There are large numbers of God’s beloved people who have never carefully studied the marvelous types of the Person and work of Christ given us in the early chapters of Leviticus. Here we have five distinct offerings, all displaying various aspects of the work of the cross and unfolding the glories of the Person who did that work. We will get great help for our souls if we meditate on these marvelous pictures of the wonderful truths unfolded in the New Testament.
The five offerings may be divided in various ways. First, we notice that four of them are offerings involving the shedding of blood–the burnt offering, the peace offering, the sin offering, and the trespass offering. The meat offering, or, as it should read, the meal offering or food offering, was a non-blood offering, and stands in a place by itself.
Then again, there are sweet savor offerings as distinguished from offerings for sin. The burnt offering, the meal offering, and the peace offering are all said to be “for a sweet savor unto the Lord.” This was never true of the sin offering or the trespass offering. The divine reason for this distinction will come out clearly as we go on.
The five offerings present to us a marvelous many-sided picture of the Person and work of our blessed Lord Jesus Christ. They show what He is to God, as well as what He has become in grace to sinners for whom He died, and to those who now stand before God accepted in the Beloved.
If there are details which are difficult for us to understand, these should only give occasion for exercise of heart before God and for meditation and prayer. We may be sure of this, that the better acquainted we become with our Saviour and the more we enter into what the Word of God elsewhere reveals as to the details of His work on the cross, the more readily we will understand the types.
As we get them in the first seven chapters of Leviticus, we see things from the divine standpoint, that is, God gives us that which means most to Him first. So we begin with the burnt offering, the highest type of the work of the cross that we have in the offerings, and we go on down through the meal offering, the peace offering, the sin offering, and the trespass offering, which is the first aspect of the work of Christ generally apprehended by our souls.
Most of us remember when the grace of God first reached our hearts. We were troubled about our sins which had put us at such a distance from God, and the great questions that exercised us were: How can our sins be put away? How can we be freed from this sense of guilt?
Many of us will never forget how we were brought to see that what we could never do ourselves God had done for us through the work of our Lord Jesus on the cross. This is the truth of the trespass offering, in which sin assumes the aspect of a debt needing to be discharged.
But as we went on, we began to get a little higher view of the work of the cross. We saw that sin was not only a debt requiring settlement, but that it was something which in itself was defiling and unclean, something that rendered us utterly unfit for companionship with God. And little by little the Spirit of God opened up another aspect of the atonement; we saw that our Lord not only made expiation for all guiltiness but for all our defilement, too. “For God hath made Him to be sin for us, who knew no sin, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.”
It was a wonderful moment in the history of our souls when we saw that we were saved eternally, and made fit for God’s presence because the Holy One had become the great sin offering and was made sin for us on Calvary’s cross.
But there were other lessons we had to learn. We soon saw that, because of their sins, men are at enmity with God, and there could be no communion with God until a righteous basis for fellowship was procured. Something had to take place before God and man could meet together in perfect enjoyment and satisfaction.
Thus we began to enter into the peace offering aspect of the work of Christ. We saw that it was God’s desire to bring us into fellowship with Himself, and this could only be as redeemed sinners who had been reconciled to God through the death of our Lord Jesus.
As we learned to value more the work the Saviour did, we found ourselves increasingly occupied with the Person who did that work. In the beginning, it was the value of the blood that gave us peace in regard to our sin, but after we went on, we learned to enjoy Him for what He is in Himself. This is the meal offering. It is here that we see Christ in all His perfection, God and Man in one glorious Person. Our hearts feed with delight on Him.
There remains one other aspect of the Person and work of our Lord to be considered, and it is this which is set forth in the burnt offering. As the years went on, some of us began to apprehend, feebly at first, and then perhaps in more glorious fullness, something that in the beginning had never even dawned on our souls: even if we had never been saved through the work of Christ on the cross, there was something in that work of tremendous importance which meant even more to God than the salvation of sinners.
In Christ’s perfect obedience unto death we see that which glorifies God completely. This is the burnt offering aspect of the cross. By means of that cross, more glory accrued to God than He had ever lost by the Fall. So that we may say that even if not one sinner had ever been saved through the sacrifice of our Lord upon the tree, yet God had been fully glorified in respect of sin. No stain could be imputed to His character, nor could any question ever be raised through all eternity as to His abhorrence of sin and His delight in holiness.
So in the book of Leviticus the burnt offering comes first, for it is that which is most precious to God and should therefore be most precious to us.
Differing grades within the offerings are mentioned as well. For instance, the burnt offering might be a sacrifice of the herd, that is, a bullock or young ox; or it might be out of the flocks, a sheep or goat; or again it might be fowls, as turtle-doves or young pigeons.
These grades of offerings had to do with the ability of the offerer. The man who could afford a bullock brought it. If unable to bring a bullock, he would bring a sheep or a goat, and the poorer people brought the fowls. But all spoke of Christ.
It is a question, I take it, of spiritual apprehension. Some of us have a very feeble apprehension of Christ, but we do value Him, we love Him, we trust Him, and so we come to God bringing our offering of fowls. We know Him as the heavenly One, and the bird speaks of that which belongs to the heavens.
Others have a little fuller understanding, and so we bring our offering of the flocks. We see in Him the devoted One who “was led as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb.” Or He is represented by the goat, the picture of the sinner whose place He in grace has taken.
Others again have a still higher and fuller apprehension of His Person and work. We see in Him the strong, patient ox whose delight was to do the will of God in all things.
May it be both our objective and our goal to know more of Him and to appreciate in a fuller way His wonderful work which has meant so much to God and which is the basis of our eternal blessing.