May it be an encouragement in our lives and a reminder to our minds and hearts of our allegiance, of our basis for living in truth. Help us to be people who love the truth, who shine out the truth in our lives, and whose actions are guided by the truth. We pray your blessing upon this time in Jesus' name, amen. This morning I want to speak to you about a particular slaughter.
That's not a very nice word. We're saying hope for sinners slain. Actually, the way it should be sung is with a real good comma. Hope for sinners.
Slain. Slain. Lots like slaughtered. It's the past tense.
One who has been slaughtered. What a thought. What a thought. I want to speak to you this morning about the burnt offering from Leviticus chapter 1 and some interesting history that goes back to the very beginning, the very beginning of human history in that connection.
Let us first consider this burnt offering. Now the Lord called to Moses and spoke to him from the tent of meetings saying, speak to the sons of Israel and say to them, when any one of you brings an offering to the Lord, you shall bring your offering of livestock from the herd or the flock. If his offering is a burnt offering from the herd, he shall offer a male without defect. He shall offer it in the doorway of the tent of meeting so that he may be accepted before the Lord, and he shall lay his hand on the head of the burnt offering so that it may be accepted for him to make atonement on his behalf.
Then he shall slaughter the bull before the Lord and Aaron's sons. The priests shall offer up the blood and sprinkle the blood around the altar that is at the doorway of the tent of meeting. He shall then skin the burnt offering and cut it into pieces. And the sons of Aaron the priest shall put fire on the altar and arrange the wood on the fire.
And Aaron's sons, the priests shall arrange the pieces with the head and the suet on the wood, which is on the fire that is on the altar. It's entrails, however, and its legs. He shall wash with water. And the priests shall offer all of it up in smoke.
All of it up in smoke. On the altar as a burnt offering, an offering by fire as a soothing aroma to the Lord or sweet saver. But if his offering is from the flock, either from the sheep or from the goats, as a burnt offering, he shall offer a male without defect. And that is the sum total of all my PowerPoint slides this morning.
That is all of them. So we have considered from Leviticus chapter 1, this burnt offering. Isn't it interesting that this is front and center? We know that the book of Leviticus is the book of sacrifices and the rituals of the people of God, the children of God on earth.
Front and center, chapter 1, the burnt offering, the burnt offering. This book is very worthy of your study. There are many aspects to these offerings, and one might well wonder in reading through them. What is the intent here of God in giving me all of this?
Well, when you move through these sacrifices, you will see that the system of sacrifices of the children of God on earth, the Israelites, was penal. It was substitutionary. It was voluntary. It was redemptive.
It was propitiatory. It was reconciling, and it was efficacious. So now I've given you enough study for about the next three months that you can go through the book of Leviticus and find those seven aspects. And the overarching aspect that all seven of these aspects have is that they are all revelatory.
They are all intended to point to the one great final sacrifice of all time and of all eternity, the sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ. When we consider this burnt offering in Leviticus chapter 1, some of the features of it, as we have just read, actually my next slide was a blank on purpose. And I don't know. Oh, there we are.
Good. Some of the features of it, as we have just read, are that it was burnt. The idea of a burnt offering comes from the etymology of the word burnt, which is it is an ascending sacrifice. It goes up to God.
It goes up to God. It is an ascending sacrifice because it is utterly consumed. Even the ashes were dealt with. You can read about that in chapter 6 of Leviticus.
It was utterly consumed and under what and why? Under intense fire. Intense fire. The intense fire of judgment completely consumed this sacrifice and it ascended to God front and center in the book of Leviticus.
The lamb itself was to be utterly unblemished. It was to be put on the altar by a qualified person. And it was for my sins, for my sins. Look at some of the things that I've highlighted here.
You're offering. You're offering. It's for you. It is without defect.
It is for your sins. You lay your hand on it. And it goes up and smoketh a sense to God by fire that completely consumes it. So this is an interesting and wonderful picture that God has given us of what happened on the cross, that the unblemished lamb of God there on the cross fell under the full fiery judgment of God.
In anger. Think of that. In anger. And that punishment ascended to God and was deemed acceptable by God.
And that that happened because of you. Because of you. What a thought. What a picture.
How might we trace it back? As I say, we have in Leviticus one front and center of burnt sacrifice. How might we trace it back? Where in your Bible was the first burnt sacrifice?
Oh, you got any thinking. Did you know it was Noah? It was Noah? Yes.
It was Noah. What was Noah imitating? Well, who was the first person to offer a lamb? Someone tell me who was the first person.
Abel. Noah was imitating Abel. What was Abel doing? What had he learned from his father?
What had he heard about had happened in the garden? Let's think there for a moment. We can go, I believe, to the original burnt offering of the lamb in the garden of Eden. Because as you know, before they were expelled, God clothed them.
God clothed them. Genesis 3 21, the Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them. This is prophetic. It is the slaying once, the slaying once for the purpose of covering.
And it is prophetic of the offering of Christ. I would suggest to you a picture and it is a disturbing picture. When you have Adam and Eve in a paradise, have you thought about what that paradise might be like? We look forward to heavenly paradise.
I don't know how much thought you've given to what that earthly paradise was like. When Adam and Eve were in full possession of the maximum faculties that God had given a human being and had been given dominion with those faculties over creation to be stewards of the creation of God and lived in a perfect place. Not only communing with God and walking with him in the cool of the evening, enjoying all that beautiful vegetation in a perfect place and having animals coming and going. I wonder whether Adam sometimes went over and scratched a lion behind his ears.
A lion enjoyed that. And then he walked over here and he stroked a sheep. And the lion is not interested in the sheep because this is God's garden. This is paradise.
What came into that paradise? What came into that paradise? A sin. Sin.
And just before they are expelled from that place, God takes action. And he takes one of those lovely creatures. And I believe that he would not have done this in secret. I suspect that he would have done this right in front of Adam and Eve.
And he skinned that animal right in front of them. And there was blood all over the place. And they were shocked. What a thing to do such is the result of sin.
Violence, blood, judgment. It speaks of the necessity of a perfect sacrifice. The offering of the perfect Son of God with whom we would be clothed. Do you think that God would leave our carcass to rot there?
I think not. In the same way that we can read in Judges chapter 6, God pointed to that and it was consumed by fire in an instant. And the skin was given to Adam and Eve and they had to leave right away because the curse was upon them. It had been pronounced.
The pronouncement of the curse, the provision of the covering. And now out you go. This is no place for sin and sinners. You will now survive by the sweat of your brow.
And the animal world is no longer your friend. That would actually change over time. But man's relationship is now totally different with creation. His mind is fallen.
I was pleased that once I digress a little bit, but some years ago, on CBC radio, there was an episode of this thing called ideas. So quite interesting. Many interesting things on that radio program ideas. And the expert was positing that, you know, one of the reasons why we have so much environmental problems is Christianity and biblical thinking.
That's one of the this business of man having dominion over the creation. This is a pernicious and bad ideas. An evil idea comes from the Bible. And it's a bad thing.
And it's affected Western society via Christianity. And this idea that man should rule over creation is fundamentally bad. We should be more, I don't know, pantheistic and imagining, as I have met actually people that are not even from the Indian subcontinent because Eastern pantheism, it's making its way into the new age movement. It is part of our society.
And a very Caucasian guy that I was chatting with was saying, I believe that there's a spirit of God in the rock just as much as there's any spirit of God anywhere, or in a turnip or anything. It's just God is kind of everywhere. And this speaker on ideas was saying, well, that's the way we need to think. We need to think about God as permeating all creation.
And that is all that God is. And this Christian idea that we would be having dominion over what God has given us to have dominion over is a bad idea. And I wrote in a letter and what do you know they read it? On national radio, I was pleased as punch.
And I had pointed out that something that I had read, I believe perhaps from the philosopher Francis Schafer, that when you have a perfect mind, an unfallen mind, you are in a position in your communion with God to be a steward over the garden of Eden and all of creation with your unfallen mind. But once the curse is upon us, this is not a blessing, it's a curse. How to manage this thing, we don't know how anymore. We are not in relationship with God.
Our mind is fallen. Now we have a big problem. We have many problems. We in fact have a bigger problem.
The problem of sin. That's where it goes back to the problem of sin. And God made a very poignant and strong point by skinning that animal. And that carcass was consumed and clothing that man and that woman and out, out and cherubim with flaming swords would prevent them from coming back in.
Because as soon as they got out, they probably got to thinking, this is not great. This is not good. This is worse than we thought. Let's, oh, oh, there's no way back in.
There's no way back in. And there is no way back in to create a garden here. It's going to have to be redone. And God is going to do that, not us, not us.
And so there was that sacrifice. And Adam lived to be, I think, I didn't write it down. 965 years old, told his sons about it, his first son and his second son. And God gave instructions for their to be a sacrifice.
And Cain did not follow them. And Abel followed what his father had told him about and offered that sacrifice. And it was unfortunately going to be, had he lived, a repeated thing, a repeated thing. They didn't do anything in the garden.
They watched with horror. A sacrificial system was coming that would require a great deal of repetition. And this was the very first one. If you fast forward many hundreds of years to Leviticus one, it is front and center in Leviticus one, the burnt sacrifice of the lamb that was skinned.
And it involved in the old economy effort. Abel did it. Abel had to do the deed. He had to cut the lamb's throat with the blood squirting everywhere.
Was that pleasant? Did he enjoy that? I think not. But it was necessary.
And as we know, his brother rose up and out of hatred and jealousy, hatred born from the jealousy, Cain rose up in hatred and killed Abel for that out of jealousy. A while back I spoke about pride, we considered the house of Nebuchadnezzar and the house of Saul and the house of Eli. And how pride goes right back to the beginning. I would submit to you that even the sin of Lucifer was fundamentally rooted in pride.
Pride is very fundamental. And where do you see the manifestation of sin and all its offices? Hatred. Hatred is when it is manifested in society and between people results in murder.
The Lord Jesus knew this and taught this in his royal law. You might only look at a woman, but God says, I know you. You might only have contempt for someone, but God says, I know you. You just assume kill that person and hate them.
I know your heart. Do you not know your own heart? That's your heart. Very often in the Epistles, Paul lists things of sins that are horrific.
And if you're like me, you sort of go, no, this is not me. Yes, yes, yes. All of these horrific things I am capable of. Otherwise, why did Paul write them down more than once?
Because that is the kind of thing our dark and evil hearts are capable of. And that is the kind of thing that necessitates a sacrifice that is totally consumed under the fire of the judgment of God. Fortunately, fortunately, as we have been singing this morning, the Lamb has been slain. The Lamb with a capital L has been slain.
We don't bear those sins anymore. They have already been born. All of them. God's fiery anger of judgment was exhausted on the Lord Jesus hanging on the cross.
There is no judgment left for the believer. There is no judgment left for you. God's anger has been completely expended and extinguished. And it is finished, as the Lord Jesus said, as he died, it is finished.
He took all of that judgment. That was yours. We thought this morning more than once about the substitutionary nature of our salvation and the burnt offering was that. How about we fast forward?
Genesis 8, then Noah built an altar to the Lord and took some of every kind of clean animal and some of every clean burnt offerings on the altar. Noah's father, Lamech, was 168 years old when Seth died. Seth was given to Adam and Eve because of the murder of Abel. He was their next child.
He was the godly line, the line of Seth. But the anti-diluvians lived to such great ages that if you look at a diagram of the overlap, there's a lot of overlap. Seth's life ended well after the beginning of Noah's father. That means that this information is passed on.
My great grandfather is still alive to tell me about what happened a long time ago. And so you have the transmission of the burnt offering up to Noah. And then with regard to the substitutionary aspect, the most powerful and clear message about that substitutionary nature is given to us where it is given to us in Genesis 22. What did Isaac say to his father?
Dad, we have the wood, we have a way to start the fire. Where's the lamb? I wonder in that moment how Abraham could answer the boy. God will provide the lamb.
He'd been given instructions to slay the boy, to slaughter his son. And when his son said we have the wood, there's a way to make the fire because we know, we all know, we've known for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years that the burnt sacrifice is completely burnt up. We have the way, we have the way, we have the wood, we have the fire, but where's the lamb? God will provide the lamb.
And of course you know that as the knife was raised, stop! And the angel, the Lord, pointed out that there's a ram stuck in a thicket, and that's the one. That is the sheep or the lamb that is going to be sacrificed today, not Isaac of the godly line. And then we come to the book of Exodus.
Jacob was a man who liked to build altars. He built altars for various reasons, but in no instance is a burnt offering mentioned in the case of Jacob. But we come to the next book of the Bible of Exodus, and we have the demand of Moses to Pharaoh that we must leave in order to do our burnt sacrifices. And he also had a father-in-law, the poorest father who was Jethro.
And that was a godly man. He knew about the burnt sacrifices. This is from ages past that Moses knew and Jethro knew. And then we get the formal instructions the first formal instructions for the burnt sacrifice is in Exodus 20.
And I always like that that is right after the Ten Commandments. I'm in this major discussion with a Muslim young lady who is trying to convert me to Islam. And the discussion is all around the Ten Commandments. And the Ten Commandments are in the preceding chapter.
I hope that everybody can know when they're, you know, as per the instruction to be ready always, to give an answer to every man that asks you if you have the reason of the hope that is in you, that you can do that. And you know where the Ten Commandments are. They're in Exodus and repeated in Deuteronomy 5. I hope you can do that.
No sooner are the Ten Commandments given than we have the formal instructions about the necessity for a burnt sacrifice in the Jewish system. Exodus 20, we have in verse 24 the Ten Commandments, actually, it's in the same chapter, but it's just that burnt sacrifice is a little bit later than the Ten Commandments. You shall make an altar of earth for me and you shall sacrifice on it. You're burnt offerings.
Oh, you're burnt offerings. The preexisting burnt offerings. The kind of burnt offering that no one knew about. That Abraham knew about.
Yes, we keep an ongoing with this Moses. It's a burnt sacrifice and it's going to continue and continue and continue because under the Levitical law, there was no end to this. The writer of Hebrews, the writer to the Hebrews, he was conscious of this. Look at the repetitiveness and the unendingness of this.
Look at the burden of this. And so it would be a burden and that burden began toward the end of Exodus 20 and it never ended. In theory, at least the obligation stood, the standing obligation to be offering the burnt sacrifices until the cross, until the cross. Then there's no more obligation.
It's a strange religion. Islam is a very strange religion, but modern Judaism is also a strange religion. It is largely evolved into what you might call rabbinic synagogue-based religion. And when they held the Passover and they say next year in Jerusalem and all of that, you know, without a sacrificial system that God never did away with, the requirement for those sacrifices is still standing.
And where are they being done? Where are they being? They're not being done at all. In other words, this Jewish religion has been gutted and yet it continues to proceed without a sacrificial basis.
Since when did God set it aside? He never did. So what are you doing? What is the basis for your belief in redemption?
Oh, well, you know, we do want to build a temple on the Al-Aqsa Mosque site. We want to. Oh, well, we shall see. We shall see.
And so we have this burnt sacrifice. And my time is now five after and I'm going to jump to page three and skip quite a bit of page two here in my notes. The year is about the year 1000. That's a nice round number for you to remember in your knowledge of the history of the Bible.
That is, you can connect that to King David, King David. And we have in Psalm 40, the wonderful prophetic indication of what was coming, but it is in such an interesting way. Sacrifice and offering, though, it's not desire. My ears now has to open.
Burnt offering and sinned offering has now not desired what? Then the preparation of the coming of the Messiah, low in the volume of the book, it is written of me. I delight to do thy will. That's the Lord Jesus.
In other words, the answer that the burnt sacrifice gave was a temporary answer. The final answer that would thoroughly satisfy God would be the statement and answer of the cross of Christ. That would be it. And the writer to the Hebrews says this in chapter 10.
You can turn there or you can just listen. For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins. Therefore, when he comes into the world, he says, you have not desired sacrifice and offering the Hebrews. Writers quoting Psalm 40 and giving us, in fact, additional exposition.
He may have been quoting from the Septuagint. You have not desired sacrifice and offering, but you have prepared a body for me. Ah, isn't that something? You have not taken pleasure in whole burnt offerings and offerings for sin.
Then I said, behold, I have come. It is written of me in the scroll of the book to do your will. Oh, God. How wonderful.
How wonderful that that system of sacrifices that is only initially opened up in Leviticus chapter 1 and opened up to an entire system of sacrifice is finished because whether it was penal or substitutionary or voluntary or propitiatory or reconciling or redemptive or efficacious in its exposition of the work of Christ, it was finished. It was finished by the Lord Jesus on the cross. It says, though, in quoting that the writer then says, note, note, says the writer. After saying the above, that is David, sacrifices and offerings and whole, whole burnt offerings and offerings for sin, you have not desired, nor have you taken pleasure in them, which are offered according to the law.
Then he said, behold, I have come to do your will. He takes away the first to establish the second. By this will, we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ, for all time, for all time. Every priest stands daily ministering and offering time after time, the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins, but he, capital H, having offered one sacrifice for sins for all time sat down at the right hand of God.
Chapter 1 sat down on the right hand of God. Chapter 12 sat down on the right hand of God. It's finished. It's finished.
The sacrificial system has been done away with because your sin has been done away with complete, complete finality. So this week, as you're going about your individual lives and you want to think back on what I have been saying this morning, I want you to think about the thoroughness and the completeness of the salvation that God brought about in Christ, that all of God's intense anger and judgment came upon the Lord Jesus there on the cross. The judgment was more intense than you and I could ever even imagine. Had you even thought that there's seven different aspects to the nature of our redemption?
In other words, there is no angle from which you can consider your redemption that God has not already thought about. And that redemption was accomplished by the intense fire of judgment that came down upon Christ and that arose as a sweet smelling saver and God accepted it. And on the basis of that acceptance, he accepts you. So as you go around doing your mundane tasks this week, you can remember and reflect and take comfort in the fact that all of the judgment of God for your sin came down past tense upon the Lord Jesus on the cross and that that sacrifice went up to God and was deemed accepted.
Shall we pray? Father, we thank you that we have such a salvation that it is so complete that we belong to you. We have been bought with a price as it says in your word, let us honor God with our bodies, let us honor you with our service, with our love, with our worship. We thank you for this time that we've had this morning in Jesus' name, Amen.
I don't know whether it's hitting a quarter after 12, whether we might sing a sort of a, we've actually sung it twice this morning already. Number 85, beyond to your name, even if you may have smiling because he knows that's one of my favorites going back at least 20 years. But if we could sing beyond to your name, number 85, we can meditate upon that.