The Sociology of Sacrifice (Part 1)

Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson, here with Greg Uttinger and Bryan Broome, and today we’re talking about The Sociology of Sacrifice. We’ve been talking about Israel’s theocratic republic and the laws that governed the Old Testament saints in the civil sense, and now we’re sort of moving to the sacrificial law.

Every religious system in history has had some concept of sacrifice. Greg, can you talk a little bit about what sacrifice has meant in different pagan religions and what makes the Old Testament idea, and even the New Testament idea of sacrifice distinct.

The problem in asking me that is that I’m not a trained sociologist or psychologist. I just pretend to be one occasionally. I’m not even an anthropologist or historian of ancient religions as such, but this much is clear. As you said, you go places, you find sacrifice.

As I look over what the anthropologists have written, what I seem to see is that as long as Christianity or Judeo-Christianity held the field in the academic world, at least as a touchstone, people said, “Oh, sacrifice, like in the Bible, only…” and they would qualify it from there.

There was at least a starting point where people could say, “Oh, we know what sacrifice is. At least we’ve seen sacrifice because we know the Bible,” either from the Old Testament or the New Testament, either from Judaism or Christianity, but when we start going into pagan tribes it seems to take on a different character.

Perhaps it’s magical, trying to control ultimate reality, trying to control the gods. Perhaps it’s a bribe. Perhaps it’s a gift. Perhaps it’s a giving up of one’s self for personal betterment or the betterment of society.

There are all kinds of explanations out there. They vary to the number of cultures, and possibly according to the number of anthropologists who are looking at them, because there’s a sense that there should be something unifying and they’re not really finding it, except perhaps in the fact that most of the time you’re killing something. But then there are grain offerings and such, too.

The pagan world does something that we look at from a Western perspective, pre-Christian, post-Christian, Christian, whatever, and say, “That looks like sacrifice.” But when we start talking to the people who do it, it doesn’t sound like what the Bible talks about. So we want to talk a little more about what the Bible has to say about sacrifice, something of what it isn’t, a good deal of what it is.

I think the starting point possibly is to – well, in the original article I didn’t deal with dispensationalism, but this is a good point to deal with dispensationalism. Dispensationalism in America tends to look at the Old Testament and, in its more extreme form, say “That was a different sort of religion. That was a different way of approaching God. When Christ came, he changed everything and all the sacrifices went away, at least until the millennium or the tribulation when the temple is rebuilt, so that can be a very different sort of religion.”

By and large, the American church doesn’t spend a lot of time thinking about sacrifice, except in just broadest outlines. “Well, sacrifice is kind of a picture of Jesus,” even though technically Dispensationalism wouldn’t allow for that.

Because it’s a completely separate track?

Yeah, it’s a completely separate track and, continuing that point, classic Dispensationalism said that the Church and the gospel mystery was something unforeseen by the prophets, and whatever happens from the death of Jesus on till the rapture can’t be really, except perhaps by type and analogy, foreshadowed in the Old Testament. That’s what classic Dispensationalism said. Whether or not any Dispensationalist pastor ever actually preached that way is a whole different story.

Yeah, it’s kind of hard to give up the protoevangelium and the “For unto us a child is born.”

Isaiah 53 and so on – “Behold the Lamb of God.” And yet that’s what Dispensationalism is trying to say. If nothing else, they did a good job discouraging any sustained thought about what the sacrifices actually were and what they actually did. That left it easy to conclude, “Oh, those sacrifices were how Israel was forgiven. You offer a lamb and God forgives you.” That’s not what’s going on there.

You can kind of almost draw a line between that misunderstanding of the Old Testament economy of redemption and the new covenant. They basically say, “Oh look! In the Old Testament, yes, it’s a different kind of religion and we don’t do the sacrifices. We’re not bloody anymore, but in the Old Testament they just had to keep doing it. That’s how it was effective, so for us we just need to keep doing it and keep doing things that God wants us to do, and that’s how we make it.”

Hebrews 10 disagrees.

Hebrews 10 disagrees with a lot in church history, starting with the mass. If we just keep doing it we are atoning, we are reconciling, we are propitiating, because there’s no clear concept that Jesus did it once for all.

It’s amazing that the Church does not understand Hebrews very well. You would think that would be the one thing, since it opens the Old Testament and lets you preach Jesus out of the Old Testament so clearly with divine authority. Even if you’re not going to go to the Old Testament, you at least can preach through Hebrews and you can reference these things and give your people something to work with.

There’s this danger of reading salvation by works or ritual, which is the same thing, back into the Old Testament, and then possibly forward into the tribulation and the millennium. Christianity becomes then this semi-Gnostic religion that floats in mid-air. Bryan gets props for ringing the Gnosticism bell, but it’s there. We don’t know what to do with the Old Testament because it’s bloody. What do you do with that? We live in a nicer, cleaner, more gentle economy.

Which in some ways is true.

Yeah, generally it’s true. I mean the symbol of our religion is an executioner’s instrument, but at least the blood is gone and, for Protestants, there’s no body on the cross. The central sacrament is not flesh and blood. It’s wine and bread because the blood’s been shed once for all.

But as you go back in the Old Testament, God made a big deal about the ritual of sacrifice. I think the first thing we have to say about it – well, I think I just said it. God made a big deal. Sacrifice was not something that humans invented.

I’ve done this before with my class. “What would God like? I want to bring God a cool present. You know what? God would like a dead animal. Everyone likes a dead animal. I want a dead animal. Let’s just bring God dead animals.”

I knew a pastor who I was trying to befriend, and in the end it didn’t work out so well, but he actually was of the opinion that since the Bible never said in so many words that God ordained sacrifice in Genesis 3 and 4, that it was something that Abel came up with, and the thing that made it alright was his faith. Because he did it in faith, even though he made it up, that was all right, and God himself had never instituted it. I never got around to asking him, “The lamb slain from the foundation of the world?”

It was obvious that Abel came up with that. Abel was the one that slayed the lamb.

Foundation of the world is a generic term, stretching at least 20-30 years past the date of creation.

I got an interesting reaction the last time I taught adults on God slaying the animals at the garden gate. I said, “This is where he institutes sacrifice,” and I got some pushback from people. “We’ve never heard that. No, that’s not at all what’s going on there.” What?

What else would you call it when God is making this ritual of killing animals in order to provide covering for his people?

Then just a few verses later we find Abel doing it, with nothing intervening, no further explanation. God did it and then his people are doing it.

Anyway, the first thing is sacrifice is God’s idea. It is an idea that God revealed, and he revealed it authoritatively. He said, “Do this.” Then God’s people were to do this. They’re to take an animal out of their own flocks. They’re to lay their hands upon it, slit the throat, kill the animal, drain the blood, slice and dice it, depending upon the particular kind of sacrifice it was, and then put parts of it – all or part, again depending on what kind of sacrifice it is – on the altar and let the flames consume it. That’s the bare bones formula.

It’s clear from the beginning, from the time that God institutes it at the garden gate, that God is communicating a message. He’s not just saying, “Hey, want to fingerpaint in blood?” God in the Old Testament is not just weird because he’s got nothing better to do, and sometimes we get that. “It’s the Old Testament. God just does weird stuff and we don’t need to figure it out. We don’t need to ask why.”

If we believe in a sovereign God at all we just say, “Well, God is sovereign. He can do whatever he wants. We don’t need to know the reasons. He would have told us.” What if maybe he has?

And we just haven’t paid attention.

We haven’t paid attention to it, starting with reading the passages that deal with sacrifice. As we’re passing from the laws that govern the theocratic republic to the sacrificial laws, what we’re actually doing – as I originally wrote out this sequence – is we’re moving from Exodus to Leviticus. When you hit Leviticus, slam! You’ve got about six chapters that deal with the sacrifices.

There are five sacrifices that God institutes or reaffirms in Leviticus. He approaches them twice in different order and spells out the details. Some of the details he misses the first time and comes back to. They’re also repeated later on in Numbers, where the drink offering is added with the view to when they come to the Promised Land and actually have wine available to them, and there are some other references here and there where God spells out these things.

And of course, then throughout the rest of the Old Testament there are constant references to these particular sacrifices. We’re used to saying sacrifice and think, “Well, all sacrifices are the same, right?” No, they’re not actually.

Even when we get to the New Testament, Paul at times is very specific as to what sacrifice he has in mind when he’s talking to us about what Christ did for us or what sacrifice means in our lives as we become living sacrifices. For instance, he says of himself, “The time of my departure is at hand. I’m being poured out as a drink offering,” the Greek says. What’s a drink offering? [inaudible 12:21] drink offerings. We have other things to do tonight.

There are five sacrifices that appear in Leviticus, and I’m going to pick just sort of a random order because, as I said, there are two different orders. In both lists, the one that starts it is the whole burnt offering. The Hebrew word is not ‘whole’ or ‘burnt.’ It’s the word ‘olah and it means ascension, to rise up, something that ascends before God, because sacrificial smoke goes up to God. The whole animal is consumed, except the skin.

We can think again back to Genesis where God takes the skins of the animals and clothes Adam and Eve, but the rest of the thing is destroyed. This appears to have been the major sacrifice from creation forward, perhaps until the Exodus, where at Passover we get something else.

This is basic. I give this sacrifice to God. The ritual is pretty simple. It has to be one out of my flock or herd, or I can buy one from a neighbor, but it needs to come out of the community. It doesn’t come from far away. I don’t go hunting for it in the wilderness. It’s one of us, and it comes and it’s without spot and without blemish, the symbol of moral purity and perfection.

I lay my hands on it. Really the Hebrew says I lean on it. Of course, the image is it’s supporting me. I’m putting all my weight on it. We’re not told if there was a prayer involved. It would be logical for people to pray one. It would be emotionally normal for people to pray one at this point, but God doesn’t prescribe words or “Say these words at this point.” Then the worshiper kills the animal.

This is really, really important because the worshiper is confessing that it is his sin that has brought about the death of this substitute, because it is a substitute. I deserve to die for my sins, but right now God is letting me kill this animal and he’s taking it in my place.

That doesn’t solve everything for always, and it becomes pretty clear it’s a symbolic act because I not only do this today, I do it tomorrow, I do it next Sabbath, and the Sabbath after that, and the year after that, and the decade after that. As the writer of Hebrews tells us in Chapter 10, the blood of bulls and goats can never put away sin, but rather it reminds us of our sins every time we offer because it’s insufficient, but there’s a message there.

So we’re back to God has a message. The message is about penal substitution. God will provide a sacrifice from the midst of his people, one who is pure, innocent, harmless. We will kill him, but he will take our place and bear our sins and the penalty they deserve.

Then the sacrifice is placed on the altar. The flames of the altar do not represent the flames of hell, because the animal is dead. When our substitute died he said, “It is finished. Father, into your hands I commend my spirit. Today you will be with me in paradise.”

What is it then? It’s passing into glory. The glory that lit the flame consumes it, transforms it, and the smoke rises up into heaven and God smells the sweet savor. God does not delight in torturing people in hell. His justice is satisfied in it, but he is not first and foremost a divine torturer who gets off on burning people.

When the sacrifice is glorified and we’re identified with it, we see, “Oh, in claiming the animal I put myself on the animal, but God puts the animal on me, so I am now giving myself to God. I am dead. I am being raised. I am being caught up into God’s glory. I am transformed. This is God’s plan for me.”

This is the message, dimly, because God doesn’t provide a script that says, “Now, boys and girls, this is what all of this means.”

We don’t get the Spark Notes.

No, there are no Spark Notes. It takes a very, very long time.

The Spark Notes are the book of Hebrews.

Yeah, exactly, and even there there isn’t everything we would like, but there’s a lot.

Anyway, so this is the whole burnt offering or the ascension offering. That’s the first one. Generally when you’re cutting a covenant, when you’re coming back to God when you’ve been away, when you’re reinitiating something huge, when it’s a big national thing, this is the sacrifice. This is the basic act of worship, and we need to go back to, “Because God commanded it.” We’re acting on God’s orders.

This is not us reaching up to God, bribing God, coercing God, manipulating God. It’s not even primarily us being thankful to God. This is primarily God sending us a message. Yes, we are the hands that draw out the message, as it were, in blood and gore, but it’s his message to us.

In sacrifice, God first of all speaks to us, and then we respond. By completing it, we respond back to him and say, “Yes, I believe this. You told me this. You’ve shown me this. Now I’m going to receive it and believe it and thus do it, because I believe your promise.”

This is where biblical sacrifice differs from all the other pagan versions of sacrifice. It’s a sacrament. It’s God speaking in grace and power to his people the promise of the gospel, that first. And as we believe the promise – Israel believed the promise, the patriarchs believed the promise – then they carried out the sacrifice and it came back to God as an expression of faith, not as a list of good works, not as a religious ritual, not as some kind of magical sacramentalism. This is really huge that we understand it this way. So that’s the whole burnt offering.

The second offering we run into – on both lists it’s second – is what the King James calls the meat offering. Unfortunately, in Elizabethan England meat simply meant food, because it’s the one sacrifice that doesn’t have any meat in it. It has no flesh. It’s a bloodless offering, but for that very reason it’s always offered with the ascension offering.

Generally it can be flour, but it can also be baked or fried cakes, what we’d think of as pancakes. In other words, you take the stuff that God gave you in your harvest and you work with it. You had to work to get this stuff. Sure, God blessed you. He made the plants grow, he sent the rain and all that, but you did have to work for this to be what it is, and that took time.

So you’ve got your time and your skills and your energy and the land and God’s blessing, and all of that comes together and you give it back to God. You give him a token amount to say, “All of this comes from you. Yes, I worked, but it’s not the efforts of my hands that have accomplished this. This is your blessing, and by giving you some I recognize that it’s all yours.”

The whole burnt offering is God is giving his substitute wholly for me. I’m giving myself wholly to him. He claims all of me. The meat offering, cereal offering, grain offering, tribute offering says, “Oh, and my stuff too – my time, my energy, my property, my lands, my crops, the works of my hands. It’s all God’s.”

So those are the two more basic common sacrifices that happen when things have not gone horribly wrong. When things go horribly wrong, a couple other sacrifices kick in.

But these two shed some light on Cain and Abel, don’t they.

Yeah, because – well, go ahead, Emily. What do you perceive here?

I perceive that the bloodless offering is given on the basis of the blood offering that’s already been given. Cain was willing to offer his power and his work and his effort, but it was Abel who recognized, “I need a substitute. I need my sins to be covered. I need to be covered with the skin of another, the righteousness of another.”

Absolutely. So what Cain did was not so much invent a sacrifice as get them out of order or bypass the one that mattered. He bypassed the blood offering to go for the cereal offering or the first fruits offering.

Yeah, God does have a claim on all of our stuff, but even that we can’t give to him unless we come through the blood, so the constant message of these sacrifices is your relation stands in the blood of your substitute. There’s no other relationship. You don’t get past it.

I don’t remember if I’ve told you two this story or not. We were meeting as elders and discussing in some manner the liturgy of our church, which is pretty simple, and someone was bringing up the possibility of following some of the Levitical order. One of our guys was saying, “No, that’s Old Testament. That doesn’t apply here.”

At the same point, one of our seminary professors walked by and we called him and said, “Hey Professor,” and he explained, “This is what each of the sacrifices means,” and did a pretty good job. He said, “In our church we do follow this order because it’s Levitical.”

The man who was objecting asked what at first seemed a simplistic question, but it turned out to be very penetrating because of the answer he got. His question was real simple. “So do all of these sacrifices point to the atonement?” and the professor stopped and hesitated and said, “I’m not sure.”

What? It’s the blood of the sacrifice! I have no idea what was going through his head at that moment. It blew anything he had just said because, yeah, except for the cereal offering or tribute offering, which is plugged into the whole burnt offering, they are all bloody sacrifices. They all give us a substitute who died. They all are atonement and propitiation to one degree or another, in one form or another.

There’s a different emphasis here, but one thing that these sacrifices do show us is that our whole life with God is caught up in the blood of the Lamb. There’s no point where we get beyond the blood. “Okay, I understand justification. Now I’m going to go on to sanctification. Oh, I met Jesus at the cross. Now I want to get to know the Holy Spirit and move beyond Jesus.”

It doesn’t work that way, but a lot of people I think try to make it that way. Perhaps naively in their uneducated understanding of Christianity they go down that path, and that’s a very dangerous path.

Of late I have been very taken with Peter’s greeting. I think it’s his first epistle. “Elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through sanctification of the Spirit, unto obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ.”

I used to wonder about that. Doesn’t the blood come before the Spirit? Aren’t we made right by Jesus’ death before the Spirit? But finally I think I understand what he’s saying. The work of the Spirit produces obedience, but even that obedience has to be sprinkled with Jesus’ blood. As Luther said, even our good works are – what’s the word Roman Catholics use for bad sins?

Mortal sins.

Thank you, are mortal sins unless they’re forgiven by the blood of Christ. Our good works are mortal sins because they’re flawed. We’ve got nothing to offer God, and it’s presumption to bring our good works and say, “Oh, but I have one filthy rag for you, Lord.” It doesn’t work.

So those are the first two sacrifices. Depending on which order you go in, the peace offering is when things are going remarkably well. You haven’t sinned in any great way. God’s not angry with you. You’re just enjoying your walk with God.

Maybe you made a promise and you want to fulfill it. God has done something really good for you – a new baby in the family or you’re going to get married or you got home from a trip. God has just blessed you. God blessed you with a prosperous harvest. There’s all kinds of things where you’re just thankful to God and you want to show that and you want to enjoy his fellowship.

Again, you don’t get to make up how you do that. God has ordained a sacrifice for this. It’s called the peace offering and it represents the shalom, the peace and beauty and rest and confidence that we have when our whole trust is in Christ.

This one differs in that only a token amount of the sacrifice was burned on the altar, but the remaining meaty parts were shared between the priest and the worshiper and anyone he happened to bring with him – so the worshiper and his family and his local pastor and hangers-on and whatever.

This is like a celebratory barbeque with a ritual attached to it.

Yeah. You give this to God and God gives it back. God says, “Oh, no need, here, you share with me.” So a little bit is consumed on the altar, the priest consumes some, but the largest amount goes to the people.

Again, remember this is Israel. This is before electricity and refrigeration. You didn’t kill animals a whole lot unless you were having a party. You can think of the prodigal son’s brother’s remark. “Well, you never killed a fatted calf for me, or you never gave me a kid so I could rejoice with my friends,” because it’s expensive. There’s no refrigeration. You have to eat it all at once and it’s got to be a big party. You’ve got to invite people over.

What if you’re doing an ox? That’s a village celebration, so you’re inviting all of your family and friends and neighbors, your pastor and elders and whoever, to this big celebration. It’s not going to happen all that much.

But God is good. God invites us to celebrate and to be happy and joyful.

And he eats with us.

And he eats with us, yeah. The sacrifice which represents his son, we eat, we take it into ourselves. It becomes part of us, but there’s this sharing, this communion meal.

As I said earlier or hinted at earlier, Passover is the one time when we definitely see this clearly, possibly for the first time, because Passover was the big peace offering. But then we start getting references to it from that time forward and detailed instructions here.

This is something else the sacrifice is. Yes, through blood, but on the other side of that blood and within that blood is fellowship with God and celebration and joy and a good time and celebration with other people. This is a communal meal. It’s not just a private exercise of the soul toward God in some mystic way. You may ring the Gnostic bell.

Ding!

We really need a sound effect for that.

We do. David can find us a sound effect for Gnosticism.

That leaves two more that have been given various names. The King James calls the first one the sin offering and the second the trespass offering, and that’s fine. I’m going to use slightly different names, but I have no problem with those names.

The sin offering or purification offering, because purification is what it does. The great sin offering is the offering on the Day of Atonement, and every individual offering or purification offering is a scaled-down version of that.

I was just teaching this the other day to our teachers and said, “You all remember spring cleaning?” I don’t know if it’s a thing that your generation does, but when I was a kid I still remember that there was this thing called spring cleaning. As soon as it gets warm enough and the winds are blowing, you take everything out. You hang all your sheets out and let them air out. You air out the house. You dust, you polish, you clean, because we like to live in nice houses. We like to live in healthy wholesome houses, clean houses. But through the year you don’t just clean it that day. Through the year you’re always dusting and polishing and sweeping and wiping down things, but there was still this one big thing.

That’s kind of what the purification offerings were all about. On the Day of Atonement, God dealt decisively with Israel’s sins. The high priest came with the blood of the goat of atonement, sprinkled it upon the mercy seat, and God’s wrath was propitiated – that is, God’s looking at his house and he’s looking at the community he lives in, and he sees a lot of filthiness, but the blood acts as a cleansing agent. It cleanses his presence – the tabernacle and, by extension, the community, because the people and the tabernacle are related. That’s the big spring cleaning thing.

The sin offerings are the ongoing daily cleanings. I sinned, I lied, I stole, I committed fornication, I did this, I did that, and I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking too clearly at the time and my sins overcame me, but I regret it. That is not who I am and not who I want to be, so I’m going to go to God and I’m going to bring an offering to say, “Lord, forgive me and be at peace with me,” and here’s the thing, “Don’t desert me.”

On the Day of Atonement, Israel said, “Don’t desert us. Don’t leave. Our sins defile your house. They defile your worship. We can understand that there could be a point where you’re so disgusted with what we’ve done that you could pack up and leave because our worship has desolated this place and made the worship abominable.”

The Bible speaks of the abomination that makes desolate. It’s not primarily Gentile armies, it’s primarily what God’s people do to desolate his house. If he leaves, the shekinah glory leaves, Christ walks out of the temple, and then the Gentile armies come in and finish it off. So the sin offerings are an answer to that. “I have sinned. I want to be right with you, God, so I do this first.”

There were different offerings depending on who you were. If you were a priest you had the most expensive offering. The whole congregation, same thing. Priest = the whole congregation. Prince, a lesser offering. Common citizen, lesser still.

There are degrees of responsibility within God’s kingdom, and worship is more important than politics. And those who handle the Word and sacraments are ultimately more important than the guys who pass laws in Washington or Sacramento, or whatever your state capital is.

Then the blood from the sacrifice was sprinkled in various places. The more closely the offender had to do with God’s presence (priests), the closer the blood was taken into the tabernacle, to the horns of the incense altar, to the veil. The less you had to do, the more the blood was confined to in and about the altar – again, this idea of degrees of responsibility. Maybe we’ll talk about that a little more before we’re finished. So this is a very complicated one.

Oh, and there’s a couple other things that I tend to forget. First, God in order to assure the worshiper “I forgive you” turned it into a quasi-peace offering. In this case, the priest could eat some of it. In other words, “I brought food and God’s priest eats it. That’s a good sign.” The worshiper is not invited to eat. He doesn’t get to profit from his sins, but the worshiper is encouraged that God has received it to the point where the worshiper sees the priest eating food and is assured, “Okay, God’s at peace with me. He accepted the offering.”

So the priest is acting both as God’s representative to the congregation, as well as the congregation’s representative to God.

Yes, which is generally what priests do. And the rest of the sacrifice, though – this is the part that’s easy to forget, but it’s so crucial in the New Testament – part of it’s burned there, but the bulk of the thing is taken outside the camp, outside of the city and burned outside.

The writer of Hebrews – we were talking a lot even before we started here about the importance of Hebrews – he says that by the same token, Jesus suffered outside the camp. He didn’t die on the altar. He didn’t die in the temple. He died outside the holy city. He was the ultimate sin offering. “Thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin.” Or in Romans, “He hath made him to be sin for us,” or some have read that as sin offering, but it’s the same idea.

Then the writer of Hebrews, whoever he is, goes on to say, “Let us then also go outside the camp and identify ourselves with Jesus, because we have here no continuing city.” What the sin offering points to – as all these sacrifices do – is this isn’t it. This is not the end. This is not the goal.

Jesus’ death outside of Jerusalem calls us outside of that whole Old Testament community with all the shadows and sacrifices and says there’s a new Jerusalem. There’s something better. There’s reality. We need to leave the shadows behind to lay hold on Jesus.

The last sacrifice is trespass offering or reparation offering. This gets less emphasis both in the Old and the New. It has to do with sacrilege. If someone trespasses on the holy things, takes an animal that was marked for God, steals from the tithe money, something along these lines, or breaks an oath to God, anything where the profane trespasses into the holy, the price of the sacrifice goes up. It’s a ram, but in addition to that the worshiper is to restore whatever he stole, whatever he defiled, whatever he rendered not holy, and 20%. Again, the idea of restitution.

Even when we come to God and God freely forgives us, there are still things that need to be made right, so that’s another principle we should look at briefly before we’re done.

Doesn’t it also carry the idea that the holy is dangerous to the common. You need to be sanctified if you’re going to approach close to God.

Yeah, for the profane to enter the holy is to take great risk, and if you have not been invited then it’s a crime and you will answer for it. We see plenty of that in the Old Testament.

We tend to think, “Well, that’s Old Testament.” Yeah, but remember Ananias and Saphira? Remember the Corinthian congregation, where they did not approach the Lord’s Supper properly and many were weak and sickly and many slept? That hasn’t gone away.

Hebrews 10 again, that whole passage.

Yeah, and we could follow this whole thing up with, “Let’s spend one on Hebrews 10 and see how it all applies.”

So those are the five sacrifices, and the Hebrew distinguishes them, so when in doubt, grab Strong’s Concordance online and look up the word and see what word is actually being used, because sometimes it does affect your understanding of the whole passage. And sometimes it carries over into the English, but not always, and not always clearly or consistently.

So when we come to passages where sacrifices are being presented, we need to ask ourselves what kind, and why these, and why in this order, and what is God telling us? We’re back to again, this is God’s message to us. This is not works religion. This is not magic. It isn’t sacramentalism in the sense that if I go through the right form then I get bonus points from God. This is God preaching the gospel and, just as in the New we need to preach it right, so in the Old.

There it was in shadows and forms and they didn’t understand all the details so they had to do it right, because whether they understood the message or not, it was there and they couldn’t corrupt the message. Today because we have the New Testament, the full revelation of God in Christ, we know what the message is or at least we’re supposed to. When we start messing with the message, deliberately altering it, God is not happy.

Ours is a generation that really has no sense of that. “But don’t you think he meant well? But so many people were blessed. But I saw the outpouring of the Spirit there. Everybody was falling down left and right. Obviously this was the work of…”

“He was lying about who Jesus was!”

“Oh, but that’s very harsh and unloving of you.”

Yeah well, God did some very nasty things to people who misrepresented his Son. Nadab and Elihu offered strange fire and got burned up. Moses struck the rock twice instead of speaking to it and was denied the Promised Land, and we could go on.

So the message for us at least – one of the many messages here – is present Christ and present the gospel accurately. “Be not many masters.” Not everybody should be a teacher or preacher of the gospel, at least to the broader community, although we all have an obligation to bear witness within our circle of our family, friends, and community.

Well, that was just talking about what the sacrifices are.

We had like seven more points we wanted to cover, but that’s about the time.

Is that time? Well, you know what? We need a Part 2 now.

All right, we’ll do a Part 2 if that’s what it takes.

We’ll consider some of these things and come back, because the one after that is called the Economics of Sacrifice, but we’ll have already done the sacrifices so we won’t have to go and repeat all this stuff. That will be good.

Good plan. Do we have any recommendations? Can I go first, because you want to talk about my recommendation. First I’m going to recommend Hebrews 10. It’s in the show notes. Just read it. You don’t need a sermon on Hebrews 10 because Hebrews 10 is so plain and so beautiful.

But my recommendation, with caveats, is Peter Leithart’s book A House for My Name. It’s a survey of the Old Testament. He does a really good job of organizing this material specifically, sort of laying out “Here’s how to remember what the sacrifices are and what they mean.”

It sounds really complicated and difficult, especially when you’re reading it multiple times in the text of the Bible, but he kind of distills it, so I really appreciate that succinctness.

The caveat – and I confess apparently that I gave you the book, right?

Yes.

Peter Leithart is a very knowledgeable perceptive theologian, but he does have some weak spots. At this point we’re not going to be shy about pointing out at least one of them, which is clarity where the doctrine of justification by faith is concerned.

I’ve read A House for My Name. I’ve profited from it greatly, but I do remember specifically one section having to do with a Psalm of David – this book goes all the way from Genesis to Malachi – where Dr. Leithart misses the point completely. Rather than seeing Jesus as the substitute who can claim to be righteous because he is, or David appealing to Christ as his substitute and therefore can claim to be righteous because he’s in Christ, the text makes it sound like, “Well, David was obeying God’s law so that’s what he’s talking about.” No, that’s not what he’s talking about, and that’s not what the Old Testament is ever talking about.

So with strains of this along, I will very guardedly agree with Emily’s recommendation because there’s so much good stuff in it. And the problem is there’s so little out there to recommend. I mean we have Geerhardus Vos’s book. Bryan, you were reading that, weren’t you?

Yes, I finished it two years ago, something like that.

You’re talking about Biblical Theology?

It’s fantastic.

Wonderful, but very dense.

Dense and not written in common language that ordinary people can follow. Now, if you’re a theologian then go for Biblical Theology, but even Vos doesn’t make some of the real simple obvious connections. He’s coming, I suppose, from a different perspective and didn’t have enough people to interact with and say, “Hey, Geerhard, did you notice this?”

We are talking biblical theology. We’re talking about how God develops his own image, signs and symbols historically and literarily throughout the course of scripture, but as we pursue those things we do have to be guarded by systematic theology, where the Church has fought hard to maintain the basic doctrines and define the gospel.

We don’t get to let our biblical theology create a brand new religion for us because we’re so creative and imaginative, and that’s the danger. So yes, with wisdom and discretion, with eyes wide open there’s stuff you can borrow here, but keep your eyes open.

As we always say, there’s only one perfect book and everything else has caveats. But this one has especially big ones.

I’m going to recommend two books. One of them is specifically relevant to the temple structure, and I’ve possibly even recommended it before, and the other one is relevant to issues regarding hermeneutical systems.

The first one is God in Our Midst by Daniel R. Hyde, which is one of my favorite theological books I’ve read in the past five years. It’s about what the layout and furniture in the tabernacle and temple tell us about who God is, and what they told Israel about who God is, and it is simply amazing.

I have never heard of this book. I must get this book. This sounds great.

Yes. Seriously, I can’t think of anyone else who’s ever covered that, except for the church fathers, who all approached it very allegorically. “The seven pieces of showbread represent the 12 tribes of Israel,” and it’s all numbers. So that’s my first one.

Who’s the author again?

Daniel R. Hyde.

Do you know anything about his background?

If I remember correctly, he’s RCUS and he’s a pastor down in southern California.

He’s not RCUS. I would know him if he were, or know of him.

He’s vaguely Dutch then.

Dutch, yeah. URC?

That’s probably it. Yes, he’s the pastor of Oceanside United Reformed Church in Carlsbad – URCNA.

Carlsbad, California, home of Legoland.

Wow, two world-famous things for Carlsbad now.

And what was your second book?

The second one is by Vern Pythress, Understanding Dispensationalists.

I was just looking at that book.

I have read it once and need to read about 14 more times to completely digest it, because that’s how Vern writes things. Sometimes you get to certain topics and you just kind of go, “I read a book about it. I need to read every book about it that’s written.” Dispensationalism is one of those things. Federal vision is another one. Sometimes I just need to refresh my mind on that one like, “Why is this wrong again? Oh, right! That’s why.”

But it’s so distasteful to read about.

Yeah, that’s part of the struggle. So those are my two.

Okay. Mine is, at my wife’s suggestion, I recommend book clubs. Book clubs are cool. Book clubs give you a chance to read books you would not normally read. If you have smart well-read friends who are a bit quirky, you will run into all kinds of wonderful things that you normally wouldn’t even know exist. ’m sure that every book club has its own set of rules and its own approach to things. I know of one where if you haven’t read it, you can still come but you have to bring the wine.

We have a book club for our teachers at school now to encourage our teachers to read. In a week or so we’re doing The Murder of Roger Ackroyd in our house – not that we’re murdering Roger Ackroyd in our house, but we’re hosting the book club on that, and I got to re-read a book that I wouldn’t have re-read because I read it already back when I was like 18. But it was fun to go back and say, “I guess I should actually read it so I remember what’s in it besides the solution,” which no one should ever give away to anybody, under pain of death.

I think someone did spoil that one for me, but I read it anyway.

So I went back and re-read it, and it was a well-done story and was interesting to see her technique and development of characters and plot and such. I’m sure when we talk about it we’ll talk about “Why this?” because there’s always somebody who doesn’t get “Why did we read this book?”

Usually there’s a good reason. Sometimes there’s really not. Everybody agrees afterward, “That was a dumb decision,” but normally there’s something good there. And one book a year for the sake of the good books you’re going to be introduced to is well worth it, and encouraging one another to read is a profitable enterprise.

To that end, join us on Good Reads.

It is the superior social media.

It is. I actually wound up recently as the moderator of a group on Good Reads, just sort of by accident. I was part of a Facebook group and somebody was like, “Hey, does this group have a corresponding group on Good Reads?” and I said, “Ask and ye shall receive, my friends,” so that exists now. I don’t want to run a group. That’s not what I want to do, so one of my other friends had actual ideas and I was like, “Here, can I make you a moderator?”

That comes up with all these reading challenges for the different years, like each month you read a different type of book or a book you wouldn’t have read otherwise. It’s fun to come up with the categories.

Kate’s getting into that. She has this list on the refrigerator. Kate, where did that come from originally?

Is it the Literary Life podcast?

The Literary Life podcast.

Called it! They have great lists.

You are correct. She’s doing one of the reading challenges – a book you’ve avoided, a book you’ve always wanted to read, a book from this particular century, a book about this particular subject. It’s forcing us to get beyond what we’re comfortable with, because it’s so easy to get into intellectual ruts by reading the same stuff all the time.

Wonderful. Thank you, guys, so much. This has been fun, and clearly not long enough, so we’ll have a Part 2 next week.

Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. Thanks to our transcriptionist. We do have transcripts for every single episode. They are professionally done. They’re not just popped into Google to see what it thinks we said. This is quality work, so if you want to read our podcast rather than listen, you can do that.

You can also check out our show notes for any books or scripture references. I don’t list all the scripture references because that would be a lot, but the main ones – if we quote multiple verses in a row, I link those. Also books and movies and music that we reference is all in the show notes.

You can visit our website at anchor.fm/haltingtowardzion. You can send us an email at [email protected]. We look forward to hearing from you.