The primary source of wealth in Moshe’s day were one’s animals, so offering an animal to the Lord was a financial inconvenience, a sacrifice. Romans 12 tells us what sacrifice we are called to make now that there’s no Temple. We give our lives to God. That is more expensive and more precious than a turtledove, goat or a bull.
God can redeem anyone He wants. When He redeems you, you give Him a peace offering and your life.
Yom haKippurim (literally, Day of Coverings) is a day that wears many people out, because we’re focused on, When are we going to eat? Yet, we are to supposed to focus upon what the Son of God — the ultimate High Priest and fulfillment of the two goats of the day — did for us. He went through a tremendous affliction for us. The Day of Atonement is not about us and what we do but about the High Priest and what He does. It’s all about how God brings us to Himself. We are only drawn to God if He draws us to Himself.
Leviticus 5 sounds very similar to Leviticus 4 in a lot of ways. Both passages discuss unintentional violations of God’s commandments and sin offerings, but the “guilt offering” we’re looking at today is different.
When you pray to God earnestly, you feel relieved that you can release those things that only God can hear, release them to Him and find relief. We don’t approach our High Priest with animals. We are God’s Temple. When we come to God with our sins, the High Priest brings His sacrifice and our repentance to God and we received God’s forgiveness. Without God’s Spirit increasing in us, we will not grow.
The entire book of Leviticus is about the function of Israel’s high priest. Yeshua (Jesus) is our High Priest, and as we study Leviticus, we learn more about what Yeshua is doing for us in God’s presence.
Leviticus 1-3 starts with instructions about how to give free will offerings to God. These are not offerings of punishment but offerings of gratitude and love of God. We also learn how the High Priest prepares and gives these offerings to God. We can see the New Testament fulfillment in Yeshua as we read through Hebrews 5.
If we can choose just one word to summarize the book of Exodus, it’s reconciliation. God used Moshe (Moses) to bring the descendants of Israel out of Egypt to be His people. Even after the golden calf was made, God still wanted to reconcile to His people Israel, and Israel wanted to reconcile to Him. The people of Israel were willing to give much to be reconciled to Him to the point that Moshe had to tell the children of Israel to stop giving because the coffers were overflowing with gifts. They wanted Him to dwell with them.
God said through Paul that He began a good work in us. God will complete the good work. We are to be living stones. We will surround the Creator of Heaven and Earth and His Son, Yeshua (Jesus) the Mashiakh (Messiah). There will be no temple there, because the temple will be there all the time. The only temple will be the people He saved.
God ultimately used the Messiah to reconcile the world to Himself, no longer recognizing their transgressions. A clean slate, it’s all new. He doesn’t pay attention to our sins, transgressions and iniquities. We are to be ambassadors to reconcile people to God.
Last time, we discussed lashon ha-ra (evil tongue, i.e., gossip, slander and divisiveness) and how it is one of the latter-day plagues among God’s people.
In this excursus, we will explore a related principle taught in Torah by Yeshua and His apostles: proportionality. A number of Christians often consider “eye for an eye and tooth for tooth” an example of the “old covenant” not to live by anymore and quote Yeshua to that effect.
Rather, we’ll see that “eye for an eye” is a Bible parabolic idiom teaching proportionality. The point of justice is to restore the offender to the community, not extract a pound of flesh.
There is a lot of exactness described in Exodus 39-40 for the design of the furniture and implements of the Tabernacle of Israel. One lesson we can draw from this is every piece of furniture had its own exclusive place. Every item had its irreplaceable function in God’s house. We were all brought to God’s High Priest first. Yeshua the High Priest presented us to the Father. When God calls us to Himself, He calls us to our irreplaceable task too.
Another lesson from the directed precision is God trained the people to stay where He stayed and move when He moved.