Exodus & Leviticus Law---what's the point for us now?

I started a Bible reading plan on my iPhone at the beginning of the year. It's a free app called "Holy Bible." I know, real creative, huh? This particular one is made by youVersion . It's far and away the best Bible app out there. More translations than you can imagine and many, many Bible reading plans. It's also available for the Blackberry and Droid, or you can just do it all on the website.

This year I stared the plan to "Read the Bible in 90 days." That means you cover a lot of ground in 1 day, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. If you were reading any other book, would you just read 1 or 2 pages a day? Probably not.

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So, I was rockin' and rollin' thru the familiar stories of Genesis and then Moses & Pharoah and the Exodus from Egypt. Then I got to the parts after the Ten Commandments. All of a sudden, my eyes began to cross. Chapter after chapter after chapter of God's extremely detailed instructions to Moses about building the tabernacle, sacrifices, cleanliness, etc. Then, once you get through God telling Moses what to do, it starts in with descriptions of how they do it!

In the back of my mind, I kept telling myself, "this is in the Bible for a reason, it's as important now as it was thousands of years ago..." but I was struggling to stay interested. I started thinking maybe I should've started with the New Testament. I kept reading, knowing that one day I'd get to something that mattered to me or that I could use in my life today. Then, in that way that God does, something leaped off the page (or iPhone screen) at me....

Leviticus 11:45
"For I am the LORD who brought you up from the land of Egypt to be your God; thus you shall be holy, for I am holy.'"

It all became clear at that moment. These weren't just instructions that God wanted His people to follow back then. This was God demanding that they recognize His holiness and respond accordingly. It was necessary for the animals that were sacrificed to be pure. It was vital that Aaron and his sons understood Who they were dealing with when they entered the Tabernacle. They needed to present themselves a certain way so that God would accept their offerings and forgive their sins.

These principles still apply today. Obviously we don't sacrifice animals or burn incense, but Paul tells us in Romans 12:1 that we are to:

"...present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship. "

It may be thousands of years later, but it's still the same process. We are still presenting sacrifices to God, only now we are doing it with the way we live our lives.

In those same chapters about offering sacrifices, God gives instructions on what to do with unacceptable sacrifices and the parts of the animals that were not pure. Using the same logic as before, wouldn't the same happen to us when the time comes if the sacrifice of our lives was not acceptable to Him? Would we be discarded, deemed unworthy, or excluded from spending eternity with Him?