A common caricature of Heaven is that God is obsessed with killing the wicked. Rather, the Bible talks about a better way to both rid the Earth of wickedness and increase the number of righteous. And that’s one of the key lessons of the festivals of Pesach (Passover), Matzot (Unleavened Bread) and Shavuot (Pentecost), lessons brought to their fullness in Messiah Yeshua (Christ Jesus). Here’s how that works.
We may soothe ourselves by saying, “I’m glad we don’t do that sacrifice stuff anymore!” But at key lesson of the Torah reading צו Tzav (“command,” Lev. 6:8–8:36) is that God is concerned about how we bring our offering of ourselves — who we are on the inside — on top of the instructions for the what and the how of the offerings.
We all need to figure out what our offering to God will be. Will our offerings be of shallow faith, shallow love, shallow actions? Or will our offerings come from a deep faith, deep action, deep love for God?
Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement) is unique among the appointed times of the LORD. It’s the only holy day in which the people do very little, while one man, the high priest, does everything. Messiah Yeshua (Christ Jesus), our high priest, sacrificed Himself for us and carried our sins away too, as the symbols of Yom Kippur memorialize. All the people are asked to do is humble themselves, do no work and bring an offering to the Tabernacle/Temple.
Without a Temple, what can we bring to God? It’s not about following the Torah to the letter with a physically perfect abstinence from food and water, but as Yeshua taught us, it’s about caring for those around us as we want them to care for us. The Torah is a covenant of life, not of death.