Sacrifices

 February 16, 2024

It was nothing like the pictures I saw as a kid in Sunday School. The priests in charge of the Hebrew Tabernacle were depicted wearing pristine and almost glistening white robes. Everything was neat and tidy like the Baptist Sunday School I attended. The scenes described in the Bible were anything but. The Tabernacle must have looked more like a slaughterhouse.

Bulls, goats, sheep, calves, birds were all ritually slaughtered, their blood caught in bowls. They were butchered, parts to be burned on the altar, parts to be given to the priests. Fact is, there were LOTS of animals sacrificed every day. It was a dirty, smelly, bloody business. There must have been quite a cacophony of bleats, bellowing, birds screaming, and priests shouting commands to one another. The price exacted for the nation’s and individual’s sins was ugly, violent, and unsettling. 

In today’s sanitized religious world, the cost of our sin is almost hidden away. As Christians, we know Jesus died on the cross to pay for our sins, but that was long ago, and apart from Mel Gibson’s portrayal of the crucifixion in the movie “The Passion of the Christ,” we know very little about such things. The ugliness and devastating destruction of the human soul caused by our sins is lost on us; we have such a shallow understanding of good and evil, especially that which is in our own hearts, that we cannot fathom the depth of God’s love nor the cost of our salvation.  

Sin is gruesome. It’s ugly. It’s destructive, demeaning, and demanding a sacrifice unimaginable so we can be set free. Ponder the sacrifices in Leviticus 1 and 2, and take time to turn from sin and humbly give thanks for the great love of Christ to which they point.