The Meaning of Blood Sacrifice

ALEC MOTYER

The practice of sacrifice, the shedding of the blood of animals, goes back to the very beginning of Gods dealings with sinful man (see Genesis 4:4). It pervades the whole of the Bible. In the New Testament it provides the terms in which the death of Jesus Christ is explained (see for instance Hebrews 9:11.).

The key verse, Leviticus 17:11, says that sacrifice is something that God has given to man: it is his provision for human need. It is a contradiction of this to say (as many Old Testament specialists do) that the basic meaning of sacrifice is an offering or gift to God. The word translated offering certainly means gift. So, it is said, the person bringing the offering gains possession of the life, the blood, of the sacrificed animal, and can give it to God. By this means he injects new life into his relationship with God. Or else he is able to interpose a living screen between himself as a sinner and God the holy One. But how can that which God gives to man be interpreted as something man gives to God?

Leviticus 17:11 gives us two great clues to the meaning of blood and sacrifice. First: the purpose of the blood is to make atonement. Whenever the word translated atonement was used it meant paying a price-a ransom price. So it is not sufficient to say that the blood screens the offender. One must say that it does so by providing a price sufficient to pay off a debt of sin before God.

So here, as always in the Bible, 'the wages of sin is death'. No sin, no sinner, can come

into the presence of an utterly holy God. To be cut off from God is death. Only if this price can be paid, the penalty taken, the sentence borne, can sinful man hope to be forgiven and come again into Gods presence. This, says Leviticus 17:11, is precisely what the blood does.

We are told, second, that the blood can do this by reason of the life. By reason of' (Revised Standard Version) translates a Hebrew preposition regularly used to express price or expenditure (e.g. 1 Kings 2:23; Proverbs 7:23; Lamentations 5:9). It is found in a basic legal passage on the necessity for exact justice, in the phrase 'life for life' (Deuteronomy 19:21), i.e. 'life in payment for life. So in Leviticus 17:11, just as to make atonement means to pay the atonement! ransom price, so by reason of the life means by reason of the payment of life.

In other words blood means death - the termination of life-just as it does in ordinary metaphorical usage (see, for instance, Genesis 9:5; 37:26; etc.). In the sacrifice, life was terminated. The flowing blood was the symbol and proof that life had been taken in payment for the sins of the guilty and as a substitute for his own guilt-stained life.

Animal sacrifice expressed the principle. The full reality took place in the death of the Lord Jesus Christ. In the Old Testament the people had a God-given preview of the shed blood of Jesus, his substitutionary death on our behalf, for our sins, the just for the unjust, once and for all.