I told you yesterday that today was going to be one of those Bible avalanche days. If not, guess what? Bible Avalanche! Because here is where we connect all the dots on how Jesus is the fulfillment of the sacrificial law. So you'll recall, we talked about five different kinds of offerings that are described in the first 17 chapters of Leviticus. Everybody on the hill would have been totally familiar with all of these. They would have known all the ins and outs the same way you know what food gets served on Thanksgiving, you know what kind of gifts you give on Christmas, you know what to expect people to give you on Easter, you know what you're supposed to wear and do on the 4th of July. They knew all the little ins and outs and tiny customs and rituals and rhythms regarding these as well. So the first of the big sacrifices that the original audience would have been picturing would be the burnt offering. This is the one about atonement, covering everything in general. We are broken, God is not broken, we come to you as broken people and offer these sacrifices to square things up, at least for the time being. Everybody would have had that in their head. And then we go to the New Testament, and what do you know? There's language all over it about how Jesus is the ultimate atonement that settles things up regarding sin. We looked at Hebrews 9.22 yesterday. In fact, the law requires that nearly everything be cleansed with blood, and without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness. Well, that's setting things up in a pretty dramatic way. Then we flip over to John 1. You know what it is, John 1? I said John 2 the other day, is where John the Baptist makes his remark about Jesus that I'm about to read. I got that wrong. You can trust me, I promise. John 1, 29 says, the next day, John the Baptist saw Jesus coming toward him and said, Look, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. See what he's saying there? Hebrews 9 22 affirms the Leviticus burnt offering idea that the shedding of blood is required for the resolution of sin. And then we flip right around over here, and John is describing Jesus as the Lamb of God, a sacrificial lamb, who does what? Takes away the sin of the world. And then the idea of Jesus being the fulfillment of the burnt offering is further fleshed out in 2 Corinthians 5.21. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. All right, so Jesus completes the burnt offering. He is the atonement, then, or at least that's what the text is holding out. And then the second sacrifice or offering that everybody would have had in their heads and they would have known, like, you know, the rhythm of your year is the Thanksgiving one, the grain offering. You know what time of year that happens? You can picture what the food looks like. Likewise, so could they, and they knew what the point of it was. This is the one that says, We're devoted to God, we're thankful to God. And of course, a bazillion times over, Jesus is expressing his gratitude to God, his dependence on God, and God reciprocates that, God the Father, toward the Son, saying in Matthew 3.17, This is my son whom I love, with him I am well pleased. So that gratitude, that devotion, that connection is made evidence there at a deeper level than can be achieved through the grain offerings of the Old Testament. So we fulfilled the burnt offering. Jesus is the fulfillment of the grain offering, and we'll flesh that one out a lot more. I realize it was quick. Additionally, Jesus is the fulfillment of the fellowship offering or the peace offering, it's also called. And this is the one that says, I want to be connected with God. I maybe didn't do anything wrong, but I want to be connected with my Maker and my Heavenly Father. And that barrier was one that was difficult to overcome religiously back in those times. But through Jesus, that barrier is broken down. You remember the whole thing about the curtain being torn in two at Jesus' crucifixion, something we'll look at a bit later on. But then 1 Timothy 2.5 says, For there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus. The idea being that Jesus is the go-between, that Jesus makes this fellowship possible in a way that a clean bull or a perfect female goat or sheep really couldn't in the form of the Old Testament sacrifice. So we've taken a look at how Jesus is the fulfillment of the burnt offering, the atonement offering, how he's the fulfillment of the grain offering, how he's the fulfillment of the peace offering. And finally, we see how he's the fulfillment of the sin and guilt offerings, one of which is about making recompense for a malicious thing that you did to somebody else. And the other is just a way to cover all the stuff that you didn't know you got wrong or you didn't mean to get wrong. And so that idea of paying for that is covered in 1 Peter 2 24. He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness by his wounds you have been healed. Matthew 20, 28, really famous one that we'll spend more time on when we get there, says, just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many. The idea here being in both of those passages that Jesus didn't just pay for a thing, he paid for a thing in the place of the actual debtors, that being us. So again, that guilt offering comes with a debt. You have to pay for what you did wrong, I think plus interest. The idea here spiritually in the New Testament is that you can't afford to pay the debt of sin because the wages of sin is death. So Jesus then steps in as the ransom for many, steps in as the one by whose stripes we are healed. But then finally, you know, the sin offering that I was mentioning, the one that's just the big general, I'm just living a state of brokenness and I don't even know how to fix what's wrong with me. It's all weird. That one is addressed with Jesus being the fulfillment in 2 Corinthians 5.18, where it says, All this is from God who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation. The idea here being that even the stuff you couldn't think of, even the debt you didn't know you owed, is generally reconciled and covered by the work of Jesus. So to you and me, that might sound like an insane amount of Bible ninjutsu where we're jumping all over the place and connecting these dots and covering these things. And I'm giving you the tip of the iceberg here, by the way. I mean, there's pretty much nothing the New Testament talks about much more than this idea of Jesus as the fulfillment of the sacrificial law, Jesus as the sacrifice for sins, the redeemer. I mean, it's kind of the whole thrust of why Jesus showed up. So it's all over the place, but I still understand how it can be a little bit overwhelming. But I think the reason for that is that you and I are having to figure out how the sacrificial system works and we're having to picture the rhythms of life that to the original audience would have been completely intuitive. And that makes it tough, just like it'd be tough for them to time travel forward and understand somebody speaking into the rhythms of our life with Thanksgiving and Easter and Christmas and birthdays and all the other weird little rituals and things that we do. But I think we've done enough in this conversation over the last few episodes to put ourselves in their shoes, to understand where they were coming from and how they would have pictured this stuff. And that'll help us keep our antenna out as we move forward in Matthew for how Jesus, in both big ways and little ways, is making it evident to his audience that he is the fulfillment of the sacrificial law and that he is the fulfillment of all the things that were familiar and religiously comfortable for them, but these are all taken to their logical conclusion in Jesus. Now, I totally understand that there are a lot of people who don't think Jesus fulfilled the law, who don't think Jesus is the Redeemer, and who don't think that he resolved any of the problem of human guilt. And you know what? That may be what you continue to think, even after we get done going through this whole thing together. Okay, I think otherwise, but the most important thing for the point of our exercise here is that we understand what the document is doing as we move forward, and we just can't understand that unless we take the time that we took to seriously look at the Old Testament and the expectations people would have had about the law so that we can be just as blown away as the original audience was when they start to see these fulfillments come about and as they realize that Jesus could actually be the real deal. We're finally going to push past Matthew 5, 17 and 18 tomorrow and get into a little more aggressive rhythm as the next stuff goes down a bit easier. Alright, thanks for hanging out with me. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do it again soon.