I recently read of Solomon’s dedication of the Temple in Jerusalem in 2 Chronicles 7, and the celebration was massive. Part of the process was a mass slaughter of animals for sacrifice:
4 Then the king and all the people offered sacrifices before the Lord. 5 And King Solomon offered a sacrifice of twenty-two thousand head of cattle and a hundred and twenty thousand sheep and goats. So the king and all the people dedicated the temple of God.
Have you ever wondered what happened to all those animals? I figured a long time ago they would never waste the meat, and we’re told in the Pentateuch the Levites were given meat from the sacrifices to eat. But they could never eat the meat of all the sacrificed animals, especially during the high holy days. Archaeological exploration has found that animal sacrifice at temple powered ancient Jerusalem’s economy, and it “confirms visions of the temple depicted in historical Jewish texts and suggests the economic heart of the city was its slaughtering operation.”
Something struck me, though, as I thought about this sacrificial operation.
My son away at college recently called me about a strange story in Numbers that didn’t make any sense to him. I asked what the Old Testament is about? And he knows the right answer: Jesus! As we discussed the passage in light of the ultimate Old Testament biblical hermeneutic, it’s surprising how the strangeness of the passage no longer appears so strange. In the context of the redemptive history in the Lord Jesus and the gospel, many Old Testament passages don’t appear so strange.
With this fresh in my mind, I asked myself the same question about the animal sacrifices in 2 Chronicles. Knowing the answer is Jesus is Christianity 101, and our primer is the book of Hebrews. All Christians of every theological stripe know Jesus is the atoning sacrifice for the sins of his people, or the propitiation, which means a sin offering by which the wrath of the deity shall be appeased. We see in the Old Testament sacrificial system a type of Christ’s atoning work turning away the wrath of God against our sin, only in him God’s wrath was fully and completely satisfied. As Jesus said on the cross moments before his death, it is finished.
Again, this is basics, as the writer to the Hebrews might say, baby’s milk. But as I was reading about the sacrifices I thought, that’s a lot of meat for the people to eat! Then a phrase of Jesus very strange to first century Jews, but one we rarely think about today, came to mind: “eat my flesh.” In John 6 as Jesus is declaring he is the bread of life, he declares that his “flesh is real food.” Because of the last supper Jesus shared with his disciples we know this as communion where Jesus says of the bread, “this is my body.” There is also something mystical in partaking of his death as we eat and experience a real spiritual union with the Word of God that we might also partake in his resurrection.
What I had never done before in my 44(!) years as a Christian was connect the Israelites of the Old Testament eating the flesh of sacrificed animals to our eating the flesh of Christ. If the Old Testament is all about Jesus, it makes total sense, yet it never occurred to me until now.
As the meat of the sacrifice to atone for their sins sustained the Israelites as they ate, so the flesh of Christ we spiritually eat sustains us spiritually but in a very real way physically. Spiritual health, i.e., peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, has psychological and emotional effects which have real implications for our physical health. All those things we should not do because we fully trust in God, like worry, doubt, fear, anxiety, anger, etc., cause stress which dishonors our Almighty Savior God, and is not healthy.
This became even more clear to me later in 2 Chronicles 35 when under King Josiah the people celebrated the Passover in Jerusalem. It’s amazing how it echoes communion in the Lord’s Supper.
11 The Passover lambs were slaughtered, and the priests splashed against the altar the blood handed to them, while the Levites skinned the animals. 12 They set aside the burnt offerings to give them to the subdivisions of the families of the people to offer to the Lord, as it is written in the Book of Moses. They did the same with the cattle. 13 They roasted the Passover animals over the fire as prescribed, and boiled the holy offerings in pots, caldrons and pans and served them quickly to all the people. 14 After this, they made preparations for themselves and for the priests, because the priests, the descendants of Aaron, were sacrificing the burnt offerings and the fat portions until nightfall. So the Levites made preparations for themselves and for the Aaronic priests.
This is all a bloody business (thousands upon thousands of animals), which is what I always focused on as it is obviously connected to the blood of our slain Savior. But the Passover wasn’t just about killing animals to cover sin, but was about eating and being sustained by God’s mercy and grace in the eating. Remember the wages of sin? The only reason we are not a smoldering pile of ashes on the ground is because of his mercy and grace. As I often say, if our sin is akin to jaywalking, God’s forgiveness is not that big of a deal. If, on the other hand, it’s akin to genocide, that’s a whole other thing.
That it is the latter, is the reason untold millions of animals had to die in order for us to understand the suffering and death of the Son of God. The only reason we don’t have to go through the bloody business of sacrificing animals today is because God himself in the person of Jesus of Nazareth died to set us free from sin and death. As I wrote recently, he is the double cure for sin!
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