The Temple Controversy: Should Christians offer sacrifices? - 5 Levitical Offerings Explained

What is the temple that God is calling us to become built up as? What are the offerings that he is calling us to offer? As Peter said in one, Peter two five, that we are building up a spiritual house. We are also a holy priesthood, and we offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through our messiah, Jesus Christ. In the first century, they had a temple physically standing. They had their red heifers and all of the things that they felt they needed. However, their offerings, despite everything they were doing, were still unclean because they were a people who became distracted. And it caused that very temple, that second temple, to become destroyed just as the messiah prophesied would happen. Offerings for them, it wasn't actually just bringing a guilt offering or bringing a sin offering forth or whatever offering, following the levitical protocols as God did outline, which was wonderful. However, their offerings that they offered became unclean because of their evil works. And this is what haggai warned in verse 14. So it is with this people and with this nation before me, declares the Lord. And so with every work of their hands, and what they offer there is unclean. The work of our hands is our offering unto the Lord. And because the work of their hands was full of hypocrisies and uncleanness, suddenly they became corrupted themselves. And with that, their expectations of who the Messiah is and what he's going to look like became corrupted. And they could not recognize him walking among them. They could not recognize the true temple of God walking among them. But if they were imitating their God in the ways that he's always called and desired, even ever since the garden, then perhaps then they would have recognized him walking among them. So it all begins with God calling his priests, his priesthood together, for us to be retrained to be the priesthood that he called us to be, and to offer the correct sacrifices he called us to offer. For us to understand what those sacrifices are, it is good for us to look at the levitical offerings outlined in Leviticus six, because understanding them more helps us understand the offerings we today can offer. The first one I would like to speak about is Leviticus six nine, the burnt offering. God explains the burnt offering as having a fire that shall be kept burning on the altar continually. And he says, it shall not go out. Now, if you think about our altars of our temples and the fire that is to be burning continuously, we know that the fire is the Holy Spirit. See, God provides the fire. He provides us the empowerment, the drive, the thing that keeps us warm and keeps us going in our faith. So the Holy Spirit is seeking us to keep our fire going. How is a fire kept going? Well, just as the priests had to go and take wood every day and make sure to put it on the fire to keep the fire going, so we have to continue to place wood on our fires to keep it going. The wood is laid by our obedience. It is something that we need to do on our end. To gather wood is to go out, to cut it down, to carry it, and to lay it on a fire. Any relationship requires work, and that does not mean we are saved by works. We are saved by faith. But our relationship with God requires us to bring our side. It means that we should come to him drawing near in prayers and fastings, in reading of the scriptures, in prayers, in obedience to whatever he is calling us to do, fulfilling his commandments in our life, fulfilling the great commission in our life, whatever that is. That step is us bringing our wood to the table, stepping forth, and then letting the Holy Spirit burn it, letting the Holy Spirit burn in us, letting the Holy Spirit empower us in every one of those works. See, we, the wood in of itself does nothing. Wood in of itself just lays there. But wood that touches the fire ignites. And so our obedience ignites into something greater. So we may feel weak, we may feel like we cannot do much. But when our wood touches the fire, the little wood that we gather touches the fire, suddenly it ignites and it burns. It burns. It burns. Becomes something that many people are drawn to. And many people see our sacrifices, and they see in taste that the Lord is good, that he has saved us for a moment like this to become a living sacrifice. I want to remind you of the story of Elijah. Who? Elijah. He had to do all the work of bringing the wood, and he packed it all up and he even came and he brought a water, and he poured water all over this wooden altar. And he made it really difficult for this fire to start of this sacrifice. But see, that water that he poured out on the altar was a demonstration of his great faith, that even despite pouring water all over this altar, it's still going to ignite because nothing will stop the Holy Spirit. And so I want to challenge you that in your life. Pour water over your altar. Pour water over your wood. Believe for the greater things that this, what I'm about to do right now, where I'm about to step right now, I've gathered the wood. But, Lord, I've not only just gathered the wood, which is like the minimum. I have even gone to take water now and pour it out on this wooden I have gone in great faith and said, this is who my God is. He can split the seas, he can walk on water, and he can even ignite wood that is drenched in water. And so the prophets of Baal stand no chance when they see who our God is. What he asks of us on our burnt offering is a valuable sacrifice. I want you to think about what are you offering to the Lord in your life that is of value to you? He has made great offerings, the most valuable of all offerings. In giving us his son, he has given us that great offering. What are you going to bring to the table? What are you going to offer him in your life? What is there that you so cherished that he is saying, I want you to give that to me. Ask of the Lord and be obedient to what he is calling Yeshua. The messiah is the perfect burnt offering, our perfect example of what it looks like to walk as a living sacrifice. The next one I would like to speak about is the grain Offering of Leviticus 614. And I want to submit to you that when we look at this grain offering, the scriptures talk about various ingredients that is in this sea. We see that there's this Flour mixed with oil and frankincense and that it is all unleavened. I want to submit that these are all ingredients for a fruitful life. First we have the flower. The flower is like the base. It is the truth, the foundation. Then we have the oil, which is the Holy Spirit, that is mixed with the flour. And then we have the Frankincense. And I want to submit to you, the Frankincense is as one of the ingredients of the incense that goes up to the Lord. The Frankincense represents our prayers and all of these things being unleavened. Speaking of our intentions, Paul says in one corinthians five eight, let us celebrate the feast not with the old leaven of malice and evil, but unleavened with sincerity and truth. See, sincerity is our unleavenedness. And that is to have an intention in our hearts of being sincere. That is who our messiah is. He is the perfect grain offering, full of spirit, full of truth, full of prayer and intentions, that is full of sincerity. Next up is the sin offering of Leviticus 625. The sin offering is interesting because whatever touches that offering becomes holy. That which is most holy is the Messiah himself. And ad Passover, he told his disciples, you must eat of me, otherwise you will have no part in me. We must eat of his body in order for us to be clean, to be made holy. And so he, becoming the perfect sin offering for us, calls us to become holy as he is holy by partaking in him. In other words, not by trusting in our own works, but by trusting in his work on the cross and in his perfect life. That is indestructible, that sin could never have a hold on and which death could never rule over. See, our sin offering is our great faith in the finished work of the cross itself. The next offering is the guilt offering of Leviticus seven one. I want to submit to you that it is all in the name of the offering. Guilt. Even if we have sinned and we are cleansed of our sins, guilt and shame can still remain on our conscience. Even if you know you've been forgiven of something you may have done before, you may still feel guilty and ashamed in your conscience of what you have done and even what has been done against you. Many people who have had sins done against them, who've been abused, they feel guilty, and they feel ashamed because of what they've suffered. And this is the offering that rids us of guilt and rids us of shame. And the messiah himself is that offering. He not only made us white as snow, but he comes to clean our conscience of guilt and shame, just as Adam and Eve were in the garden, and as they themselves sinned and suddenly felt naked and ashamed. That's what we go through. But what God comes, and he says for us to do is take the blood of this offering, throw it against the sides of the altar. And so I want to submit to you that he comes to our altars, of our temples, and he cleanses it of all guilt and all shame in order for us to be able to, from there on out, have sacrifices, living sacrifices in our life that are not contaminated with guilt and shame, because shame and guilt is something that wants to contaminate everything else in our life. Everything else we set out to do, everything we set out to see the lens by which we see the world, how we treat other people. If we live in guilt and shame and condemnation, our relationship with people and God is most affected. But he is saying, I died even for you to no longer live in guilt and shame. I died for your conscience to be cleansed. Hebrews 914 says, how much more will the blood of Christ, who, through the eternal spirit, offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead, works to serve the living God? Hallelujah. The next offering I'd like to speak about is the peace offering of Leviticus 711, which consists of loaves of leavened bread and is described to be a gift to God, but then belongs to the priest for his consumption. Now I want to submit. That is how it is with peace. God desires us to have peace and walk in peace. Our peace is something that he cherishes. It is a gift to God. But it is something that we partake in as the priests. It belongs to us at the same time. Think about it this way. Yeshua speaks and he says, before you go and make an offering to God, consider whether you have a brother or at odds with you. And if so, go and make things right with that brother and then bring your gift to the altar. This is part of it. God desires us to be at peace with our brothers and sisters. And that is our gift to God. But it also then belongs to us. Because as we forgive our brothers and our sisters, he says God forgives us, and if we do not forgive them, God will not forgive us. Therefore, we get to partake in the forgiveness of Christ, in our forgiveness of others and treatment of others. He makes specific technical delineations on when it may be eaten. And he says it has to be eaten on the day that it is offered and not left until the next morning. But he says that if the offering is done out of a vow or out of free will, then you may eat of it the next day. Now consider this for a moment. Why does he say this about this peace offering? We should forgive quickly, as he has forgiven us quickly on the day, if you will. But if we make a vow, for example, if we say that we will make things right with our brother, we haven't yet. But that is what we are going to do. God allows us to take time until the second day before we can partake in that peace. Or if we have a free will offering. In other words, we desire to go above and beyond what is commanded. But out of our free will, we pursue peace in ways of going above and beyond. That means, like Yeshua said, you have heard it said, but I say to you, turn the other cheek. You've heard it said, but I say to you, walk further with someone. He is calling us to go further than the minimum requirements. Out of our own free will, our own desire, our own love for God and our neighbour. And in that, he permits us to partake in that peace that comes from that kind of an offering unto the second day, if you will. But he says, no matter what, you cannot eat of that offering on the third day. It is not allowed. He says in verse 17, what remains on the flesh of the sacrifice on the third day shall be burned up with fire. Why is this? I want to submit to you, spiritually speaking, that the third day represents the day of the resurrection. Christ was in the earth, and he was raised on the third day. And so he has promised that we all will be raised again. The resurrection that awaits us all is going to come. And when it does, the time is up to forgive. The time is up to make peace. The time is up to restore. See, God is in this life going to look upon our lives, and he is going to see whether we made peace offerings. He is going to see whether we forgave our brothers and sisters, and that is going to determine how he looks at us when we stand before him. Because did we fulfill our end of the forgiveness we were to walk out in light of the forgiveness he has given us through his death? It's going to be too late to pick up the phone after the resurrection to make peace with your father. It's going to be too late to call your son or daughter or your brother or your sister at church who you have odds with. Call, reach out, make things right before it is the third day, and you will be the one who benefits from eating of that offering. And that will be a great gift to your lord that pleases him. Matthew five nine blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God. In being peacemakers, it reinforces our identity as sons, and it allows us to start operating out of that identity as sons, which comes with the authority that the Holy Spirit brings for us to walk in the power of the spirit as the messiah did, but we have to be peacemakers, as he was a peacemaker. Why does it help that you try and you pursue signs and wonders and miracles and people coming to faith and people repenting all around you all these wonderful things, but yet you have a life full of chaos with others instead of peace. Why does it even help that we say that we are a people who keep the Sabbath day, the day of peace, the day of the prince of peace, but we are not a temple of peace. All of our boastings of keeping a sabbath day means nothing if we do not actually walk it out in our lives. And you may say, well, Petey, it is so difficult to love and to be in peace with others. Sometimes I want to remind you about who our brothers and sisters in the faith actually are and what they are. One corinthians 316 do you not know that you are God's temple and that God's spirit dwells in you. If anyone destroys God's temple, God will destroy him. For God's temple is holy, and you are that temple. When we start seeing fellow believers as temples of God, that changes everything, because the temple of God is something we have reverence for. It's something we consider holy. We consider something that it is where the spirit of the Lord dwells. And if we can start seeing one another for the actual temple, not just like symbolically, but actually the place where the spirit of God dwells, even more real than the copy that was on earth, the actual place where the spirit dwells, perhaps then that will change the way we treat fellow brothers and sisters with more reverence. See, brothers and sisters, we have to be perfectly justified in our treatment of others when they are temples of the Holy Spirit, especially if we are treating them poorly. We should fear and be careful that we stand justified before God, not moving out of assumptions, not moving out of our flesh, but having reverence for the vessel that God has chosen to indwell in use. Even if you may say, I wouldn't have chosen that vessel, and I wouldn't have used that vessel. You are not God. He is, and he therefore uses people that you may not expect. That is the pattern of scripture. Therefore, let us stand in fear, lest we come against and destroy the temple of God. So become an offering of peace. Offer up your guilt and shame to the Messiah as he died for you to be free. Offer up your sin and that which keeps you in bondage, and let the Messiah touch you so that you would become holy. Offer up your burnt offerings, that which is most precious to you. That offering he calls you to burn up in your life and offer up your grain, offering the ingredients of spirit and truth. Become a living sacrifice, walking it out with good, sincere intentions at all times. And then you will see that the garden becomes restored all around you. What is inside of you starts changing the world outside of you. And then it will be. They won't say, look, here it is or look there, but they will recognize that the kingdom of God is within you. Perhaps then all of the lack that we witness in our lives will be turned to prosperity, as Haggai concluded in Haggai 219 is the seed yet in the barn? Indeed, the vine, the fig tree, the pomegranate, and the olive tree have yielded nothing. But from this day on I will bless you because you have inclined your eyes to the temple that I would like to establish in you. So let us no longer say the time is not yet. The time is now let's become it father, I pray right now Lord and you would come with your spirit and indwell every temple listening to this and you would come and make our our offerings clean father, remove uncleanness from us remove guilt and shame and condemnation from us us remove remove all of the distraughts and disunities from our hearts that we have with one another lord father I pray lord that you would come and help us to become a temple of spirit and truth a grain offering worthy of your spirit father, help us to be a people that is seen and becomes known for the love because to love the Lord of all of our heart, mind, soul and strengthen our neighbor and as ourselves is more than all burned offering and sacrifices Lord help us to love above all we thank you we praise you Yeshua bring about a great move bring your people into alignment with you let them see and taste that you are good I pray this name of Yeshua amen thank you for joining me subscribe and like this video and we'll see you in the next one.