Monday, May 25, 2015

Leviticus 22: The Costliness Of Sacrifice

"You shall not offer anything that has a blemish, for it will not be acceptable on your behalf" (vs. 20).

Leviticus 22 outlines some of the rules about sacrificial offerings.  The first half of this chapter deals with who may eat of the offerings.  Unclean priests, servants, lay people, etc. may not eat the sacred donations.  The second half of the chapter deals with the quality of the offerings themselves.  God's altar is not a place where you can easily unload your cheap "seconds," those animals with a disease or deformity, and consider that you've fulfilled your responsibility to the Lord.  To believe that God deserves less than your best is definitely not the message that Leviticus is sending!

In fact, the opposite is true.  Leviticus 22 informs us that God deserves the best - unblemished, perfect animals from the herds and flocks.  Certainly this must have been a very costly practice in the ancient world.  But rather than reckon it as excessive or even count it as "a waste", the overriding idea was that nothing is too good for God.  Yes, sacrifice (by definition) was meant to be costly - but that costliness reflected God's value to you.

After all, consider what God reckoned we were worth in the sending of His only Son to be our sacrificial lamb!  God did not hold back from giving us His very best in order that we might be saved.  Perhaps Paul put the meaningfulness of Christ's perfect sacrifice best in Romans when he stated, "What then are we to say about these things?  If God is for us, who is against us?  He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else?" (Romans 8:31-32)

Paul wrote these words to a people of whom it could be said, "For your sake we are being killed all day long; we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered" (Romans 8:36).  We give God our best, even to the point of being willing to lay down our own lives, because He gave us His best, even willing to lay down His own life.

There is a profound message in the costliness of sacrifice.

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