I love the story of Abraham and Isaac in Gen 22, it shows so many things but mainly how God provides all for our salvation, this little study really shows how its not by works we are saved but all comes from God the Father, though Jesus the true sacrificial lamb. God is so good and wants a relationship with us all, will we not take the gift of time He has given us and spend it with Him in His word, that We might be sanctified? So that we might fulfill Micah 6:6-8 6 Wherewith shall I come before the LORD, and bow myself before the high God? shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves of a year old? 7 Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil? shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? 8 He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God? In a passage where God instructs the Israelites not to eat any blood, He provides an interesting reason for this prohibition: blood stands for life, and God has made sacrificial blood a ransom for human life. One life, represented by the blood, ransoms another life. The principle of substitution, which became explicit on Mount Moriah when Abraham offered the blood of the ram in the place of the blood of his son, is firmly anchored in God’s legal requirements for ancient Israel. As in Genesis 22, God shows that it is He Himself who provides the means for atonement; in the Hebrew the I in “I have given it to you” (Lev. 17:11, NKJV) is emphasized. We cannot provide our own ransom. God must give it. The concept is different from that of other religions that use sacrifices. In the Bible, it is not a human who approaches God and knows how to appease Him; it is God, rather, who provides the means for a person to come into His holy presence. And in Christ, He Himself provides the blood for ransom. Read 1 Samuel 15:22 and Micah 6:6–8. What are some of the dangers of the ritual system? God never intended the sacrificial service to be a substitute for the attitude of the heart; on the contrary, the sacrifices were to open the heart of the believer to the Lord. If we lose sight of the fact that sacrifices express a spiritual relationship between God and us, and that they all point to a much greater sacrifice, Jesus Christ, we could easily mistake the sacrificial ritual for an automatic apparatus for making atonement. Besides sacrifice, God really wants our hearts to be right with Him (Ps. 51:16-17). Consistently the Israelite prophets accused the people of false piety and called for them “to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God” (Mic. 6:6–8, NRSV; compare Isa. 1:10-17).
Posted on: Sat, 01 Feb 2014 15:23:08 +0000
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