The book of Leviticus is interesting for Christians. It is part of the Bible, so we have to take seriously what it says. At the same time it’s clear that the world of Leviticus – about 33 centuries ago – is quite different from the world of today. One very obvious difference is this: Christians do not offer burnt offerings on the altar for the atonement of our sins; we believe Jesus has made that sacrifice, once for all (Hebrews 10:10, 10:14). Yet Leviticus specifies the details for how various sacrifices are to be offered.

“If the offering is a burnt offering from the herd, you shall offer a male without blemish; you shall bring it to the entrance of the tent of meeting, for acceptance on your behalf before the Lord.  You shall lay your hand on the head of the burnt offering, and it shall be acceptable on your behalf as atonement for you.  The bull shall be slaughtered before the Lord, and Aaron’s sons the priests shall offer the blood, dashing the blood against all sides of the altar that is at the entrance of the tent of meeting.  The burnt offering shall be flayed and cut up into its parts.  The sons of the priest Aaron shall put fire on the altar and arrange wood on the fire.  Aaron’s sons the priests shall arrange the parts, with the head and the suet, on the wood that is on the fire on the altar, but its entrails and its legs shall be washed with water. Then the priest shall turn the rest into smoke on the altar as a burnt offering, an offering by fire of pleasing odor to the Lord” (Leviticus 1:3-9). That might be more detail than you wanted, but it’s right there, as part of the Bible.

Even though we don’t practice animal sacrifice, we can discern some important lessons from this material. One key principle is this: we don’t offer to God the leftovers; instead, we want to give our very best. The farmers of Israel, looking at their animals, would see which ones were not quite prime, a little sickly or a little slow, and would recognize that these were the animals that they would keep, while the blue-ribbon livestock was the one that needed to be sacrificed. That’s a devotional principle that we need to emulate.

One of the interesting sacrifices is the shalom offering (3:1-16), translated sometimes as the sacrifice of peace, or the sacrifice of well-being. The idea of shalom includes peace (as opposed to conflict or war); but it also includes freedom (as opposed to slavery or bondage) and justice (as opposed to economic or legal injustice) and right relationships (as opposed to hatred or bitterness). The shalom offering, then, is a sacrifice seeking to establish shalom in the family, the community, and the nation. We today need shalom as much as ever, but we don’t have a formula for how to do that by sacrificing an animal – so we’ll have to consider how we live and speak so as to hope to establish shalom in our current situation.

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Teach us, O Lord, to seek after your shalom, to find the ways, in devoutly offered sacrificial words and in our deeds, to establish peace in our own hearts, and in our families and communities, in our nation and in the world.

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