The Sociology of Sacrifice (Part 2)

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.

Last week we talked about what the sacrifices in the Old Testament sacrificial system were. Today we’re going to move on from that to talk about what they do, the role that they play and the function that they serve in the Old Testament redemptive economy, what they communicated to the people of Israel and what they can communicate to us today.

Greg, do you want to give us a quick recap of the five different types of sacrifices before we move on?

Oh, you are so trusting. Quick, huh? Okay, I’ll try. First is the whole burnt offering or ascension offering. The whole thing is offered up to God, except the skin, which goes to the priest. In it we are testifying that this animal takes my place wholly. I’m giving myself wholly to God in it, because Christ when he comes will give himself wholly for me.

Then the grain or tribute offering, which is tagged onto the whole burnt offering, itself is bloodless but it’s always offered with a blood offering. It says that all my time, energy, and stuff is God’s as well. God doesn’t just get my heart, he gets my stuff when he gets my heart.

The peace offering is for those who don’t have a major sin issue to deal with, except the ongoing sin we all struggle with, but it’s a time for fellowship or thanksgiving or fulfillment of a vow, and it is a communion meal with God. The priest gets some, some goes on the altar, and the worshiper and his family and friends, the local Levite, get to have a big party and celebration before God.

The sin offering or purification offering is for specific sins – not sins of high-handed rebellion, but the kind of sins that sometimes we do that are, “Yeah, that was really sinful and I really blew it. I’ve broken my fellowship with God and he’s going to be displeased with me and I need to make things right,” but we can’t do anything. But we can bring a sacrifice that says God will provide a solution.

For this sin offering, the details varied with who the offender was, what his place in society was, and that would determine which sacrifice was brought, where the blood was sprinkled or smeared. Part of it’s burned on the altar, but the remainder is burnt outside the camp. The priest does eat what’s left, again assuring the worshiper that God now accepts him and that there is fellowship restored.

Then finally the reparation offering or trespass offering, where I have violated holiness in some way, committed sacrilege, taken away that which is holy, or deprived God of tithes. Usually it’s a financial thing, and I am bringing a ram to atone for the sin, for the violation or profanation of the holy, but also to pay back what I owe, what I’ve taken, with 20% on top of that so that restoration of fellowship means restitution. I need to put right what I’ve made wrong. I don’t get to just say, “Well, I’m just really sorry, so glad God forgives me. Next!” There is a making-right process that goes along with the forgiveness.

So those are the five.

And you did it in three minutes.

Wow, against all odds.

We’re talking then about the sociology of sacrifice, and what things do these tell us about society, about how God thinks about community and communion, about the relationship of his people with one another, and such things.

The first thing I’ve kind of already said, and feel free to jump in on this. The whole burnt offering especially, but all of the sacrifices say that I belong to God. I have laid my hands on this animal. I’ve confessed my sins over it. It has taken my place. It’s gone up in flame and God receives it. It’s my substitute so he’s receiving me, so I am giving myself to God.

The animal has symbolically borne my punishment – not really because it can’t do that, that’s for Messiah when he comes – but it points to the fact that God is going to provide a substitute. In trusting God’s promise of that substitute, I get claimed in the process. God claims me and I have to serve him with all that I am and all that I have.

I was thinking about this in the context of the first fruit offering, how you were to give the first representative portion to God to show that he owns all of it, and Christ is compared to that, to the first fruit, to say that Christ is God’s and therefore we are God’s, because we are the body. We are the rest of the stuff that Jesus was the representative of.

We can think here particularly of I Corinthians 15 in the context of the resurrection. “Christ the firstfruits; afterward they that are Christ’s at his coming.” He rose in time and space, and that guarantees that one day we will rise because we are in him.

This is not an individualistic thing, and that’s kind of the point of this whole discussion and so counterintuitive to American thought. We’re fond of thinking, “It’s just me. It’s just my decision. What I do doesn’t affect anybody else, and what other people do doesn’t affect me.”

At the heart of all of sacrifice is the idea of representation. The animal represents me because somebody else is going to represent me. If I’m in him, and that’s the only way for this to work, then I’m in him and he’s the head, I’m only the body. I’m only one member of the body. He, thus, is in charge. He’s the boss, he’s the Lord, he’s the Savior.

The struggles we had a generation or two ago about what they called lordship salvation only came up because we didn’t understand what salvation is at all, so we started arguing over it like it was fire insurance. “When I paid this policy did I sign something that said – or do I have to sign something that says I’m going to obey God too? Because that sounds like salvation by works.”

Well, put that way it might, but the point is that I am a member of Christ. I belong to Christ. He is my representative, but he’s the head. He’s the representative of the whole body. Imagine a finger getting off the hand and saying, “I’m not going with you guys because you really made me mad today, so I’m going to be over here in this corner,” or the liver stepping out and saying, “Yeah, I’m staying with the finger because you guys are dumb.”

You can’t do that. The body moves together because the head tells it where to go, and the body does not complain and ask to vote on the headship of the head. “Can we have somebody new here? This isn’t working for us.”

This is key to this whole concept. We understand as Christians instinctively, because we’ve at least been taught this much, that sacrifice is about someone bearing our sin and taking our place. That’s representation. It’s a legal concept and it’s also a political concept. We vote for representatives.

I remember one gentleman complaining about the people in Washington – “They don’t represent me!”

“Yeah, sorry, they actually do.”

“But they don’t believe at all what I believe.”

“That’s not the point.”

They are your representatives, just as parents represent children, pastors and elders represent their congregation, and so on.

I was having a conversation recently, and I don’t want to linger too long on this point, but I think it’s worth mentioning and I’m not sure where else in our outline it’s going to fit, so I’m going to say it now. It’s this concept that’s sort of resurfacing in culture today of collective guilt.

Sometimes there’s a kneejerk reaction to say, “No, sin is completely individual. Guilt is mine alone if it’s mine alone,” whereas I think the sacrificial system reveals to us a larger concept of guilt that’s not merely collective but covenantal. There’s not only a way in which we share guilt as a community, there’s a specific way in which that guilt is distributed and dealt with.

Yeah. Politically as a nation, again, we’re represented by presidents, armed forces, diplomats, judges, all kinds of people. The wonderful thing about the American system is that in theory we have the ability to call them to account when they do wicked things. But if we go along with the wicked things and don’t raise our voices and don’t protest, then we’re part of the problem. The sin is ours in part, even though we didn’t do it. God will hold us collectively accountable for such things.

Even if the sin is in the past, there may be – and there’s all kinds of things you could get into here, and I really don’t want to because it’s a hornet’s nest unless you really have thought through it well, and some of these matters I haven’t – but still, there may be reparations that need to be made.

I’ll pick an easy one, and I think we’ve dealt with it, but again I’m not an expert. That’s the internment of Japanese-American citizens during the Second World War. These people clearly were American citizens, and simply because of the way they looked or because of their ancestry we took away their lands and their businesses and we confined them. All kinds of arguments were made at the time of why this was good and necessary.

I believe, from what little I know, that a lot of that has been dealt with, but it took a long time and it took these people or their descendants to bring lawsuits for the correction of this, and it should have been corrected. We collectively did not have the right to do that.

I suppose if you could track down every single person who participated in it and dealt with them individually – every lawmaker, every governor, every judge, or whatever – perhaps that’s an option, but that’s unlikely, especially after any time passes. At that point, as a people we have to say, “Yeah, we let that happen and we have reparations to make.”

Obviously, there are other areas where this could apply and may really apply. I will leave that to those who know more about history and have thought through the legal ramifications better than I have.

Second then, our relationship with God then is legal and covenantal. I think the tendency today is to think in terms of broken relationships. “We were harmonious and now we’re not. We’re just not getting along. God’s upset with us for some reason, and I don’t always feel the way I should about God. Jesus came to kind of put that together somehow. He’s kind of the great psychotherapist who brings mental and psychological healing.” And while there’s an element of truth in that, that’s not primarily what’s going on here. What’s primarily going on is a legal action.

We are guilty before God – and guilt, too, is not an emotional state. Guilt is a legal state. It means I’ve broken God’s law and I deserve punishment. How I feel about that is irrelevant. How everyone else feels about my guilt is irrelevant. Even, in a sense, how God feels about it is irrelevant – not in the long run, because his feelings will move him to do things, but by the simple fact that if I’ve sinned against God, God’s own nature, his own justice, requires that he punish me – that he punish me either in my own person or in the person of a representative – and that leads us back to sacrifice.

But there’s no getting around the fact that guilt demands punishment, and punishment is personal. God doesn’t punish sins in hell. He punishes sinners. In the sacrificial system we acknowledge on the one hand that this is true, that God punishes sinners for their sins, but it also shows us that God, being a covenantal God, a God who deals in representation, can legitimately and legally punish a representative, the right kind of representative, in the place of his people who have sinned against him.

That’s fundamental to the nature of biblical salvation, of what the gospel is telling us, although there are many voices today that are horrified of that idea, and many voices throughout church history who have said, “That’s not fair, and that doesn’t work, and that doesn’t even make sense,” Charles Finney being one of them, Socinius another.

But the sacrificial system says, yes, we have someone here, a sinner who is legally guilty. He’s broken God’s law and deserves punishment. God’s nature requires that, and yet God, without violating his nature – in fact, because of his very nature, because he is a God who deals in representation – his Son is the image, the representation of the Father – finds it natural and acceptable to deal in a representative who can act as our Savior, a second Adam.

The third thing that I have on my list is the one I just talked about. It says this. Sacrifice portrayed the legality and necessity of covenantal representation and substitution. I think I just blended the second and third one together.

The second point being the expiation of guilt, and the third one being that we need the representation and substitute.

It becomes possible through the representation. We look at the sacrifice on the altar and we say, “Something died here. It should have been me, but it wasn’t. It was a substitute. It was a representative.”

But God didn’t just say, “Oh, look at the cute fluffy lamb. I now forgive you. I wouldn’t want to hurt it.”

“Now I know you’re really sincere.”

“Now I know you’re really sincere because you brought me a pet.” No, the lamb has to die, and that seems harsh if you like lambs. They’re white and fluffy. I know, Emily, that the memes you put up – there were these fluffy lamb knees or something going on with fluffy little lambs.

Yes, their little fluffy knees.

And some people think that that’s enough. Just awe God with fluffy-kneed lambs and teddy bears and everything’s going to be okay, because that’s what God’s like – puppy dogs and rainbows.

Pony noses?

Yeah. Sacrifices say no, God demands the death of an animal.

There are people in our age who think that’s absolutely horrible. What kind of God would demand the death of an animal? What he’s really demanding is our death, and the animal is just a substitute that says, “You deserve this, but I’ve got Someone better coming and this is just a picture.”

If it’s bad enough that God demands the death of an animal as a holding thing, as a picture, as a pointer, ultimately it means that God demanded the death of his Son. Again, there are people who don’t like that.

I’ve recommended American Gospel Part 2: Christ Crucified, and you can hear lots of voices within the progressive and emergent church who are just horrified at the idea that God would have given his son over to death for our sins, that it doesn’t make sense, it’s cruel, it’s child abuse on a cosmic level, and yet that is consistently the gospel that the Bible presents, from the first sacrifice and all the way through.

I remember in this video a couple of young podcasters are just laughing at the idea of the gospel. In fact, they basically say, “You’re asking us to define the gospel? I can’t do that,” as if the gospel is constantly changing. It’s one thing for Jesus, another thing for Paul, and so on.

The animal sacrifice from Adam and Eve to Abel and on shows that God always had the same idea. It’s always the same gospel. It’s preached on the altar. There’s nothing new here. It’s one of penal substitution. You can’t get away from that. It’s kind of hard to teach the Old Testament without coming face-to-face with it.

Now, pursuing the third point again of representation, let me read again from the original manuscript:

Mankind originally fell into sin and guilt through the representative act of a single man, Adam. Many nations continued to receive judgement and blessing because of the representative acts of their covenant leaders. Though the sacrificial laws placed a heavy responsibility on civic leaders, it placed even greater responsibility on those who ministered God’s Word and sacrament. Worship is more important than politics.

We saw in the purification or sin offering that when the people sinned, they brought the bull or calf, but when the priest sinned, he too brought the calf. The sin of the priest was equivalent to the sin of the whole people. The civil leader brought something far less expensive, and the blood was not taken as far into the tabernacle system to be displayed or splashed or sprinkled.

Politics, as important a place as it plays in our civil lives and the whole of our lives, is not as important as those who minister the gospel, whether through the Word or the sacraments or both. When those people go astray, when our pastors are corrupting the gospel, that carries serious implications for the Church. Either the Church better do something real fast about that and remove their pastors and call men who are faithful, or the Church is going to suffer a good deal.

Some of it’s going to be natural consequences of having a false prophet in the pulpit. You’re going to listen to false things and you’re going to start believing and doing false things. But God is angry about such things.

Now, blessings and cursing here – we’re not back to some kind of salvation by works religion, but whether it be God’s common judgement on all sin or his common goodness to all people, raining on the just and the unjust, or whether it be his disciplinary hand on those who are his covenant people – we can sin and God can spank us or correct us, or we can continue by grace in faithfulness and God can continue to expand the blessing that he’s already building on because we’re in Christ.

This idea of consequences is still very much there. What your leaders do, matters. And what your church leaders do actually matters more than what the president or the new president does. That’s something that I think a lot of American Christians really need to deal with right now.

The fourth point, to keep myself in line I will read:

Sacrifice spoke of restoration. The worshiper doesn’t just escape the punishment, but in the image that’s on the altar he is transformed – slain dead and then transformed in the fires of the altar and rises up as smoke before God, who is pleased. After Noah brought his sacrifices, it says the Lord smelled the sweet savor.

The fire on the altar is not the fires of hell crisping eternal victims. That’s not God’s reaction to that. God has a holy satisfaction with that because it’s just. But when he delights in something, what he delights in is that we’ve passed through the blood of Christ and we are acceptable and he can see us in Christ, and not only is there a legal transformation, but there is a substantive transformation. We’re born again. We become new creatures on the basis of what Christ did for us, and in that, God is delighted. God is putting back what went wrong, beginning in our hearts and continuing on ultimately into glory. The altar also speaks of our eventual glorification.

When we sit down and eat a meal – a peace offering or the priest eats the sin offering – again this is emphasizing in a very material sort of way. It’s a peace offering. I’m eating some of the same food that God’s priest is eating, that God himself consumed on the fire. I have a very tangible kind of reassurance that fellowship is restored, and it’s restored down to the level of eating and drinking. It’s a very non-Gnostic kind of thing.

[ding!]

I’m still waiting for the Gnostic bell.

I think David was looking at gong sounds for that.

I like gongs. Gong and Gnostic start with the same letter, so there’s the connection.

There’s the connection, yeah.

The next thing…

Can I make a side note?

Absolutely, please do.

I have an inkling of what you’ll say about this, but I would love to hear your thoughts, both of you, on this – noticing that God’s covenant with Noah is established through sacrifice as well, that there’s the sweet savor ascending before the Lord.

Some people call the Noahic covenant the common grace covenant, and sometimes it sounds as though the common grace track is separate from the ‘in Christ’ track. I was noticing in my readings in Genesis lately that, nope, this one’s on account of the blood as well.

Yes, and?

Do you care to elaborate or respond?

I think you hit it. Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. This is not something that comes simply because God wants to perpetuate his creation aside from Christ or outside of Christ. Noah found grace.

That doesn’t mean Noah was so good that God said, “Hey, you’re cool! Let’s hang out!” That’s exactly what it doesn’t mean. It means he found Noah a sinner, a rebel, a breaker of his law, and said, “Okay, that’s over. Now you’re mine and here’s what we’re going to do.” He intervened sovereignly, monergistically in Noah’s life and brought him to Himself. It’s in that context that we get the word that before the flood God established his covenant with Noah.

It’s true that the people on the ark are all of humanity. It’s also true that they are the Church, and that Peter compares the passage of the ark through the flood to a baptism and mentions all eight souls on board as being part of this thing.

At this point, God has eliminated everyone outside of his Church and he’s giving the world back to the Church in the person of these eight people. Were they all born again? Were they all saved? Probably not. Ham seems to have had some issues. We can’t say with certainty. Even godly people do some wicked stupid things at times. We’re not invited, actually, to read their hearts.

But at that point when they step forward and God says, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth,” he gives them the planet and he’s giving it to his Church again. He does it, as you say, in terms of a sacrifice. God smells the sweet savor, and on the blood of that he again speaks up by covenant. He puts the rainbow in the sky as the seal.

I realize common grace is a theologically acceptable term and I’ll live with it, but I think it’s acquired some baggage. What God is promising to do is to hold the world and history and society together for the coming of Messiah. Does that overflow into blessings for everybody? Well, sort of. It means that all kinds of unbelievers get to live in a pretty nifty world where there’s regularity and dependability that allows you to go out and function and earn food and clothe your family and all that – sunshine and rain on everybody.

It also means that God is pouring coals of fire on your head if that goodness does not lead you to repentance. It’s all for Christ, and what we do with Jesus is what it’s about. It’s not about God having a secondary plan or a secondary track, some other sort of grace. He is a good God who does good things, but all of that is centered in the person of Christ, who owns the world and who proved that by dying and rising again. He established his claim by his resurrection.

The Noahic covenant – the most obvious thing it does is preserves the Messianic line. Where’s Messiah going to come from? Noah. Why doesn’t it say that? Because he’s the only one left! One of the next things that happens is that, because of Ham’s sin, Noah identifies Shem as the one who will continue the promise. There wasn’t a great deal to choose from, and that’s the way God sovereignly appointed it all.

There’s a danger in taking anything in the flow of covenantal history out of the person of Christ, or even off-centering it from Christ, as if there is Christ and something else that’s going on here. No, it’s all about Christ. Unless you want to think that Jesus doesn’t own everything and that Jesus isn’t in control of everything and that he’s not Lord of all, we have to confess it is a salvific covenant. It’s about Messiah and what he’s coming to do, and it’s a step toward that.

I remember Bryan mentioning – and I don’t remember if this was on an episode that we actually released, it might have been our test episode…

I think it was.

You know what I’m talking about then and you can say it.

I remember having this discussion ourselves, but I don’t remember what I said about it. That’s the only problem.

You brought up the wheat and the tares, how it was all for the sake of the wheat.

Yeah. The only reason the tares are kept in the field is because they’re spread out amongst the wheat, and the Master cares about the wheat, so he gives instructions to the workers and says, “Leave the tares be until the harvest time has come.” Then when the harvest has come, everything’s bundled up. The wheat is placed into storehouses and the tares are thrown into the fire.

That’s why they’re still around, and they get the bonus of receiving the water and the sunlight and the pleasant breeze of the field in the meantime. It doesn’t mean that they’re meant to be there. It doesn’t mean that the favor of God rests upon them. It just means you’re alive because you’re in the midst of the ones I do love.

We can all have some flimsy problems with this. “Well, God’s omnipotent. He could just go in and take care of them and pick out the tares specifically, and then life on earth would be wonderful.” Yeah, he could but he’s not going to.

That’s not what he’s decided.

And as you say, God could do anything. That’s an excellent thing to bring up here, Bryan. The parable, of course, is limited in what it can show us. In the parable, the seeds are both there from the beginning and they grow together. In history, however, unbelievers give birth to children who become believers, who give birth to children who become unbelievers. It’s all mixed up.

If you went in and picked out in that first generation all of the unbelievers – the first generation after Christ came – then a great many of us would not be here because we’re not descended just from the Jewish church and the early Gentile converts. We’re descended from someone on the other side of the planet, perhaps, who had no part in that, and our ancestors would have been wiped out in that first generation.

We wouldn’t exist, because God has not only planted the seeds geographically, but temporally across the timestream. Whereas God could create a world in which he could do something like this, given the world he’s created, you can’t pluck people out of the timestream without disrupting everything. You’re going to lose people.

It’s like that sci-fi…

Back to the Future?

Yeah, it’s Back to the Future but there’s something that shows up now and then on the internet. It’s called “Everybody kills Hitler” or something like that?

Yes, that’s the one.

Yup. We’ll post a link to that.

The whole rule is it’s a time traveler forum and everyone kills Hitler their first trip, except the problem is if you kill Hitler, then there’s no Cold War Western alliance, and there’s no nuclear escalation…

There’s no space program.

There’s no space program…

So you don’t get time travel invented.

There’s no computer boom. You get no technology invented that comes up to time travel, so everyone is like, “Okay, I’m back from fixing the new guy’s mistake and Hitler just thinks some guy wants to kill him and he’s a bit freaked out, but he’s fine. He’s alive.”

And it ends with some guy saying, “Well, you are all a bunch of racists and hypocrites because you keep talking about little old Europe. On the other side of the planet…” – I don’t remember if it’s China or where – “there was this tyrant who killed millions and millions of people, and no one says anything about that.”

And everyone goes, “Well, I don’t see a problem with it.”

Yeah, there’s no rule against killing him.

“We don’t have anything that would get disrupted that way, so go ahead,” and it’s like, “I’m off to be the savior of China” and he disappears in the past. Then, “Hey, looks like it worked out. How’s it go….he’s descended from that guy, isn’t he? Anyone want to go and save him? Anyone?”

Nope!

Anyway, walking it back to the sacrificial system…

But the point is, God does deal with temporal complexities and, praise God, he didn’t just wipe out a whole generation of unbelief, because throughout history he has his elect who spring up out of the non-elect, out of complete rebels.

This is part of what people call common grace. Yes, people who are unbelievers get to live and enjoy life now, but if they don’t repent it’s not going to be very pleasant in the next world. As a pastor said the other night, “If you are an unbeliever, you are living your best life now. It’s not getting any better than this. On the other hand, if you’re a Christian, this is your worst life now because it only gets better.”

So back to the sacrificial system…the sacrificial ritual, fifth, speaks of sanctification. The sacrificial system existed in terms of the tabernacle and its veil. The larger tent is the tabernacle and it consists of two connected tents – the holy place, which to get to you have to pass through the first veil, and there’s the table of shewbread and the bread of the presence on the right-hand side. There’s the menorah, the lampstand on the other, illumining the shewbread. In front of you is the altar of incense, and this speaks of our fellowship with Christ, the light of the word, as proclaimed by the pastors and elders of our church and the prayers that they offer, that Christ ultimately is the one who offers.

Then there’s the second veil, and behind that is the glory of God enthroned on the cherubim, the mercy seat that sits upon the ark of the covenant.

The holy place speaks of daily Christian living – our fellowship, our growth in terms of the light of the word, our prayers – but what the problem was in the old covenant is there’s this veil that keeps us from actually walking up and saying “hallelujah!” to God himself. Everything is veiled, and of course only a priest could do any of this.

But what the sacrificial system shows us is that God does dwell in our midst. Although it’s veiled and shadowed and potentially extremely dangerous, he’s here. And by the blood, we can go closer and closer, and by the blood, the priests sprinkle it. God sees the blood, and not only does he forgive me, he’s content to stay here.

This is particularly important in the sin offerings. They are purification offerings to purify the precincts where God dwells. The tabernacle reflects our existence as the body of Christ, as redeemed humanity. It’s reflected in the very fabric, as it were. And if our sins are not dealt with, then God’s dwelling place becomes corrupted and he leaves.

But as we come to God by the blood, we ourselves are sanctified. God continues to dwell in our midst and he continues to be our light, our blessing, our God, our Lord, our Savior. We grow in our relationship with him. Now I’m going to read this –

The tabernacle with its veils and altars were all splashed or sprinkled with blood. The tabernacle represented God’s presence with his people. To cleanse the tabernacle was to cleanse the congregation. God’s people were thus symbolically released from the pollution and power of sin, just as they were freed from its penalty. The sacrifice promised ethical transformation and spiritual empowering to those who believed the promise.

To sprinkle the tabernacle, the implication was to sprinkle the people, if you believe the promise. That’s what we have to keep coming back to; otherwise, this rapidly descends into magic. “If you do this, if you go through these steps, then this is the good stuff you get.” No, these are the promises being acted out in front of us. You have to believe the promise. If you believe the promise, then God does the reality. We don’t twist his arm. We don’t force his hand. We simply believe what he has already come forward to us with.

That’s why it’s so important with all of the sacraments, whether the old or the new, that we understand that this is God speaking to us, not us reaching out to try to lasso God and hogtie him and make him do what we want, not even on his own invitation. He is sovereign. He moves first. He makes the promise. Then through that promise and through the Spirit he changes our hearts to believe and receive the promise.

If you get this wrong, you end up in certain other errors like the New Perspective on Paul, where it turns second temple Judaism into this religion of human effort, where you keep yourself in the covenant by faithfulness. These sacrifices that are performed in the temple are now your bi-quarterly purification to be good enough for God.

Anytime faith gets confused with faithfulness, where those ideas are conflated, it’s bad news.

It’s bad news. You come so far by faith, and then you work your way the rest of the way. And however much people may scream and say, “No, that’s a misrepresentation,” I’ve seen it up close. That’s exactly what happens. It becomes, “What do I do?”

Yes, God required X. He required perfect holiness. Well, I don’t have that. I have a lot of it, but not enough, so I will add to that these sacrifices to make up for where I’ve screwed up, and surely that together will be enough.

It’s sort of like the Arminian idea that God no longer demands our obedience. What he demands now is faith in Christ as a good work, which people now substitute for total obedience. But we have to make the decision and then he can step in.

It leads to a very morbid introspection.

There’s no peace in this system.

Because even if you only have to go 1/1,000th of infinity, you’re not going to make it because it’s still infinity. You’re going to look at your own sinfulness and your own decrepit-ness, your own failure to love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength, and come away hopeless because God in their system, in that particular way of looking at it that’s wrong, can’t help you if you don’t do your part.

Right, but there is another possible take on that, and that’s to have such a low view of God that you honestly think that your filthy rag of self-righteousness takes care of it all, that ultimately religion is not that big a deal, and you don’t do the soul-searching. You condemn that all as pietism and mysticism because we’re just looking at the externals. We’re looking at, “Okay, so I lied. I’ll take care of that with a sacrifice. Now we’re good,” and I never question the corrupt heart within me that did the lying, that moved me to lie, that still loves lying.

You start talking to people about that and they get incensed or they look down on you with pity and, “Oh, you poor pietist. You don’t understand the legal nature of the religion.”

“Yeah, we do. You just don’t understand how far the law goes. It goes deep into your heart.”

The two ditches on either side of the proper interpretation are hopelessness and pride.

Absolutely.

Sixth, then, sacrifice pointed beyond sanctification to glorification. I’ve sort of said this already because the animal is caught up in the glory of the fire that was lit from the glory cloud in the tabernacle and ascends up into heaven.

Again, we keep coming back to the passage with Noah. God smells a sweet savor. This is something that is pleasing to him in the most positive of senses, because in Christ he sees us already glorified.

We look at the passage in Romans 8 – “For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate…” and “Moreover, whom he did predestinate, them he also called; and whom he called, them he also justified; and whom he justified, them he also glorified,” past tense.

People have wondered about that, and generally I think the solution has been, “Well, our glorification is so certain that Paul can speak in this past tense.” That’s true and maybe that’s part of the solution, but as you read through Paul, he already describes us as being risen in Christ, seated in heavenly places with Christ, we’re dead and our life is hidden with God in Christ.

I’m getting an “in Christ” refrain here.

Yeah. Since we are united to the sacrifice, and ultimately to Christ’s sacrifice by faith, and he has passed through death into glory, we already are glorified. Now, there’s more to come, and what we have in Christ will be worked out individually in us in the final resurrection.

Here I think, if you’ll pardon me, is one of the differences between amillennialism and some forms of post-millennialism. Amillennialism is often content to say, “We already have all the glory. We already have everything. What more do we need, but to see Jesus?” and in a sense you can say, “Yes, that’s true as far as it goes.” Certainly we have all these things, and there are forms of post-millennialism that say, “No, but we need the earthly victory.”

Well, yes but no. Let’s not downplay what we have in Christ. It is very real and they are things we will never lose. On the other hand, let’s not fall into the Gnostic trap of saying that the physical creation and physical body don’t have a place in God’s plan, and that there is a glory for our bodies and for the creation that hasn’t come yet.

So sacrifices point through justification, through regeneration, to sanctification, and ultimately to glorification, to the complete restoration of everything we lost in Adam, and to the addition of so much more because Christ is not just another Adam. He’s not just another guy. He’s God, and what he purchased for us is infinitely more than what we lost, so we should see this.

In the Old Testament it came through blood and death, and sometimes it’s hard to see a pretty picture in that, but we need to. We need to see that, yes, these are kindergarten pictures. When your kindergartner brings you a picture and says, “This is our home!” and you say, “What’s this?” and “That’s how I see it. See, this is the doorway to church, and this is the light that looks out of the sky, and this is all the animals we have, like in Eden.”

I’m just seeing a lot of scribbles here. I don’t know. “Yes, dear, it’s beautiful!”

Going on the fridge, oh yeah!

Once we’re more familiar with the Old Testament, and indeed know just a little more about agricultural life, rural life, and having animals around and killing them, it makes a little more sense. But God intended it to be sort of a dark picture because we’re not supposed to go back and do that forever and ever. It intentionally was a picture that was distasteful, but it pointed to something that’s glorious, and we need to understand that.

The last point has to do with community, because there was one altar for all of Israel. We’ve already seen the things that united Israel were not so much its national boundaries and not its political system. When they had judges, a given judge did not necessarily have responsibility for the whole nation at any time. When Shambar was judging in the south, Deborah was judging in the north.

The union fundamentally rested on the altar. The tribes of Reuben and Gad and half-tribe of Manasseh understood this. When they went back across the Jordan, they raised a bunch of memorial stones in the shape of an altar to say, “In time to come we want children on both sides of this – our great-great-grandchildren – to understand that the thing that ties us all together is that altar and the tabernacle, and we’ve done a picture of it here so that nobody forgets. The Jordan may separate us. Time and heredity may pull us apart. We may pick up different dialects as we go along. We’re going to have different callings. We’re cattle, you’re farmers, but the thing that matters, the thing that pulls us all together is the blood of the altar.”

When the rest of Israel heard that they said, “Oh, okay. That sounds good. Praise God. That’s right. We need to remember that, don’t we?”

We all come to God one way. We can rightly speak of the holy catholic church, or the church catholic. God has one people, and with all of our differences of language and nation and culture and ethnicity, we are one people in Christ because we have one sacrifice and we all partake of that one sacrifice, which is reflected in the communion meal. We are all partakers of that one bread.

And also when we speak of communion, going back to your earlier point about how the sacraments are things God does to us and for us, we don’t go to the bread and tear a piece off for ourselves. In some liturgical traditions you have the priest or pastor standing up at the front, and they take a piece off and hand it to you or put it in your hand or – I think Roman Catholics do this a lot, but I’m pretty sure there are other ones that do too – they’ll put it directly on your tongue. Or the elders come around and they bring the bread to you. In everything, it’s not something where we’re taking this active meritorious step in.

Right. It’s not because I chose to do something, I push myself forward, I grab for the gold. God gives it to me. The Heidelberg Catechism – its language with regard to the Lord’s Supper is, “As certainly as I receive from the hand of the minister” – it’s very explicit.

Now, there are a lot of ways administratively that you can do that. You can go up to the pastor. The pastor can pass among you. You can distribute among the elders or deacons. There are a lot of ways that work in terms of the technicalities of how do you get the bread from here to there, but what you’re saying is profound.

The bread is from one loaf, from one source. The wine ideally is from one source, although we may break it up into little cups for easy handling, and we generally do, at least in churches I’ve been in. But it’s supposed to come from a unified source – one cup, one bread – and that’s because God then divvies it up and gives it to us by the hand of his minister.

You can think here also of the food miracles that Jesus does – the feeding of the 5,000 and the 4,000. He breaks the bread. He gives it to his guys, to the apostles, and then they distribute it. There is an order in the church, both regard to the sacraments and with regard to the Word itself. We don’t come to God individually outside the order of the church, but we submit to the order that God has ordained.

This runs through the whole sacrificial system, through the tabernacle. I will easily get sidetracked here, but excellent point.

To extend it to the other sacrament – we don’t baptize ourselves.

Right. It is physically impossible.

That’s why the formula is the minister says, “I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.” It’s not, “All right, here’s the pool. You know what to do. Just kind of like dunk yourself under and it’s fine, or just pat your head with the water.”

I found a book in my house when I was in high school or something, some Army field manual or something. I don’t know why we had it, but in the back was a formula for Christian baptism. It was like, “This should be administered by an elder or a minister of some sort, but in an emergency any Christian can do it.” I was like, “Okay, if it’s an emergency baptism…” That’s just kind of a strange scenario to think about.

Everyone comes up with the outside scenarios. Then people used to ask, like the host of Fighting for the Faith, who’s a confessional Lutheran…

Chris Rosebrough?

Yeah, thank you. They used to ask, “Oh, you think baptism saves? Well, what if someone’s on the moon and they don’t have water?”

Let me know when you’re on the moon.

It’s like, “I think God would be nice enough to respect the faith, but do you recognize how outside the norm this is?”

Where that actually became an issue in an earlier century was when so many women died in childbirth. The fear was that if the child was not baptized before it dies, then he’s outside the pale of salvation. That’s a sort of sacerdotalist approach to it anyway. Baptism does not save. The child does not have to be baptized to go to heaven, but at least with Rome there had been concessions that a midwife can apply baptism if the child is likely to die, and the priest can’t get there in time. But that’s a misunderstanding of the nature of the sacrament. We’re not saved by the sacraments. They are good gifts of God.

They are means of grace.

They are means of grace, but they’re not essential to salvation, to justification or regeneration. That would be the moon, a desert island, childbirth.

All right, recommendations?

I have one, since my wife recommended it. This is something I have not read in total, so there’s always a danger there, but I’ve skimmed it extensively and my wife’s begun reading it.

Oh, here’s my cat with her cone. She’s had surgery and she’s right here. Hi, is no one feeding you? It’s okay, we’ll get to you in just a minute, okay?

The book is The Shortest History of Europe. It’s by a man named John Hirst, who apparently died not long ago. It is a streamlined really quick repeated overview of European history. He limits himself to Europe and he says up front, “Look, yes, we would all like to believe that our countries contributed something key, and maybe they did, but I’ve only got so many pages so your country may get left out of this. Just accept that and go with the flow here.”

Of course, as I was reading through the evaluations on Amazon – “He left out my country!” or “He left out this partition of Poland that was so important!” Yes, some people obviously, but you know, it’s only a short history. He tells the story of Europe and does it in a very informal but intelligent way. I’m looking here at the Table of Contents. He distinguishes what he believes are the three main influences on European history, and again he’s being general, and you can find all kinds of fault with this if you want to.

He speaks of the Greeks and Romans as giving us – he sums it up as a rational approach to things, but he realizes also they’re very pagan elements at the same time. Then Christianity as distinguished from Judaism, although he understands there’s a connection there. He understands both the morality of Christianity, but also the idea of a divine Savior. Then Germanic barbarian warriors because they make things happen.

It’s humorous, and yet it works as he shows you how these three broad circles – which he has to tweak and redefine a little bit as he goes – keep influencing each other to bring forth what we have today. He talks about invasions and conquests, then forms of government, then the political history, emperors and popes, language, then finally the common people, and he keeps cycling through it again and again.

If you don’t know much about European history or you just want a good read and you like history and you like people who have a sense of humor about it, I think you would really enjoy this. I cannot say whether or not the man is a Christian because I haven’t looked closely enough, but he at least does not hate Christianity in an open virulent way. He realizes that European history spins in part around Christianity, and he makes some rather astute observations about how Christian faith can or cannot, will and will not interplay with all these other things.

One of the interesting things that I found is he’s talking about the argument today of whether or not creation should be taught in public schools. We know how America has done with that one. “But in my country we have these wonderful aboriginal myths,” and he described one really sweet myth/legend about…I forget, but it’s this wonderful thing. He says, “Wouldn’t you want your children to be taught this?” and everyone of course would say, “Yeah! That’s a really great story. They should hear that!”

Why would you then keep people from at least hearing what Christianity has to say? Not even teaching it as truth, but if you want them to hear aboriginal fairy tales, why wouldn’t you – even if you don’t believe it – want them to hear the Christian story?

He’s from Australia?

He’s from Australia. His answer is, “But it’s too complicated and there are not going to be any easy solutions, are there?” and just leaves it there and walks away. He leaves us thinking, “Wait, am I being hypocritical? Uh-oh. Isn’t that a sin or something?” Anyway, that’s The Shortest History of Europe by John Hirst.

Great. Bryan, do you have one?

Yes, of course. I’m going to recommend – it’s kind of two-pronged. The first is a band called The Arcadian Wild. They’re incredible. There’s four people. Three of them met in choir class at community college and started a band. Somewhat predictably, their harmonies are incredible, just vocally. I can sing every bit of the vocal parts and it’s fun, no matter what, so they’re really good.

This year they wrote a song cycle and it’s four parts: spring, summer, autumn, and winter. It’s a poetic retelling of the creation of man through to the fall. Spring is subtitled Wake, summer is subtitled Walk, fall is subtitled War, and winter is subtitled Will. It is phenomenal and beautiful. The lyrics are gorgeous, so that is my recommendation. It is called Principium.

Hmm, “beginning.” Emily?

My recommendation is somewhat inspired by Greg’s recommendation. It is a short book that you will find fun if you have ever been involved in undergraduate history classes. It’s called 1066 and All That.

Oh yes! [laughing]

I recommend this to like everyone I ever talk to.

Good. I’m not going to say anymore about it. I’m just going to say 1066 and All That.

It’s so fantastic.

You actually need to understand something about England and English history, and have a sense of humor worthy of Neil Gaiman or Terry Pratchett, pretty much, because otherwise you’ll say, “What? I don’t get it.”

The more confusing thing is it’s the most important things of history worth remembering, but they’re remembered badly. It’s like the names kind of sound like what they are, like The Venerable Bede, the historian, becomes The Venomous Bede.

I remember reading it as a much younger person, junior high or high school, and thinking, “Oh, this is just so silly – ha ha ha!” Then I went and got a degree in history and came back to it and thought, “Oh, this is really biting satire of the way history is taught.” Anyway, I said I wasn’t going to say anymore about it, but now I’ve said all I want to say about it for real.

Thank you, guys, so much. This has been a pleasure. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. Thanks to you, our listeners. We appreciate you tuning in.

If you’d like to send us an email you can do that at [email protected]. You can Like our Facebook page. Leave us a review on whatever podcast catcher you’re listening to us through. I just ended a sentence with a preposition, and that still bothers me.

What are you going on about?

It’s something we can not put up with.

Up with this we shall not put!

Anyway, have a good night.