Leviticus may be one of the easiest biblical books to preach badly. The preacher can move too quickly from an animal sacrifice to the cross, turn clean and unclean into synonyms for righteous and sinful, extract a contemporary rule from an ancient holiness law without explaining covenantal change, or avoid the difficult material altogether and preach only Leviticus 19:18 and perhaps the Day of Atonement. None of those approaches allows Leviticus to perform its own theological work. The book first needs to be heard within the world created at the end of Exodus, where the holy God has come to dwell among a redeemed but still imperfect people, before its rituals, priesthood, purity regulations, ethics, sacred calendar and land legislation can be carried responsibly through the canon to Christ and the church.

The fundamental preaching question is therefore not, “How can I make this strange rule relevant?” It is, “What does this text reveal about life in the presence of the holy God, and how does that reality develop within the biblical story?” Once the question is framed that way, apparently remote passages begin to belong together. Sacrifice concerns acceptable approach; priesthood concerns mediation; purity concerns ordered access to sacred presence; atonement concerns God’s provision for restoring what threatens communion; holiness extends God’s character into the whole life of the community; Sabbath and festivals sanctify time; and Jubilee brings divine ownership, freedom, kinship and land into the same theological world.

The preacher’s task is therefore neither to reproduce Israel’s ritual system nor to jump over it. We must understand what a Levitical institution meant and accomplished within Israel, identify the theological reality embodied in it, trace what later Scripture does with that reality, and only then ask how Christ’s fulfilment and the church’s situation reshape its contemporary force. That extra interpretive work is demanding, but it is also what makes preaching Leviticus unusually rewarding: the book gives theological texture to words such as holiness, sacrifice, priesthood, impurity, cleansing, atonement, blood, Sabbath and redemption that Christians otherwise use without realizing how much of their meaning has been inherited from Israel’s Scriptures.

Start Where Exodus Ends: God Has Come to Live Among His People

The most important homiletical decision comes before the first sermon outline is written. Leviticus must be preached as the continuation of Exodus rather than as an isolated legal handbook. Exodus 40 ends with YHWH’s glory filling the completed tabernacle so overwhelmingly that Moses cannot enter, and Leviticus 1 begins with God speaking to Moses from that same tent. The question generated by the narrative is therefore immediate and existential: if the holy God now lives at the centre of Israel’s camp, how can ordinary, sinful and frequently impure human beings continue to live with him?

That narrative setting gives the preacher a governing centre for the whole book. Sacrifices are not primitive religious technologies designed to coax a reluctant deity into friendliness, because the God who gives them has already rescued Israel from slavery and chosen to dwell among them. The regulations are responses to grace and presence. They show how relationship with this God can be enjoyed, protected and restored, and therefore preaching should begin with God’s initiative rather than with Israel’s performance.

Scarlata makes this especially fruitful for preaching by following the consequences of divine presence beyond the sanctuary. God’s dwelling is related to Israel’s dwellings, and the holiness concentrated at the tabernacle gradually reaches the household, body, social order, land and calendar. This allows a sermon series to retain one theological centre even as its subjects change dramatically. The question behind sacrifices in chapters 1–7 and Jubilee in chapter 25 is finally related: what does a human community look like when every sphere of life is lived before the God who has chosen to dwell among it?

Preach the Sacrifice Before Preaching Christ as the Sacrifice

The quickest route from Leviticus to a Christian congregation is not necessarily the safest one. If the preacher begins by saying that every animal represents Jesus dying for our sins, the distinctiveness of the offerings disappears before it has been heard. The burnt offering, grain offering, well-being offering, purification offering and reparation offering are not five interchangeable versions of one transaction; their materials, occasions, manipulations, beneficiaries and results differ, and those differences are part of the theological meaning of the text.

The first exegetical task is therefore to establish what the particular offering is doing within Leviticus. Some sacrifices express dedication or homage, some enable fellowship and celebration, some address particular disruptions, and reparation can include concrete restitution rather than merely an inward feeling of remorse. Only after the preacher has reconstructed the Old Testament ritual grammar should the sermon ask how the New Testament gathers sacrificial categories around Christ. Doing it in that order makes Christological preaching richer, not weaker, because the congregation discovers that “Christ our sacrifice” contains several dimensions rather than one vague image.

This also prevents forced typology. The preacher does not need to assign a secret Christian meaning to every portion of an animal, every utensil, every movement of the priest or every colour in the sanctuary. Typology is strongest where Scripture itself develops structural correspondences: sacrifice, priesthood, sanctuary, blood, Day of Atonement, holiness, cleansing and Jubilee provide genuine canonical roads toward Christ. The goal is not to prove ingenuity by finding Jesus hidden under every ritual detail but to show how the theological realities established in Leviticus reach their larger biblical fulfilment.

Do Not Preach “Unclean” as Though It Means “Sinful”

Some of the most pastorally damaging sermons on Leviticus begin with a category error. Ritual impurity can arise from childbirth, menstruation, seminal emission, skin conditions or contact with death, none of which means that the person concerned has committed a moral sin. Leviticus distinguishes holy from common and clean from unclean while also addressing actual moral wrongdoing, and those categories interact without simply collapsing into one another. A preacher who repeatedly calls an impure person “sinful” is therefore not merely simplifying the book but changing what the text says.

This distinction matters particularly when preaching chapters 11–15. These texts concern bodies, illness, sexuality and reproductive processes—subjects around which congregations may already carry embarrassment, fear or unnecessary shame. The sermon should explain the Levitical system of sacred access and bodily states rather than moralizing normal human processes that the text itself does not condemn. The theological question becomes how creaturely human life, vulnerability and mortality coexist with divine holiness, not why certain classes of people are morally inferior.

The canonical bridge can then proceed more responsibly. Jesus’ ministry repeatedly crosses boundaries associated with impurity—touching the sick and dead rather than becoming a source of contamination himself—and the New Testament eventually reconfigures the purity boundaries that once distinguished Israel. Yet the underlying theological seriousness does not disappear: God’s presence remains holy, sin and death remain enemies, and cleansing remains part of salvation’s vocabulary. The preacher can therefore show genuine fulfilment and transformation without first misdescribing the original system.

Handle Atonement with More Precision Than “The Animal Paid the Price”

Kipper is one of the central terms of Leviticus and one of the places where responsible preaching should acknowledge the limits of scholarly consensus. Milgrom’s enormously influential account emphasizes sanctuary pollution and purgation; other interpreters understand the ritual differently or combine cleansing and relational dimensions. Greenberg’s recently examined study pushes the discussion further by arguing that kipper establishes or repairs a positive, protective relationship between the worshipper and YHWH and signals God’s acceptance of the prescribed remedy. The technical debate is too complex to reproduce in most sermons, but it should make the preacher more careful about declaring one mechanism obvious when the Hebrew and ritual evidence remain disputed.

The pulpit does not require false certainty in order to proclaim the text confidently. What Leviticus repeatedly makes clear is that disruption is real, approach to holiness cannot be invented by the worshipper, God provides appointed means of dealing with the problem, priestly mediation matters, and promised outcomes such as forgiveness, purification or restored access follow in their appropriate contexts. Those claims are strong enough to preach without pretending that every occurrence of kipper describes precisely the same ritual mechanism. In fact, allowing the details to remain complex can deepen the congregation’s sense that biblical atonement is richer than a slogan.

When moving canonically to Hebrews and the cross, the preacher should similarly distinguish fulfilment from flattening. Hebrews can employ Day of Atonement imagery, priesthood, sanctuary and blood together because Leviticus has already furnished those categories, but the New Testament writers use them creatively rather than mechanically reproducing the ritual system. Christ is priest and offering; his work concerns cleansing, access, forgiveness, covenant and perfected approach to God. Leviticus therefore supplies the grammar in which the New Testament speaks, while Christ gives that grammar an eschatological and once-for-all centre.

Preach Priesthood as Mediation, Responsibility and Accountable Authority

Leviticus 8–10 should not be reduced to an ordination service followed by a warning against innovative worship. Priests stand at the dangerous interface between divine holiness and ordinary communal life, and their privileges are inseparable from responsibility, knowledge, discernment and exposure to judgment. The deaths of Nadab and Abihu make the danger unforgettable, but the narrative is also about the seriousness of mediation when a community lives around God’s immediate presence.

Watts adds another dimension that preachers need not adopt reductively in order to find useful. Ritual legislation does not merely explain what priests happen to do; written Torah also establishes legitimate procedure and authorizes particular religious offices. Yet once the instructions become publicly authoritative Scripture, priestly performance is itself answerable to the text. Authority and accountability therefore grow together, and this makes Leviticus unexpectedly relevant to preaching about religious leadership without requiring a simplistic identification between Aaronide priests and modern pastors.

The Christian bridge should proceed first through Christ’s unique high priesthood rather than immediately through church leadership. Hebrews places the decisive mediation in Christ, whose priestly work gives access to God in a way the repeated Levitical system anticipated but could not finally complete. Only after that Christological centre is established should application turn toward Christian ministers or the priestly identity of God’s people. The sermon then avoids flattering clergy with priestly status while still allowing Leviticus to speak searchingly about those entrusted with sacred responsibility.

Let Leviticus Be Literature Before Turning It into a Systematic Theology

Mary Douglas makes this preaching principle more important than it might initially sound. Leviticus contains long legal sequences, but it also contains carefully located narratives, repeated formulas, spatial language, patterns and transitions that may contribute to the message of the book. Douglas’s boldest proposal is that Leviticus mirrors the tripartite architecture of the tabernacle, with its two major narrative interruptions functioning analogously to the sanctuary screens. A preacher need not persuade a congregation of the complete architectural reconstruction in order to learn from her central instinct: where material occurs can matter as much as what it says.

This means that individual laws should be preached within their literary neighbourhood. Nadab and Abihu should be related to the inauguration of priestly worship before and the purity instruction after; the blasphemer narrative belongs within the movement of holiness legislation rather than functioning as an isolated problem text; Jubilee appears after an extended development of sacred time, land and communal holiness. The preacher who extracts an individual regulation without locating it within those larger movements risks turning Leviticus into a topical dictionary rather than hearing the book’s own rhetoric.

Literary sensitivity also improves sermon shape. Instead of importing a three-point outline unrelated to the text, the preacher can allow repetitions, movements of approach and withdrawal, changes of speaker, gradations of sacred space and narrative interruptions to supply the sermon’s progression. Leviticus is undeniably alien to many hearers, but its strangeness becomes more manageable when the sermon enables them to experience rather than merely define its ordered world.

Holiness Must Move Beyond the Sanctuary

The command to be holy is easy to preach as a demand for personal moral purity, but Leviticus gives holiness a much larger social and theological field. The sanctuary is its concentrated centre, yet chapters 17–27 progressively show what life looks like when the God of that sanctuary claims bodies, meals, sexuality, harvests, neighbours, workers, foreigners, courts, festivals, land and economics. Leviticus 19 therefore does not represent the surprising discovery of “ethical religion” after seventeen chapters of ritual; it shows what sanctuary-centred holiness looks like when translated into ordinary communal existence.

This is where Scarlata provides one of the strongest new homiletical bridges. The home of YHWH and the homes of Israel belong to one sacred geography, and sacred time extends the same theology into Sabbath and festival rhythms. The preacher can therefore move naturally from worship to neighbour-love, honest weights, prompt payment of workers, treatment of vulnerable people and protection of the foreigner without suggesting that ethics has finally replaced ritual. The God encountered in worship is the God whose character reshapes the community’s ordinary practices.

This also exposes the weakness of the familiar division into “ceremonial law” and “moral law” if those categories are treated as though Leviticus itself had already sorted its commands that way. They can be useful later theological classifications, but the biblical text repeatedly intertwines worship, purity, social justice, sexual conduct, agriculture and sacred time. A sermon should therefore ask not simply whether a particular law is still directly binding, but what vision of God, neighbour, body, creation and covenant life is being enacted through it and how that vision is transformed within the new-covenant community.

Preach Jubilee as Restoration under God’s Ownership, Not as a Ready-Made Modern Economic Program

Leviticus 25 is particularly vulnerable to political appropriation because almost every modern economic ideology can find something attractive or offensive in it. Bergsma helps restore the chapter’s own centre by emphasizing the relationship among ancestral land, kinship and freedom. The text imagines an Israelite progressively losing land, house, economic independence and eventually personal freedom, while redemption mechanisms and Jubilee prevent such alienation from becoming permanent. The deepest premise is theological: the land belongs to YHWH, Israel belongs to YHWH because he redeemed them, and neither can therefore be treated as though ownership and economic power were absolute.

That gives the preacher abundant contemporary material without requiring a direct blueprint for tax policy, land redistribution or modern credit systems. A sermon can address the danger of turning human beings into economic instruments, the limits placed on property rights by divine ownership, the responsibility of kin and community toward those descending into poverty, the importance of rest, and God’s opposition to permanent structures of dehumanizing bondage. Those are theological deductions from the text’s world rather than claims that ancient agrarian legislation maps directly onto a modern state.

The Christological bridge through Luke 4 then becomes much stronger. Jesus’ proclamation of release evokes Jubilee language within a larger prophetic context, but the sermon should first let Leviticus establish what restoration means before announcing fulfilment. In Christ, release from bondage and restoration to God’s inheritance become dimensions of the kingdom, while the church is called to embody the character of that kingdom in concrete treatment of debtors, workers, poor people and socially vulnerable neighbours. Jubilee should therefore enlarge Christian imagination before it becomes a slogan.

Keep Law and Story Together

Carmichael presses this principle with unusual boldness by arguing that many Levitical laws were formulated in deliberate conversation with narratives elsewhere in Genesis–Kings. I would not preach his individual proposed correspondences as established history, because many are ingenious but difficult to demonstrate, and the pulpit should distinguish suggestive intertextual possibilities from secure exegesis. Yet his larger challenge is valuable: biblical law is embedded within biblical story, and a preacher who treats legal material as though it had no memory of Israel’s narrative identity has already abstracted it from its canonical environment.

Some connections do not require Carmichael’s more ambitious theory. Leviticus repeatedly appeals to the exodus from Egypt; the entire book presupposes the tabernacle narrative of Exodus; priesthood emerges within the Moses-Aaron story; Sabbath reaches backward toward creation; and the land legislation anticipates Israel’s life in the promised inheritance. Law tells redeemed people how to inhabit a story. Preaching becomes much richer when commands are therefore connected to the acts, relationships and identity that make obedience intelligible.

This principle also protects Christian application from legalism. Israel does not obey Leviticus in order to manufacture redemption from Egypt, because redemption has already occurred. Likewise, the church does not pursue holiness in order to persuade God to become gracious. The canonical movement from saving action to covenantal response supplies an enduring homiletical grammar: grace creates a people, God’s presence reshapes that people, and obedience becomes the fitting form of redeemed life.

The Christological Bridge: Four Roads Are Better Than One Shortcut

Preaching Christ from Leviticus becomes safer when the preacher recognizes several legitimate canonical routes rather than using the same typological formula every week. Typology is particularly appropriate for sacrifice, high priesthood, sanctuary, Day of Atonement and festivals, where the New Testament itself develops substantial correspondences. Analogy allows the preacher to reason from God’s revealed character and earlier provision toward the greater reality accomplished in Christ without pretending that every historical detail was a prediction. Direct New Testament use is especially important for holiness, neighbour-love, sacrifice, purity and priesthood because Jesus and the apostles explicitly quote or appropriate Levitical material. Redemptive-historical development then helps distinguish what continues, what is transformed and what reaches completion as the story moves from Israel’s sanctuary to Christ and ultimately to God’s dwelling with humanity.

These roads should normally be travelled after the Old Testament passage has been understood rather than substituted for exegesis. A sermon on Leviticus 16 should explain Aaron, the sanctuary, the two goats, purification, the annual ritual and Israel’s covenantal problem before Hebrews is allowed to interpret those categories christologically. A sermon on Leviticus 19 should hear the chapter’s own integration of worship, neighbour, poor, foreigner, justice and holiness before Jesus’ summary of the law is introduced. A sermon on Leviticus 25 should understand land and kinship restoration before Luke 4 is invoked.

The destination is not merely the statement that “this points to Jesus.” The congregation should see what aspect of Christ’s work becomes clearer because Leviticus supplied the category. Priesthood clarifies mediation and access; sacrifice clarifies costly divine provision and consecration; purification clarifies the removal of what excludes from God’s presence; Jubilee clarifies release and restoration; holiness clarifies the kind of people grace creates. The richer Leviticus becomes, the richer Christological preaching becomes with it.

From Biblical Theology to the Congregation

Application should arise from the theological reality carried through the canon rather than from reproducing the surface form of the ancient regulation. A helpful sequence is to ask what the text required or enacted in Israel, what it revealed about YHWH and covenant life, how the rest of Scripture develops that reality, what changes through Christ and the new covenant, and what corresponding form faithful life takes now. That process is slower than saying “Israel did X, therefore Christians should do something analogous,” but it prevents both legalism and irrelevance.

Leviticus can then speak powerfully to contemporary congregations without pretending that they live in ancient Israel. Its theology challenges casual worship because divine presence is not trivial; it challenges individualistic Christianity because holiness is communal; it challenges moralistic treatment of bodies because impurity is not identical with guilt; it challenges religious compartmentalization because household, economics, sexuality, land and time all fall within the scope of holiness; and it challenges cheap grace because restoration to God’s presence transforms the people who receive it. At the same time it offers extraordinary hope: God himself provides the means by which a compromised people can continue to live before him.

The eschatological trajectory matters here as well. Leviticus begins with carefully guarded sacred space, but Scripture ends with God’s dwelling encompassing the renewed creation and his people seeing him face to face. The preacher can therefore present holiness not merely as a list of restrictions but as preparation for communion—the restoration of a world in which God’s presence no longer threatens because everything opposed to his holiness has finally been overcome. That positive vision helps keep a Leviticus series from becoming twenty-seven chapters of warning.

What Not to Do When Preaching Leviticus

Do Not Turn Every Sacrifice into the Same Sermon

If every offering becomes “Jesus died for your sins,” the preacher has effectively erased Leviticus before claiming to fulfil it. Establish why this particular offering is brought, who participates, what happens to it, what result is promised and how it differs from neighbouring offerings. Christological fulfilment should magnify those distinctions rather than make them irrelevant, because different sacrificial categories illuminate different dimensions of reconciliation, dedication, fellowship, cleansing and restored worship.

Do Not Equate Ritual Impurity with Personal Wickedness

This mistake is exegetically inaccurate and pastorally dangerous, particularly in texts concerning childbirth, menstruation, sexuality, disease and death. Explain the ritual system and the problem of access to sacred space before discussing moral application, and distinguish unavoidable bodily impurity from deliberate transgression. The congregation should leave understanding Leviticus’s categories more accurately, not feeling that ordinary human embodiment has been given a moral stigma the text does not place upon it.

Do Not Use “Ceremonial Law” as an Excuse Not to Interpret the Text

Saying that a law is ceremonial and therefore fulfilled in Christ may be part of a later Christian theological conclusion, but it does not explain why God gave the law, what it communicated to Israel or why it occupies its present place in Scripture. The preacher still needs to reconstruct its function, symbolism and relationship to holiness before reaching questions of continuity and discontinuity. Fulfilment is not the same thing as meaninglessness after Christ.

Do Not Allegorize Ritual Details without Controls

The history of Christian interpretation contains extraordinarily creative readings of the sanctuary, sacrifices, priestly garments and animals, but creativity is not itself evidence. Prefer connections supported by textual function, recurring biblical patterns and explicit New Testament use, and distinguish theological analogy from claims of divinely encoded prediction. A congregation should learn to trust Scripture’s actual interconnections rather than admire the preacher’s ability to invent them.

Do Not Reduce Leviticus to Moral Rules

Leviticus 19 contains compelling social ethics, but those ethics belong to the theology of the holy God dwelling among a redeemed people. Removing neighbour-love, justice, honest commerce or concern for the poor from that theological setting turns the sermon into generic morality and obscures why holiness encompasses these practices. Christian ethics should similarly arise from communion with God and participation in his redemptive work rather than becoming a new law detached from grace.

Do Not Preach the Difficult Texts as Though No Interpretive Questions Exist

Leviticus contains genuine debates about sacrifice, kipper, impurity, sexual laws, priesthood, source history, Jubilee and the symbolic meaning of many procedures. The congregation does not need an academic seminar every Sunday, but neither should the preacher convert disputed reconstructions into facts merely because one commentary states them confidently. Responsible preaching distinguishes what the passage clearly establishes from what remains a plausible explanation, and that modesty usually strengthens rather than weakens authority in the pulpit.

A One-Sermon Route Through Leviticus

If only one sermon is available, I would preach the book under the controlling question “How can the holy God dwell among his people?” Begin with Exodus 40 and Leviticus 1:1 so that the congregation understands the problem created by God’s presence, then move through sacrifice as divinely provided approach, priesthood as mediation, purity as ordered access, Leviticus 16 as the climactic provision for restoration, and Leviticus 17–27 as holiness spreading into the entire life of God’s people. The sermon should then move canonically to Christ as the one through whom cleansing, priestly mediation and access are brought to fulfilment, before ending with the biblical vision of God’s dwelling finally filling the renewed creation. This route gives the congregation a map of the book rather than a catalogue of strange laws.

A Three-Sermon Route Through Leviticus

The first sermon can cover Leviticus 1–10: “Approaching the Holy God,” emphasizing sacrifice, priesthood and the danger as well as gift of divine presence. The second can centre on Leviticus 11–16: “Cleansed to Live in God’s Presence,” carefully distinguishing impurity from sin before allowing the Day of Atonement to gather up the problem of purification, mediation and restored access. The third can cover Leviticus 17–27: “Holiness in the Whole of Life,”showing holiness moving outward into body, neighbour, foreigner, worship, time, land, economics and covenant faithfulness. Christ can be preached throughout, but the three-sermon progression should remain visible: approach, cleansing and transformed communal life.

A Four-Sermon Route Through Leviticus

A four-part series gives enough room to prevent Day of Atonement and holiness from competing for one sermon. “God Has Moved In” (1–7) can introduce divine presence and the differentiated sacrificial system; “Serving Near the Fire” (8–10) can focus on priesthood, mediation, glory and Nadab and Abihu; “Clean, Unclean and Atoned” (11–16) can explain bodily impurity and culminate in the annual restoration of the sanctuary-community relationship; and “Be Holy Because I Am Holy” (17–27) can show the outward movement into ethics, festivals, Sabbath, Jubilee, blessing and exile. The four sermons should repeatedly remind hearers that the movement is not from primitive ritual to mature ethics but from the holy presence at the centre toward a whole life ordered by that presence.

An Eight-Sermon Series for a Congregation Willing to Stay Longer

A fuller series could move through sacrifice (1–7), priesthood and dangerous holiness (8–10), clean and unclean bodies (11–15), the Day of Atonement (16), holy life and neighbour-love (17–20), holy leadership and sacred time (21–24), Jubilee and the land (25), and covenant presence, judgment and hope (26–27). Each sermon would establish the Old Testament function before building a canonical bridge, and the series would deliberately vary the Christological route rather than preaching eight versions of the same typological sermon. Such a sequence also gives the congregation enough repetition to learn Leviticus’s conceptual vocabulary, which is essential if later sermons are to build rather than begin again from zero.

Which Commentaries Help Most in Moving from Exegesis to the Pulpit?

Jay Sklar — Leviticus and His Preaching Guidance

Sklar is the most useful first stop because he can move from Hebrew and ritual mechanics to theological explanation without making either stage disappear. His preaching guidance is particularly sound in insisting that God remain at the centre of the sermon and that Christ be reached through several controlled canonical routes rather than by indiscriminate allegory. Typology, analogy, explicit New Testament citation and redemptive-historical development give the preacher several ways to move forward while preserving the distinctive contribution of the Old Testament passage. Sklar also stresses the hopeful world created by Leviticus: divine presence, cleansing and restoration should shape Christian imagination rather than allowing every sermon to become another illustration of Israel’s failure. I would therefore use Sklar first for both the exegetical centre of a passage and the overall direction of the sermon.

Derek Tidball — The Message of Leviticus

Tidball remains one of the most practical companions once the exegetical work has been done because his entire exposition is designed around the conviction that Leviticus is not only preachable but necessary for Christian understanding. His organization itself is homiletically suggestive: sacrifice becomes enjoying God’s presence, priesthood concerns entering God’s service, purity encounters God’s design, atonement ensures forgiveness, holiness enacts God’s word, and dedication responds to grace. Those labels occasionally simplify difficult ritual debates, so I would not rely on Tidball alone for precise exegesis of kipper, sacrifice or impurity. His strength is instead the second half of sermon preparation—finding the theological burden of a unit, expressing it clearly and moving toward contemporary Christian life without turning the text into an antiquarian exercise. For a preacher who has already worked with Sklar, Milgrom, Wenham or Gane, Tidball is still among the best resources for asking, “How might this actually preach?”

Jacob Milgrom — Leviticus 1–16; 17–22; 23–27

Milgrom is not primarily a preaching commentary, yet serious preaching on Leviticus becomes safer after wrestling with him because so many popular explanations of sacrifice, impurity and atonement are less secure than they sound. His distinction between ritual and moral impurity is especially important pastorally, and his detailed reconstruction of the sanctuary system prevents the preacher from treating ritual actions as interchangeable symbols. At the same time, Milgrom’s model is sufficiently comprehensive that it can tempt users to preach the reconstruction instead of the biblical passage, particularly where later scholars have disputed his account of pollution and kipper. I would therefore use him as the major technical conversation partner rather than the homiletical destination. His greatest pulpit service is often negative but essential: he stops the preacher saying easy things that the text does not actually support.

Roy Gane — Leviticus, Numbers

Gane is particularly useful when the preacher understands the vocabulary of a ritual but still cannot visualize how the complete system functions. His careful differentiation of sacrifices, impurities, sanctuary zones and Day of Atonement procedures helps turn abstract theological words into processes, which in turn makes sermons more concrete. Gane also engages Milgrom closely enough that he gives the preacher an alternative model rather than merely repeating the scholarly consensus, although his own denominational and theological context becomes relevant at some points and should be evaluated rather than ignored. For preaching, his strongest contribution is explaining why ritual details matter before application begins. Once the preacher understands the mechanics, Sklar, Tidball or Morales can help carry their significance more naturally into biblical theology.

L. Michael Morales — Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?

Morales is the resource I would use when the exegetical work has produced many accurate details but the sermon still lacks altitude. His biblical theology organizes Leviticus around access to divine presence and connects Eden, Sinai, tabernacle, priesthood, sacrifice and later canonical developments within the larger story of humanity’s return to communion with God. That framework is enormously helpful for preaching because it explains why Leviticus belongs in the Pentateuch and why rituals concerned with access and holiness eventually matter for Christian theology. The danger is the opposite of Milgrom’s: a large canonical pattern can move faster than the local details if the preacher reaches Morales before doing the passage-level work. Used after a technical commentary, however, Morales often supplies exactly the biblical-theological bridge needed before moving toward Christ and the pulpit.

Mary Douglas — Leviticus as Literature

Douglas is now one of the most useful specialist additions for sermon design, even when her complete literary reconstruction is not adopted. Her reading of Leviticus as a carefully patterned literary object reminds the preacher to notice arrangement, repetition, spatial imagination and the significance of the two narrative interruptions rather than simply extracting regulations one by one. The proposal that the book corresponds structurally to the tabernacle is imaginative and sometimes difficult to verify, so it should not become a hidden code announced dogmatically from the pulpit. Its homiletical payoff lies instead in recovering a sense that Leviticus has shape and movement. Douglas can help the preacher create sermons that allow listeners to enter the symbolic world of the text rather than hearing only explanations of individual laws.

Mark W. Scarlata — The Theology of the Book of Leviticus

Scarlata is perhaps the strongest newly attached resource specifically for the biblical-theological middle stage of sermon preparation. His theology begins with God’s home in the tabernacle and tracks holiness into Israel’s homes, land and sacred time, thereby explaining why cultic, bodily, ethical, agricultural and economic material can belong to one theological vision. This is especially valuable when preaching chapters 17–27, where a sermon series can otherwise feel as though it has changed subjects from “religion” to morality and social policy. Scarlata instead allows the preacher to say that the same divine presence generating sacrifice and purity also claims neighbour-love, Sabbath, land-rest and Jubilee. I would place him beside Morales as a synthesizer, with Morales giving the broader canonical ascent-to-presence framework and Scarlata giving the more specifically Levitical expansion of holiness through space and time.

James A. Greenberg — A New Look at Atonement in Leviticus

Greenberg is most useful for preachers precisely when they think they already know what “atonement” means. His sustained reassessment of kipper questions both ransom-based explanations and the assumption that the dominant pollution-and-purge model exhausts the ritual evidence, proposing instead that the rites establish or restore a positive and protective relationship with YHWH. I would not transfer Greenberg’s technical reconstruction directly into a sermon as though the scholarly debate were settled in his favour, because the sanctuary-pollution evidence remains important and major interpreters disagree. His value lies in forcing greater precision: what result does this particular text actually promise, who or what is acted upon, and what relationship is being repaired or maintained? A preacher who asks those questions will normally deliver a better atonement sermon even if Greenberg’s full model is ultimately rejected.

James W. Watts — Ritual and Rhetoric in Leviticus

Watts adds a dimension that homiletical commentaries seldom foreground: ritual instruction is also rhetoric about authority. His argument that Leviticus 1–16 legitimates Aaronide priesthood may at points explain too much through institutional interest, and I would resist preaching the text as though its theology were merely camouflage for priestly power. Yet he usefully reminds preachers that laws establish legitimate performers, procedures and jurisdictions and that written Torah itself becomes an authority by which religious practice can be judged. This opens responsible applications to leadership, institutional accountability and the relationship between office and Scripture, provided those applications pass first through the unique role of Israel’s priesthood and ultimately through Christ’s high priesthood. Watts is therefore not the book from which I would derive the sermon thesis, but he can make the preacher notice important dimensions of what ritual texts are doing socially.

John Sietze Bergsma — The Jubilee from Leviticus to Qumran

Bergsma is the specialist I would consult before preaching Leviticus 25 because he keeps the chapter anchored in land, kinship, freedom and restoration rather than reducing Jubilee to an abstract programme of economic equality. His analysis of progressive impoverishment helps a sermon show the human movement behind the regulations: land can be lost, dependence deepen and freedom itself become endangered, while redemption and Jubilee work against permanent severance from inheritance and clan. His historical reconstruction and defence of the practicability of Jubilee are more debatable than this structural insight and should therefore be handled cautiously in public preaching. The later history of interpretation is also useful when moving toward prophetic and New Testament Jubilee language, particularly Luke 4. Bergsma helps the preacher resist both extremes—treating Leviticus 25 as economically irrelevant and claiming it supplies a ready-made twenty-first-century economic system.

Calum Carmichael — Illuminating Leviticus

Carmichael is best used late rather than early in sermon preparation because his law-and-narrative correspondences are provocative precisely where they are least secure. He argues that many Levitical rules were generated by reflection on memorable biblical stories, and this produces striking proposed links involving Noah, Joseph, Rachel, Onan, David, Jonathan and other figures. Some of those readings can enliven canonical imagination, while others seem too speculative to carry the weight of a sermon claim. The enduring homiletical insight is therefore broader than the individual proposals: laws belong within Israel’s remembered narrative and should not be preached as detached statutory fragments. Carmichael can stimulate excellent questions, but the preacher should verify every proposed intertext independently before allowing it into the pulpit.

Rolf Rendtorff and Robert A. Kugler, eds. — The Book of Leviticus: Composition and Reception

This collection is valuable for preaching indirectly because it prevents the preacher from imagining that one method or one audience exhausts Leviticus. Essays range across literary context, sacrifice, priesthood, textual transmission and later Jewish and Christian reception, giving a broad sense of how many interpretive worlds surround the book. Lester Grabbe’s argument that Leviticus cannot simply have been a professional priestly manual is particularly useful homiletically: much of its material is relevant to ordinary Israelites, and the book’s purpose reaches beyond technical cultic procedure. Other essays expose tensions between ritual and morality, textual history and reception, which can help the preacher identify where familiar Christian readings are historically late rather than obvious from the Hebrew text itself. I would use the collection selectively during sermon research rather than as the primary expositional guide, but it is excellent for preventing provincial interpretation.

A Practical Workflow for Preparing a Leviticus Sermon

I would begin with the biblical text and a technical commentary, identifying the unit, its literary context, participants, ritual actions, repeated vocabulary and promised outcomes before thinking about contemporary application. I would then ask which Levitical categories are functioning—sacrifice, holiness, purity, priesthood, sacred space, sacred time, land, restitution or covenant—and test my understanding against a second commentator from a different interpretive tradition. Only after the Old Testament text has a coherent meaning would I move to a theological synthesizer such as Morales or Scarlata and then trace explicit canonical developments, especially in Hebrews, the Gospels, 1 Peter and Revelation.

The final step is to formulate the sermon not as an explanation of ancient oddities followed by a Christian appendix, but as one theological movement. State the human and covenantal problem the Levitical text addresses, show God’s provision within Israel, trace how that provision belongs to the larger biblical story, identify how Christ fulfils or transforms the category, and then describe the corresponding life of God’s people now. The congregation should leave knowing more about Leviticus and more about Christ, because the sermon has allowed the Old Testament book to supply categories that make the gospel clearer rather than merely using the gospel to make Leviticus disappear.

Bottom Line

The safest path from Leviticus to the pulpit is presence → ritual or law in its Israelite setting → theological reality → canonical development → Christ → transformed communal life. Skipping the early stages produces allegory or moralism; stopping before the later stages leaves the sermon historically informative but ecclesially unfinished. The best preaching therefore preserves the strangeness of Leviticus long enough for its categories to become intelligible and only then shows how those categories are gathered, transformed and fulfilled within the wider canon.

The newly examined specialist literature makes that bridge stronger at precisely the points where sermons most often become simplistic. Douglas helps us respect literary form; Greenberg slows down our claims about atonement; Watts exposes authority and rhetoric; Scarlata integrates sanctuary, home, land and time; Bergsma gives Jubilee its concrete social world; Carmichael reconnects law and story; and Rendtorff–Kugler reminds us how diverse the book’s interpretive and reception history really is. None replaces the core exegetical work of Sklar, Milgrom, Wenham, Levine or Gane, and none replaces a preaching companion such as Tidball. Together, however, they make it possible to preach Leviticus not as a collection of obsolete regulations needing rescue, but as a profound account of what happens when the holy and gracious God chooses to live among his people.