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The Sacrifice of Christ

by Jerry Ousley
3/09/2018 / Christian Living

How would you feel if you had to sacrifice an animal every morning and every evening? Sounds gruesome, at least it does to me. Now don’t get me wrong; I love a good steak. I love good meat. But I have often said that if I had to kill it, gut it, and skin it myself, I would probably end up a vegetarian. I just hate to take the life of an animal. I know that sounds a bit hypocritical; if I am going to eat it then I should be prepared to do the necessary actions to get it; but I am not prepared to do that. If the grocery store ever stops selling meat then I am vegetarian bound.

In Exodus 29:38-46 we are given the law that the Jews were to practice concerning the daily sacrifice. This was in addition to all the other special sacrifices. Each morning and each evening, if no one at all sinned that day and had to bring in their own offering, still at least two animals had to give up their lives for the morning and evening sacrifices. But it was impossible that no one sinned in a day so there were many sacrifices made between the morning and evening ones. These just seemed to kick the day off and bring it to an end at twilight.

What a wonderful thing occurred when Christ died for us on the cross. You see according to Hebrews 7:26-27 we are told “For such a High Priest was fitting to us, who is holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners, and has become higher than the heavens; who does not need daily, as those high priests, to offer up sacrifices, first for His own sins and then for the people’s, for this He did once for all when He offered up Himself.” How wonderful and glorious! His sacrifice on Calvary took care of all sacrifices. Now an innocent lamb or other animal was no longer required to die in our place. Jesus did it for us once and for all!

In addition to the daily offering when people sinned they were to offer a sin offering. Also, once each year the high priest offered a sin offering for the nation. There was also a peace offering – which was an offer of peace from man to God. I won’t go into detail about these two offerings. You can look them up for yourself in your trusty concordance. Just suffice it to say that these had to be given.

For us Jesus became all three of these offerings. He became our daily offering. He died in our place for our sins and so became our sin offering. He did this so that man can make peace with God by accepting Christ as Savior thus applying the power of these offerings to our lives.

Man was the one who sinned in the Garden of Eden. Man is the one who lost the peace of the whole world with God. Man is the one who should have died. But because man was full of sin he was an unclean, imperfect, and unacceptable offering for what had been done. We were doomed and condemned. God instituted the offering system with Israel not to appease Himself for their sin but to show the world that no innocent animal was good enough to once and for all atone for man’s sin. And no man on Earth was good enough to pay the penalty for sin.

Without Christ we really are hopelessly and helplessly lost and doomed to eternal death. But Jesus’ sacrifice took care of all of that. He became our daily sacrifice. He became our sacrifice for sin. And He became the sacrifice to finally make peace with God.

Yes it is sad that He had to die on the cross. Whenever I see a movie about that or read it in the scriptures my eyes fill with tears because it is so sadly devastating that man had the cruelty in his heart to do that to another human being let alone the Son of God. But we did. Yes we as mankind nailed Jesus to the cross. We spit in His face and put the crown of thorns on His head. We made fun of Him as He hung dying on that wooden altar. We ran the spear through His side to make sure that He was dead.

But He allowed it because He loved us. That’s why when He died He prayed to God saying, “Father, forgiven them, for they do not know what they do.” (Luke 23:34). We had no idea that we were slaying our final sacrifice.

Thank God He arose claiming victory over sin and death. But by this process of dying and being resurrected Jesus also gave us that victory. All we are required to do is to believe – believe to the point that we are willing to completely change our lives to be free from the curse of sin. Then He becomes our daily sacrifice, our sin sacrifice, and our peace sacrifice. Praise God!

Jerry D. Ousley is the author of ?Soul Challenge?, ?Soul Journey?, ?Ordeal?, ?The Spirit Bread Daily Devotional and his first novel ?The Shoe Tree.? Visit our website at spiritbread.com to download these and more completely free of charge.

Article Source: http://www.faithwriters.com-CHRISTIAN WRITERS

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