Leviticus 4:33

‘He shall lay his hand on the head of the sin offering and slay it for a sin offering in the place where they slay the burnt offering.

The Old Testament was given to us as a teacher. God used it so that he could teach men about sin. God did not have to wait thousands of years to bring Christ and offer Him as a sacrifice for our sins. And yet He did because it was a part of His plan. He wanted it to wait until the fullness of times. Part of that was dealing the kingdoms and having a fertile soil. The other part was that He used the Law to help men understand what sin was and its consequences.

One of the biggest lessons can be found in the sin offerings in Leviticus 4. What we see is that when a man sinned (and note that the sins under discussion or the unintentional or ignorant ones) he had to offer a goat or a lamb as a sacrifice. From this we can get a glimpse at the cost of sin. First it hurt the owner because it was a financial loss to give up an unblemished lamb. The second part though is the severity of sin. Blood had to be shed. They could not just scare the goat or injure. They had to place their hand on the goat and kill it themselves. Their sin meant the death of the lamb. They sat there and executed what they deserved on that lamb.

That lesson is carried over to Jesus. He was referred to by John the Baptist as the Lamb of God. The lamb that was sacrificed in the Old Testament was teaching us that sin brought about death. And yet a lamb’s life for ours was not a one to one comparison. To be truly fulfilled, God’s plan needed us to be redeemed by Jesus, the unblemished lamb. Redemption that could only come through His death. Having never slain a lamb for our sins, it might be easy for us to forget the correlation between sin and death and that it was us who put our hand on Jesus for the sacrifice and caused Him to die. Yet we must not forget because that lesson is the core of the entire gospel message.

‘He shall lay his hand on the head of the sin offering and slay it for a sin offering in the place where they slay the burnt offering.