This chapter had to do a lot about the animal sacrifices at the temple for the priests and future priests to perform. Remember back in Genesis, Adam and Eve’s son Abel was a shepherd who loved God and wanted to give the Lord a gift, so he sacrificed a sheep for God and the Lord liked the pleasing aroma of the burnt sacrifice, so generations later they are still making animal sacrifices to the Lord to please Him. If you are meek in spirit and are interested in running to sacrifice a sheep right away to please the Lord, that is beautiful, but no longer necessary. That’s why Jesus came! God has always wanted to live with us, from the beginning of time. It makes me feel so sad for Him that His children that He created and planned to live with forever have been taken away from Him by an enemy. I never want to know what that feels like, and I can’t even imagine that heart-breaking devastation. When His children were enslaved in Egypt, the Lord freed them from that torment so that He could try and live with them again. As we continue reading in the Old Testament, we learn that doesn’t work... and we realize the dire importance that it was that Jesus come to be our ultimate living sacrifice for us so that we could finally dwell with Yahweh, our God. After having all of His children stolen from Him by the enemy, He sends His one and only Son who is still living with Him to come on earth and die by the hands of the enemy, as well. The amount of love this shows He has for us is incredible. He gets nothing in return, only us. That’s all He’s ever wanted is you and me. In that way, He was able to provide a holy atonement for all of us, that never needs to be repeated like the ones we read about in this chapter, of all of our wretched sins. He died as the final sacrificial lamb for us to make atonement for our sin to the Lord. When He gave up His Spirit with His last breath, He made it available to all of us so that when we accept the fact that He died for us, and we remove our guilt from our hearts to make room for Him, He could live inside our hearts through His Spirit forever. He frees us from the chains of the enemy, from the enslaving ways of this world, from the entrapment of the guilt from our sin, so that He can dwell with us in our hearts until we are reunited again with Him on His day to come. He is Yahweh, our God. But this is only true if you have already made Jesus Christ your Lord and Savior. If today is the day that you make that decision to have our God live inside of you forever, then please message me so we can talk more about that decision. I’d love to be an encouraging ear for you, sister!
“What agreement is there between the temple of God and idols? For we are the temple of the living God. As God has said: “I will live with them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they will be my people.””
2 Corinthians 6:16