Friday, January 11, 2019

The Blood Covenant

I've been blessed with some amazing teachers in my life, from kindergarten through to grad school and everywhere in between. My favorite teacher, coincidentally, has been there since the day I was born--Pop. Though I never sat in his school classroom, he's been teaching be since the very beginning. Sometimes the lessons were easy and sometimes they were hard. Whatever the case, though, I can say that Pop has taught me well through the last 34 years (although whether or not I've learned well is sometimes debatable). Today, I want to share the lesson he taught Sunday morning.

On a side note, if you're around Green Forest on a Sunday morning at about 10:15, come visit our little church. We meet in the little white building across from the sale barn, right next to the car wash. And yes, those are sufficient directions to find us even if you've never been to Green Forest. It's not a big place, but you'll get to learn from one of the best teachers around. We're a pretty casual bunch, and we'll welcome you with a hot cup of coffee, breakfast, and a lot of conversation.

Okay, so back to the lesson :)

Sunday morning, Pop took us to the book of Leviticus to talk about Jesus. I know, I know--that sounds a bit strange. I told you that he's a great teacher, not a conventional one. If you aren't familiar with it, Leviticus definitely isn't one of those books I would suggest starting with if you're looking to get into Bible reading. To be honest, it's a great one to read if you're having trouble getting to sleep at night.

In the first few chapters of Leviticus, God is teaching Moses all about the sacrifices Israel is to make. Let me backtrack a bit first, though. God had made a covenant with Israel. He promised to make them His people, a great nation among all the peoples of the world. They had to hold up their end of the bargain, though. That meant they had to follow the law He gave Moses, down to the last letter. This was sealed with a blood covenant, where Moses poured half the blood from the sacrifice on the altar and sprinkled the other half out onto the people of Israel.

Wait a minute--sprinkled them with blood? That sounds incredibly morbid, right? Well, during that time a blood covenant was common. I'm definitely not an expert, but here's a very quick rundown of my understanding: If two people wanted to seal a really important deal, they would do it with a blood covenant. Part of the ritual was to sacrifice an animal and then use the blood as a symbol. If someone broke the covenant, the other person was justified in demanding the payment of blood. That means if you broke the promise, the person you made the covenant had the right to kill you.

So here's Israel, making a blood covenant with God, telling Him that they would follow His law down to the smallest detail in exchange for His protection. If they broke their promise, He would be justified in demanding their lives.

Pretty weighty stuff, right?

Part of the covenant they instated was the rite of sacrifice. Pop pointed out 4 types of sacrifices: burnt offerings, grain offerings, peace offerings, and sin sacrifices.

The first three could be seen as "optional" sacrifices. They are sacrifices of communing with God. The burnt offering is for being in God's presence;
the grain offering is the sacrifice of your labors;
and the peace offering is simply doing something to make God happy, something not required.

The last is the sin sacrifice, and it's the only one that's required. You see, sin demands death. Through the sin offering, God gave Israel a way to pay the price for their sins. He put it in the contract, because He knew His people--He knew they would mess up, and He gave them a way to pay for that right in the contract. Sin demands a spotless sacrifice.

The problem is, God's people broke the covenant. It didn't take long for the promises to follow God and to do whatever He said to turn into griping and complaining about things God wasn't doing for them. In the midst of the wilderness, the Israelites quickly lost sight of everything God had done to pull them out of slavery in Egypt. They forgot how His power had been shown through the plagues. They forgot how the Egyptians had basically paid them to go away, desperate to get on God's good side by freeing His people. Things started to get rough, to not go according to their plans, and they blamed it on God.

Sound familiar? As much as I hate to admit it, it's pretty familiar to me.

So here we are, broken people who broke a blood covenant with God. According to the terms of the contract, He's fully justified in demanding blood to cover the broken covenant.

But God? He knew we would mess up. He knew we would break the covenant. He knew we would owe Him our very lives to cover the debt of blood. Instead of demanding payment from us, though, He took care of it Himself. Remember, sin demands a spotless sacrifice. That means that no matter how much I want to, I can't offer my own life to redeem my kids from the price of blood demanded by the blood covenant. I'm not perfect (big surprise there...). There's nothing I can do to redeem anyone, not even myself.

So God? He provided the contract, gave us a bunch of ways to hold up our end of the bargain, and then provided a sacrifice to cover the demand of our blood for when we failed. He sent the only perfect man, Jesus, to serve as the spotless sacrifice for all mankind.

All we have to do in return is accept that Jesus paid the blood price for us.

Sacrifice wasn't an impersonal thing. The people of Israel were commanded to place their hands on the animal they were sacrificing, to be there with it as they killed it to cover the blood price. Have you ever killed something you were going to eat? It's a totally different thing to buy meat at the grocery store, already cut up and neatly packaged, than it is to harvest a deer after a hunt. You truly see the cost of the sacrifice when you see that one life has been given for another.

The sacrifice of Jesus wasn't an impersonal thing, either. Even though I wasn't there that day, God saw me there. He saw me driving the nails into the hands of His Son, sacrificing Him so that my own debt would be paid.

He saw me,
and He loved me,
and He forgave me.

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~Mandy

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