Introduction
This chapter continues the Divine directions to the priests respecting their office in the presentation of the various sacrifices. In it are rules for the trespass and the peace offerings, the prohibition of eating suet and blood, and the assignment of the priest’s portion in the peace offering.
CONCLUDING NOTE.
That this sacrificial code was burdensome will not be denied by those who have enjoyed the more glorious dispensation of the Spirit. There is a striking contrast between the sacrificial law and “the law of liberty” in Christ Jesus our Lord. The great purpose of the first was the ushering in of the second. In this regard not only the moral law but the ceremonial, also, was our παιδαγωγος , child-leader, to bring us to Christ. All the shadows adumbrate him; all the types prefigure him in his various mediatorial offices. This will account for the variety of the sacrifices containing an expiatory element. A subordinate purpose of this variety may have been to prevent that tedium which would have attended one invariable form of sacrifice. Rationalism suggests that this complicated and elaborate system was devised simply to keep the Israelites so busily employed that they would have no inclination to adopt the idolatries of the surrounding nations, especially the religious rites with which they had become familiar in Egypt. But the suggestion that God has created any thing for the sole purpose of filling a vacuum is not only a reflection on his wisdom, but a glaring indication of a lack, on the part of Rationalism, of that true spirit of philosophy which is satisfied only with the discovery of worthy final causes of things. “These rites and ceremonies were minute, in order to impress upon the Jewish mind, and upon the mind of humanity itself, the great ideas of substitution, atonement, vicarious sacrifice; till this idea became so familiarized to the hearts of mankind that they should be able not only to appreciate, but to hail with joy and gratitude that perfect atonement of which these were the shadows, saying, each of them, ‘We are voices crying in the wilderness, Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world!’ ” Dr. Cummings.
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