Compassion
Leviticus
doesn’t often get a reputation for being a book of compassion. Therefore, when I see a clear place of
compassion within the Law I think it is important that it be pointed out. Specifically in this chapter, we see God’s
compassion in Leviticus 22:7.
God
doesn’t ease up the rules for uncleanliness when it comes to His priests. However, He isn’t merciless, either. God knows that some things that may cause His
priests to become unclean might just happen and not be intentional. In these instances, notice that the penalty
period for the uncleanliness is simply until sundown.
God
knows that a person needs to eat. He
knows that a person can undergo consequences, but only so many
consequences. So here we see that in
some instances God allows the priest to experience a short period of
consequence. The point is that there is
a penalty associated with lesser and unintentional sin; but that penalty is not
so great as to realistically prevent the priest from being able to do his job,
either.
Sacrifices
Since
I spent a good bit yesterday reflecting on the holiness of the priests – and
reminding us all that we are all God’s priests – from here on I am going to
solely focus on the second half of this chapter: the sacrifices. Specifically, I am going to focus on the
sacrifices without blemish.
I’ve
always asked myself, “What does God have against animals with blemishes?” In other words, it seems that God presents
Himself as loving the perfect over and above the non-perfect. It almost seems to support this idea that our
current media sells about having to look like a supermodel in order to be
acceptable. After all, an animal with a
blemish couldn’t be used, right?
Look
again. Leviticus 22:23 tells us that
animals offered as a freewill offering (an offering that is solely intended to
give praise to God) can have a blemish.
The restriction about animals with blemishes is only for the sacrifices
that are required for atonement of some kind of sin. That is an important distinction to make.
Here’s
the reason why. At the deepest level, the
sacrificial system was really God’s way of setting up the need for His Son,
Jesus the Christ. When the Old
Testaments priests offered their sacrifices they had to redo it year after year
after year. They had to bring in animals
without blemish every year for the sacrifice.
When Jesus was crucified, only then was something that was truly without
any blemish at all given up for God. So
the sanction against animals with blemishes didn’t have anything to do with God
finding disfavor among the blemished animals as much as it has to do with
setting us up to understand just how necessary Jesus is.
Now
here’s the cool part of this. Remember
that verse I said to look at? Blemished
animals could be offered up as freewill offerings. So for those of us that follow Jesus, we know
that Jesus is our sacrifice of atonement.
We cannot be that specific sacrifice to God because we all have
blemishes. So Jesus is the sacrifice who
is without blemish and He is a once-and-for-all sacrifice. What that means is since He takes the place
of the sacrifice with special conditions placed upon it, we are free to offer
ourselves up as a free-will sacrifice to God.
We can be a sacrifice to God; we just cannot atone for our own
sins! This passage (and Jesus’ death)
makes Paul’s words in Romans 12 about being living sacrifices to God possible!
That
doesn’t mean we should go through our life not caring about our blemishes. We should not go through life intentionally
bringing sin upon ourselves because we know that Jesus covered it already. But we can go through life knowing that so
long as we are genuine in our worship and gift of ourselves to God that He will
accept each of us as a freewill offering to Him.
Holiness Over Perfection
Before
I end, I will bring attention once more to the aspect of holiness brought forth
in the end of this chapter. I have
spoken at length about holiness, so I will not belabor the point. But it obviously must be significant to God
because he makes sure to bring it up again.
God does not expect perfection, that’s why He knew He had to send
Jesus. But He does expect holiness. If any of us are not willing to be holy
(separate) for God and therefore think like God thinks and not like the world
thinks, then we really need to rethink this faith stuff and whether it is as
important to us as we say it is.
Holiness is primary to walking with God as a priest underneath the
Lordship of Jesus.
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