A Bloody Mess

Today's Reading: Exodus 28-30; Matthew 27 

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A Bloody Mess

 

It's impossible to read Exodus 28-30 or Matthew 27 without wincing and wiggling in my seat over the gruesome bloody mess. It's impossible to escape the fact that all that died in these actions died as sacrifices for the ransomed souls of others, including me.

 

I marvel over the extent which God goes to cermoniously illustrate the sacrifice for our sin.  In painstaking blood-shedding detail, the Lord determines who can be priests in ancient Israel, what the priests need to wear, and what the priests are to do.  This includes which specific animals need to be slaughtered.

 

I'm not a regular hunter, but I have seen a quartered deer killed, and prepared to be carried out of the woods.  Just last week, I saw a mutilated creature on the side of the state highway slain as road kill.  Blood smeared everywhere within several feet of the majority remains of the animal.  As I sped by, I was unable to be clear as to what animal this bloody mess once was.

 

The Bible is not a tidy little story of neat little events in the lives of God's little people.  There was an entire geneological line of Israelite men devoted to the systematic slaughter of thousands of lambs, goats, bulls and pigeons on every day through every year from the days of Moses until the day of Jesus' death recorded in Matthew 27 about 1600 years later.  These men--called priests--stood in a symbolic way between the sin of the Israelite people and the consuming holiness of God.

 

The sacrifice of an animal on behalf of a human dates back to the days of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.  Following their catastrophic choice to embrace sin, Genesis 3:21 says, "And the Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins and clothed them."  Whatever animal that was that God killed to cover their shame, it points to these facts of acceptable sacrifice for our sin:  (1) The sacrifice is selected and killed by God's authority and (2) The sacrifice itself did not sin.  Its stunning to see God in love initiating the solution to the problem of sin from the first sacrifce in Genesis on.

 

In Exodus 28-30, the sacrifice is also selected by God, and the animal's death is demanded by God, and the particular animal did no sin of its own. 

 

In Matthew 27, the sacrifice is the perfect Son of God--God in the flesh.  His death is demanded by the Father, and Jesus Himself had never sinned.   2 Corinthians 5:21 sums it up this way:  " For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God."  Jesus' brutal and bloody crucifixion then finished the work of satisfactory sacrifice (John 19:30) and tore the dividing curtain of the temple symbolizing the separation between God and man due to sin (Matthew 27:51). 

 

The prophet Isaiah speaks explicitly about the sacrifice of Jesus pointing out the characteristics: 

 

"Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted.  But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed.  All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned—every one—to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all." (Isaiah 53:4-6)

 

In reality, Jesus Himself, was entirely unique.  As the true priest He stood  between the condemning sin of all people and the avenging, consuming justice of God.  But He stood as the ultimate priest and the sacrifice!