The brazen altar of the tabernacle or tent of meeting was used for sacrifices. It was positioned right at the entrance to the courtyard of the tabernacle.
As we are having a brief look at fellowship in the Old Testament we are going to have a study on the different types of sacrifices the people offered to God in the Old Testament. The book of Leviticus provides us with considerable detail about these offerings and they seem strange to us. There must have been many animals slaughtered each day at this tent of meeting as the people brought their different animals for the different offerings. They had to do repeat visits - it was not a one-off experience. When we stayed in Stevenston, Janie and I lived in the vicinity of an abattoir and sometimes if the weather conditions were correct, we could smell the slaughter-house from our garden. It was not pleasant. Imagine what it must have been like to go near this tent of meeting where there would be pools of blood from the many animals which had been killed that day. There were precise details about how the animals were to be killed and what was to happen with the meat and the blood and how the carcase was to be disposed of. Some animals were taken outside the camp of Israel and were burned again producing an unpleasant aroma. This aroma was a constant reminder of the deadly effects of sin and this contrasts with our way of living today where we treat sin and disobedience against God very lightly. The lesson written clearly over the offerings was that God was holy and mankind was sinful and that to approach to God in any way required a sacrifice.
Not all the sacrifices were evil smelling. There were five main offerings and three of these were described as 'pleasing aroma offerings' - the burnt offering, the grain offering and the fellowship (or peace) offering. These three offerings brought pleasure to God and so there was a pleasant aroma coming from them. The grain offering was the only one which did not require an animal or bird to be killed. There were other two offerings - the sin offering and the guilt (or trespass offering) and they were not 'pleasing aroma offerings.' There is nothing pleasing to God about sin. He is holy and cannot tolerate any indication of sin.
However, this is very important. All these five offerings were types of Christ. In other words, they were a picture of some aspect of the person or work of God's Son, Jesus Christ who was the perfect sacrifice. We might have missed the significance of this statement because it is staggering. Jesus Christ brought great pleasure to God the Father in His person and in His work. The burnt offering spoke loudly about how Jesus was obedient to God and His willingness to do God's will in everything. (Read Psalm 40:6-8 and Hebrews 10:5-7). The grain offering was a bread cake baked in an open or on a griddle and it was made with the finest ingredients such as the very finest wheaten flour. This was giving a lesson on the perfect life of Jesus Christ which brought pleasure to God. The third offering is very relevant to us today as it could be called the fellowship offering or the peace offering. This offering was necessary to provide the Israelite with the opportunity to enjoy communion or fellowship with God and also with those other Israelites who had been redeemed from the slavery of Egypt.
But it is important that we realise that Jesus is also the sin offering and the guilt offering. If we could grasp this today, it would transform our lives. His death on the cross was no accident. It was absolutely necessary and was the only way that God could forgive sins without lowering His divine standard of righteousness and holiness. His own Son became the sacrifice for us on the cross - and there was a stench associated with the cross not only because it was an despicable form of execution which was despised by the Romans and the Jews alike. The stench was because Jesus was bearing our sins in His sinless body so that we could be forgiven.
Just to close our thoughts for today, can we understand that Jesus' death was a 'pleasing aroma offering' (it was the burnt offering and also the peace offering) but it was also a sin offering and a guilt offering which was distasteful to God. So we hear these words of Jesus as He hung upon the cross - "My God, why God why have you forsaken me?" Jesus experienced being forsaken because He was bearing my sins on His body on the tree. He took our place so that we could have fellowship with God.
I am going to need yet another blog before we leave this subject.
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