The Israelites, like all people, had at least two problems:
- They were alienated from God by their sin.
- The heart of their sin was that they didn’t want to submit to God.
Before looking at the offerings we see in Leviticus, it might be helpful to briefly look at these problems.
We’re in trouble because we’re alienated from God.
We have all rebelled against God and tried to live life without Him involved.
This is a problem because we were made to live as God’s people. Genesis 1 - 2 tell us that God created us and gave us this world to fill and cultivate. Romans 12:1 tells us that we should give ourselves to God ” as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God”. In line with this idea, the first question in the Westminster Shorter Catechism teaches that our chief end (or reason for existence) is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him forever. God created all people to live life as His people in joyful dependence on God.
For us there is no better life than to submit ourselves to God. When we depend on God, something of His glory is seen in our dependence on Him. If we don’t give ourselves to God, our lives lack the sense of meaning and place that God intends them to have. We may be successful in the things we do, but ultimately without submission to God everything we do is meaningless and unsatisfying.
So our being alienated from God is a big problem. Our sin prevents us coming to God, and therefore it prevents us from being happy.
However, there is another more fundamental problem.
We’re in trouble because we want to alienate ourselves from God
We think that to be happy we need to be free of God … free of restrictions. So we rebel against God and try to live life without him.
In other words, not only has our past sin alienated us from God, but we are still actively making that alienation worse.
We don’t want to do the very thing we were created to do. We don’t want to give ourselves to God. We want to chase the things this world offers without reference to God. We want all the good things our creator God gives us, but we prefer to leave Him out of the package.
Immediately after their rescue from Egypt, the Israelites began grumbling and chasing after false gods. This shouldn’t be surprising to us; we do the same thing. We chase after money and sex and power and worship those things as false gods.
In Romans 1, Paul tells us that at the heart of sin is valuing other things more highly than God:
21For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools 23and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles. … 25They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised.
We are designed to glorify God and to find our satisfaction in Him. Instead, we glorify creation and try to find our satisfaction in it. It won’t work. It can’t work. Creation was not designed to satisfy us. Creation was designed to help us glorify God, and find our satisfaction in him. We need to remember God and submit to him. Then we will be truly free. Then we can be truly happy.
The offerings in Leviticus show that God intends to rescue us and deal with our alienation from Him
God rescues us from alienation so we can again give ourselves to Him. In calling Abraham to follow Him, and later, in rescuing the Israelites from Egypt, God showed that he intended to rescue people from the alienation. Just as the Israelites were slaves to the Egyptians, so are all people slaves to our sinful desire to rebel against God. Just as God rescued the Israelites from Egypt, so God, through Jesus, rescues us from our slavery to sin.
The offerings in Leviticus primarily address our first problem above. They show that our sin can be dealt with so that our alienation from God can end. The offerings don’t specifically address the second problem above, but they hint at the fact that it can be addressed. They do this by modelling the idea of giving ourselves freely and wholeheartedly to God. As we will see in the next post, the offerings in Leviticus express recognition that all that we have and are belongs to God.































