February 2, 2026 - Leviticus 1-7

The Tabernacle, along with all its furnishings including the altar of burnt offering, was finished.  Now, the Lord speaks to Moses and gives instructions for the use of the Tabernacle, beginning in chapter 1with instructions for the burnt offerings.  The manner of making burnt offerings was important.  The one bringing the offering was to bring to the tent of meeting a male without blemish.  The person would then lay his hand on the head of the animal, signifying a transfer of guilt from the man to the animal.  Then, the man himself must kill the animal, thus making emphatically clear to the man the cost of atonement, that is, the spilling of the sacrifice’s blood.  The priests then threw the blood against the altar and cut the offering into pieces before burning it there on the altar.  It was all a terribly grizzly procedure but, then, the sacrifice of a victim is bloody and painful, something that must always be remembered.  Of course, all this pointed ultimately to the only sacrifice that can genuinely result in atonement, i.e., the sacrifice of the Son of God.  Peter puts it like this:  “For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit” (1 Peter 3:18).  What a picture Isaac Watts paints in his hymn!

Not all the blood of beasts

On Jewish altars slain

Could give the guilty conscience peace

Or wash away the stain.

But Christ the heav’nly Lamb

Takes all our sins away,

A sacrifice of nobler name

And richer blood than they.

My faith would lay its hand

On that dear head of thine,

While, alike a penitent, I stand,

And there confess my sin.

My soul looks back to see

The burdens thou didst bear

When hanging on the curséd tree,

And hopes my guilt was there.

Believing, we rejoice

To see the curse remove;

We bless the Lamb with cheerful voice

And sing his bleeding love.   –Isaac Watts (1709)