Leviticus 9 — Thoughts

What Lights Your Fire?

Leviticus is quite the ride. It can be legitimately boring on the surface and then it takes a sudden turn to become wildly dramatic. This chapter is a great example.

Here, Moses and Aaron finally make all the sacrifices that the previous chapters described. So it feels like a lot of repetition. Kind of boring.

But then — the Glory of God appears to everyone and fire comes from God to light His own sacrifices. 

Meticulous detail followed by a literal explosion.

There’s a message here about how God shows up for us in unexpected ways when we commit to living faithfully for him, even if it is monotonous for a while. But I don’t want to miss the significance of what that explosion meant.

We were told in chapter 6 that the fire on the altar was supposed to never go out. That means God’s people would always be using this fire, the fire that God himself lit.

And why did God light this fire? Because He is a just God who hates sin.

Remember that the priests put their hands on the sacrificial animals before killing them to symbolically transfer their sin to the animal. The animal was then killed and burned before God, symbolically judging and destroying the sin that was transferred.

The really beautiful thing is that Jesus is our ultimate sacrifice. He made it so that our sin that God hates would be on Him instead of us — and that made it so that God’s just judgment of our sin would fall on Him instead of us.

The judgment of God falls on a substitutionary sacrifice so that we can be forgiven. This explosion is a picture of the Gospel.