February 3, 2025 - Leviticus 4-7

Remember Genesis 3:15?  Remember Genesis 22?  Remember Exodus 19?  The fulfillment of all those promises is foretold as the Lord explains the burnt offering that is to be made when one sins.  The one who has sinned will bring an unblemished bull to the tent of meeting where he will lay his hand on the head of the bull, thus signifying the imputation of sin to the bull.  He will kill the bull, taking the blood and sprinkling it before the veil of the sanctuary and on the horns and at the base of the altar.  Furthermore, the entrails and kidneys will be burned on the altar while the rest of the carcass is taken outside the camp and burned.  I have seen bulls butchered and taken apart.  Reading this in Leviticus, I am envisioning it all and, yuk, it pretty much disgusts me:  the picture in my mind, the smells, the steam off the organs, the goo.  Ugghh . . .  But, then, sin is ugly, and its remedy is ugly.  Of course, all this points to the greatest sacrifice of all, that of the Son of God.  How ugly that was and, yet, how beautiful in that, as Paul puts it, “For if, because of one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ” (Romans 5:17).

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.   –Isaac Watts (1766)