Sunday 09 • 23 • 18

If anyone of the Lord's commandments about the things not to be done and does anyone of them, if it is the anointed priest who sins, thus bringing guilt on the people, then he shall offer for the sin that he has committed a bull from the herd without blemish to the Lord for a sin offering. He shall bring the bull to the entrance of the tent of meeting before the Lord and lay his hand on the head of the bull and kill the bull before the Lord. And the anointed priest shall take some of the blood of the bull and bring it into the tent of meeting and the priest shall dip his finger in the blood and sprinkle part of the blood seven times before the Lord in front of the veil of the sanctuary. And the priest shall put some of the blood on the horns of the altar of fragrant incense before the Lord that is in the tent of meeting. And all the rest of the blood of the bull he shall pour out at the base of the altar of burnt offering that is at the entrance of the tent of meeting. And all the fat of the bull of the sin offering he shall remove from it. The fat that covers the entrails and all the fat that is on the entrails and the two kidneys with the fat that is on them at the loins and the long lobe of the liver that he shall remove with the kidneys. Just as these are taken from the ox of the sacrifice of the peace offerings. And the priest shall burn them on the altar of burnt offering. But the skin of the bull and all its flesh with its head, its legs, its entrails, and its tongue, all the rest of the bull he shall carry outside the camp to a clean place to the ash heap and shall burn it up on a fire of wood. On the ash heap, it shall be burned up. — Leviticus 4:1-12

If anyone commits a breach of faith and sins unintentionally in any of the holy things of the Lord, he shall bring to the lord as his compensation, a ram without blemish out of the flock, valued in silver shekels according to the shekel of the sanctuary for a guilt offering. He also shall make restitution for what he has done amiss in the holy thing, and shall add a fifth to it, and give it to the priest. And the priest shall make atonement for him, and the ram of the guilt offering, and he shall be forgiven. If anyone sins, doing any of these things that by the Lord's commandments ought not to be done, though he did not know it, then realizes his guilt, he shall bear his iniquity. He shall bring to the priest a ram without blemish out of the flock or its equivalent for a guilt offering. And the priest shall make atonement for him and the mistake that he made unintentionally and he shall be forgiven. It is a guilt offering. He has indeed incurred guilt before the lord. — Leviticus 5:14-19

If anyone sins and commits a breach of faith against the lord by deceiving his neighbor in a matter of deposit or security or through robbery or if he has oppressed his neighbor or has found something lost and lied about it swearing falsely. In any of all the things that people do and sin thereby, if he has sinned and has realized his guilt and will restore what he took by robbery or what he got by oppression or the deposit that was committed to him or the lost thing that he found or anything about which he has sworn falsely, he shall restore it in full and shall add a fifth to it and give it to him to whom it belongs on the day he realizes his guilt and he shall bring to the priest as his compensation to the Lord a ram without blemish out of the flock or its equivalent for a guilt offering. And the priest shall make atonement for him before the Lord and he shall be forgiven for any of the things that one may do and thereby become guilty. — Leviticus 6:1-7

The word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

Alright. Remember the good old days when we started this series on Leviticus and we did like a half verse? We've downshifted now. Last week, we covered the first three chapters and three different kinds of offerings that took place in the tabernacle, in the sacrificial system of ancient Israel, and now we're covering three more chapters dealing with two more sacrifices.

So we do that. Let me go to God in prayer. Lord, we thank you for your word. We thank you for the work of redemption that you have done throughout the ages, and ultimately in your son, Jesus Christ. We pray this morning that as we consider these final two sacrifices of ancient Israel that you would enliven our hearts that we would be made more aware of the immense privileges we have in your son. Lord, point us to Christ. We would see him. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.

Well, as I mentioned, we're looking at the last two sacrifices in a five sacrifice system of ancient Israel, the five sacrifices laid out in the first several chapters of Leviticus.

And just to review, the last couple weeks Jeff started by painting a picture of the tabernacle or the temple. Just to remind you, essentially what that was—it was pretty incredible, really. Mankind had been cast out of the garden, but through this system of sacrifices, God was making his dwelling place with his people again. It was almost like there was this portal, this dimensional rift that was opened up in which his people had access again to him directly as they did in the garden.

A lot of the imagery of the tabernacle and the temple as Jeff went through was Edenesque, symbolizing that return to God's presence. The sacrifices—the first three sacrifices were really sacrifices of approach. It was essentially the sacrifice of the burnt offering, which was an ascension, meant to image the people going into the presence of the divine. Then there was a grain offering, which was meant to image a tribute, basically them offering themselves holy to God. And then a peace offering, a shalom offering, that was essentially them altogether fellowshipping in a great feast of perfect fellowship and unity with God.

My son James has a game, LEGO Dimensions, where he builds these little LEGO characters and puts them on this little platform that connects to our Wii U game system. The little things that he builds suddenly appear on the screen and he's able to play with them. That's essentially what's going on here. God is creating a passageway into his presence from this fallen, decaying, messed up world—all kinds of sin, all kinds of wrong, all kinds of decay, all kinds of impurity—into his holy dwelling place. It's really something.

But the thing that's challenging is that God didn't just make a way for the people to come in. That wouldn't have been enough. Because the problem is as the people come in, there's still sin, there's still decay, there's still fallenness, there's still uncleanliness that surrounds them.

And so the question that the last two sacrifices essentially deal with is: okay, great. God's made this way for me to come into his perfect, holy, pure presence, and that's cool. He's cleared a passageway for me, but what about my ongoing sin and guilt? What if when I enter into the portal, when I'm in the camp with the holy God that consumes all impurity with fire, I have an impure thought? What is God gonna do if I mess up now that I'm enjoying full fellowship with him? In other words, what if you're sitting at the table of God, right, having a meal with him and you burp? Or worse. What do you do with the fact that you're still a mess and God has made a way for you to sit down at the table with him? That's what these last two sacrifices have to deal with.

The Cost of Living in God's Presence

This summer was a hard summer for my family. We did this big addition to our house several years ago and it was amazing, it was incredible. We had this 1,200 square foot house. We added on to it and it became a 2,000 square foot house, which was really great because we had had five kids from the time when we bought that 1,200 square foot house till now. When we did this addition, we renovated everything in our house. It felt like a brand new place. It was all clean and beautiful. When it was done, we were just like, "Oh, space and clean walls. Everything was nice."

We replaced all the windows and the siding and the paint. Everything was beautiful. And then we brought our five kids in there and we started living, and grime started getting on the walls because people rub stuff on there and throw food at dinner. All of that started happening. And then this summer, we had a dishwasher leak where the water actually went underneath the beautiful flooring that we had installed four years ago and mold started to grow. Eventually our floors started to buckle. There were problems. That's another look at what these last two sacrifices are meant to deal with.

God has made his dwelling in and amongst his people, but he wasn't so naive as to think that there wouldn't be damage, there wouldn't be issues, that there wouldn't be ongoing maintenance that was necessary for him to remain in relationship with his people.

And so these last two offerings—the first offering is called the hathat offering, which is a sin offering. Hathat means sin. I'm gonna show you that I think it's probably best understood as a purification offering. We'll talk about that. And then the other offering is the Asham offering, which is translated as guilt—it's a guilt offering, which I think is better translated or better understood as a reparation offering, and we'll talk about that.

So those are our two points for this morning, just two points, right? Three chapters, but two points. So we're gonna do it. First thing that I want us to look at is the Hatat offering. This was an offering for unintentional and intentional sin. The unintentional part is dealt with in chapter four, the intentional part is dealt with in the beginning of chapter five.

And essentially, the sacrifice was different for different people. It depends on kind of how high ranking you were, if you were a priest, if it was a sin of the entire congregation, if it was a sin of a leader, or if it was a sin of an individual, it was handled differently. And all of chapter four deals with all of that. But essentially, whatever the issue was, some animal, depending on who it was, was different—some animal was brought as a sacrifice. The sacrificer would lay his hand on the animal, sacrifice it, kill it. Blood would be poured out in different places depending on who it was, blood would be poured out as a cleansing, and then a lot of the animal would be burned up as essentially a symbolic gesture of the death of all of that sin. The sin would be killed, essentially.

There were certain parts of the law that required this offering not just for sin, but also for purification issues. If you, for whatever reason, became ceremonially unclean, you also offered this sacrifice, which is why I think that this is best understood as a purification sacrifice. And purity, holiness, is really important in the language of Leviticus. It's really important. And that's essentially what God is trying to do—preserve the purity of the temple and to protect the impure from his all-consuming purity. It's dangerous, essentially, for the impure to come into the presence of God. And God wants his temple to be pure and clean and holy and blameless, and so he has to clean this.

When we had our water leak at our house and the water got under the floors, we waited about a month because we were kind of hoping maybe it'll just dry out, right? And the floors started to buckle and we started to talk to more people and they were like, "You know what their big concern was? They were like, You have five little kids and you've got all this water underneath your flooring, in between your flooring and your subflooring. You know what's gonna grow there? Mold. And that mold is gonna be dangerous to you, right? Eventually, it's gonna cause health problems potentially for you and your family. You have to deal with the cleanliness problem of your house. You've gotta clean it."

And that's what the Hatat offering was about. It was about cleaning the temple, purifying it from all impurity and uncleanliness that's brought about by sin. Our sin makes us unclean. It makes us impure. It makes a real problem for us to be in fellowship with God. And God—I hope you see, this is something that's so beautiful. God doesn't just deal with your past sins. He came up with a plan to deal with your ongoing sins.

Our floor replacement involved this week-long water mitigation process where they ripped out all the floors and they brought in all these fans, cost thousands of dollars. Replacing our floors cost $15,000. But fortunately, we had an insurance policy and we only paid $500 of that. Score! God wanted an insurance policy for his people as well as they come into his presence. He knew that there was gonna be ongoing issues of their purity.

You know, in our current kind of experience of God, the temple is no longer a place in Jerusalem. It's no longer a tent. There's no longer a tabernacle. We are the temple. We are the temple. Think about that for a minute. God dwells within you. He dwells inside of you. That means all of your sin, all of your impurity, that goes straight into the house of God.

God needs to have a way of dealing with that and the good news is that not only in Leviticus, but also now, God had an insurance policy for us. Our insurance policy is the great sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Their insurance policy was the Levitical offering of Hatat, right? And I want to look at a couple of different observations from this.

First of all, I want you to see how their process offered them a way to own and disown their sins simultaneously. They had a process by which they could own and disown their sin simultaneously. It's the same with us. It's fuller with us, but it's the same. They essentially would bring this animal, they'd lay their hands on him, as I said. Essentially, that's an association, a recognition of, "Hey, I have this sin and I need to place it somewhere else. I'm owning my sin. I'm coming to the temple. It's a very public act, right? They're coming to the temple, owning their sins, saying, 'Hey, look at me, I'm here to make a sin offering,' everyone would know. Very outing, right?"

They would come and place their hand and publicly sacrifice this animal, recognizing their sin and their need for a sacrifice. They're owning it. We similarly have an opportunity to own our sin and we're invited to do that. We are asked to do that. We confess our sins every week during our worship service here at this church. That's not just merely some sort of liturgical dance that we do just because we think it's cute. It's something that we do because we need to own our sin. It's something that God wants us to do.

You know, the temptation had to be for the Israelites. Just imagine this, right? You've got a tent in the center of your camp where at various different times the presence of God is obvious. The consuming fire of God's presence is there. And then you sin. What do you want to do? Let me just hide that in my tent. Let me not let anybody see that because we're right here in the presence of God. The fear factor had to be huge. They experienced it when Moses was on Sinai. They had to experience it in the camp.

And you know what? You guys experience it too. I know you do because I talk to you. There are some of you that over time have developed different ways of dealing with your sin that doesn't look like confession, that doesn't look like owning. It looks like running, it looks like blame shifting, it looks like hiding, it looks like deceiving others and yourself. And you feel like you need to do it because you're a Christian now. You're not supposed to sin anymore. That's sometimes the impression that we get, or sometimes the impression that Christians give.

But the truth about the gospel and the truth about Christ and his sacrifice means you don't have to hide. There is no reason that you can't own your sin. There's no reason why you have to hide it. Jesus Christ, God, has always had a plan, an insurance policy for how to deal with your ongoing sinfulness. Your sin is not a surprise to him. It's not something that shocks him. It's not something that he suddenly was like, "Oh, I didn't see that coming." He saw it all coming, and from the very beginning he had a plan. He had a plan in Leviticus that pointed to an ultimate plan in Christ that points to an ultimate plan in heaven. We can own our sin, brothers and sisters in Christ. We don't have to hide. We don't have to run.

Owning and Disowning Sin

But also in the sacrificial system, I want you to see that there was a way to not only own, but also to disown sin. And that's important because I think that many of us struggle with that on the other side. This process of laying your hands on the animal and sacrificing it was like you're owning it, but I'm also separating it off from myself and putting it onto this animal somehow. I'm pressing my hand, recognizing my sin, but I'm not gonna hold on to it. I'm giving it away. And that's a weird process—something to think about: how do you do that?

Romans 7, the apostle Paul talks very transparently about his sin. He says, "Sometimes I do what I don't want to do. Other times I don't do what I want to do," and he says this very curious phrase:

"When I do what I don't want to do, I find that it's not me, but it's sin living within me." — Romans 7

What a total cop out, right? I can tell you this: if I went to my wife at some point and I've sinned against her and I said, "You know, honey, I know I really hurt you, but that really wasn't me. That was just sin living within me"—that's not gonna go well, right?

But it's not a cop out. What Paul is essentially saying is not that he's disowning his sin and saying that he's not responsible for it or he's not to blame for it. He's saying that he doesn't want it to be the core of who he is. He doesn't want it to be the core of who he is. He wants to disassociate from it. He wants to take it away from him, and he wants to kill it.

And that's what the sacrificial system represented. They put their hand on the animal, the sin goes into the animal, the sin is destroyed, sacrificed violently to totally cleanse, to totally wash away sin.

Now, just as there are some who struggle to own sin, I know that there are some of you who struggle to disown it. Some of you are very quick to own your sin. Some of you talk to me about it. Some of you are so grieved by it. Some of you have so much trouble realizing the forgiveness that is offered to you in Christ. You have trouble disowning it. You have trouble believing that a perfect God would ever forgive you for whatever it is that you've done.

God, for thousands of years, knew about your sin and he knew you were gonna need a way to deal with it.

He knew that they needed a way and we now have a fuller way in Jesus Christ. So whatever sin you're struggling with this morning, whatever you're wrestling with, whatever you can't let go of for whatever reason, whatever you think is so sinful about you that God can't wash it away, he can. He can wash it away in the blood of Christ, and he's promised to do that.

And that brings me to the last thing that I want you to see about this sin offering. He was violent and bloody and costly. I think we can kind of think about the people in the Old Testament like they were maybe desensitized to some of the killing that would have taken place here at the temple, because after all, unlike us who go to Chick-fil-A to eat our chicken, they had to kill whatever they were eating. The point is, they had to kill all the time, so this wouldn't have been a big deal to them, they would have been desensitized to that.

I think maybe not. Maybe not. I think that this would have been an incredibly hard thing for them. Consider the fact that the animal had to be spotless, blameless. They're taking the best of their flock. And these are people that raise these animals for a living. When the Bible talks about a shepherd knowing his sheep by name, think about that for just a minute. If you've raised an animal from birth and you see it grow into this perfect spotless thing, you're going to feel a little bit of an attachment to that. Anybody have pets? You have pets, you look into their eyes, you feel a little attachment.

So I think that these people bringing this spotless, perfect animal, and there were accommodations made for, as Jeff mentioned last week, for whether you were wealthy or poor. Whatever the animal was that you were bringing, there would have been an attachment. You would have had to look that animal in the eye and kill it. That would have been so hard. It would have almost felt like you were killing a child.

And I think that there's a sense that we can think about these sacrifices and think, okay, well these were the Israelites bringing sacrifices, but these were people who recognized that everything that they had came from God. They saw these animals not as something that they of themselves owned or had rights to. They saw them as a provision from God. And they saw in these animals this perfect, spotless way for them to be forgiven of their sins and they killed it. How jarring must that have been?

How jarred are you by the sacrifice that God has offered for you? I think sometimes we come in here and we do move through the confession of sin, we do move through the Lord's Supper, and there's no aspect of us looking Jesus in the eyes and realizing that the Son of God is who was sacrificed for our sins. There's a sense in which every Sunday ought to be Good Friday for us. Every Sunday should also be Easter, by the way, and Christmas, and all of those other things that we kind of sense liturgically move through. We celebrate all of Christ every Sunday, but on the Good Friday aspects of that, is that lost on you? Have you ceased to be shocked by the incredible sacrifice that God has provided for you? Do you come face to face with the horrific, deadly aspects of your sin as they are poured out on Christ himself?

That is what we do on Sunday mornings. And it's not an exercise merely in navel gazing or rubbing our face into our sin, but it's an exercise of engaging with both the beauty and the horror of the cross. The horror in that our sin is terrible, but the beauty in that God himself came down to die for you. Your sin is taken care of.

As we go through this portal, as we're engaged in the current situation that we find ourselves in, there is a way that God has provided for our sin to flake off of us even as we are moving closer and closer into his presence for eternity. Your sins are not surprising. God has one heck of an insurance policy prepared to cover you in the Lord Jesus Christ, and we celebrate it every Sunday. We come face to face with it every Sunday. And it's not something that we re-sacrifice. We don't view this as a re-sacrifice of Christ. It's a once and for all penalty paid by the Son of God himself, and we celebrate it and we rejoice in it every Sunday.

Do you do that? Do you come in here? Do you engage with the reality of that? The reality that God is bringing you through this portal and is dwelling within you and has made a way for you to be in communion and fellowship with him. What a blessing. What an amazing thing.

The Guilt or Reparation Offering

Alright. Second point is the guilt or the reparation offering. The Hebrew word is asham, which means guilt, but there's also a sense of reparation.

Kind of the deal with this one, and it's dealt with at the end of Leviticus chapter five into Leviticus chapter six, is essentially that you can do wrong either to God or to other people that costs something. You can do damage that causes issues that really require you to spend money to fix. Our floors, right, is the example. $15,000. It didn't cost $15,000 to put those floors in the first time. It cost $15,000 to deal with them and put them in the second time. And that's pictured here.

Anytime there's any kind of sin of this nature that's dealt with in the sacrifice in the Old Testament, you not only have to offer an offering to God, you also have to go to whoever was wronged, whether it's God or somebody else, and you have to make a reparation payment of essentially 120%. You pay for it and then on top of what it originally was worth, you add 20%. And that's to repair the damage.

There's a break that these sins represent. Sin isn't just an issue of impurity. It's not just the mold that we have to deal with. It's the breaking up of the floors. It's the broken stuff that needs to be repaired. And as we go through life and as we sin, there's not only an impurity issue that we have with God, there's a brokenness that we have with God. There's a broken relationship that we have with him. There's a broken relationship that we have with each other. And this sacrifice was meant to deal with that. Of course, we see the complete fulfillment in Christ's sacrifice. It's another picture of what Christ does for us.

When the New Testament talks about Christ paying for you, redeeming you, there's a financial element to his work, and that's recognized in this sacrifice. The temple payments were done in shekels of the temple, silver shekels. He would pay 120% of what originally was the cost. And essentially, Christ is paying for more than your sin. He's more than a payment to restore.

Similarly, I want you to see that there's a vertical and a horizontal aspect to this sacrifice, right? It's not just that Christ is restoring the relationship between us and God, but he also restores the relationship between us and each other.

You know, this allowance for reparation, restoration within relationship in the Old Testament was great, important, and valuable. The people were told that they could go and make amends for their sins, not just with God but with each other. There was hope that when you sinned against someone you could actually repair the break in relationship that existed there. How much hope do you have as Christians of that? Do you think about how Christ's sacrifice has an implication not just with your relationship with God but your relationship with other people in this room? Other people groups that are not in this room? Do you think about the wrong that you've experienced or the wrong that you've done to others and think about whether or not that can be fixed?

God had a plan for that from the beginning, and we who are in Christ have more hope for reconciliation than they did. We have a fuller picture of the extent to which God is willing to go in order to repair damage that exists between you and other people. That should give you incredible hope.

Now I just want to say pastorally, right, there are some of you in this room that have experienced hurt that I can't even begin to understand. So I don't want to just run over that and say, "Hey, you should just forgive each other because Jesus." But in Christ we have incredible hope, incredible capital to go and approach others who have wronged us with the anticipation that he's going to work somehow. And it's not going to be easy, it's going to be costly, it's going to be hard, but he can work because he's paid the sacrifice enough to cover our sin, not just with him, but with each other.

The stories abound of how Christ has worked in difficult relationships. You can read about people who were tortured by Nazis who through Christ found their way to forgiving them. You can read about marriages that were falling apart, that through Christ were reconciled. I can share story after story of redemption, of relationship even within this congregation. I won't do that because I don't have permission to do that. But if you talk to each other, each of us have experienced some of those, and we can have hope that Christ can work in our relationships. He offers incredible opportunity for reconciliation.

The Sacrificial System and Hope for Change

So in conclusion, I want to try to summarize all of the sacrificial system and talk a little bit about, as we look to Christ and we look beyond Christ, what's going on. I want us to see that the sacrificial system as a whole offers hope for change.

You know, there's this sense in which all these animals are sacrificed, all of them. You look at it and it's kind of like, isn't that an incredible waste? It would be an incredible waste if there wasn't some sort of purpose to it. The Israelites had to have been sacrificing all these animals, thinking to themselves, "Man, again I'm going to offer a sacrifice. God again is cleansing me. Why is he doing this?" Unless he has some sort of greater plan. That greater plan, of course, was Jesus.

We should be thinking, hey, as I continue to sin, as I continue to be impure, as I continue to cause breaks in relationships with God and with other people, God continues to forgive me. Why would he do that? Unless he has a greater plan? There's hope for change. He who began a good work in you will be faithful to complete it, Paul says. Or to put it this way:

And by that will we have been made holy through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once and for all. Day after day, every priest stands and performs his religious duties. Again and again, he offers the same sacrifices which can never take away sins. But when this priest had offered for all time one sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God. Since that time he waits for his enemies to be made a footstool because by one sacrifice, by one, he has made perfect forever those who are being made holy. — Hebrews 10

Did you hear the end of that? We are being made holy. There is a purpose to Christ's sacrifice. It wasn't simply to cover over our sins so that we could enter into an eternity of relationship with each other in imperfection. That would be terrible. He's making us holy, bringing us into eternity perfected and cleansed and purified. And in the interim, we get a taste of that. But that's where we're going. Remember the nesting dolls? That's where we're going.

The Blood and Access to God

I also want you to notice, finally, that in the offering, the different ranks of people—if the priest or the congregation sinned, the blood went further towards the Holy of Holies. If it was just a leader or a normal person, the blood got poured out in front of the altar and right on the horns of the altar and that was it. But if it was a priest who represents mankind, essentially like the people of God to God, or if it was the whole community that sinned, well, then there was a little bit more involved. Not only was the blood poured there, but they also went into the holy place and they sprinkled it before the veil that separated the holy of holies.

In our sacrifice, the blood didn't just stop at the veil. It went into the holy place, into the holy of holies. Jesus Christ himself offered a sacrifice. The blood that was poured cleansed the entire temple and made complete access so that—that's why the veil was ripped in two. There was no longer any need for it. The blood had purified all the way into the holy of holies, and we had access. We have access perpetually because of that one sacrifice of Jesus Christ.

Again, Hebrews:

But when Christ appeared as high priest of the good things to come, he entered through the greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made with hands, that is to say not of this creation and not through the blood of goats and calves, but through his own blood. He entered the holy place once for all having obtained eternal redemption. For the blood of goats and bulls and the ashes of a heifer sprinkling those who have been defiled sanctified for the cleansing of the flesh, how much more, how much more will the blood of Christ who through the eternal spirit offered himself without blemish to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God. — Hebrews

God has made a way for your relationship to him to be closer than theirs and for it to be perpetually preserved by the one sacrifice of Jesus Christ.

The Broken Cup

One final illustration: this cup. Hang with me, I'm not going where you think I'm going. Several months ago, this cup was broken. It got knocked off the altar, fell on the ground, and shattered. It seemed like it was Saturday night and we didn't have a cup for the Lord's Supper. That was a problem, right? And so we were talking about how do we figure this out? Can we go get another cup? Where are we gonna go? What's open? Where are we gonna get another cup? Are we just gonna—does somebody have a wine glass? What can we do? And there wasn't really anywhere to go. So I took it home and I washed it off. The edges where it had broken, some of the grit was still in there, I brushed it off and I was surprised, but it fit back together. So I got some glue and I glued it back together. You guys have been using a Lord's Supper cup for the last six months and you had no idea that it was broken, did you?

The sin offering is similar to the cleansing of the cracks. You clean it off, it fits back together. But that's not enough.

Right? There needs to be reparation. The glue offering holds it together. Jesus Christ offers you both for eternity, bringing you, cleansing you, and gluing you in absolute perfection and in total unity with God and with each other.

Praise him who entered into that sanctuary and made a sacrifice one time for all that covered all of the sacrifices and gave us unity with the father and with each other.

In the name of the lord Jesus Christ, the father, the son, and the spirit. Amen.