It's not that God is thirsty for blood.
That's one of these internet village atheist fantasies and caricatures.
That shows they don't really know much of anything about the Bible.
Most of the time, severe moral violations are punishable by either death
or exile from the community.
The people, the offenders are "cut off", that can be either a reference to death penalty,
or a reference to you're kicked out of the community.
You want to live this way? You want to throw your allegiance to some other god?
Bye! Go do that now. Which was a frightening thing.
There is no sacrifice for adultery, to forgive that.
There's no sacrifice for the sin of idolatry.
There's no sacrifice for a lot of things.
It's exile or the death penalty, depending on how you read different passages.
This is the deficiency of the law and the superiority of the gospel
later in the book of Hebrews. Because the sacrifice of Christ covers everything.
There's no like gradation and division. It covers everything.
The blood of bulls and goats do not forgive sin.
The writer of Hebrews knows what he's talking about here.
We misunderstand because we do this inversion thing between Old and New Testament.
The forgiveness language of Leviticus is about making the person acceptable
to re enter the system of worship because they had become ritually defiled,
not morally defiled, but ritually defiled through some thing that was unavoidable in life:
lost blood, seminal emission, menstrual period, I touched the dead body,
I had a baby, that loses blood.
I mean, all of these things make people ritually impure,
you know, I got a skin rash, some imperfection.
The system was designed so that they would not defile sacred space.
So they would bring an offering, they would wait a certain amount of time,
they would go through some procedure.
And then they were okay to approach sacred space with an offering
or worship or whatever they're going to do.
It has nothing to do with moral violation, and forgiveness of moral sin.
Even things like stealing, there were "reparation offerings",
terribly translated as "guilt offering", by the way, listen to the podcast episode.
These are offerings where you would make restitution.
You had to be "forgiven" in the sense that, okay, you've broken the code here.
But the solution here is not just you bring a goat or whatever.
The solution here is you make reparations,
you own what you've done before the Lord,
you're honest about it, you make reparations to people who are harmed,
and then you're allowed back into the system. It's reset for you.
Then of course, annually, they would do the big reset with the Day of Atonement.
Again, there's a lot of stuff going on here.
But I just want to introduce you to some of the basic ideas here.
And again, here's the list of Levitical offerings.
Again, some of the translations are fairly misleading, but they're really all about
protecting sacred space, making people fit for sacred space
so that they can be a functioning part of the community, they can worship the Lord.
They are taught the difference between them and God,
in terms of this protecting sacred space idea.
They learned lots of theological lessons through this.
There's a logic to the Levitical system.
I'm gonna read this selection from Harper's Bible Dictionary.
«The purpose of this sacrifice [and this is in reference to Leviticus 4,
which is the sin offering]
was not to atone for any kind of sin, as the name seems to imply
[again, the blood is never applied to people].
Crimes against other people were dealt with by appropriate punishments
that did not involve sacrifice, while deliberate crimes against God (done ‘with a high hand’)
could not be sacrificially atoned for at all.
Rather, the sin offering was used to cleanse the sanctuary of impurity.»
To purge the impurity to protect it. I like to use the word "decontamination",
in the Leviticus series of the podcast, this is really what's going on here.
The point of course, is that it's more of this cosmic geography stuff.
It's Eden versus anti Eden. It's Yahweh against the other gods.
It's Yahweh's domain versus everything that's not.
You've got sacred space concepts.
You've got cosmic geographical concepts.
Sacrifice itself; I have a note here about de-creation.
Again, there's a logic to the killing of an animal.
It is a substitution, in the sense that, at least the Passover lamb was.
And the Passover lamb, by the way, is not part of the Levitical sacrificial system.
I mean, there's a substitutionary element there.
And again, depending on the context, you could see that there was
a sort of replacement idea that if you want to come back into sacred space,
then this animal is going to die and its blood is going to purify sacred space
and you wait a certain number of days, and we're okay.
Okay, there is that flavor to it.
But ultimately, what it's teaching the Israelites is that look,
if you want to be in the presence of God, Yahweh, the true God, the true Creator.
If you enter his space defiled and defile his space, that is a violation of creation order.
There's the Creator, and there's the creation. There's God and there's you.
You were created to be part of his home and his family; fit for sacred space,
but rebellion and sin, and all the stuff that's happened has made a separation there.
There has to be redemption. We have to reinforce these concepts.
Again, we're on the way to restoring Eden. But we're not there yet.
So we have to sort of set some ground rules here and reinforce some ideas.
Because you're no longer just by default, in sacred space like in Eden,
for you to have that status restored; being fit for sacred space,
something needs to be de-created.
The whole idea is this notion of one thing plays off the other, this balance notion.
The act of sacrificing an animal is acknowledging that the animal lived
because the Creator created it.
It's being given back to the Creator, it's being de-created.
So that this person now can essentially occupy the position, or this person now
is fit for sacred space, they will not tarnish sacred space,
and so the Creator accepts them, but in return de-creates something.
There's a cost to the loss of Eden.
There is a cost to correcting and restoring Eden.
And this cost is illustrated, the concept is illustrated through de-creation, ie sacrifice.
It's not that God is thirsty for blood.
That's one of these internet village atheist fantasies and caricatures.
That shows they don't really know much of anything about the Bible,
or the Levitical sacrificial system, they don't understand it at all. Okay?
It's creation and de-creation.
It's the Creator surrendering something or de-creating something
so that this relationship can be reestablished.
To teach the point that there is a cost to all this.