SACRIFICE

When Adam and Eve sinned and God instructed them to kill animals for skins to cover them, God did not shrug off the loss of life. The animals were His creation — maybe not His PRIZE creation, but still the work of His creative voice.

Similarly, God did not, through the Law given to Moses, blithely assign the death of bulls, goats, sheep, and doves. He did not set the rules in place for covering sin and walk away. Each animal was ritually sacrificed to maintain the constant awareness of sin and sin’s resulting death. The heart of God, always viewing the sacrifices with the forward vision towards Christ and His death to redeem man from sin, experienced pain as their Creator.

The pain attached to the death of God’s Son, the ULTIMATE sacrifice, was a culmination of all the centuries – all the millennia – of representative sacrifice.

Can my head even begin to “go there”? The totality of the pain is unexpressible. It makes the sacrifice of Christ even more poignant as the Father’s extreme climactic, accumulated pain was manifest in the rending of the veil.*

Sacrifice –
Striking the throat
of bull, lamb, dove, or goat.

God –
Searing pain –
A daily refrain.

Christ –
Accepting life’s loss,
Faced the cross.

Redeemed Man –
Viewed Eternity’s Rift;
Received God’s Gift.

* A Messianic Christian friend once said that when a Jewish father heard of the death of a son, he tore his garment from top to bottom in grief; he had been taught that the temple veil was torn top to bottom to express God’s grief at the loss of His Son. I am aware of different understandings/ interpretations; however, a multi-faceted God can most certainly have multi-faceted meanings to these critical events.