Dennis Tuuri

Stand for the reading of the Lord’s word and be attentive. Leviticus 19, beginning at verse 23. When you come into the land and have planted all kinds of trees for food, then you shall count their fruit as uncircumcised. Three years it shall be as uncircumcised to you. It shall not be eaten. But in the fourth year, all its fruit shall be holy, a praise to the Lord. And in the fifth year you may eat the fruit that it may yield to you its increase.

I am the Lord your God. Let’s pray. Almighty God, we thank you for your word to us. We thank you for the simplicity of some portions of it and the complexity of others. Help us, Lord God, to be your wise and attentive people today, attending to this every bit as much part of the inspired word of God as the gospel of Matthew, Mark, or Luke. Bless us, Lord God, as we seek to understand this text. May your Holy Spirit be amongst us corporately.

May he indwell us individually. And may he bring us understanding of your word that we might be holy even as you, the Lord God from whom comes our salvation is holy. In Jesus’ name and authority, we ask this and expect you to answer it. Amen. Please be seated.

Okay, so this is hard. You guys are a wonderful, very disciplined group of people. A couple weeks ago when Flynn A. preached, I sat back there and I was amazed at very little distractions. People were attentive and focused. That’s great. We’re going to need that today. You’re going to need to sort of sit up in your seat. You know, if you drift off, you’re going to get confused. Even if you pay attention, you’re probably going to get confused. So now it’s the Tuuri thing—the guy that I can’t ever understand what he says thing going on today. And that’s kind of one of the truths: portions of the scriptures are hard to understand and we may not understand it fully. And this is one of those portions.

The historic church has celebrated at the first of the year the feast of circumcision. This is the circumcision of the Lord Jesus Christ on the eighth day after his birth. And so if we celebrate his birth on December 25th—not tagging that date as the actual birthday, but that’s where we celebrate it—then eight days later is January 1st. I love the Christian year as it opens up every year.

I love that Thanksgiving stuff that starts to put us in the right frame of mind. I love Advent, the multiple lessons of it. I love to rejoice in the Advent of the Lord Jesus Christ and all the songs of victory because God and man are now united. And then this eighth day feast, this feast of circumcision is a wonderful thing too. I may or may not, as the spirit moves here as I move along, quote a little bit from some medieval sermons and texts about it.

But suffice it to say that the church has sort of seen the feast of circumcision as very much related to the beginning of our year and to the resolve that I spoke of last week—to the setting aside of sinful ways, rolling away uncleanness and turning with renewed dedication in the new year to Jesus Christ. This is one of the essential elements in terms of application of the feast of circumcision, and the other of course is the gospel.

So we have the gospel—the beginning of Christ’s bloodletting, right? Eight days in—you know, we go from the lancet to the spear, or the small article of cutting to the large sufferings and the great giving forth of his blood on the cross. And those things kind of mark his life. So the feast of circumcision is gospel. It’s Jesus Christ undergoing pain and suffering for us. All of God’s word is gospel.

Leviticus 19:23-26 is gospel. We can see that just kind of in the general movement of the thing, right? You know, so there’s a period of time that you can’t eat the fruit of these trees you planted, and then you dedicate the whole thing with the next year’s fruit, and then you enter into ordinary time, we could say. So there’s this movement that is gospel because God creates a work, takes a world that manifests sin in the fall and changes it—and changes it through the circumcision of Christ, changes it through his suffering on the cross, changes it through the advent and all that stuff. And the point is that’s gospel. And so Leviticus 19:23-26, a lot of people make fun of these kind of verses, but it’s gospel really. It’s gospel given to us in a way that makes us meditate a little bit. Not everything is sort of laid out there for us, but it’s gospel nonetheless.

And it’s related in the providence of God. This is a third word sermon—still we’ll talk about this in a couple of minutes—but this is Leviticus 19. Seventy commands, those commands can be thought of or related to the Ten Commandments, not in a direct flow but an application, jumping around. So third, this seems like this section of Leviticus 19 is aimed at third word stuff.

We take the third word: don’t take God’s name in vain. Don’t be a Christian without having a full-orbed witness. That’s literally what it means. And if Moses’ sermon in Deuteronomy concerned the food, remember that’s where we were at. His sermon, his explanation of the third commandment, all was about food. And so we have a couple of sections in Leviticus 19 about food.

And we talked a couple of weeks ago about alpha food and omega food. You know, we give God first fruits, and then we’re also to—well, actually he gives us the peace offering. And then we’re to remember people God’s given us grace. We disperse it. So this is full witness of Christ in the context of our lives. And this food law here is the same thing.

So you know, it’s about circumcision of trees. Weird. Now it’s not as weird as we first might think. If you know your Bible, you know that God talks about people of uncircumcised lips or ears. We’ve talked about it. But circumcised heart is what we’re supposed to have. And in Romans, we’re all recognizing that we’re all true Jews whose circumcision is inward and not external, right? The external right pointed to some realities. We’re going to try to get at those realities today. And that’s what circumcision is all about.

So we need to meditate upon that a little bit. God could have said, you know, you can’t eat the fruit the first three years and left it at that, but he didn’t. He says the fruit is uncircumcised. Now, if you got an ESV, some translations translate it as forbidden, but really probably a more literal translation is this uncircumcised thing. It’s the same root word as circumcision, and where it’s used in other places to talk about uncircumcised people being cut off. So for some reason—I didn’t make it up—God decided to tie our thoughts about circumcision and uncircumcision to trees, to fruit, and then to somehow observance of the third word.

So we’re going to talk about it. What is its purpose? It’s interesting. You know, I read lots of commentaries for preparation for this. One commentary says this: “Like so many of God’s laws given to the Israelites, this one had a practical purpose rather than a spiritual one.” Oh, so some laws are practical, some are spiritual, which implies that if it’s practical, it’s not spiritual, and if it’s a spiritual law, it’s not practical. That really is bad thinking. And you see a lot of this in commentaries at this particular portion of God’s word.

He was just trying to teach them how to be better fruit growers, right? Because—and it’s interesting the take on this because some commentary say well, they were supposed to pinch off the fruit so it didn’t actually bear fruit for three years. Because if it’s bearing fruit, it’s taking away from the establishment of the leaves and the root structure and all this stuff. So to have really good fruit in the fourth year, you want to pinch off things so it doesn’t produce fruit for the first three.

Other people say well no, horticultural what it is: apples or whatever the fruit is, it’s got to drop to the ground, provide fertilizer for the tree, and that’ll give you better fruit, right? So they take this kind of practical approach, and they have different, completely different ways of looking at it. And you know, I don’t think that the scriptures are primarily a horticultural manual. Obviously there’s good things that happen as we apply these things, but I just think that’s a really not a particularly good way to go to think about this particular commandment.

Start imagining what we would have done if we would have written something like that. And even if you do take it that way, why uncircumcised, right? You could have just said don’t eat the fruit or pinch off the buds or whatever it is. But he doesn’t say that. He calls it circumcised.

Another commentary says, well, you know, this is God’s way of saying that all the land is his. And so here he’s giving you instructions, not about whether you know what you should do in terms of theft or murder or adultery. He’s giving you instructions about the land. And so this represents the comprehensive claims of God in the land. Well, that’s good. That’s better. You know, spiritual and practical are put together. And God’s comprehensive claims over everything that we do or address. That’s good. You know, to that we could also add, I suppose, the application that this is this helps us a lot—as much of the Old Testament did—to avoid kind of agnosticism where really what Christianity is about is kind of ideas and it really isn’t linked to the physical creation. Well, here it’s very directly linked.

Unfortunately, that direction just sort of reinforces an Old Testament bad, New Testament good, Old Testament worldly and having to do with fruit trees, New Testament we don’t got to worry about that stuff. But if we just take the Bible as one scripture, right, one word from God. Yeah, it’s good to think about the comprehensive claims of God. At the beginning of our year, there’s no square inch of this earth. There’s no endeavor you’re going to put yourself to do this week. There’s no thoughts you can think over which Jesus doesn’t say mine, right?

Now, it doesn’t mean you got to go nuts thinking about all that and neurotic, but it does mean that everything has been given to us by God for a particular purpose and it’s all to be governed by his word somehow, some way. So that’s that’s a better way of looking at it—this comprehensive claim of God.

But still, it seems like what we think is good to do in the people that we’re in communion and fellowship with and read the books of is sort of let the scripture interpret the scripture. And so we want to look to other scriptures to sort of understand this. And we wanted to be—we don’t just want to take a verse and abstract it and think, well, this means this to me. You know, Bible studies are good, but frequently, home Bible studies can just be people sharing what the verse means to me, and nobody wants to make anybody feel bad. And so you get a lot of things being said that aren’t the result of careful study.

Careful study shows, as I’ve said many times, that Leviticus 19, seventy commands, is broken up into two sections. The overall header is holiness. That’s what the third word is about, holiness, right? Complete consecration to God. We’re set apart. We’re cut away from things. We’re consecrated to him. And we’re supposed to be holy because he’s holy. He’s totally dedicated to his purposes. He’s totally faithful to his plans. Nothing involved in him has anything to do apart from his character. And it’s the same with us. Our holiness is linked to him.

So, but Leviticus 19 is broken into two sections. Holiness and obedience is one way to think of it. And this particular verse is in the opening section of the second half, the obedience stuff. Generally speaking, the first half—holiness—has primarily to do with things that most people won’t see. Reverencing your parents, how do people know? You don’t know. And primarily—this isn’t exclusively this way, but it seems like the second half of these commandments, the obedience side, are really not personal obedience. It is, but it’s more corporate. So it’s kind of a corporate idea. And if you violate these corporate rules, people can see it. They can see you picking or not picking the fruit, right?

So this is kind of one of those things. Just before this, the opening verse in the obedience second half of Leviticus 19 has to do with forbidden mixtures. And we’ll talk about that when we talk about the seventh commandment because that’s where Deuteronomy does it. And now remember, the first three commandments are comprehensive. They have to do with how we relate to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Father, great authority. Son, only mediator. Spirit, spirit-filled walk he empowers us to bear the name of Christ and fulfill the will of the Father. And if we do those things, we get the fourth day rest and enthronement in power, and we’ll talk about that in a couple of weeks—we’ll start in two weeks, I think. But then it seems like the cycle sort of repeats. This first three thing, so we’ve talked about this before, but remember that the next three commandments are: honor your parents (Father), don’t kill—the Son, you’re the image bearer of God, don’t commit adultery (striving against the Holy Spirit).

So forbidden mixtures is third commandment stuff, but it also is seventh commandment and tenth commandment stuff. And we’ll talk about it at that point. So we’re restricting ourselves to this second half of the opening structure in Leviticus 19 of the call to obedience. So, you know, it we know that in terms of applying it, well, it’s kind of corporate stuff—stuff that you’re supposed to do that’s visible to other people for the most part. It helps us a little bit, and it’s we can connect it up to this obedience that is the sign of holiness.

But there are other verses involved where we could think about this same thing. In Joshua, in the book of Joshua, in Joshua chapter 5, the people of Israel have been led into the promised land. They’ve crossed the river. They’ve gone in, and what they have to do then is several things happen in sequence. And the first thing that happens is at Gilgal where they’re encamped there in the land of Canaan. They circumcise themselves, because for all the generation in the wilderness hadn’t been circumcised. And it doesn’t seem like that was necessarily wrong. I don’t want to get into that today. But the point is that as they’re about to enter into the promised land for victory and conquering, the first thing they do is make themselves militarily unfit for battle. The battle is the Lord’s.

So they circumcise themselves, and then the very next thing that they do is they eat the Passover, right? And the Passover is kind of like holy food. And then the very next thing they do—it then says that on that very day then they began to eat from the fruit of the land. So you know, this prohibition in Leviticus 19 is only about trees you planted. As soon as they’d been circumcised and had Passover, they could start eating the fruit of the land that very day.

And then of course, all of this is preparation for going in, and God comes to Joshua and is the Lord of hosts and he’s going to lead him into battle. So we can see this connection in Joshua. We should think about it here between this idea—being circumcised and then a holy eating and then a common eating—because that’s the progression here. For three years you can’t eat anything. And when finally do then you have to eat it in a holy place. And then you can do eat it in the fifth year in a common place—ordinary food then for you.

Fourth year, you know, the phrase is somewhat ambiguous, but it seems like it doesn’t say you can’t eat any of it, but it is—you’re supposed to eat it in special rejoicing, community sort of meals like the peace offering. That kind of thing. I think it’s eaten as praise to God, so it’s special eating. Well, so we can think of that progression. And then that kind of puts this verse in a little different context because again it sort of reminds us that there’s a goal there’s a preparation you know for uh full occupation of the land going on here.

So Joshua 5 is a verse that might come to mind to help us think through this thing. There are other verses, and some commentators have taken this direction. An animal once it’s born can’t be sacrificed on the altar until the eighth day. And so you got this animal who is basically unclean for holy purposes for seven days, and on the eighth day he can be sacrificed. And now you’ve got this fruit—the new fruit that for three years, you know, can’t be used. And then in the fourth year, it can be sacrificed. It can be eaten as praise to God. It can be devoted to him as first fruits.

So that’s a good biblical connection in terms of a period of time that precedes the fitness or the strength of something, right? The animal at day one or two or three kind of shaky, you know. God wants the best. He wants, you know, kind of eight day old now strong, isn’t going about ready to die anyway. Wants that kind of thing. And the first three years of fruit, the fruit is weaker and smaller, etc. So people have seen that. They’ve seen this biblical connection between the eighth day of an animal being ready and the third year, fourth year then becoming the day when the fruit can be circumcised.

And we could start to then meditate on this text and think about eighth day creations, three-day resurrection, new creation on the fourth day, all that sort of stuff. And that’s useful. It kind of talks here about, you know, old creation, new creation, fallen creation, and then new creation being fit and eligible.

Interesting commentary that I read on another website was from some sort of like Talmudic Christian guy who takes kind of a Talmudic approach to scriptures even though he believes they’re fulfilled, that Jesus was Messiah. And he takes an interesting take on this thing. He says you could read the verse in this way. Uncircumcised means it’s immature, okay? We sort of see that not properly seasoned enough for ingestion. It is to be inspected but not ingested.

So what he does is he draws a correlation. And so he says that here’s how you might want to think about it. After you have planted all manner of trees for food—food means studying the Torah and other scriptures. Then you shall count the fruit thereof, the earliest understanding of your study of the scriptures as uncircumcised, unacceptable, and premature. It shall not be eaten of, ingested as sound doctrine, okay?

Interesting approach. Verse 24: “But in the fourth year all fruit shall be holy to praise Yahweh, and in the fifth year shall ye, the body of Messiah, eat of the fruit thereof.” And he connects this up with the fact that the disciples—you see where it’s going? For three years, you know, they were immature. They didn’t know much. And it’s in the fourth year, after Jesus dies, is resurrected, the spirit’s given to them that now their teaching and instruction begins, and then they become acceptable.

So they take a biblical text about the disciples being with Jesus three years and that’s sort of interesting, right? And connect it up with this and say, well, you know, there’s an immaturity when people become Christians and part of the body of Christ. You really shouldn’t learn from them. They should study, they should be patient for three years, and the fourth year really start to study well. And then in the fifth year they can teach, and the body of Christ should accept that teaching.

So there’s another view of it. And at least that view has some connection to the scriptures. And I guess what I’m doing here—and it probably is frustrating—hopefully you haven’t slunk down in your seat and gone to sleep yet. You know, man up for this thing. I know it’s easier for me standing. It’s tougher to fall asleep, so possible for some people, I suppose. But the point here is that when you got a verse as obscure as this one in Leviticus 19, you know, what God wants you to do is meditate on it, turn it over in your mind, look at different perspectives—and perspectives that are not primarily driven by, you know, practical concerns apart from spiritual ones, but perspectives that come from the scriptures.

You want to start to think about that, right? Think about connections within the scriptures to help you understand it. And whether you come to a direct understanding of everything that’s in the text, you will have done well to remember that these are certainly good, positive truths. If the disciples waited three years to do much teaching, so should you, right? And the church commonly makes this mistake. New converts are all jazzed up, all jacked up, and they, you know, get taught teaching positions and this that and the other thing, and it’s just a mistake. And the scriptures tell us the same thing. Elders are not to be novices. They’re in that third year. They need a fourth year of study, and then their doctrine can be accepted.

This same man also relates this to the fig tree, right? So you got a vine dresser, a master of a fig tree, and he’s come three years looking for fruit on the darn thing, and it’s got no fruit. Wants to burn it down. But the vine dresser says, “No, let me work with it for a year. And after I’ve worked with it for a year, if it still doesn’t bear fruit, then you can cut it down.” Well, that’s interesting because that’s directly out of the scriptures. It’s a gospel parable. It talks about this same thing, and it sort of says that in that fifth year is the year of determination whether it’s good or bad, and the fourth year becomes a year of special preparation.

So, you know, these are different perspectives that we can take on this. There’s another perspective frequently in scripture both with our Savior in the parables. He see—he’s healing a guy from blindness. He sees men as trees. Many references like that. Ezekiel 31 is an interesting one because it talks about Pharaoh and Egypt as a mighty, huge tree above all the trees. And all the trees—specifically of Eden is mentioned. And because of its pride, it’s cut down and thrown into hell. And in the context of that, Ezekiel calls them uncircumcised.

So here you have a direct biblical reference to a tree that’s uncircumcised. It won’t be circumcised of heart and of thought, and so it’s cast into hell. Now, what this does is it sets up a relationship between trees and men. And after all, a simple reading of Leviticus 19:23-26 does that, right? It’s using a term that every other place is used only about men—whether it’s literal circumcision of the heart, of the ear, of the mouth. Whatever it is, it’s terms about man. And so we read this and we can think about men and relationship to trees.

And these trees are forbidden to men as well. It’s forbidden fruit, right? It’s forbidden fruit for three years. And and only then after a special year of consecration to God is it unforbidden. So with Ezekiel in mind, we would think about the garden, and we would think about the prohibition to Adam and Eve to eat a particular fruit of a particular tree for the moment. And so they have to patiently wait for three years before they can offer it to God. Then patiently wait another year before they can begin to eat because by then they’ve matured—is the imagery. At least they’re like the tree.

And then they’ve matured. And so in Eden, what do we see? We see Adam and Eve being impatient, eating the tree in the very first year—here the very first day. And it seems like the text—and this you know if you want to argue with me about it you can, but I’m convinced of this based on a wide variety of scripture—that eventually they were going to eat that tree of the knowledge of good and evil when they were mature. And it’s the same thing here.

So if you think about that, and that’s looking at it from a biblical you know biblical theological perspective—what do these other texts say? How do we wrap them together with this verse? The verse starts to take on some life for us. It begins to take on some practical application. It begins to teach us again the importance of patience. Patience. Because that after all is what Adam and Eve weren’t was patient. Surely, if nothing else, this prohibition for three years should remind us of the need for patience in areas of our lives. A great deal of holiness isn’t actively working. It’s being patient not to do things or make use things until we’re mature enough to do it.

So, patience, I think, is a big part of this. And that comes out of understanding this as forbidden fruit.

All this week, there’s a song by the band that kept running through my mind. My wife got tired of me singing it. “Forbidden fruit. It’s the fruit that you better not take. Better watch out for the sign of the snake.” And part of the lyric is “People only want what they cannot have.” And the web that we get caught in when we eat forbidden fruit. The prohibition does set up some sort of desire in us, right? If we see a sign that says don’t walk on the grass, we’re almost tempted to walk on the grass. It’s funny how we’re kind of wired that way, but we are.

I think prohibition sometimes can make us desire something. It’s the forbidden fruit thing. It’s Adam and Eve in the garden. It’s our tendencies. And this text then at least warns us against that. It reminds us that there are webs of deceit and things that we have to be careful and patient relative to. It’s forbidden fruit at least for a season. And when it’s forbidden to us by God, that’s for our well-being. Because after if they’re patient for three years and then worship God with it in the fourth year, then they can eat of it, you know, for years and the rest of the rest of eternity or long as the world lasts, and they’ve got that fruit tree—they’re eating from the thing.

So it’s deferral of what using something until that thing has been accomplished. And this is the basic problem in America financially. We don’t want to defer things. We want them until we can save up to afford them. We want them now and engage in debt. So we’re not patient. We don’t learn the lesson of Leviticus 19:23-26. And we’re not holy. And it ends up with us having a bad witness, right? As Christians, we end up not doing what we should have done if we would have deferred the benefit of a thing for a period of time.

So, Leviticus 19:23-26 has some pretty practical stuff that it relates to us, right? Patience beginning everything with honoring God. So first fruits—you honor, what are you doing today? You’re taking the first day of the week and you’re consecrating it to the purposes of God. And then you’re going to enter into the week. Many of you today are submitting your tithe checks or money or offerings, and you’re taking the first part of your money and offering it to God like that fourth year thing. And so you got your time, you got your money, you got all of your life is sort of to be regulated. So those are some thoughts about this circumcision thing.

You know, ultimately at the end of the day, the circumcised fruit trees—if you were living in Israel at the time, you didn’t have to understand it. That’s really an important truth. God gave his people some laws that many of them wouldn’t understand. And boy, this is just this really rankles Americans. The modern mind says, “I’m not going to do something until I understand it.” And that’s a real problem. And we need to train our children and to train ourselves that we don’t wait for full understanding of something we know God wants us to do.

Now, he doesn’t want us to do this. This was particular law under a particular period of time and circumstances. You were going into a conquered land. You were planting fruit trees. So it doesn’t relate to us directly. But my point is that we don’t understand some of the things that God requires of us. How does it help to tithe that I’m poor? Well, I don’t know. It doesn’t make any difference if we know or not. We just got to obey because that’s really what testing what God’s what trusting in God is all about.

Trusting isn’t—it’s not trust when you understand the practical advantages of something and do it because you can see why it’s being done and what all it means. That’s just walking by sight. Not a bad thing, but it’s just what it is. God wants us to walk by faith. He wants us to know his law. He wants us to study the statutes as we read in Psalm 119. He wants us to meditate upon them. He wants us to be transformed by them in ways that we can’t even rationally understand through an interaction with texts like this one.

I believe there’s lots of texts in the Bible like this one that are quite important for us, and people just skim over them. But if you meditate, see, you may not get to an understanding. I’m not sure I do as to why this is laid out the particular way it does. But I come away thinking about all kinds of biblical associations with the tree in Eden, with Egypt and Pharaoh and men’s trees and God wanting us to be patient. All kinds of connections based on the scriptures begin to form as I meditate on these difficult texts.

Well, people don’t like these texts because they’re negative. You can’t do this. You can’t do this. You can’t do this. That’s what you Christians are all about. You and your God is always telling the things we can’t do. You got those ten commandments, and at least eight of those are don’ts. And if you throw in the Sabbath—that you don’t do certain things—now you got at least nine of those ten commandments that are negative. What’s the deal with that? We need positive religion. We need positive law.

Well, you know, the reality is I got an email this week. I got an email from a guy. I think he’s a pastor maybe in the series. I’m not sure who he is, but he sent me an email. He said, “I see in your website that you have segregated—you have segregation going on in your in your Sunday school program.” Now, he never said it, but I assume he meant age segregation. Unlike Harry Reid, but anyway, age segregation. Why? What’s your justification for this?

Well, it so happens that I think that probably Doug H. or maybe Doug H. and me together, somebody we ended up writing something for our Sunday school program that this is sort of a little bit of a justification of age segregation in terms of education. And I mean, in a way, everybody does it, right? You talk to your baby different than you talk to your 19-year-old. But the thing I told him, I’ll send you that. I said, but you know what? I don’t have to give you a justification for it. If you want to prohibit me from doing something, then you have an obligation to come to me with God’s word and says, “This is where you’re wrong.” And if you’re going to do that, that’s great. I’ll think about it.

But see, people don’t know anymore the value of negative law. The value of God’s law is it says you can’t do a certain few things here, but that means that most of life you can do. You know, if you got six hundred, seven hundred laws from God, that means you got all kinds of activity that you don’t got to sit around worrying about: does God tell me to do it or not? You have a freedom, right? If you have a culture that tries to tell you what you should do or what you must do all the time in detail, then you don’t have any liberty, right? You have to get permission for whatever it is you want to do.

God says the other way around. Negative law is actually very freeing because it’s limited. It produces freedom for a people, and we lose this in our culture. So, you know, it’s important to recognize that if we don’t understand it, that’s okay. If we don’t understand what God wants us to do, well, we got to do it anyway, and eventually he’ll give us the understanding, right? If we resolve to do the will of God, then we’ll know the teaching.

And secondly, we shouldn’t, you know, let people make fun of negative law. It’s a great thing. I’m pro a limited number. We have replaced six or seven hundred biblical laws in the whole scriptures with literally tens of thousands of laws and administrative rules that have the force of law. You’re all law breakers according to the state. I mean, I’ll bet you every one of you this last week did something that was a violation of an administrative rule or law. That is not a good trade to give up a few laws and the liberty of doing everything else, whether it’s wise or unwise, for a system where they’re going to tell us everything is being controlled by law from the civil state.

So, you know, don’t let people do that to you. Praise God and thank him for this. And then finally, this so this law reminds us that negative law is good, that we don’t have to understand things before we obey them. And the third big thing that’s going on here is this relationship between uncircumcision and uncleanness. Remember, this is third word stuff. And certain foods in Deuteronomy, for instance, are unclean. And certain things are clean. They can be eaten. And as we’ve talked about here a number of times, uncleanness doesn’t mean sinful. It means manifesting the effects of the fall.

Remember we talked about this. If you look at the fall in Genesis and the things that happen there, and then you look at the general section of Leviticus dealing with laws of uncleanness, it parallels each other. And so uncleanness isn’t sinfulness. It’s manifesting the fall. And the beautiful thing about uncleanness is it can be rolled back. Leviticus laws of uncleanness usually tell you how to get something clean again too. If you’re leprous and unclean, there’s a way to get clean. You know, if you—even your sexuality is tinged by the fall—but you can become clean just by washing and waiting, you know, going the next day, you’re clean.

So the thing about uncleanness is God, whenever he talks about it, reminds us that it will be dealt with, right? Isaac Watts, “As far as the curse is found, as far as the manifestations of uncleanness are evident, Jesus is rolling back uncleanness, right? And as I said in Joshua, when they got circumcised they named the place Gilgal, which means rolling. And you know, it’s a literal reference. We shouldn’t be overly Victorian about this stuff. God says that he rolled away the reproach of Egypt when the men got circumcised. He cleaned them. Okay? It’s a cleansing ritual. And this is given explicitly in Isaiah 62, this relationship between circumcision and cleansing.

Isaiah 62 says, “Awake, awake. Put on your strength, O Zion. Put on your beautiful garments, O Jerusalem, the holy city. For there shall no more come into you the uncircumcised and the unclean.” And a parallel. See? So the Bible wants us to connect up uncircumcision with uncleanness. And that’s what it’s doing here. The fruit’s dirty. It’s demonstrating the effects of the fall, and it’s got to be cleaned. And the way it’s cleaned is simply not eating it for three years, and then in the fourth year using it self-consciously somehow in worship and praise to God. And then fruit have been clean for eternity—little bit of prohibition, right? A little bit of negative law—and then all kinds of freedom to eat all kinds of fruit as much as your heart desires and all that stuff.

And so there’s this relationship, and this fruit then becomes cleansed by this imposition of the weight of three years. Okay. So this is why when the writer of the sermon to the Hebrews talks about the Old Testament, he says there’s only two kinds of fleshly rituals, two kinds of external rituals. One in verse 10 of Hebrews chapter 9, he says one was concerned only with food and drink, and two various washings. These are the carnal ordinances applied in the Old Testament. All the various, you know, ceremonial law we could say, is related to cleansing—food and drink, or I’m excuse me, washings or eating food and drink. What’s circumcision? It’s washing.

And we just saw that it’s related to uncleanness. The fruit has to be washed, and cleanliness happens, and then we can enter into food and drink in terms of that particular thing. So circumcision of trees here is a reminder that you know, this is one of those cleansing ordinances as circumcision was. So this is why we see this connection in Ezekiel. He says “I’ll sprinkle fresh water on you and you shall be clean. Circumcision cleansed the child, right? And this was involved with purification. And baptism is involved with a visual or symbolic washing away of the defilement of the fall and brings somebody into that new creation.

And so baptism and circumcision and this text are reminders that this is a washing deal. This is a cleanness-uncleanness sort of deal. So this is also another relationship—by the way, between cleanliness and circumcision is the laws in regarding childbirth in Leviticus 12. You got a baby boy, you know, you got to—after eight days circumcise them, and then another 33 days are involved in the days of purification for you. And so you got 40 days of purification.

Well, that immediately ties circumcision and purification, cleansing. And again, having kids isn’t bad. This is not a health deal. This is a symbol, a sign that even childbearing is going to be affected by the fall, and we need to have our children cleansed, and we need to be cleansed in our childbearing capacity. So this relationship of circumcision and purification is kind of an obvious thing from Leviticus 19:23-26. It’s very much given to us in Isaiah 61, where those two things are put in common. And it’s very much given to us in connecting up these two rituals in Leviticus 12 as part of circumcision—part of a general purification and cleansing.

So that’s what it is, and that’s what this text reminds us of. Now, when it reminds us of that, it reminds us in the Old Testament that God will affect the cleansing of the earth definitively. Okay? It’s a reminder—you have all these prohibitions set up, but when God comes, there’ll be a new creation, which doesn’t really manifest the old creation. So it points us forward. Well, it preaches the gospel to us that uncleanness is dealt with by God and things become clean. Uncircumcision of the trees becomes circumcision in the fourth year by just waiting, and then the fruit is able to be partaken of, and blessing happens to our homes.

Well, all this is related to the feast of the circumcision because in Luke 2, what do we read? We read in verse 21: “When eight days were completed for the circumcision of the child, his name was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb.” So the circumcision of Jesus and then immediately in next verse 22: “Now when the days of their purification according to the law of Moses were completed, they brought him to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord.”

See, because in the law, this circumcision and purification are really two halves of the same ritual. And I think what we have going on here—by picturing the circumcision of our Savior—is we see that the one has now come that will definitively move the world from its uncircumcised, unclean state to a cleansed state. Still there’s some manifestations, of course, but definitively he has transformed things. He’s brought about the end of circumcision. You don’t need it anymore after Jesus is circumcised because it was a picture of something else.

And now we have a bloodless sign, baptism, that is a reminder of the same thing—that our children are cleansed by God and they’re brought into the new creation, right? Eighth day. What does this mean? The circumcision of Jesus. Why did those medieval poets and sermonizers and these folks wax so eloquent on the feast of circumcision? Because they knew that this eighth day thing was this great picture of the removal of defilement, guilt, the definitive Gilgal, rolling away the reproach of the old world, preparing us to move into the new world. United with Christ, which is who we are. We’re Christians. United with Christ, we have the circumcision that was made without hands on us because it was made in hands on him.

He is identified as the heir of the covenant, right? The circumcision was a sign given to Abraham that through him, God would save the entire created order—fruit trees included. And we see this manifestation in the New Testament. We’re told Israel is Jesus. He’s the true Israel. Through the one man, the one circumcised man, all undefilement is definitively rolled back. The eighth day: old creation, seven days. Eighth day, beginning of the new world. Three days in the grave. When’s he resurrected? He’s resurrected on the eighth day of the week. Right after the seventh day, the Sabbath. The third day is the eighth day.

The third year of the fruit trees is connected to the eighth day of Jesus’s circumcision. And now the great tree representing all of humanity, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, has submitted to the ritual of circumcision as an eight-day old baby and then participated in the rest of the purification rights in concert with his mother. And the end result of that is that the new creation has happened. You and I have the ability now to walk with undefilement in our lives fully consecrated and holy to God in a way and in a powerful way that the Old Testament saints weren’t able to do because the reality has now come of which they only saw the signs. We see the great fulfillment of it.

We see the great cleansing has been accomplished. You see Jesus, the one who would save his people—and Bernard was the great theologian who saw in this text the combining together of humanity and God in the incarnation. But now in his demonstration of his humanity through the shedding of his blood at circumcision, being connected up with him being Yeshua—”saves.” What Jesus means: He is Yahweh. Yahweh saves. He’s Yahweh. He’s a child. He’s God. Can’t bleed as God. He’s a human who bleeds. And Bernard knew that once those two came together, the world would never be the same again.

God and his incarnation, and his demonstration of that, and his demonstration of the humanity and divinity of the Lord Jesus Christ. The text tells us he was circumcised on the eighth day. And that was when the name day was—his circumcision day was his name day. That was when the world was told: This is Yahweh who saves. And those two things come together. That’s why the church has waxed eloquent for two thousand years about the feast of circumcision. It’s the great circumcision. It’s the great fruitfulness that will now happen in the context of our world because Jesus has accomplished what Leviticus 19:23-26 preached in short form. The gospel has come in very intensified form, and he has brought us into that time when now we’re this side of Leviticus 19:23-26.

The definitive cleansing has occurred. The definitive work by which we can now work out, live out the holiness of the Lord Jesus Christ through the Spirit who brings us into union and communion with him. We can then be that holy people. Leviticus 19—the whole header was “Be holy, for I am holy.” And by the way, in order to be holy, there’s going to have to be a circumcision of everything, including the world and trees. And by the way, that’s going to happen in the one who comes along, who is circumcised himself to roll back the defilement of the human race, who will bring us into the position of then being eligible to eat that Passover feast with God and then being eligible to leave this place eating normal food.

And what do they leave to do in the book of Joshua? They go to take that gospel into all the world. That’s what we do every Lord’s day. We come together. We’re reminded of the definitive cleansing of Christ. We’re then celebrate the Passover, the Christian Passover at the communion table. And all this is done to sync us up with those people in Joshua who, having definitively been circumcised through union with the Lord Jesus Christ, circumcision walk forward into victory.

Now, the text in Leviticus 2 doesn’t stop there. You know what happens next? We talked about it at Christmas sermon. The next thing that happens is the Nunc Dimittis. “Lord, now let us thy people depart in peace.” You’re letting me depart in peace, says Simeon. Simeon’s song happens next as Mary goes for the purification. That’s when the song of Simeon bursts forth. It’s happened. It’s been accomplished. Circumcision, the letting of blood that will take its full flow on the cross. Nonetheless, it has happened definitively in Christ.

And because of that, we can depart in peace. There’s a movement of God here in the text that we are joined with. He’s definitively rolled back the uncleanness of the world and its trees. He’s through the first fruits, the Lord Jesus Christ, brought humanity into the throne room to be eaten as praise to God, so to speak, like that fruit from the trees were. And this means that we can then enter into the rest of normal ordinary life with a renewed set of consecration and devotion to him.

There’s this old song it’s found in English hymnals about the feast of circumcision, and it’s all about this. This is the feast of circumcision. It’s a great thing. Let’s drink strong drink and eat good food and rejoice because of what Christ has accomplished. And one of the lyrics from that as well says, “Now let us shake off the serpent’s skin. Our new lives begin”—is the implication. I don’t remember the exact words, but the song celebrated the fact that the feast of circumcision was the great definitive removal, which then becomes for us the beginning of our new year in a new resolve to shake off the ways of the serpent, to shake off ways of unholiness so that we can be fully consecrated to God and move on in sanctification and holiness from year to year.

That’s the great gospel that really we see in miniature form in Leviticus 19:23-26. Our proper response to that gospel is to say, “Praise God. Praise his everlasting name that the Lord Jesus Christ and what we celebrate the feast of circumcision has brought to bear these great truths of the scriptures and made us calls on us, demands of us that we respond with a commitment today to holiness—to having that full-orbed witness of Christ in everything that we do and say that the third word absolutely demands of us.

God has made it possible. God has affected it through the work of the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. And God expects us to respond in the power of the Spirit with thanksgiving, but more than that with dedication to live our lives in obedience to him. Let’s pray.

Almighty God, we thank you for the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. Thank you that in him we have been those who have had the reproach of Egypt and our own sinfulness rolled back away from us. Thank you for this new year that opens up in front of us. Help us, Lord God, to resolve today to serve the Lord Jesus Christ in holiness. In his name we ask it. Amen. Amen.