The Book of Leviticus

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. THE BURNT-OFFERING (CONCLUDED). Lev. i. 5-17; vi. 8-13. AFTER the laying on of the hand, the next sacrificial act was? The Killing Of The Victim. And he shall kill the bullock before the Lord .(ver. 5). In the light of what has been already said, the significance of this killing, in a typical way, will be quite clear. For with the first sin, and again and again thereafter, God had denounced death as the penalty of sin. But here is a sinner who, in accord with a Divine command, brings before God a sacrificial victim, on whose head he lays his hand, on which he thus rests as he confesses his sins, and gives over the innocent victim to die instead of himself. Thus each of these sacrificial deaths, whether in the burnt-offering, the peace-offering, or the sin-offering, brings ever before us the death in the sinner's stead of that one Holy Victim who suffered for us, the just for the unjust, and thus laid down His life, in accord with His own previously declared intention, as a ransom for many. In the sacrifices made by and for individuals, the victim was killed, except in the case of the turtle-dove or pigeon, by the offerer himself; but, very naturally, in the case of the national and public offerings, it was killed by the priest. As, in this latter case, it was impossible that all individual Israelites should unite in killing the victim, it is plain that the priest herein acted as the representative of the nation. Hence we may properly say that the fundamental thought of the ritual was this, that the victim should be killed by the offerer himself. And by this ordinance we may well be reminded, first, how Israel, ?for whose sake as a nation the antitypical Sacrifice was offered, ?Israel itself became the executioner of the Victim; and, beyond ...