Scripture Daily

Context No. 592 of 4322 · Leviticus

Context · Reflection

Leviticus 20:11-15: in context

11“‘The man who lies with his father’s wife has uncovered his father’s nakedness. Both of them shall surely be put to death. Their blood shall be upon themselves. 12“‘If a man lies with his daughter-in-law, both of them shall surely be put to death. They have committed a perversion. Their blood shall be upon themselves. 13“‘If a man lies with a male, as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination. They shall surely be put to death. Their blood shall be upon themselves. 14“‘If a man takes a wife and her mother, it is wickedness. They shall be burned with fire, both he and they, that there may be no wickedness among you. 15“‘If a man lies with an animal, he shall surely be put to death; and you shall kill the animal.

This is one of the hardest kinds of passage in the law: a list of sexual offenses that, under Israel's covenant, carried the death penalty, incest, adultery with a father's wife, relations with a daughter-in-law, with the same sex, with an animal. It is severe, and I will not pretend it reads easily to modern ears, or that the ancient civil penalties are how the Church deals with such things now; under the new covenant God works through mercy and transformation, not the executioner. But it will also not do to skip past a passage simply because it is uncomfortable. It is here, and it is saying something true about how seriously God regards the moral order of our lives.

What the severity communicates is gravity. To God, sexuality is not a trivial or private matter that carries no weight; it is bound up with the created order, with the family, with the integrity of persons, and its corruption is serious to him, serious enough, under the old covenant's civil code, to be a matter of life and death. And notice the breadth of the list. It does not target one kind of person; it names a whole range of sexual sins, including ones that respectable, upstanding people commit, so that no one reading it honestly gets to stand outside it pointing fingers. Held up against God's holiness, the list indicts far more of us than we would like to admit, and it is meant to silence self-righteousness, not to fuel it.

That drives me somewhere specific, and it is not toward condemning other people. It is toward the sober recognition that God takes sin, including mine, including the ones I treat as minor, far more seriously than I do, and that his holiness would rightly condemn me. And it is toward the astonishing mercy of the new covenant, where the God who set these grave penalties sent his Son to bear the condemnation my sin deserves, so that I am met not by the executioner but by the one who says, go and sin no more. Do I take my own sin as seriously as God does, and have I fled to the mercy that alone answers what his holiness exposes in me?

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