An Offering For Sin

When you become aware of your guilt in any of these ways, you must confess your sin. Then you must bring to the LORD as the penalty for your sin a female from the flock, either a sheep or a goat. This is a sin offering with which the priest will purify you from your sin, making you right with the LORD. Leviticus 5:5-6

IMAGINE THE EXPENSE of taking the best animal in your herd down to the Temple in Jerusalem just to be sacrificed and burned up. That was the animal that would have produced the best offspring, and it wouldn’t have been easy to give up. Imagine the time burden, especially if you didn’t live in Jerusalem. You would have had to travel and find a place to stay. Imagine the emotional and spiritual burden as you made this trek, knowing you would have to identify and confess your sin to the priest in offering your sacrifice. Yet when you slit that animal’s throat and watched it burn, and when the priest declared your sin forgiven, you would think, It should have been me. I am the one who deserves to die. But this innocent animal has become my substitute. This animal has died so I can live.

The visceral and immediate nature of offering an animal sacrifice would leave a lasting impression on you and your children. It would speak of the seriousness and the cost of sin. Year after year, animal after animal, it would repeat the message that sin brings death and that forgiveness of sin requires the shedding of blood.

Of course, none of the animals offered in these sacrifices could, in themselves, take away a person’s guilt or truly pay the debt for sin. But by offering these sacrifices, the people of the Old Testament demonstrated their faith in the superior, once-for-all sacrifice who was to come. Jesus was God’s provision of a sacrifice sufficient to put an end to the need for the sacrifices prescribed in Leviticus. “He has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself” (Hebrews 9:26, ESV).

Lord, as we live and breathe in an atmosphere of such grace, made possible by the sacrifice of your Son, we don’t want to take our sin lightly. We need your help, as parents, to rightly emphasize the gravity of sin and the costliness of forgiveness to our children, while also relishing the freedom from punishment provided for in the once-for-all sacrifice of Christ.