The Burnt Offering
One of the reasons why I wanted to do a sermon series on the book of Leviticus is because I wanted to better understand myself what the burnt offering was.
Leviticus chapter 1 describes the burnt offering in three distinct ways. First for someone who brings a bull, second for a person who brings a sheep or a goat, and third for someone who brings two birds. When we read this passage carefully we will notice that each of these offerings end the exact same way, that a burnt offering is a food offering with a pleasing aroma to the Lord. Leviticus is generous in that it adjusts what you bring according to what you have, and it does not adjust what God says about it. The bull was the most valuable asset that a household in Israel could own, and two pigeons were what a day laborer could catch. But God accepts these various burnt offerings in the same way, and Leviticus makes it clear by repeating the same phrase three times for each offering.
The Hebrew word for this offering is olah, and it comes from a verb that means to go up. When I first thought of a burnt offering, my focus always had been on the destruction of the offering, and the fact that a burnt offering is completely consumed by the fire. But in the Hebrew, the idea behind a burnt offering is more pointed at the fact that the smoke goes up to the Lord and the fragrance is pleasing to Him.
What is fascinating is that the worshiper kills the animal himself. Verse 5 is explicit, and verse 11 as well. The priests handle the blood and the fire and the altar, because those are the holy things which are their responsibility, but the killing belongs to the person the offering is for. You brought your own bull, you laid your hand on its head, and you cut its throat in the courtyard while the priests stood by with basins. Israel was an agrarian society, and so they understood how to slaughter animals. We today live in a society in which the killing of animals is so separate from our lives, that even when we go grocery shopping, the stores make sure to make the meat look completely different than the animal they came from. The same today goes for our offering and worship. Many times we fail to recognize that God is asking us to offer ourselves up as a living sacrifice, in that we need to make sure we are the one who is actively and personally involved in the act of worship. Whatever the cost, you paid it with your own hands and could not watch from a distance.
Whole burnt offerings were not something unique to Israel. Many of the surrounding nations burned animals completely for their gods, and the assumption underneath most of those rituals was that the gods needed to be fed. In the Babylonian flood story the gods have gone hungry while the waters covered the earth, and when the survivor finally offers a sacrifice they crowd around the smell of it like flies. Genesis 8 uses that same picture after Noah's offering, and it is not an accident, but what God does with it is completely different. He smells the pleasing aroma, and then He makes a promise never again to curse the ground. Generations later the psalmist says it even more plainly, that if God were hungry He would not tell us, because the world and everything in it already belongs to Him. The nations around Israel were maintaining their gods. Israel was being received by theirs.
Verse 3 says the worshiper brings the animal to the entrance of the tent of meeting, that he may be accepted before the Lord. Verse 4 says that he lays his hand on the animal's head, and it shall be accepted for him, to make atonement for him. God tells us the purpose of the entire ritual before He gives a single instruction about how to carry it out, and the purpose is that a person would be accepted. The verb in verse 3 is passive, which means the worshiper is not accomplishing his own acceptance, he is receiving it. Everything from verse 5 forward is method, and the reason for it was settled two verses earlier.
This is the same order we have been seeing since we started this series. God rescued Israel out of Egypt before there was a law for them to keep, and Leviticus opens with God breaking the silence rather than Israel finding a way into the tent. Here that same pattern shows up inside a single paragraph. Purpose first, and then procedure. If we want to read Leviticus as a system for earning our way into being acceptable, we have to skip over verse 3 in order to do it.
Something else worth noticing is that the word for atonement shows up here in chapter 1, attached to the very first offering, before sin has even been mentioned. Many of us were taught that atonement belongs to the sin offering in chapter 4, and that the burnt offering is more of a gift that we bring. The text does not divide it that way. The burnt offering is the foundational offering, the one that secures our standing in front of God, and the more specific offerings that come later deal with particular failures and particular debts. If we have been carrying around a picture of God in which He handles our sin in one place and receives our worship in another, this chapter puts the two of them together on the first page.
The other thing that separates this offering from every other offering in the book is that nothing comes back. That is easy to miss unless you already know the others. In the grain offering the priests eat. In the fellowship offering the priests and the worshiper and his family share a meal together in God's presence, which is one of the warmest pictures in the entire Old Testament. Even in the sin offering there are portions that get eaten. The burnt offering alone goes up completely, and chapter 7 tells us that the officiating priest keeps the hide, so the man who brought a bull went home with nothing at all. He walked out of that courtyard poorer than he walked in, and more secure than he had ever been.
I want to be careful here, because there is an obvious sermon in this chapter that is not actually the sermon this chapter is preaching. The obvious one is that God wants all of us, so we should give Him everything. That is true, and Paul says as much in Romans 12, and I already brought it up a few paragraphs ago. But it is not the claim that Leviticus 1 is making. If we jump straight to it, we take a chapter that is telling us what sin costs and we turn it into a chapter about how motivated we ought to be. The completeness of the burnt offering is a measurement before it is a metaphor. It tells us the price of standing at that door, and the price is everything, and then God hands the worshiper an animal so that he does not have to pay it himself.
If you have time this week, read Genesis 22 alongside Leviticus 1. Abraham is told to take his son and offer him as an olah, and it is the same word and the same offering. Isaac carries the wood for the olah up the hill. He asks his father where the lamb for the olah is, and Abraham tells him that God will provide for Himself the lamb. Then a ram shows up caught in a thicket and goes up in his son's place. Everything that Leviticus 1 lays out as law is already sitting inside that story as narrative, including the substitution, the completeness, and the provision that comes from God's side rather than ours. Israel had that story in their hands for generations before they were ever given this chapter.
And if you want to know where all of this is going, Paul says it in one line in Ephesians 5, that Christ gave Himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. The phrase he uses for a fragrant offering is the exact phrase the Greek Old Testament uses at the end of each of the three sections in Leviticus 1. Paul is not reaching for a pleasant image. He is putting Jesus on that altar and telling us that the smoke went up and that it was accepted. Which means that when we are asked to present ourselves as a living sacrifice, we are not being asked to purchase anything. We are being asked to respond to an offering that has already gone up on our behalf and has already been received.
Leviticus chapter 1 describes the burnt offering in three distinct ways. First for someone who brings a bull, second for a person who brings a sheep or a goat, and third for someone who brings two birds. When we read this passage carefully we will notice that each of these offerings end the exact same way, that a burnt offering is a food offering with a pleasing aroma to the Lord. Leviticus is generous in that it adjusts what you bring according to what you have, and it does not adjust what God says about it. The bull was the most valuable asset that a household in Israel could own, and two pigeons were what a day laborer could catch. But God accepts these various burnt offerings in the same way, and Leviticus makes it clear by repeating the same phrase three times for each offering.
The Hebrew word for this offering is olah, and it comes from a verb that means to go up. When I first thought of a burnt offering, my focus always had been on the destruction of the offering, and the fact that a burnt offering is completely consumed by the fire. But in the Hebrew, the idea behind a burnt offering is more pointed at the fact that the smoke goes up to the Lord and the fragrance is pleasing to Him.
What is fascinating is that the worshiper kills the animal himself. Verse 5 is explicit, and verse 11 as well. The priests handle the blood and the fire and the altar, because those are the holy things which are their responsibility, but the killing belongs to the person the offering is for. You brought your own bull, you laid your hand on its head, and you cut its throat in the courtyard while the priests stood by with basins. Israel was an agrarian society, and so they understood how to slaughter animals. We today live in a society in which the killing of animals is so separate from our lives, that even when we go grocery shopping, the stores make sure to make the meat look completely different than the animal they came from. The same today goes for our offering and worship. Many times we fail to recognize that God is asking us to offer ourselves up as a living sacrifice, in that we need to make sure we are the one who is actively and personally involved in the act of worship. Whatever the cost, you paid it with your own hands and could not watch from a distance.
Whole burnt offerings were not something unique to Israel. Many of the surrounding nations burned animals completely for their gods, and the assumption underneath most of those rituals was that the gods needed to be fed. In the Babylonian flood story the gods have gone hungry while the waters covered the earth, and when the survivor finally offers a sacrifice they crowd around the smell of it like flies. Genesis 8 uses that same picture after Noah's offering, and it is not an accident, but what God does with it is completely different. He smells the pleasing aroma, and then He makes a promise never again to curse the ground. Generations later the psalmist says it even more plainly, that if God were hungry He would not tell us, because the world and everything in it already belongs to Him. The nations around Israel were maintaining their gods. Israel was being received by theirs.
Verse 3 says the worshiper brings the animal to the entrance of the tent of meeting, that he may be accepted before the Lord. Verse 4 says that he lays his hand on the animal's head, and it shall be accepted for him, to make atonement for him. God tells us the purpose of the entire ritual before He gives a single instruction about how to carry it out, and the purpose is that a person would be accepted. The verb in verse 3 is passive, which means the worshiper is not accomplishing his own acceptance, he is receiving it. Everything from verse 5 forward is method, and the reason for it was settled two verses earlier.
This is the same order we have been seeing since we started this series. God rescued Israel out of Egypt before there was a law for them to keep, and Leviticus opens with God breaking the silence rather than Israel finding a way into the tent. Here that same pattern shows up inside a single paragraph. Purpose first, and then procedure. If we want to read Leviticus as a system for earning our way into being acceptable, we have to skip over verse 3 in order to do it.
Something else worth noticing is that the word for atonement shows up here in chapter 1, attached to the very first offering, before sin has even been mentioned. Many of us were taught that atonement belongs to the sin offering in chapter 4, and that the burnt offering is more of a gift that we bring. The text does not divide it that way. The burnt offering is the foundational offering, the one that secures our standing in front of God, and the more specific offerings that come later deal with particular failures and particular debts. If we have been carrying around a picture of God in which He handles our sin in one place and receives our worship in another, this chapter puts the two of them together on the first page.
The other thing that separates this offering from every other offering in the book is that nothing comes back. That is easy to miss unless you already know the others. In the grain offering the priests eat. In the fellowship offering the priests and the worshiper and his family share a meal together in God's presence, which is one of the warmest pictures in the entire Old Testament. Even in the sin offering there are portions that get eaten. The burnt offering alone goes up completely, and chapter 7 tells us that the officiating priest keeps the hide, so the man who brought a bull went home with nothing at all. He walked out of that courtyard poorer than he walked in, and more secure than he had ever been.
I want to be careful here, because there is an obvious sermon in this chapter that is not actually the sermon this chapter is preaching. The obvious one is that God wants all of us, so we should give Him everything. That is true, and Paul says as much in Romans 12, and I already brought it up a few paragraphs ago. But it is not the claim that Leviticus 1 is making. If we jump straight to it, we take a chapter that is telling us what sin costs and we turn it into a chapter about how motivated we ought to be. The completeness of the burnt offering is a measurement before it is a metaphor. It tells us the price of standing at that door, and the price is everything, and then God hands the worshiper an animal so that he does not have to pay it himself.
If you have time this week, read Genesis 22 alongside Leviticus 1. Abraham is told to take his son and offer him as an olah, and it is the same word and the same offering. Isaac carries the wood for the olah up the hill. He asks his father where the lamb for the olah is, and Abraham tells him that God will provide for Himself the lamb. Then a ram shows up caught in a thicket and goes up in his son's place. Everything that Leviticus 1 lays out as law is already sitting inside that story as narrative, including the substitution, the completeness, and the provision that comes from God's side rather than ours. Israel had that story in their hands for generations before they were ever given this chapter.
And if you want to know where all of this is going, Paul says it in one line in Ephesians 5, that Christ gave Himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. The phrase he uses for a fragrant offering is the exact phrase the Greek Old Testament uses at the end of each of the three sections in Leviticus 1. Paul is not reaching for a pleasant image. He is putting Jesus on that altar and telling us that the smoke went up and that it was accepted. Which means that when we are asked to present ourselves as a living sacrifice, we are not being asked to purchase anything. We are being asked to respond to an offering that has already gone up on our behalf and has already been received.
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