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“So Many Sacrifices!”
“For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it to you on the altar to make atonement for your souls; for it is the blood by reason of the life that makes atonement.”
Leviticus 17:11
Leviticus gets a bad rap for being tedious. To many people, it’s only value is the contrast it makes with the gospel. We read it only to say with relief, “Whew! Glad we don’t have to do all those sacrifices anymore!” While that contrast is helpful, there’s much more to the book than that. There are pointed foreshadowings to Christ throughout Leviticus.
The first seven chapters are about the many sacrificial offerings the priests were to make. Some sacrifices were ways of expressing sorrow for the wrong things that we do (the burnt offering, sin offering and guilt offering). Others were ways of expressing gratitude to God for the wonderful things that he does (the grain offering and peace offering).
If you didn’t grow up hunting or working in a slaughter house, the instructions for animal sacrifices sound pretty gnarly. It wasn’t just killing the animal. The priests had to cut it up and take certain parts out. Blood was collected and sprinkled on the altar. Parts were burned on the altar while other parts could be cooked and eaten. Levites must have had to develop strong stomachs to deal with all the grisly details of their job.
An the sacrifices were endless. In addition to the morning and evening sacrifices, there were special sacrifices and annual feast days which ramped up the number of offerings. The annual day of atonement, which lies at the literary center of the book (chs. 16-17), was a day dedicated to the purification of the entire nation of Israel. Only on that day the high priest was permitted to enter the most holy place of the temple, the inner sanctum of God’s presence where the ark of the covenant resided. After making purification for himself, he made a sin offering for the nation and sprinkled the blood on the cover of the ark. In the second ritual, the high priest would symbolically burden the scapegoat with the sins of the nation and it would be led out into the wilderness, away from the camp.
So many sacrifices! So much blood! Over all those years the altar and the ark must have been stained a deep crimson. What gives? The answer is in Leviticus 17:11. Blood is a symbol of life. Human sin introduces death into God’s good world. Because he loved Israel, he made a provision to accept the animal’s life in place of the life of the sinner. The animal blood would “atone” or cover human sin making it possible for a holy God to dwell among a sinful people. But the brutality, costliness and frequency of the sacrifices were all meant to teach Israel both bad and good news:
- Sin has terrible consequences — Imagine the financial strain of selecting the very best of your flock to sacrifice. Back then, folks counted their wealth in livestock. If we had to pay $1,000 per week for our sins don’t you think it would motivate us to gossip and lie less? Imagine the emotional strain of watching an animal bleed out in front of you and connect those dying gasps for air to your sinful behavior. Don’t you think we would develop more self-control and patience?
- Sin is a constant problem in our lives — Imagine having to perform these rituals every day, every week and every year. Our calendars would be red with blood, a reminder of our never-ending battle against sin. It would leave us hoping that someday, there might be an end to it all, that God might provide an ultimate sacrifice to fully cover us (Psa. 51:10). Our moral failures would drive us to our knees in prayer, crying, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” (Lk. 18:13)
- God is holy and cannot endure sin — The sacrifices would also drive home the point that our God is pure, full stop. He is light. There is zero darkness in him. He cannot coexist with it. He cannot excuse it. He cannot tolerate it. He holds no truck with it. He is altogether righteous and utterly “holy”—unique and set apart from us and all creation.
- Yet God provides a way to dwell with his people — These ritual instructions made it possible for a perfectly holy God to dwell among a sinful people. Doesn’t that prove how much the Lord loves his people? Doesn’t it show how desperately he wants to be with them?
Of course, as the book of Hebrews makes abundantly clear, the sacrificial system all points to the finality of Christ’s sacrifice and the foreverness of his priesthood. But wouldn’t we appreciate our Lord’s achievement much more if we had a better grasp of Leviticus? We can read about Jesus’ death in the New Testament but wouldn’t we see it more clearly, smell it even, feel it’s horror—and the joy of it’s triumph—if we better understood how it was under the Old Covenant?
