Vay-Kay

I'm going to be out for a couple weeks on vacation. I'll see you all in mid to late August again, hopefully with some good stories and perhaps some fresh insight.

The Sacrifices

I've been putting some miles in Leviticus, and I have come up for air to discuss just some brief thoughts from the book. And to mention that for the first couple weeks of August I'll be gone, so what irregular posting I write here will be interrupted further.  Also, as a quick aside, Tim Enloe put up an interesting post about science fiction and religion; as a fan of the genre, I found it pretty neat.

There a great many hints of the sacrifice of Christ in the laws concerning the offerings. The obvious ones:

• the death of the innocent lamb, goat, ram, bull in place of the guilty priest, person, nation
  
• grain offerings without leaven (often a symbol of human works)

I think there are some other interesting notes here, though.  The priesthood lived off of the sacrifices.  And we see in the New Testament that we are also a priesthood, and we live off of the sacrifice of Christ.  It is not a mistake that Christ is the bread of life, and we do not celebrate an empty symbol in the eucharist.

Another example is the burnt offering, which was to burn continually.  The fire burned day and night, never to be extinguished.  In a similar way, the sacrifice of Christ is a continual one, and continuously effective.

There are several kinds of offerings, also:  sin, trespass, peace, and burnt.  In each we see, I think, a shadow of the cross.  We see him also as the high priest, making intercession for the people.

There really is a lot there, and it's well worth the time to read through it and try to digest a few things it has to say.

Leviticus

I'm reading in Leviticus now, having moved from the New Testament (where I recently finished second Thessalonians) to the Old. My time in the Scripture usually involves more verse by verse study, but in this case I'm trying a slightly different tack—short notes jotted on each logical unit to get an overall view. I'm hoping that it moves faster, for starters, and that my view is "big picture" more than "nitty gritty."

The first several chapters of Leviticus deal with the sacrificial system. The text is rife with types of Christ, and I hope that in the coming weeks I'll have some examples and commentary on them and how we might see them realized in his person and work.