“You must not offer the blood of my sacrifices with anything leavened. The fat of my festival offering must not remain until morning. Bring the best of the firstfruits of your land to the house of the Lord your God. You must not boil a young goat in its mother’s milk.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

A couple of weeks ago, I found myself tasked with having to get the sound working for an outdoor movie event. I had all of the supplies I needed, but I wasn’t sure how to connect them all in a way that made the audio come out where I wanted it to. I needed instructions. Anytime we do something new, we need instructions. Just about everything you buy from the store comes with instructions. When we understand the instructions, we’ll know how to do whatever it is we are trying to do. God was creating a people who were being called to follow Him. The trouble was, that kind of thing hadn’t ever existed before. They needed instructions. Thus the law. Sometimes, though, just like instructions can be hard to understand, so can the laws God gave to Israel. Here’s a classic example. Let’s see what we can do with it.

One of the things scholars have used for a long time to help make sense of the laws by which Israel was to operate is to group them into three different categories. Some were focused on the people’s moral behavior. Others were primarily about legal matters. A third category was most concerned with ceremonial aspects of their worship. The truth is that these categories are artificial and are tools for understanding that should not be understood to be hard and fast for any law. Sometimes a law that seems more ceremonially-focused has a clear moral element to it. Laws that are obviously about a person’s behavior necessarily impact legal settings. And laws focused on legal matters translate directly to how the people worshiped.

That last crossover is especially relevant for Exodus 23. If you can remember back that far, the chapter started with a clear focus on legal matters, but now we are obviously in a section concerning how the people worshiped the Lord. The immediately prior section which we talked about last Thursday laid out the basic contours of three religious festivals the people were to observe each year. Following on the heels of that are this quartet of laws about the kinds of sacrifices and offerings the people were to make during these festivals. The first three of them are fairly easy to understand. The fourth one is perhaps the single most classic example of a law that doesn’t make the first bit of sense to us today, and thus, as the argument often goes, can’t possibly have anything of even the remotest relevance to do with our lives. Naturally, we can just ignore the law and go about our merry way without it.

Well, as we have talked about before, because we live under the new covenant of Christ, the law doesn’t apply to us or have authority over us in the same way it did for the Israelites. But as I also hope I’ve made clear over the course of this journey, ignoring it isn’t a wise option at all. There’s just too much wisdom here once we filter it through the lens of the new covenant to let us get away with thinking ignoring it is a good approach. Paul himself said that every word of the Scriptures (by which he meant what we call the Old Testament) was breathed out by God and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness. So then, what kind of training can we find here?

I think the big idea running through all four of these laws is that we should take our worship rituals seriously. There is a right and proper way to worship the Lord. This doesn’t mean there hasn’t been, isn’t, and shouldn’t be great variety in terms of how people have worshiped the Lord across history and around the world today, but there is nonetheless a right and proper way to do it regardless of the exact approach we happen to be taking. And this right and proper way is for us to give our worship practices our full and best attention and to take seriously what it is we are doing. God is worthy of our best. Taking a flippant attitude to our worship reveals a profound lack of understanding of God’s character on our part. And, if we don’t understand God’s character properly, it may be that we’re not actually worshiping Him at all. God wanted the people worshiping Him and not anyone or anything else. Thus these kinds of guardrail commands.

And while we’re at it, so many of the commands God gives to Israel function kind of like guardrails. While Israel was wise and right to keep God’s commands, the act of accidentally mixing a little bit of leaven in with the blood of their sacrifices to God wasn’t likely to result in instantly cutting them off from Him forever. Nor was boiling a young goat in its mother’s milk probably going to cause God to smite them on the spot with a lightning bolt out of the clear sky (maybe a stormy sky, but definitely not a clear one). Instead, commands like these were intended to remind the people to think like they were the people of God. They were to see the significance in the things they did. They were to worship God with their minds as well as their hearts and their actions. Doing the right things without the right heart and head behind them wasn’t any good for them or God. At the same time, Doing the wrong things when worshiping was a symptom that their minds and hearts weren’t really in it which was equally problematic.

Okay, but why these laws exactly? To a certain extent here we have to acknowledge that we’re guessing. We’re dealing with a text that was written as much as 3500 years ago to a different culture with different customs and assumptions of knowledge. There are some references that are going to be opaque for us in spite of our best efforts to understand them. What this means is that we need to be humble in our approach. It also means that while we may come up with a really good explanation that fits with the context and coheres well with the rest of the Scriptures, someone else may come up with a different explanation that also seems to hit those marks and that’s okay. How we understand these kinds of laws through the lens of the new covenant is not a salvation determining issue. We can have charity our understanding.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, but what do these mean? Well, leaven was often symbolic for sin and evil. Paul picks up on that imagery in some of his writings. Blood was holy. The point of the first command was perhaps to stop the people from mixing the sacred and the profane. Good and evil are not the same. One does not go with the other. God was calling them to reflect His own character of righteousness and holiness. This meant they could not tolerate sin among them in any form or fashion. Instructing the people to keep this kind of a divide in their thinking about worship was intended to translate to their thinking about the rest of their lives as individuals and as a whole people. When you are endeavoring to follow Jesus, follow Jesus. You can’t follow two people at the same time who are going in opposite directions. Don’t follow Jesus and something else. Then you’re not really following Jesus at all. You’re following something else. Something else won’t lead you to life the way Jesus will.

This same kind of theme seems to run through the second law here. When something was dedicated to God, it was to be dedicated completely to God. And, if you committed to doing something for God (or anyone else for that matter), you needed to finish the work. Leaving the fat of the offering until morning resulted in an incomplete sacrifice and was likely the result of laziness or inattention. That kind of halfway thinking would translate to other parts of their lives if they were willing to let it go here. They were to be wholly dedicated to God as a people, and were not to be satisfied with going on part of the way.

The next two laws, including the weird one, both seem to have to do with the attitude the people were bringing to their worship. The first one in particular seems to be about teaching them something about God’s character. If God is really holy and righteous and worthy of their worship, then He is worthy of the best they had to bring, not the rest. Taking for themselves first and bringing God the leftovers simply wouldn’t do. Nothing about that was honoring of Him. Giving the people permission to put Him second would eventually result in His being put last and then ignored entirely. The people needed to know and understand that God was greater than they were. As such, He was worthy of the best they had to bring. He still is.

When we worship, we need to bring God our very best. This is why people used to dress up for worship. You were appearing before someone important when you went to participate in the physical rituals of worshiping the Lord. You wouldn’t go appear before someone important wearing your grubby gardening clothes, so why would you appear before the Lord in anything but your “Sunday best”? That kind of thinking over time, though (like the kind of thinking being encouraged of the Israelites here), resulted in a legalism wherein people paid more attention to the condition of their clothes than the condition of their hearts. That’s part of why people don’t dress up in many churches today and it’s not encouraged. My own congregation understands this really well. We recently had someone show up with a half pink/half brown afro and pajama pants for worship and no one batted an eye. It was awesome. The bigger point, though, is that we still need to take God seriously and focus on bringing Him our best. He deserves the best of our time, the best of our attention, the best of our talents, the best of our resources, the best of our everything. Anything less communicates that we don’t really understand who He is. And if we do, lazy behaving will eventually result in lazy thinking which will not lead us to a good place.

As for the last law here, no one really knows what to do with this one. There are about as many theories for it as there are commentators commenting on it. I’m not looking to add anything particularly original because until I did some studying on it, I really didn’t have any idea what to do with it either. What makes this even more interesting is that this same command appears two more times in the law (again later in Exodus and in Deuteronomy). While it looks like there has been a strain of interpretation that sees this as countering some kind of a Canaanite worship practice, it doesn’t look like there’s much in the way of conclusive evidence for this. Two other ideas on it make the most sense to me. Both are pretty firmly rooted in the context here.

The first is that by boiling a young goat in its mother’s milk the people were mixing what was intended for death (the goat being sacrificed) with something that was intended for life (the mother’s milk). This goes back to the first part about not mixing the blood of sacrifices with leavened bread. Mixing death and life this way was wrong in the same way that mixing symbols of good and evil together wasn’t good. The people needed to learn to distinguish one from the other in their hearts and minds. Doing so with their actions was a physical reminder of the importance of this.

The second idea is that a young goat represented what was new and the milk from the mother represented what was old. The people were not to bring last year’s leftovers as an offering for the Lord. They were to bring the best of the firstfruits of this year’s crop. Prohibiting the people from mixing the old with the new this way was a reminder of the importance of bringing their first and best to God rather than their leftovers.

Are one of these more correct than the other? Perhaps. Or they could both be wrong. Thankfully, however you interpret this strange command doesn’t have any bearing on whether or not Jesus rose from the dead, and so we don’t have to worry about it all that much. What is worth remembering, though, is that God is worthy of our best. When we commit to giving that to Him, much of the rest of our relationship with Him will fall nicely into place.