Sacrifice, Part One

For since the law has but a shadow of the good things to come instead of the true form of these realities, it can never, by the same sacrifices that are continually offered every year, make perfect those who draw near.--Hebrews 10:1

A major act of worship for Old Testament Jews was sacrifice. They could not enter the temple without presenting a sacrifice for sin. This sin offering opened the door for Jews to commune with God in the more holy parts of the temple. (You can read Leviticus if you want to know all the specifications and gory details.)

We don't sacrifice animals anymore, but just imagine what it might have been like. (Sorry to all you animal lovers out there.) Imagine leading your lamb, the one that you had herded and protected from its birth, up to an altar, laying your hand on its head as a symbolic imputation of sin, and watching its throat slit for your impurities and transgressions.

To most suburban Westerners, this practice probably seems at best weird and at worst cruel, barbaric, and primitive. To a non-animal lover like me (again, sorry), it just seems nasty and troublesome. Can you imagine the sacrifices of thousands of animals burning on altars? I mean, just think about how much blood that would be. There were probably some serious smells happening in the temple courts, and none of them were pleasant. Even though the priests' methods were relatively humane (and the animals were probably going to be slaughtered and eaten eventually anyway), sacrifice is not a pretty picture.

The question you're probably asking yourself about now is, "Why would God require such a strange and bloody thing?"

So....think about all the genocides, murders, child abuse, forced labor, sex trafficking, broken relationships, oppression, cruelty, disease, disasters, hopelessness, depression, uncertainty, anxiety, failure, addiction--the unfathomable horror of our world. (As if you weren't already appalled at the animal sacrifice thing.) Consider all that chaos and terror for just a moment.

Then consider a God who is the exact opposite of all of that. Imagine a being who "is light, and in him is no darkness at all" (1 John 1:5). No dark spot in Him at all--not one atom of cruelty, not one thought of hate.

It's hard for us to imagine one so perfect in love, goodness, justice, and purity. But since we're human, we are all too familiar with sin and its consequences. We understand pain. So we can perhaps grasp the goodness of God by thinking of it as a direct contrast to everything we know.

If one so perfect does exist, it would be impossible for someone like me or you--someone who has been exposed to and has participated in the imperfection of the world--to enter His presence without first becoming clean from impurities.

For us to become clean, sin has to die.

That was what the animal sacrifice was for: to symbolically slaughter the sins of the people. Devout Jews saw this process repeatedly over the course of their lives until sacrifice became inseparable from their existence and their identity: God is good. You are not. Someone has to die. Over and over again. Were you a jerk to your neighbor? Kill a goat! Did you drop a hammer on your foot and utter a curse? So long, pet doves. You can try to be perfect next week...but I wouldn't count on that bull making it to his next birthday. The Jews became defined by the hopelessness of how imperfect they were in comparison to God.

Have you ever felt like a failure? Have you ever felt hopeless?

I want to introduce you to my friend, Jesus.

You see, the reason for all the animal sacrifice was to remind the Jews that they could never achieve perfection on their own. It was to show them that they needed a permanent sacrifice. Animals are sinless because they can't make decisions, like we do. They don't have a sense of right and wrong or a deep sense of love. (Again, sorry animal lovers...I know your dog loves you, but I promise your mother, wife, friend loves you in a deeper way.) In order to take care of our problems once and for all, we needed a sinless human.

I want you to think about Jesus on the cross. There are many graphic descriptions of crucifixion you can find if you really want to know the details. I think every believer needs to understand what Jesus went through on the cross, not so that we may be condemned, but so that we may be convinced of our holiness through the perfection of His sacrifice.

Think about the animals being slaughtered. Then think about the perfection of God in contrast to the horrors of the world. Then think this: God sacrificed Himself.

I'm not trying to be morbid. (Network TV now provides a great selection of morbidity if that's what you're after.) I'm just telling the truth. It's amazing to me how many Christians try to worship without recognizing the cross. His death is our life.

And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God (Ephesians 5:2).

When he said above, "You have neither desired nor taken pleasure in sacrifices and offerings and burnt offerings and sin offerings" (these are offered according to the law), then he added, "Behold, I have come to do your will." He abolishes the first in order to establish the second. And by that will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all (Hebrews 10:8-10).

It's hard for us to wrap our minds around sacrifice, especially literal sacrifice. As we see above, God doesn't really enjoy it either--especially not when He was the object of sacrifice Himself. Not really a fun-in-the-sun Kodak moment for Jesus. But sacrifice is a requirement that God must impose because He is perfectly good. His nature demands purity.

I could write a whole book about God's holiness, the symbolic nature of offering, and why sacrifice is required to approach Him. If you want to talk about that, send me an email. (Or better yet, read The Attributes of God by A.W. Tozer.) For the purposes of keeping this blog post shorter than War and Peace, I'm just going to wrap it up with thoughts about why Jesus said "It is finished" on the cross.

Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God (2 Corinthians 5:21).

Jesus not only bore our sin, He became our sin. When He died, sin died. All the sin in us--past, present, future--died.  The God-man who had never known separation from the perfect goodness of God, who was completely unfamiliar with the horrors I described earlier in this post, had to become the horror. Try to wrap your mind around that.

Sin--all the horror of the world--was separating a perfect Father from His wounded, terrorized children. For a time He was content for it to be slaughtered in the flesh of bulls and sheep. But one beautiful day, He took sin and violently destroyed it once and for all, flogging it, piercing it, and nailing it to a cross in the form of the flesh of...Himself.

We may never really understand this glorious exchange in this earthly life. It's a mystery that should leave us humbled.

All the sin in us was placed on that cross. It became unnecessary, from that moment on, for anyone to die for sin. Goats, bulls, lambs, doves never had to die again, and we don't either. Jesus died--and in Him, so did we.

But that's not all. The greater news is this: Jesus rose from the dead--and in Him, so did we. We live a new reality, one infused with hope and success and freedom.

And that's what I want to talk about in my next post. Stay tuned.