Old Testament Sacrificial System: Dust to Glory with R.C. Sproul

0:00 It was almost thirty years ago when I was working as a professor of philosophical theology at the Conwell School of Theology in Philadelphia that I was invited to come to one of the local churches in Philadelphia to give a lecture on the meaning of the New Covenant. And the way this series of lectures had been set up by the church was that the prior week they were to have a rabbi lecture on the principles of the Old Covenant. And I got a call before I came to the church, and they said the rabbi had become ill, and he was not able to give his message, and so they asked me to change mine to talk about the relationship between the Old Covenant and the New Covenant. And I tried to do that by focusing my attention on the way in which Christ on the cross in making an atonement fulfilled the sacrificial system of the Old Testament.

1:06 And something happened in the middle of that lecture that had never happened to me before in a public meeting place. I was lecturing on the cross and on Christ becoming a curse for us there when somebody in the audience who was very agitated by what I was teaching hollered out, that's primitive and obscene, right in the middle of my lecture. And there were hundreds of people there. I wasn't sure what to do, but I stopped right there. I couldn't help but stop, and I said, what did you say? I knew perfectly well what he said, but I was trying to gather my thoughts. I said, what did you say? He said, I said, that's primitive and obscene. And I said, you're absolutely right. I couldn't agree with you more that the whole drama of the cross is primitive and obscene.

2:13 I like particularly the word primitive to start with because when we look at the Old Testament ritual system and the sacrificial system where people kill animals and offer their blood and the substance of these animals on altars of burnt offering and so on, and you go through all of these rites that involve the application of blood and so on. This is the kind of thing that sounds on the surface as being barbarian and savage, and certainly the term primitive well describes the whole process. But one of the things that we have to understand about historic Judeo-Christianity is that the faith that has been delivered to us from the fathers is not an esoteric religion that can only be understood by a Gnostic elite group of highly trained intellectuals.

3:20 God is concerned to communicate His message of redemption to the simplest person in this world. And the way in which this redemption is dramatized in the Old Testament is primitive, and that's because we are primitive, and we need to understand with clarity this whole message of redemption. I said, but I particularly like the word obscene, because that's what the whole drama of atonement is about. It is dealing with the obscenity of human rebellion against God. And I doubt if there was anything, in fact, I'm sure there was nothing that ever appeared on this planet that was more obscene than Jesus of Nazareth when He hung on the cross.

4:20 Because, at that moment in space and time, Christ had gathered to Himself and put upon Himself the sum total of all of our sins. And after He had taken upon Himself our sins, every filthy thing that we've ever done had been imputed to Him, He was the quintessential obscenity. Obviously, in and of Himself He was blameless and pure, without spot or wrinkle. But once our sin was imputed to Him and transferred to Him, and He became a curse for us, this was obscene that even the heavens became darkened and God, as it were, turned His back and couldn't look upon this obscenity. That's the gospel that God has condescended to cover our obscenities, to cover our sinfulness.

5:28 And all of that is dramatically portrayed in the entire sacrificial system that is instituted in the Old Testament. We see all kinds of sacrifices, all kinds of offerings, restitution offerings, sin offerings, trespass offerings, burnt offerings, grain offerings, cereal offerings, and all of these different kinds of offerings and sacrifices that are such an integral part of Old Testament religion. And again, the opening chapters of the book of Leviticus give specific details regulating these various offerings. But what I want to look at today is the heart and the soul of this whole sacrificial system, because fundamentally there are two things that are underlying these sacrifices that God ordains and commands from His people.

6:37 One is expiation. And the other is consecration. In the one hand, you have the offering of sacrifice, which is at the same time rendered as a gift. If we ask the fundamental question, what is worship, and we would ask that question of an Old Testament saint, I'm sure that the answer would be something like this, that the chief element of worship in the life of the believer is the making of an offering or a sacrifice of praise.

7:34 And it starts very early on in the Old Testament. We remember the story of the sacrifices and the offerings that were brought by Cain and Abel, and how that God delighted in the offering that was given by Abel, but He rejected the offering that was brought by Cain. And because of that, Cain was filled with fury and envy and jealousy against his brother and rose up and took his life. But Abel's sacrifice was a sacrifice given to God in an attitude of faith and in a posture of praise and thanksgiving. But from that early, primitive form of sacrifice, the whole system of sacrifice grew and enlarged and took on deeper and deeper meaning, so that the sacrifices that were brought began to indicate the principle of expiation.

8:43 And expiation, as I say, is at the heart and core of Old Testament sacrifice. Now, there are two words that we hear often in theology that sometimes we stumble over, expiation and propitiation. And the term expiation has to do with the removing of defilement or the removing of sin. So when we look at the New Testament, we are told that on the cross, Christ made an expiation for His people. He removed their sins from them and took them upon Himself. We remember on the Day of Atonement two animals were used in the Old Testament. There was the lamb without blemish that was offered on the altar of sacrifice, and there was the scapegoat.

9:42 And when the scapegoat was presented, the priest laid his hands upon the back of the goat, symbolizing the transfer of the sins of the people to the back of the goat. That's why He was called a scapegoat, and we use the term scapegoat for somebody who is made the goat or the one responsible for something that goes wrong. He becomes the one who is blameworthy, even though He didn't do anything. And so, on the Day of Atonement, the sins of the people were transferred to the back of the goat, and then the goat was driven outside the camp, out into the outer darkness, away from the presence of God, into the place of darkness, into the place of defilement. And the sins were symbolically removed from the presence of the people of God.

10:44 That's what is meant by expiation. This is what John the Baptist had in his mind when he sang the Agnes Day in the New Testament, saw Christ approaching, and he said, Behold, you know, the Lamb of God who taketh away the sin of the world, because Christ is both the Lamb and the scapegoat. When He bears our sins on His own person or in His own person, He expiates our sins. But also, there is the concept of propitiation, and the difference is found in the prefix. means out of or from, and it has the horizontal dimension of removal or of remission of sin, sin being sent to the outer darkness. The Lord says, as far as the east is from the west, so far have I removed your transgressions from you.

11:38 Propitiation has a vertical dimension to it, and it has to do with standing before or in front of God. And we get the word propitious from it, and here a propitiation is a sacrifice offered to God to satisfy the demands of His holiness and to satisfy the demands of His justice. And so, the sacrifices in the Old Testament symbolized this idea of satisfying the demands of God's holiness and justice so that His wrath would be set apart, so that there is the vertical and the horizontal. On the one hand, God's justice is satisfied. From the other, our sins are removed from us, all of which finds their culmination in the work of Christ on the cross.

12:42 Now, key to this whole system of sacrifice in the Old Testament is the idea of substitution. we speak of the substitutionary atonement in the New Testament with respect to the death of Christ. Well, this idea of substitution is rooted and grounded in the Old Testament sacrificial system. Now, when sacrifices were brought by the people of Israel, and they went through the cultic rituals that were prescribed in the book of Leviticus, the major sacrifices had six different acts or six different steps that were followed in the procedure. The first three steps were accomplished by the rank-and-file Israelite themselves, and then the last three steps were accomplished by the work of the priest.

13:46 And so, what would happen is when the sacrifice was brought for an animal sacrifice, for a burnt sacrifice, for example, the person was required to bring an offering that was his or her personal possession. That is, if it was an animal sacrifice, it had to be an animal that you owned. If it were a cereal or grain offering, it also had to come from your own property. And this personal property became an extension or representation of you. And so, the Jew would bring the lamb or the goat or the ram or whatever it was that he was bringing for this offering. And He would first of all lay His hands on the animal, just as the high priest did on the Day of Atonement with respect to the scapegoat.

14:47 Now the individual Israelite would lay His hands on this sheep or on this ram or whatever, symbolizing the transfer of His personal guilt to this animal. Then the offering was to be, or the animal, was to be killed by the owner. And after he killed the animal, then the third step was that he had to bring it to the priest. And then the priests would take the blood of the animal and sprinkle it in the holy places, and then offer the animal on the altar of sacrifice, and then in certain provisions where the priest would eat the remaining portion that was edible as a result. But the whole process here involved killing, burning, and eating.

15:50 Now the Old Testament principle was this, that life was in the blood, not because the Jews had a primitive form of anatomy or an understanding of the circulatory system. They didn't make an absolute identity between blood and life. There was a symbolic relationship here. I remember the Anglican evangelist, John Guest, once remarked in a conference, he said, We're always talking about the blood of Jesus and the blood of Christ this and the blood of Christ that. And he said, Think for a moment. Jesus came to this world and scratched his finger on a nail. Would that have done it? You would have had the blood of Christ.

16:47 But would that have been sufficient to satisfy the demands that God had made for the ultimate atonement? Of course not. The idea of the shedding of blood is symbolic of the giving up of life, because the penalty for sin is death. And so, the death of the substitute is what is required for that penalty to be fulfilled. So it wasn't simply that they cut the animals and just took some blood and sprinkled them, but the idea of the blood was symbolic of the giving of the entire life of the animal. Now, we also understood that these offerings and sacrifices that were made in the Old Testament were typical.

17:50 That is, they foreshadowed the supreme atonement that was to come in the final transaction of redemption when Christ offered Himself as the perfect sacrifice once and for all. And as the author of Hebrews labors the point, raising the question, can the blood of bulls and goats take away sins? Obviously, these animals are not sufficient to be an adequate substitute for the life of the person who was guilty before God. But they took their value by, as I said, symbolizing the promised Redeemer who would be the Lamb without blemish, who would give His life as the ultimate sacrifice once and for all. Now, I mentioned that in the ritual there was, first of all, the killing, and then there was, second of all, the burning.

18:58 And the burning on the altar of sacrifice was part of its being an offering or gift to God. Now, obviously God wasn't able to consume these animals, and He had no need of them, but the idea in Israel was that the aroma that rose to heaven from the burning of these sacrifices was considered by God to be sweet and pleasant and delightful. That is, if the sacrifices were offered with a proper spirit of penitence and in true faith. We know that what happened later on in Israel is that the nation degenerated into externalism and ritualism, where they simply went through the outward motions without faith and without any genuine desire in their hearts to repent before God or to offer Him the gift of praise.

20:04 And so, there came the time when the judgment of God was announced by the prophets, where the prophets would say, Thus saith the Lord, I despise Your feasts, I despise Your solemn assemblies, and Your offerings have become a stench in my nostrils." Just look at the imagery and the symbolism of the aroma. Get out your concordance and look how often that idea is found in the New Testament, where the offerings of the saints are considered a sweet and pleasant aroma to God. All of these things were symbolized in this elaborate structure of sacrifice. Finally, the blood was sprinkled. We see it supremely, as I mentioned the other day, in the sprinkling of the blood on the mercy seat on the Day of Atonement.

21:07 And it was the sprinkling of the blood on the altar or on the mercy seat that was done to symbolize still one more concept tied to the sacrifice, and that was the idea of the covering. This is a magnificent theme that runs all the way through the Old Testament. If you will recall, in the Garden of Eden, at the fall of Adam and Eve, the first sensation that mankind had of sin and of guilt was an awareness of nakedness. God had made Adam and Eve in such a way as which He said that He created the male and female, and the both were naked and were unashamed. But as soon as they violated the law of God, as soon as they transgressed His commandment, suddenly they're overcome with a sense of embarrassment and a sense of shame about their nakedness.

22:11 And if you go and pursue that motif through the Old Testament, you will find all kinds of riches that associate it with it. And I labored the point at times that the very first act of redemption in the Old Testament is when God stoops from heaven and covers the embarrassing, shameful sin of our first parents by making them clothes of skin. We think of the story of Noah when his one son mocked him when he uncovered his nakedness and his other sons covered their father's nakedness and received the blessing of God for doing it. And so throughout the Scriptures, the symbolism of the sacrifice, the symbolism of the blood is to work as a covering, a covering that shields our sin and our evil from the holy gaze of God.

23:13 That's why Christ is called the garment of our righteousness as His blood is shed in the final consummate act of covering the sin of His people.