and women.

At the end of the preaching of this sermon, you’ll respond to the preaching of the sermon by bringing forward your tithes and offerings. This is our tribute offering. This is our tribute offering layered alongside of, following directly upon, the ascension offering of the preaching of the sermon. You’re going to offer your bodies. You’re going to come forward. You know, many churches don’t do that. We do it because it’s a reminder that what you’re representing is yourself as you give your offering, your tribute, your loving tax, whether it’s your tithe or some other offering that you give to Jesus.

This is what you’re doing—you’re engaging in the application of the work of Christ in the tribute offering. And then finally, at the end of the service, the third wave is the peace offering at the Lord’s supper. You remember the peace offering in Leviticus 3. That’s the one where the meat is eaten by the priest, some by God, and some by the worshipper himself. And so, we get to have a meal with Jesus and his priests here at the table at the conclusion of our service.

So in our service, the tribute offering follows the sermon and is represented by the coming forward with tithes and offerings. Okay.

Sixth point: details. What do you notice about the tribute offering that’s different from the other offerings?

Details. And what we notice about the tribute offering—one thing we notice is that it is processed material. You know, with the bull, you raise the bull up; you don’t make, you know, T-bones out of it before you come to the temple or tabernacle. You don’t make ground beef out of it. You don’t make a roast. You don’t do those things. You bring the animal as it is in the raw, so to speak, in its natural state. You bring it, and then the priest does things to it—kills it, offers it up.

Not so the tribute offering. The tribute offering is processed material. You would not be able to simply take the grains of wheat out of your field, put them in a bag, and bring them for your tribute offering. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. You had to do something to it. You had to either grill it up or grind it up, mill it into very fine flour, and then put some oil and frankincense in there. And by the way, you don’t put olives right on there. You’ve got to take olives and do some work and make oil out of the olives. You’ve got to put it through a press. And the frankincense, you don’t bring the bark of the tree that creates frankincense and just throw the bark on there.

You take that bark. The tears of frankincense ooze out of the bark. You collect those tears. So you’ve done work to this tree to transform it into incense. Then you make it hard and stuff. So whether it’s the grain, the oil, or the frankincense, you work the product with your hands. You see, you process it.

I read in Numbers that eventually when they get into the land, along with the tribute offering is a libation of wine. Again, it’s not raw grapes. It’s not even grape juice. It’s wine, representing a transformation of state and the labor of people.

Okay. What does that mean to us?

Well, if we’re giving tribute to our king, the first thing it means to us is that we acknowledge that those fields, those vines, those trees—whatever we engaged in work at doing this past week—that it doesn’t belong to us. He’s the king, right? So we’re giving him tribute, acknowledging his ownership of the whole world. That’s part of what you do. Every Lord’s day when you bring forward your tithes and offerings, you’re saying it wasn’t mine to begin with. You gave it to me. I used it. But, you know, I’m acknowledging that you own the whole world by giving you back the part.

So it has to do with property stewardship. And then also, not just the property are we bringing to God—because we don’t bring it in the raw state—but it is a representation of our labor. That’s what your checks or your dollars or whatever you bring forward. It’s a representation of your labor. The flour that you would grind it up into or the cakes you would make.

Did you notice the detail in Leviticus 2? Well, you can roast them this way or you can cook it this way. You can bake it in a pan or you can put it in an oven. Lots of different ways to prepare it. But over and over again, what the text is telling you is work it. Work it somehow. Work it in a way that’s maybe distinctive to you, but work the product.

And so when we bring God our tithes and offerings, we’re not just saying that he owns our property. We’re saying he owns our labor. We’re acknowledging him as the one who gives us strength to do the labor that he has called us to do.

Secondly, we have this implication of lordship and work. Remember when you bring forward your offering that the whole of God’s truths of worship in the scriptures from one end to the other is training us that we’re giving tribute to the king. And if you’re going to bring tribute from the work you did this last week, that means you had darn well better have done it under the rules of the king.

If you’re going to bring tribute to the king, the king demands that you work according to the way that he’s told you to work. Not just acknowledging his ownership, not just acknowledging his power that gave you the labor to work, but saying that you must work under the dominion of King Jesus. That immediate implication of the tribute offering and our application of it in our worship service is a grabbing of your vocation by the Lord Jesus Christ, and telling you it’s mine, when you come forward every Lord’s day. Bring your tithes and offerings. And I think we all should every week. Don’t come before me empty-handed. God says we’re acknowledging the lordship of Jesus Christ. We’re giving tribute to the King of Kings.

Third, very importantly, this tribute offering teaches us the acceptability of our work—even menial work.

Now, this is holy stuff, right? This is holy stuff going on here in Leviticus, at least this portion of old worship history, this time frame. You know, I mean, you’ve got a whole system set up of the cult, so to speak, the religious duties. You know, if you violate the details of this religious system, you’re liable to get zapped or killed somehow, you know, the way that different people did in Leviticus chapter 10, I think. Nadab and Abihu come forward with strange fire. They ignore the specific regulations, the details, and they’re killed. They become crispy critters. Judgment of God comes upon this. This is holy stuff going on.

And into this holy system where God’s presence literally filled the tabernacle and later the temple, into that holy system you bring your lousy, crummy, menial work and labor. You bring that weird cake that didn’t maybe fall or didn’t come out quite right. You know, you bring what you did this week.

Now, the implications of that are not that God is less holy, but it’s that we’ve failed to comprehend how holy our work is, or should be perceived as being, in the sight of God. Our labor is acceptable to the Lord God of heaven as tribute from us. You understand that this is why the sermon is entitled work and holiness. The tribute offering, properly seen and applied, is a declaration of the holiness of our work.

The end result ends up in the holiest of holy places it can go—into that tabernacle system—and representing the labor in the worship of God. God says that the tribute offering is pleasing. Right? It’s a sweet savor to him. He likes it. He enjoys it. And the implication is that God enjoys, likes, and evaluates our work. Not just, you know, on Sunday when you bring your tithe or offering. He’s reminding you that he likes it all week long.

At the end of the day, if you’ve worked well, if you’ve worked under King Jesus and you’ve done what you’re supposed to do, God is pleased with your work. This is the basis of the Protestant Reformation—this understanding of vocation and the holiness of vocation. And that’s our understanding every Lord’s day as we properly apply the teaching of the tribute offering in our particular setting today.

Fourth, it provides a proper motivation for our work. I’m going to talk more about this next week, but I think that ultimately we have to say that when we go to work tomorrow morning, why are you there? And if the reason you’re there is to put food on the table, I think personally I’m convinced by the word of God that is improper motivation.

Jesus says, you know, “Seek first the kingdom of God and all these things shall be added to you.” What’s more important? If you want to prioritize things, your family or your creator and redeemer? What’s more important—your own well-being, your creator and redeemer? What’s more important—how people perceive you at work in the workplace or your creator and redeemer?

You know, clearly family is a great blessing of God. Work is a great blessing. Friends are a blessing. Diligence is a blessing. But just as clearly, God brooks no rivals, including your family, including your desire to put bread on the table.

I think that the tribute offering teaches us that this is the reason we work. The reason we work is to bring back to God our labor and find it acceptable by him. We work to glorify God in heaven. He is number one.

You know, we have two more people this week unemployed at RCC. When I was in Poland, I spoke impromptu to a group of twenty men, a number of whom were unemployed. They wanted me to speak about employment. And this is what I told them. You know, if you’re going to seek work, why? What’s your motivation? Just to feed yourself or your family? Not good enough. In the Bible, your motivation should be to glorify God through your labor. It provides proper motivation.

We bring the world to God. We take those grain, we take the wheat fields. We take the grapes. We take the olive trees, and we bring them. We bring the created order, living things. We bring the created order into the worship of God, and we present the creation to him, because that’s who God calls us to be. We’re dominion stewards of the whole world. You see, we’re put in charge of the whole thing. And we bring to him the work that we have done with his order that he gave to us, with this world that he calls us to mature and to transform. We bring the world to God in worship. And that is the highest, best, and proper motivation.

Whether you’re seeking work or whether you’re thinking of why you go to work tomorrow, this should be your motivation: to bring back to God the results of your labor, that he might find it acceptable. This gives us the proper context for our work as well.

Our work is not caretaking. God does not like it if we bring to him raw, unproduced grain, unprocessed grain. He demands that we process it. This means that nature is not normative. Nature is not best. God wants us to bring our best into worship. And when he gives us this tribute offering that represents our labor, our best is supposed to be to take what he gave us and to improve it.

The sluggard roasts not what he gets in hunting. God gives him a bunny. He gets the bunny. He eats the bunny, but he doesn’t cook the bunny. He doesn’t add any value to it to make it tasty. It’s a picture of sinful man who thinks that the world is just some kind of museum and we are caretakers and just want to maintain the pristine quality of nature.

No. God told Adam to exercise dominion and stewardship over the whole world. He said, “Beautify the garden.” If all God told Adam was to guard the garden, then we’d be caretakers, and that’d be the proper way to think of it. But he didn’t. He told Adam, “Guard it and beautify it. I know it’s pretty. It’s a garden I made.” God says, “But you can make it even better. Under my dominion, the power of my Holy Spirit going through you, and you can take that garden image and beautify the whole world. That’s our job.”

And the tribute offering is a reminder that our job is not to just leave things in their natural state as if that was best.

No. I had an interesting conversation in Poland. There’s a man and his wife who live right next to Bzezno. And I visit him every year for these five years I’ve gone. Two years ago he graduated from school, and now he’s working at a land—at a nursery. He’s got twenty-two acres. They employ four hundred and some people. Twenty-two acres, think of that. Twenty-two acres can support over four hundred people working full-time, and it’s all under glass. And what this guy does is he’s in charge of the computers that determine how much water to send down these little tiny capillary tubes along with nutrition. Every day he determines what each plant needs based upon the temperature and light and different things like that.

And so he enters—he has people enter the data form, then he determines what to do with it. And so it’s totally a controlled environment, right? They have like I don’t know, shredded coconut shell. They have some kind of substance they grow these things in, not dirt. They feed them, you know, water and nutrition, and they grow wonderful tomatoes and cucumbers, etc.

And I asked him, I said, “Well, is it organic?” As an American people like organic stuff.

Oh no, organic. No, we can do better, you know, than the soil will do, because the soil, if you just plant the tomato in the soil, you don’t know what it’s going to get in terms of nutrients, metallic byproducts that may be actually bad for people. Who knows what it’s going to get out of the soil? But if we control the environment totally now, we know exactly what we have in the tomato. See, now to many people in America, that just sounds horrendous. And no doubt if people aren’t operating under the kingship of Jesus, they can use artificial means for and not be careful and produce bad results. But I think on the face of it, what this man does for work is right in line with the tribute offering. I told him probably every time I talk on the tribute offering from now on, I’ll use him as an example, because he’s right. That’s what God wants us to do.

God wants us to take what we’ve been given and not think that nature is best, but to think that nature should and could be improved upon by our work, work and labor. The tribute offering is a picture of the processing of the natural order. God wants us to bring back not just things that he already planted and are causing to grow. He wants us to beautify them. He wants us to do things with them. Big implications in terms of the environmental movement, ecology, and what our position on these things should be.

We want to operate under the kingship of Jesus. We’re stewards of the land, but we are never caretakers of it. We are always dominion men and women who improve the world that God has given to us. And that gives meaning and purpose to your vocation. Whether it’s just grinding the flower, which is the very minimum amount of labor put into the tribute offering, or whether it’s, you know, programming computers to do various wondrous things in the context of our world, all this labor is pleasing to God. And God wants to see what we’ve done to his creation.

Now, it’s not as if he can’t see all week long, but he wants to evaluate, to taste us, right? To taste us by tasting our labor. The tribute offering represents us in our production, and he wants us to bring that to him and he evaluates it. So our purpose for work is to transform and beautify the world and to bring back to God the transformed, beautiful things that we’ve made representationally by dollars and tithes and offerings. But ultimately we should always be thinking of what we’ve done for God this week.

This is our motivation: to please God by beautifying the world. This is our holy calling before God as in the tribute offering.

Faith without work is dead. Faith without work is dead. Then faith, you couldn’t just come and worship God and say, “Gee, I really love God, but I’m not working and I don’t care to work.” Now, you may or may not be employed—while work isn’t employable work necessarily—but you should be doing something with your time to change and to transform and make better this world. And if you don’t, all the faith in Jesus and all the singing of hymns on Sunday count for nothing if you don’t come with some aspect of the tribute offering in hand.

Jesus has died to deliver us from sloth. He has died to deliver us from a caretaker mentality. He has died to transform us into men and women who grab a hold of whatever the task is for the day and beautify the world for King Jesus. And if we say we have faith and don’t have work or labor from which tribute can be offered to King Jesus, you see, we’re not telling the truth. We’re not telling the truth. Faith without works is dead, and faith without work is dead as well. We have a high, holy calling to work to God.

Now the final point on the outline is more details. You know the details have shown us the importance, the holiness of work and the proper motivation for work and what you should do, whether you’re seeking work this week or whether you go to work. You understand now the relationship of the tribute offering to the holy calling that God has called you to in labor and vocation. And you understand this is your motivation: to beautify the world, to transform it and make it better. To grow better tomatoes than grow in an organic farm, to grow better things, to build better buildings than caves that we simply find and inhabit. To make a wonderful world out of the world that God has given—the wonderful raw products that God has given to us—to make them even more beautiful.

This is our motivation for work. If we seek first this kingdom, the manifestation of the excellence of diligence in the world, then God will add the financial blessings to our families and ourselves and our church and our community and all this other stuff. But the motivation is pleasing God in that way. And it relates work to holiness.

And really, it’s interesting how this isn’t just grain. It’s a little bit of oil and a little bit of frankincense. And what is interesting is that really this represents the holy place in the tabernacle structure. In the tabernacle structure, before you get into the holy of holies, there’s a holy place. And you know, we should know these things. We don’t. But there’s three things in there: there’s a lampstand, and the light that shines in there is oil. It’s olive oil. So the lampstand is oil. There’s a table of showbread. And the bread, of course, is grain, like this tribute offering. And then there’s a golden altar of incense where God has his potpourri for his living room going on. And that’s where the frankincense would be burned to make it smell really nice in there.

Oil, frankincense, grain. Big pictures of that in the holy place. Little picture of this in the tribute offering that we bring to God. You see, our labor, our production is signified by being in the power of the spirit. The oil refers to the spirit. We could go through all the references to that, but that’s what it is. The olive oil is a picture of the power of the Holy Spirit to do our work. The frankincense, as we know in this church, represents the prayers of the saints in Revelation and the Psalms: “That my prayers descend as incense before you.”

It tells us that our work is to be done in the context of the empowerment of the Holy Spirit. The spirit empowers you, comes upon you, and you receive the fullness of the power of the spirit. Not to talk in utterances that people cannot understand that might have happened and can happen in certain situations, but more normatively, the power of the Holy Spirit is for vocation. Your vocation tomorrow is a work of the Holy Spirit in the world. And you should apply the oil, the unction of the spirit.

If you put on perfume or cologne in the morning, think of the unction of the Holy Spirit for the task that you have to do. Whether it’s milling grain, doing somebody’s financial books, writing computer programs, whatever it is, you seek the anointing of the Holy Spirit for that task, and you apply the prayers to the Lord Jesus Christ that the task may be effective for his purposes.

We remember that our work is never separated from the ascension offering, which indicates transformation, but it also includes a reference to the death of the Lord Jesus Christ. When we go to work tomorrow, as high and holy a calling as that is, if we do it without applying the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ, if we do it somehow separated from the whole burnt offering representing Christ ultimately, then we’ve made it an idol and we’ve come under judgment.

We must do it under the atoning blood of the Lord Jesus Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit, and with prayers to him that he would give us wisdom and guidance for our work and bless the fruit of our hands, so that we can come back Sunday and give him tribute and say, “Boy, we did great work for you. We beautified things this week. Here’s our tribute to you.”

And when we do that thing, then we have represented here in this tribute the grain of the table of showbread, the oil of the lampstand, the frankincense of the golden altar of incense. We have represented the holy place of God. Once more reminding us of the holiness of this great task that God has called us to do. What we normally think of as simple, the work we do, the day-by-day routine, go to put our nose to the grindstone—no. God says it’s a high, holy task that we’re doing for him.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you now for this section of our worship at which your people come forward and bring you tribute. We pray that today and every Lord’s day from now on, that when we do this, we’ll think once more the holiness of our vocations. We’ll ask for the anointing and empowering of your Holy Spirit. And we’ll commit ourselves in prayer to you to work at our jobs in ways that will bring beauty to this world, delight, and pleasure to you. Thank you, Father, for telling us how pleasurable you find our labor. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.