Thoughts on Leviticus 4

Today’s reading: Leviticus 4; 1 Thessalonians 1-2

I knew it was coming up soon, but I had forgotten how quickly we got into “sin offerings” in Leviticus, but, like I’ve mentioned a couple times now, I want to talk a bit about what these offerings are and aren’t.

For many Christians, myself included, when we hear or read about a “sin offering” we immediately filter that through our New Testament understanding of Jesus’ sacrifice for our sin. This though is a sacrifice they have to make regularly, so we see in that how Jesus’ sacrifice was so much better than these Levitical sin offerings since Jesus’ death covers all our sins once for all, but the death of the sin offering only covered one “sin event.”

But, as I’ve mentioned in previous days’ posts, this is not what the Levitical sin offering was about, and if we take that trajectory, we miss just how much better Jesus’ sacrifice really is.

Sin Purification Offering

In his work on it, Dr. Michael Heiser points out that “sin offering” is not actually a good translation of the Hebrew, for technical reasons I’m not going to dive into here, but you can go listen to his podcast episode about it if you’re interested. Instead of “sin offering,” Dr. Heiser suggests “purification offering,” and I think that really helps make some important distinctions.

First and foremost, we have to realize that these offerings do not cover intentional sins. From the beginning, it is repeated over and over that this offering is for people who sin unintentionally only (e.g. a non-priest accidentally eating part of a consecrated sacrifice that only priests and their families are allowed to eat, not realizing what it was). Later on, as we go further in Leviticus, other categories will be included as being covered by this offering, like touching a dead body, child birth, etc., things which have absolutely no moral component to them and so cannot be called “sinful” at all.

Under the Levitical system, there is no forgiveness of intentional sin. When you sin intentionally, you either make restitution immediately, or you are put to death, depending on the severity of the offense, but there is no sacrifice you can bring to the altar to be “forgiven.”

The other thing we have to realize about this purification offering is that it isn’t really about the individual like we tend to think of sacrifice. Again, filtering this through the work of Jesus, we think, “I sinned, so I needed a sacrifice to cover my sin, and Jesus did that, so now my sin is paid for and I am forgiven.” It is a very individual-centric perspective on what sacrifice accomplishes.

This sacrifice though is not so much about forgiveness for the individual as it is about purification of sacred space from contamination or defilement. You can see this in the nuances of how the sacrifice is performed based on who committed the “sin” and how much access they have to sacred space.

A priest, for example, enters all the way into the tabernacle, stopping only before the curtain to the most holy place, so their unintentional sin defiles the tabernacle all the way up to that curtain, which is why, when a priest is involved in the offering as one of the “sinners” (either as the individual who sinned or as part of the community doing something), the blood gets sprinkled against the curtain. If it is a non-priest though, they do not have the same access to the tabernacle, so their contamination of sacred space does not reach as far, so the blood of their sacrifice is only put on the horns of the altar and poured out at the based of the altar.

It does say that after the sacrifice the individual is forgiven, but again, we will see this same language used later of someone making this offering after childbirth, so we are not talking about moral forgiveness here like we find in Jesus. Instead, again, we are talking about the removal of contamination and the ability of that person to again be part of the community of Israel and participate in the worship of Yahweh without defiling the camp or the tabernacle.

Yahweh is holy, He is completely “other,” and for His presence to continue to dwell among the Israelites as His chosen people, they needed to understand and respect that holiness, and this purification offering provided a practical reminder and means of maintaining that holiness.

Jesus’ sacrifice is better

The reason I’m even bothering to point this out is that we need to realize just how much greater the sacrifice of Jesus is than any Levitical sacrifice could ever be. The notion of being morally forgiven and made right before God by a sacrifice, especially for intentional sin (and who among us has not sinned intentionally?), is completely foreign to the Old Testament systems of worship.

Jesus’ death on the cross was not just a better or more complete version of the Levitical sacrifices, but was categorically different. Praise God for just how different, and how complete, the sacrifice of Jesus is!