Some Steps in Offering Sacrifice¹

George Smeaton

We shall better apprehend the meaning of the sacrifices, and their united symbolical and typical significance, if we follow step by step the order of the ritual. It must be carefully noted that, in the private sin offerings of the people, the priest was present at the first three acts, but began his proper function only when the blood was to be received for the act of sprinkling. On the great annual day of atonement, however, the high priest, the representative of the nation, performed all the acts of the sacrifice. The ritual advanced according to the following successive steps.

1. The worshipper who had contracted guilt by any violation of the law for which a sin offering was provided was to bring a clean animal, without blemish, to the tabernacle of the congregation. The animal must be alive, as the arrangements involved the taking of its life. The act of presentation, as performed by a willing offerer, implied the voluntary character of the sacrifice. The presentation was to be on the altar, to which, erected on an elevation, the victim was to be brought up, just as the great antitype was lifted up on the cross (1 Pet 2:24). To the perfection of the sacrifice, however, it was indispensable that the victim should be without defect or blemish. This is constantly alluded to by the sacred writers (1 Pet 1:19, Heb 9:14).

²² A True Copy of the Whole Printed Acts of the General Assemblies of the Church of Scotland 1638-1649, 1682, p 466.

¹Taken, with editing, from Smeaton’s excellent volume, The Doctrine of the Atonement as Taught by the Apostles.

Now what did this intimate, in a typical point of view, but the sinlessness of Jesus, who must be righteous to stand in the place of the unrighteous, innocent to stand for the guilty? Did this convey anything further than the thought that the spotless holiness of Jesus was necessary as a prerequisite for the oblation itself? It meant more. The holiness of Jesus was itself an essential element in the atonement, considered as a satisfaction to justice, as a fulfilment of the law. One essential part of the sacrifice was the perfect holiness and sinless purity of the Lord, who through the Eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to God (Heb 9:14).

1. The next act of the ritual was the laying on of the hand upon the victim’s head. This symbolically intimated the communication of that which was ours, the transfer of our guilt, to the substitute, and it was accompanied on the day of atonement with the confession of sins (Lev 16:21). This conclusively shows what was the meaning of the act, and this is not to be overthrown by fanciful theories. Thus Bahr, opposed in principle to vicarious sacrifice², will have the action mean no more than this, that the animal was the offerer’s property. Kurtz will have it mean the devoting of the animal to death, forgetting that there must be a reason why it was visited with death. That reason is the imputation of sin, or the arrangement by which it was made sin.

The laying on of the hand, at one time for one purpose and at another time for another, was a common action – meaning generally the communicating of something from one party to another. In the case before us it meant that the offerer put himself in a relation to the victim, or into a special connection with it, so as to communicate to it his own guilt, or the nation’s guilt, according to the private or public nature of the sacrifice. And after this ceremony the animal suffered death for the sin. The punishment followed, and this determines its meaning. Though this is the only act of the ritual not expressly named in the New Testament, it comes before us under other turns of phrase. Thus, when Jesus was numbered with transgressors (Mk 15:26), when He was sent in the likeness of sinful flesh (Rom 8:3), and made sin (2 Cor 5:21), we have that which was denoted by this ritual act.

1. The next act was the animal’s death. The symbolical meaning of this is that death is the wages of sin, and that sin and death stand related as cause and consequence. But further, the animal must die by the hand of the worshipper, and for an obvious reason. His was the sin laid upon the victim – his the death – and hence none but he who laid his hand on the animal’s head was to kill it. In this part of the sacrificial ritual there was, on many grounds, a deep significance; not least is the circumstance that there was a marked cor-

²That is, the doctrine that when Christ offered Himself as a sacrifice, He did so as the substitute of sinners.

response between this fact and the mode in which the Saviour died. The Lord was not to meet His death in any other way but by violence. The sinner’s hand was to be the instrument of inflicting the death, even as the sinner’s guilt was the meritorious cause, and the only assignable cause, why death could come to Him at all.

Still further, the death was penal. This is to be strictly maintained; as the notion that the death was only in order to obtain the blood – a mere means to an end and without further significance – would perplex and unsettle the entire ritual. The death in itself was punitive, the wages of sin. If not, what could the blood have accomplished? But on the principle that the imputation of guilt was signified by the laying on of hands, death followed as the necessary effect; for the worshipper owed death, and the infliction of it was penal.

This excludes the subjective theory, which has been contrived by the opponents of vicarious satisfaction to explain the death of the victim. Thus Bahr, with those who follow in his tendency, will have it mean that the self-seeking life of man dies, and is replaced by a spiritual life devoted to God. According to this notion, the death of the animal, in its symbolical meaning, teaches the mortification of sin, that self must be sacrificed. On every ground this exposition is untenable. Not to mention that it is out of keeping with the ritual, according to which the animal died and continued dead, it takes for granted that a guilty man can, without any reparation, dedicate himself to God. But that cannot be, as he has no power to dispose of a forfeited life; and without atonement, or covering, for his soul he cannot be dedicated to God. There is no possibility of this without expiation, for death is the wages of sin.

1. The next act in the sacrificial ritual was the sprinkling of the blood. At this point the priest’s activity commenced. He had been, up to this step in the ritual, present as a spectator, but he now steps in to take part in it. It was he who received the flowing blood of the animal and who put it on the horns, or highest point, of the altar, and who poured it out at the bottom (Lev 4: 25-34), an action which intimated that the meeting-place between God and His people was from top to bottom covered with blood, that the sins of the people were covered by an atonement, and that the worshippers were no more exposed to His frown.

The blood received by the priest, and made his own, is regarded as the vicariously-shed blood of the priest. Thus, in the ritual, we consider not the victim alone but also the priest, without whom the sacrifice could not be duly offered. The action of receiving the blood had a special significance: it signified that he made the blood his own. Besides, the washings, vestments and other typical sanctifications shadowed forth the holiness and righteous-

ness of the Antitype. What was done upon the victim was supposed to have been done upon the priest, who now became a party to the action. He appropriated the blood, which now passed for his own blood, for the priest’s action began here.

The ritual advanced gradually till it reached this act of sprinkling, where we find sin expiated and divine wrath propitiated. But from the necessary imperfection of types, the idea was broken into parts, and in succession. The blood was brought to God and made to cover sin. The sprinkling – whether performed at the horns of the altar or in the holy of holies, the meeting place between God and His people – figured forth that the sin of the individual or of the nation, though piled up as an heap, was now covered and all cause of separation removed. Death had intervened, and the blood that had passed through death was now most holy and had atoning power wherever it was sprinkled (Heb 13:12).