Satisfaction Through Substitution

“And he came down from offering the sin offering and the burnt offering and the peace offerings… And fire came out from before the Lord and consumed the burnt offering and the pieces of fat on the altar, and when all the people saw it, they shouted and fell on their faces.” – Leviticus 9:22, 24

“Apart from what the Bible tells us, we really don’t know anything of the awful nature of sin and the awful holiness of God. If we forget that we really don’t know anything, we are kidding ourselves.” – J.L. Packer

Admittedly, the book of Leviticus is a bit weird. Reading it is like trying to decode a language utterly foreign to the modern mindset. Makes me recall something N.T. Wright wrote: “We need to come to the text, trying to give 21st-century answers to 1st-century questions, rather than 19th-century answers to 16th-century questions, as much of the church still tries to do.” The burning question for an Israelite at that time would have been: how does one enter God’s presence? The Israelites had a tangible understanding of “the awful holiness of God” and “the awful nature of sin.” They had gone to great lengths to build a tabernacle but no one was able to enter it. How was this to be resolved? 

God introduces a radical new answer: substitutionary sacrifice. If you’ve been in church for a while, it’s easy to get inoculated to this concept, but consider what it would have meant to hear that instead of dying, another could die in your place. Instead of your child or wife or friend dying, another could die in their place. For every kind of sin, there was a kind of sacrifice. There was a way. Understanding this is the key to understanding the cross. As John Stott writes in The Cross of Christ:

“The righteous, loving Father humbled himself to become in and through his only Son flesh, sin and a curse for us, in order to redeem us without compromising his own character… The biblical gospel of atonement is of God satisfying himself by substituting himself for us… The concept of substitution may be said, then, to lie at the heart of both sin and salvation.  For the essence of sin is man substituting himself for God, while the essence of salvation is God substituting himself for man.  Man asserts himself against God and puts himself where only God deserves to be; God sacrifices himself for man and puts himself where only man deserves to be.  Man claims prerogatives that belong to God alone; God accepts penalties that belong to man alone.” 

What does this mean for our 21st-century questions? Often our response to inadequacy is to try harder, to strain ever onwards in self-actualization, to achieve or acquire something more. This is what our world tells us to do. It’s not natural to admit our efforts will never be enough. It’s scary to trust something outside of ourselves, just as it would have been scary for Aaron to offer the animals and trust the fire would consume them and not the people. But over and over, in every mention of fat and entrails and organs, God is saying, there must be a substitute. And you must completely trust that the substitute is enough. That is the only way.

On some level, if I really absorbed this truth, my life would be driven less by anxiety, fear, guilt, and more by rest, thankfulness, awe, and love. Much of my life is a growth in grasping and living into something inherently foreign to my own tendencies and culture. But better a feeble trust in the right thing, perhaps, than a strong trust in the wrong thing. Even if all I can whisper is, “I believe; help my unbelief,” that is something. What would it mean for you to believe this truth, and how would you live even just a little bit differently?