Companion: Deep Study
A condensed companion to the full study. For each section of the expanded outline: key insights, applications, and the application questions for discussion.
Section 1 — The Fire of Molech and the Face of God (Leviticus 20:1–5)
Key Insights
- Chapter 18 forbade these things as sin; chapter 20 now treats them as crime and attaches penalties.
- The law covers Israelites and resident foreigners alike, because child sacrifice offends the moral order and not merely Israel’s ritual.
- Giving a child to Molech is said to defile God’s sanctuary and profane His name, because the people and the sanctuary form one holy sphere.
- If the community hides its eyes, God Himself will set His face against the offender and his clan (v. 5).
- Where Molech demanded that fathers surrender their children, the Father gave His own Son, and the sentence of being cut off fell on Christ instead of on us.
Applications
- Ask what in your household is being spent to purchase something you want more.
- Where you have both knowledge and standing, act through lawful channels rather than looking away.
- A warning: God’s promise to judge where courts fail is a reason to leave vengeance with Him, never a license to take it.
Application Questions
- What has God entrusted to me that I am currently spending in order to buy something I want more?
- Where have I closed my eyes to an evil I had both the knowledge and the standing to address?
Section 2 — Mediums, Consecration, and the LORD Who Sanctifies (Leviticus 20:6–8)
Key Insights
- The Hebrew terms ‘ob (medium) and yidde’oni (necromancer) name specialists in obtaining knowledge from the dead.
- Consulting them is called whoring, because the covenant is a marriage and going elsewhere for guidance is betrayal rather than mere error.
- Matthew Henry’s verdict is the plainest summary: it is madness to go to a liar for information and to an enemy for advice.
- Verses 7–8 interrupt the penalties with a command and a promise — consecrate yourselves, and I am the LORD who sanctifies you.
- The holiness demanded is the holiness God supplies, which is why Christ became to us sanctification (1 Corinthians 1:30).
Applications
- Notice where you actually turn when you are desperate to know something God has not revealed.
- Pursue holiness with real effort, and give God the credit for every inch gained.
- A warning: neither wait passively for holiness to arrive nor grit your teeth alone — the command and the gift were given together.
Application Questions
- When I am desperate to know something God has not revealed, where do I actually go?
- Am I trying to become holy by my own effort, or waiting passively for God to make me holy?
Section 3 — The Household Betrayed: Capital Offenses Against Parents and Marriage (Leviticus 20:9–16)
Key Insights
- The Hebrew verb qalal in verse 9 means to treat lightly, despise or curse — the settled repudiation of parental authority, not ordinary friction.
- Matthew Henry sets the symmetry: cursing a parent breaks the fifth commandment as directly as murder breaks the sixth.
- Adultery carries an equal sentence for both parties (v. 10), because marriage is a covenant God Himself consecrated.
- The penalties are graded by the text itself, from stoning through burning after execution to being cut off.
- Every offense here carries a death sentence, and Christ bore that sentence, becoming a curse for us (Galatians 3:13).
Applications
- Honor your parents in speech, provision and presence, including when they are old and difficult.
- Guard a marriage in small decisions made long before any crisis arrives.
- A crucial warning: these are the civil sanctions of a nation that no longer exists, and they license no contempt toward anyone (1 Corinthians 6:11).
Application Questions
- What do my parents actually hear from me, and what do others hear from me about them?
- Do I treat my marriage, or the marriages around me, as a covenant God Himself has consecrated?
Section 4 — Cut Off, Bearing Iniquity, Childless: Sins God Judges Himself (Leviticus 20:17–21)
Key Insights
- The penalties change register: no court is instructed to act in verses 19–21, and God reserves the judgment to Himself.
- To bear iniquity means, in the Pulpit Commentary’s definition, that a man remains in the state of a criminal until he is cleansed.
- The force of the karet formula (cut off) is genuinely debated, covering exclusion, premature death, or a line ended.
- Childlessness as a sanction fits a society where the promise ran through the family line; it is not a diagnosis of anyone’s infertility.
- Christ was cut off out of the land of the living (Isaiah 53:8), so that those who deserved exclusion could be brought in.
Applications
- Distinguish what the church must formally address from what belongs between a believer and God.
- Lay down any unresolved guilt at the cross, and make repentance visible where another person was wronged.
- A warning: never read infertility as evidence of sin, and never tell a repentant believer that his guilt still stands.
Application Questions
- Is there a specific guilt I am still carrying, and what has kept me from laying it down?
- Do I try to adjudicate matters that God has reserved for Himself?
Section 5 — The Land That Vomits and the God Who Separates (Leviticus 20:22–26)
Key Insights
- Israel holds Canaan as a tenant; the Landlord has already evicted one tenant for these same practices.
- The Hebrew verb badal, to separate, appears three times in verses 24–26 and is the verb of Genesis 1.
- God separates first (v. 24), and Israel’s separating of clean from unclean is the response, never the cause.
- Verse 26 makes holiness a matter of belonging — you shall be holy to me, that you should be mine.
- Peter hands this verse to the church, a people ransomed by Christ from every tribe and nation (1 Peter 2:9).
Applications
- Let obedience flow from identity, not from an attempt to secure acceptance.
- Keep daily reminders of belonging — Scripture, prayer, the Lord’s Day, the Supper.
- A warning: separateness that curdles into contempt for outsiders has become the opposite of what this passage commands.
Application Questions
- In what visible ways is my life actually distinguishable from that of my neighbors who do not know Christ?
- Do I obey God in order to become His, or because I already am?
Section 6 — The Closing Sanction on Mediums and Necromancers (Leviticus 20:27)
Key Insights
- The chapter opened with idolatry and divination and closes with divination, framing the whole catalogue as covenant infidelity.
- Verse 6 addressed the person who consults; verse 27 addresses the practitioner, because an available oracle creates its own demand.
- The verse works as the enforcement clause of verse 26: a people separated to God cannot house such an institution.
- The law names a man or a woman, refusing to let sex determine culpability.
- Christ is what necromancy was reaching for — He makes the Father known and commands the unclean spirits (Mark 1:27).
Applications
- Identify one thing you have repeatedly promised to manage better, and remove it instead (Acts 19:19).
- Fill the imagination with Christ’s authority rather than with study of the enemy.
- A warning: do not read demons behind every difficulty, and welcome the person even while refusing the practice.
Application Questions
- What is present in my life that I ought to remove rather than manage?
- Am I more impressed by spiritual darkness than by the authority of Christ?
The chapter that sentences every offender to death points beyond itself to the One who was cut off in their place, and who is Himself the holiness He commands.
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