I find it interesting at how so many people can’t seem to understand the sacrificial system in the past. Let me explain:
Originally, the punishment for messing up was death. If you messed up, you had to die, it was that simple. And God was no less tolerant when Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit. Those were the rules…you break them, you die. But God knew we would mess up, even before He even gave the Law. So God gave us a way out of the punishment: Burnt Sacrifices. If we wanted to live after messing up, we could please God by killing a certain kind of animal instead of dying, ourselves.
God set up the sacrifice system as an act of mercy! But the people didn’t see this. Instead, after a while, people sacrificed animals as an act of religion. They had taken God’s awesome gift of mercy and turned it into a regular thing they did – as if on a schedule. It became routine, meaningless. I believe that’s why God said through Isaiah, “Enough with your meaningless sacrifices!” God didn’t want routine motions. He didn’t want sacrifices for the sake of sacrifices. He wanted people’s hearts. He wanted people to be so sorry for what they did that after killing and burning this other creature, they would then realize that it should actually be them on the hot coals…they deserved that verdict, and at least try not to commit this act against God again (or ask God to help them to not sin again). It’s something where people should be thankful to God…praising Him on their knees and faces that it was the life of this animal instead of their own that was taken for their sin! But their hearts were not in the sacrifices.
Remember, in the Garden, what are now wild beasts, lived among humankind in peace. In Genesis 2:18, God said, “It is not good that the human should be alone; I will make him a helper as a partner.” And verse 19 tells us that in response, God created from the ground (same as the human) “every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the human to see what he would call them.” Although Genesis 1 says that God made the animals before humans. Genesis 2 doesn’t actually say that the order was reversed, but only that once Adam was created, the Lord brought the animals to him to name. Either way, it was after this that the human realized there still was not a helper as his partner. So God created the female human.
The point is that God values the lives of the animals, too. Adam valued the lives of the animals, and we, as descendants of the first human, should also.
Also, when God flooded the Earth, He made sure that several pairs of clean, and 1 pair of unclean animals were among Noah and his family on the Ark. If they were only saved for sacrificing, then there would only be ritually clean animals, no unclean ones. But God brought both clean and unclean. That’s because God cares for them as well, and we should too, as Adam (the first human) did. Yes, we were created to be above the animals, but they are God’s creation, too.
I suppose you could say, the Israelites began killing the animals for the sake of the kill, not for the sake of sustaining life. In the same way that poachers today kill animals solely for their financial purpose, God’s people killed animals for the sake of the kill, solely for their selfish purposes. There is no honor in killing as a poacher does, neither was there honor in sacrificing for the sake of keeping up their “required duties”.
God wanted the people’s hearts, not their sacrifices. He wanted them as His people, and to be their God…He wanted to be as God and humankind were before the first bloodshed in the garden (Genesis 3:21).
Jesus was the last and final (required) sacrifice…the most perfect of them all. Once and for all, for the sake of all of humankind, Jesus took our place, instead of that of a wild beast.
Above all the reasons for Jesus needing to be the final and perfect sacrifice, maybe one of the other things God was hoping for was that we would come to understand the seriousness of the sacrificial system by having a human die for us. Maybe in the same way, God was trying to help us understand His care for the animals by comparing it with the death of a human for the same reason. But then, Jesus wasn’t just any human…Jesus was, and is, God. God came to us and took the place, not only of the animals, but also those of us who should have been on that cross instead of Him.
See? All throughout history, God was saying, ‘you belong on that sacrificial altar. You should be there, not this animal. It was your fault, your sin, you are the guilty party here, and therefore you should die.’ But because God loves us so, He gave us a way out by allowing us to replace ourselves with an animal of His choosing. And He later replaced us by dying, Himself. This was not as a way of escape from our guilt, but an act of mercy concerning our guilt.
The animals were part of God’s act of mercy. Therefore, we should not make the same mistake our ancestors made. Don’t make God’s act of mercy something to take for granted. God wants our hearts…He’s always wanted our hearts. And we need to give them to Him, full-heartedly if we’re to be fully His.
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