Why I Wrote a Book About Leviticus (Of All Things)
If you had asked me a few years ago—hypothetically—what book of the Bible I would one day write about, Leviticus would not have made the list. Not even close.
If you had asked me a few years ago—hypothetically—what book of the Bible I would one day write about, Leviticus would not have made the list.
Not even close.
Leviticus is the book most of us skim or skip entirely. It’s where Bible reading plans go to die somewhere around mid-February. It’s strange, repetitive, and heavy with details that don’t seem to connect to modern faith.
Yet there it sits at the very center of the Torah, the center of Israel’s Scriptures, and the center of the story that defines Jesus.
So why write a book about it?
The short answer is this: I came to see that Leviticus is essential to the gospel, and I couldn’t not share what I had learned.
Jesus said he came to fulfill the Torah—and Leviticus is at the heart of it.
In Matthew 5:17, Jesus says:
“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Torah or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.”
It’s a familiar verse. One we tend to read and nod along with, and then move past.
But I began to wonder: do we actually take Jesus at his word?
Because if he did not come to abolish the Torah, then we have to wrestle with what it means that he came to fulfill it. And that question becomes especially pressing when we arrive at Leviticus—the book that sits at the center of the Torah’s main tension: how can a holy God dwell among unholy people?
Leviticus is not a side note. It is the core of the good news. It’s where we learn what it means for a holy God to draw near to unholy people—what that looks like and what it costs to make it possible.
And when you start paying attention, you begin to notice something: Jesus lives and speaks as if Leviticus still matters.
He operates within categories of clean and unclean.
He spends a huge amount of time in and around the temple.
He is deeply moved by the fate of Jerusalem—the place of God’s dwelling.
And he seems to believe that its story is not over.
That realization alone was enough to stop me in my tracks.
“Fulfilled” does not mean “replaced”—and that changes how we read everything.
Somewhere along the way, many of us inherited an assumption: that once Jesus came, Leviticus—and much of the Torah—was effectively finished.
Not abolished, exactly. But completed (past tense) in a way that no longer holds real weight. As though Jesus arrived, died, rose again, and poof—the Torah was fulfilled and done. But the more I sat with Jesus’ words, the less that assumption held up.
He goes on to say that those who set aside even the least of these commandments—and teach others to do the same—will be called least in the kingdom. To me, that didn’t sound like a system that’s been rendered irrelevant.
And it raised uncomfortable questions:
If Leviticus is“fulfilled” by him basically doing away with it, why insist he didn’t come to abolish it?
If the Torah is complete and already behind us, why warn against setting its commands aside?
That tension forced me to ask deeper questions: what if I’ve been reading all of this wrong?
That shift changed everything.
Instead of reading Leviticus as a dry relic—something that once mattered but no longer does—I began to read it for what it was actually saying. I tried to see it as Jesus did: a framework that points forward. One that finds its depth and future in the work of Messiah, but is not discarded by him. I asked,
What if the categories still matter?
What if the vision still matters?
What if the priesthood, the sacrifices, the rhythms of worship all still matter?
And what if its story is still unfolding?
Suddenly, Leviticus became impossible to ignore. I began to realize that a book that was central to the life and mission of my Savior was not central to me.
That needed to change.
I had questions no one seemed to be answering.
Once those first two realizations settled in, they opened up a flood of questions.
If Leviticus still matters, how does it matter?
If it hasn’t been replaced, how should we read it now?
What do we do with sacrifice, priesthood, ritual, the Day of Atonement?
How did Jesus understand these things? And how did his first followers hold these things alongside faith in him?
And what about the New Testament? The temple?
Paul, Galatians, Hebrews? The new covenant? “You’re free from the Law!” I went looking for answers.
I read books, articles, and journals. I listened to sermons and podcasts. I took classes. I searched for voices asking these same questions. And I found…very little.
There were excellent scholars writing about Leviticus in its ancient context. There were thoughtful theologians explaining how Jesus relates to the law. But usually, the conversation seemed to stop too soon. Leviticus was either reduced to metaphor, absorbed into church tradition, or ultimately dismissed as something Jesus came to transcend.
None of them could answer the question I was asking: what does it mean to take Jesus at his word—that he didn’t come to abolish the Torah—and take Leviticus seriously at the same time?
I couldn’t shake the sense that Jesus didn’t read Leviticus the way I did. He didn’t stand over it, deciding how he’d render it all obsolete. He stepped into it. He let it shape his mission. His identity. His understanding of what he came to do—and what God is still doing.
For him.
For the Jewish people.
And for the world.
And that left me with a decision. I could set those questions aside, or I could follow them wherever they led.
So I wrote the book I couldn’t find.
I didn’t start with a plan to write a book.
I started with a growing, gnawing sense that I had missed something.
So I began tracing the threads, from Leviticus into the Prophets, the Gospels, and the letters. From the tent at Sinai to the heavenly tabernacle still destined, one day, to descend to the land.
I stopped trying to read Leviticus backwards—starting with conclusions about Jesus and forcing the text to fit them—and instead tried to read it the way Jesus knew it: as a living part of the story he was stepping into.
What I found was not a disconnected system of ancient rituals that Jesus replaced with himself at the cross. I found a vision of a people and a tent that are at the very center of everything God still intends to do.
And I found that without Leviticus, I completely misunderstood almost everything about Jesus and his mission.
Why this book—and why now?
I wrote this book because I think we’ve lost something.
Not just a book of the Bible, but a critical piece of the story that most of us don’t even know.
We’ve learned to read the New Testament without its foundation.
To talk about Jesus without the categories he lived within.
To celebrate fulfillment without understanding what is being fulfilled.
And in doing so, we’ve emptied the gospel of Leviticus—and our future hope of its promises.
The Forgotten Gospel is my attempt to recover that missing piece.
Not by discovering something new, but by returning to something old.
As old as Sinai.
As old as covenant.
As old as the gospel itself.
An Invitation to Reimagine Leviticus
If Leviticus has ever felt distant to you, you’re not alone. If you’ve wondered why it’s there, or what it has to do with Jesus, you’re asking the right questions.
And if you’ve assumed it no longer matters, because no one has ever shown you why it would—I understand.
But what if that assumption is wrong?
What if the book we forgot is the one that helps us see the gospel more clearly? What if, instead of leaving Leviticus behind, we’re meant to grow into it? What if we need to reimagine Leviticus?
That’s the question that started this journey, and it’s the one that led me to write The Forgotten Gospel.
Some stories deserve to be remembered. Leviticus is one of them.