Most of us read Exodus 25-40 quickly and skip Leviticus altogether. A tent. A priesthood. A calendar of feasts. Five offerings. Chapter after chapter of detail God gave Israel, and we treat it as background.
Hebrews treats it differently. "For since the law has but a shadow of the good things to come" (Hebrews 10:1). Not a detour. Not filler. A shadow cast by something real that was still coming, all seen in the Person of Christ.
That is the Connections Class this year. We will study sections of Exodus and Leviticus, then work through all of Hebrews in the spring. First the shadow, then the substance. Hebrews sets Christ against the old covenant and shows him greater than all of it: a better priest, a better sacrifice, a better covenant. Then it presses what that means for how we live now.
I asked someone who comes regularly what keeps them coming back. They gave three reasons. The first was the people. The class is a group of like-minded believers working through the same text, asking real questions, willing to say when something doesn't make sense yet. The second was the topics. The class does not stay on the surface. It goes after the hard parts and stays there long enough to get somewhere. The third reason was the connection between the Old and New Testaments. Passages they had read for years started to fit together. The offerings in Leviticus will stop being strange and start pointing somewhere.
That third reason is the whole aim of this year. When you see what the blood, the veil, and the Day of Atonement meant for Israel, what Christ did on the cross and what he does today for us from heaven lands with weight it did not have before.
Come and study the shadow and the substance with us on Sundays at 9AM in the Chapel.
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