Religious sacrifice in the ancient world and where it is still practiced today has always been an enigma to me. This is especially true of what I read in the Bible, where God set up a sacrificial system at the very heart of his relationship to his people. Consider this summary statement found in Hebrews 9:22, “According to the law almost everything is purified by blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.”
But when you think about it, notice that everyday life is all about making sacrifices. There is no getting around it. Every choice we make is selective. We choose to do one thing and all that we could have otherwise done is sacrificed.
And within the context of relating to God, the Israelites were given this first of the Ten Commandments, “you shall have no other God’s besides me.” By implication, God was their abundance of joy-filled, purposeful living. Hence out of love for his people he was against any divided loyalty as that which would destroy such a blessed life.
But in the event of breaking that law, an animal sacrifice was stipulated by God as the way back. The sacrificed animal life involved was a visual way of saying, I am dead to the choice I made. I am again putting God first and sacrificing all my alternative attempts at purposeful, joyful living.
Only when this was what the animal sacrifice meant to the worshipper was the sacrifice pleasing to God. The sacrifice didn’t mean anything on it’s own. For that matter God explicitly rejected sacrifices that did not represent a repentant heart.
However, something deeper was also involved because every sin of not putting God first is also in some way a sin against God’s love for one’s neighbor. Either directly or indirectly, seen or unseen, known or unknown, every sin has the effect of diminishing other people’s value to God.
The seriousness of this is ominous since each person is immeasurably valuable to God. That means any sin against anyone warranted an incalculably great consequence. For that matter, so great a consequence that the animal sacrifices were just a prefigure, a foreshadowing that could not and did not resolve this part of what was going on.
Why? Because our value is intrinsic and infinite. Hence infinite retribution is required to answer for any sin since it diminishes human value. Anything short of that and we imply that the worth of the victim has a limit.
This is why God could never “just forgive” us. Take away everlasting retribution and we are implying that human beings are not quite that valuable to God.
And yet God loves each of us with an incalculably great love — a love as great as our worth. And although wrathful beyond measure at all the ways anyone of us diminishes the value of another, God could not bear the thought of meting out endless retribution on any one of us.
So he came into the world and being eternal, he took that penalty on to himself for an infinite and unspeakably dreadful moment. He suffered the everlasting retribution due us for all the thoughts, words, and ways we diminished one another’s value to him. By his sacrifice our intrinsic and infinite worth was upheld and vindicated. And now he can freely forgive us of our every wrong.
