Michael Lefebvre > Quotes

“holiness laws identify sins, like sexual immorality (see Lev. 18:1–30), while purity laws identify life’s brokenness due to human sinfulness.”
― Michael Lefebvre, Leviticus: A 12-Week Study

“The assumption that a law must set specifics is rooted in modern legal concepts. Ancient law was actually a kind of wisdom literature, and this law is an example of that. Kings were responsible to avoid these and other excesses, not based on specific formulas but based on a specific capacity these limitations were established to foster: the king’s administration of justice as a peer among his neighbors. The measure of a king’s self-abasement in these power sources is in the resulting (or lacking) humility with which he fears God and cares for the needs of the distressed as an administrator of God’s law.”
― Michael Lefebvre, Bulletin of Ecclesial Theology, Volume 9.2: Love

“Give thanks to God for the privilege of worship mediated by the perfect high priest, Jesus Christ! Pray for faith and humility to worship God in Christ’s name and in faithfulness to his Word.”
― Michael Lefebvre, Leviticus: A 12-Week Study

“We should no more use the creation week narrative to determine how long God spent creating the world than use dates in the book of Exodus to calculate the duration of Israel’s journey from Egypt to Sinai, or other dates in the Pentateuch to calculate the time it took to build the tabernacle. The Torah was not written to preserve those chronologies nor to answer many other questions that modern-day historians and scientists like to ask, interesting and worthy as those questions may be. The Torah was compiled to instruct the faith of God’s people within the cadences of the sabbaths and festivals of farming and worship.”
― Michael Lefebvre, The Liturgy of Creation: Understanding Calendars in Old Testament Context

“The purpose of kingship in Israel was neither conquest nor glory, but to defend the weak, to care for the poor, and to lead the nation into righteousness (Ps 72).”
― Michael Lefebvre