God Knows Dead Men Can’t Climb Ladders

There is a sentence in the middle of Leviticus that has confused a lot of sincere people. God tells Israel to keep his statutes and rules, “which if a person does them, he shall live by them” (Leviticus 18:5).

Read quickly, it sounds like a deal. Do this, and you’ll earn life. Keep the rules well enough, climb high enough, and you’ll reach the top — you’ll live. That reading has launched a thousand anxious sermons and a million exhausted Christians, all of them trying to climb.

But there is a problem with the climbing reading, and it is not a small one. It is this: the people God said this to were already dead.

The people who couldn’t climb

Not physically dead, of course. Dead in the way the Bible keeps describing Israel — hard-hearted, stiff-necked, unable to hear. Moses says it flatly near the end of Deuteronomy: to this day the LORD has not given you a heart to understand (Deuteronomy 29:4). And a few chapters earlier, God himself sighs over them: Oh that they had such a heart as this always (Deuteronomy 5:29).

So here is the picture the climbing reading forces on us. God hands a ladder to a corpse and says, “Climb, and you’ll live.” And then he watches, disappointed, as the corpse fails to climb.

That cannot be right. God is not cruel, and he is not naive. God knows dead men can’t climb ladders. If “do this and live” means “perform your way up to life,” then God gave a command he knew was impossible to a people he knew were dead, and then judged them for failing it. That is not the God of the Bible.

So the sentence must mean something else.

The law was never a ladder

Here is what it means. The law was never a ladder in the first place — not for the dead, and (this is the part people miss) not for the living either.

Go back and watch how God actually describes the law to the person who has a living heart. He does it a few chapters earlier, in Deuteronomy 6. The words are to be on your heart. You are to talk about them when you sit and when you walk, when you lie down and when you rise. They are to be as near to you as the doorpost you touch on the way out. And the whole thing is summed up in one command that is not a rung on any ladder: love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might (Deuteronomy 6:5–7).

That is not a description of climbing. That is a description of abiding. Of a living person who has received something and is now at home in it. The law, rightly understood, was never a machine for generating life out of a dead person. It was the near word of God, given to be received by faith and lived in — the way you live in a house, not the way you scale a wall.

Which means the failure of Israel was never that the ladder was too tall. There was no ladder. The failure was that they took something God gave them to live in and tried to use it to climb up — and a dead heart trying to climb a ladder that was never there is the very picture of religion gone wrong.

Note well: living people can’t climb ladders either

Now here is where it gets uncomfortable, because it stops being about ancient Israel and starts being about us.

The obvious mistake is the dead man trying to climb. That one is easy to see once it’s pointed out — a corpse on a ladder is plainly absurd. But there is a subtler mistake, and it is more dangerous precisely because it looks like faithfulness.

It is the living person trying to climb.

Paul spent a whole letter on this. The Galatians were real Christians — genuinely alive, having received the Spirit by hearing with faith. And then they started climbing. They began adding performance, rule-keeping, ladder-work, on top of the life they’d already been given. It felt like rigor. It felt like taking God seriously. And Paul was furious, because it was a fundamental misunderstanding of what a living person does. Are you so foolish? he asks. Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh? (Galatians 3:3)

His correction is not “climb better.” His correction is: you never needed the ladder. You started without it — you began by hearing with faith — and you continue the same way you started. The near word that was near at the beginning is near still. Faith is the only posture that ever received it, at the start and all the way through.

So the line cuts both ways, and we should let it. God knows dead men can’t climb ladders. But note well: living people can’t climb ladders either — because there is no ladder, and there never was. There is only the near word of God, and the two ways a heart can meet it: received by faith, or seized as a rung.

What this has to do with reading the whole Bible

One more thing, because this is not just a nice point about one verse.

When you learn to read Leviticus 18:5 this way — as the near word to be received, not a ladder to be climbed — you find that the rest of the Bible has been reading it this way the whole time. Nehemiah reaches for it. Ezekiel reaches for it. Jesus quotes it to a lawyer who was, tellingly, trying to justify himself (Luke 10:28–29). Paul builds on it in Galatians and again in Romans. Every one of them is pressing the same point: the word was always near, life was always received, and the only thing that ever went wrong was a heart that tried to climb.

That is what it means to understand the Bible on the Bible’s terms. We don’t bring the ladder to the text and then read it in. We let the text tell us there was never a ladder — and then we watch the whole of Scripture say the same thing, one voice, one direction, from the first page to the last.

The word is very near you. It always was. Stop climbing, and live.