Leviticus 17:11 For the life of the flesh is in the blood; and I have given it to you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh atonement by reason of the life.

Imagine a complex well-ordered society such that in every area of life there are actions that make a person dirty and further prescribed actions that make that person clean.

When you get up in the morning, you wear clothes of certain kinds of fabric, but not others. There are clean foods and unclean foods. If a spot of mold appears on the wall of your house, there are procedures for treating it.

Some unclean things must not even be touched. In addition there is a complex religious and sacrificial system each person is supposed to observe, and failure to observe it at any point brings its own uncleanness. And all of this fits into a still broader set of constraints that include what we normally call moral categories: how we speak, truth-telling, how we treat others, questions of property, sexual integrity, neighborly actions, judicial impartiality, and so forth.

Understand, too, that in this society the rules have been laid down by God himself. They are not the results of some elected Congress or Parliament, easily overturned by a fickle or frustrated public eager for something else. To ignore or defy these rules is to defy the living God. What kinds of lessons would be learned in such a society?

That is the world of Leviticus. This is part of the heritage from Mount Sinai, part of the Mosaic Covenant. Here the people of God are to learn that God prescribes what is right and wrong, and that he has a right to do so; that holiness embraces all of life; that there is a distinction between the conduct of the people of God and the conduct of the surrounding pagans, not merely a difference in abstract beliefs. Here the Lord himself prescribes what sacrifices are necessary, along with confession of sin (Lev. 5:5), when a person falls into uncleanness; and even that the system itself is no final answer, since one is constantly falling under another taboo and returning to offer sacrifices one has offered before. One begins to wonder if there will ever be one final sacrifice for sins.

In the Book of Leviticus, particularly chapters 1–7, that the sacrificial system of the Old Testament is set forth. Three fundamental principles of redemption are illustrated forcefully in the blood sacrifices of the Old Testament:

(1) The principle of identification, the person offering the sacrifice pressed his hand heavily upon the head of the animal, thus identifying himself with it.

(2) The principle of substitution, the innocent animal was reckoned sinful, suffered, and died instead of the sinner.

(3) The principle of propitiation, the offering of the blood was the tangible and visible evidence that a life had been offered up.

Questions about sin.

If we cannot sin since Christ’s blood permanently deletes our sins, why try?

Why work so hard to follow the law? In short, since we are saved, why try?

We must remember that the cannot, is not saying that it is, as the philosophers would say, ontologically impossible, impossible in reality to sin; that it is a moral impossibility.

Like saying, you cannot chew gum here. You cannot sin here. Sinning is not done here, which is a bit different from saying it is impossible in reality for anyone to sin.

If we are saved, why try?

The biblical way of looking at things is just exactly the opposite. Because we are saved, we’ll want to try. What does it mean to be saved but to be reconciled to the God of holiness, both for this life and for the life to come?

If that’s the case, then what I will want will be what he wants. I will want to love him with heart and soul and mind and strength. In other words, the Bible does not really have a lot of space for the old evangelical slogan, “Let go and let God.” It’s much too passive. You really do trust Christ to reconcile you to God, but that does not induce passivity.

Again and again in the Bible, it says, Because of what Christ has done, therefore press on. Exert every passion to do such-and-such. Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. That’s everywhere in the New Testament.

It does not say, Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling because God has done his bit and now it’s all up to you. It’s Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God in you, both working and willing, to do his good pleasure.

Instead, it is the assurance of the gospel, the promise of the gospel, the power of the gospel, the regeneration of the gospel, the transformation of the gospel that motivates us to pour our whole heart, mind, soul, and spirit into loving God.

It is a sin to say, because we’ve been saved, therefore we don’t have to try; we just have to sit back and coast. That actually reduces itself to being another form of self-indolence, self-focus.

I’ll just sit back and let it happen. I’m at the center of the universe, and God exists to make me happy and save me and let me free to do whatever I want.

No, we receive our greatest freedom when we are free to do what we ought to do as God’s creatures.

If we are saved, why try to work to live it out?

It’s sort of a checklist. No sin allowed here; I agree. I love the Lord God with heart and soul and mind; I agree. I have the Spirit of the Lord in my heart; I agree. I have experienced rebirth in Christ; I agree. So why do I continue to sin?”

The Bible does insist that ultimately the consummation of all things is a new heaven and a new earth, a home of righteousness, with a resurrected body, and then we will not sin anymore. To use Paul’s categories, there is still something of the old nature that is at war within us. We have not yet been finally and totally transformed. We have a new birth, yes, but we still are in our old decaying bodies, and the old nature is not obliterated.

Yes, we have been forgiven. Thank God for that, and we can go back to the cross and beg forgiveness again. Yes, all of the promises of God are there, and the God who has begun a good work in us will perform it till the day of Jesus Christ. That’s true. But at the end of the day, we have still not yet reached the consummation. That’s why in the New Testament there is a running tension between what some have called the already and the not yet.

The kingdom has already come. Christ has already died on the cross. We have already received forgiveness of sins. The Holy Spirit has been poured out upon us. Yet the kingdom hasn’t come in its consummated form, It is not yet here. We do not yet have resurrection bodies.

Romans 3:21–26

“But now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.

God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood. He did this to demonstrate his justice, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished—he did it to demonstrate his justice at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.”

From 1:18 to 3:20, Paul offers one sustained argument to demonstrate that all human beings without exception, Jew and Gentile alike, justly stand under the wrath of God. That is where we stand because of our sin.

When we try to explain something of Christianity to a larger watching world, how do we talk about sin and evil? Don’t we almost always talk about the horizontal dimensions of wickedness? Everybody knows, the statistics show us, Sociologists will even admit it. If you have stable God-fearing families, you’re more likely, statistically speaking, to produce citizens who are reliable and honorable and taxpaying.

If you have endless broken homes or you have endless families absorbed in Hedonistic self-worship, and pretty soon things begin to fly apart, and it can have nasty deleterious effects to the second, third, and fourth generation. That’s when you start talking about structural poverty and things like that, which is why you can’t fix those things by simply pouring more money into them. There are whole structural things and alignments that have to be changed.

That’s why the sin in the garden is portrayed as being so awful. It’s not just, we ate the wrong fruit, the point is God said one thing and these people were doing the opposite, and this within a context in which it was very carefully explained by the Serpent, “God knows that if you do this, you will become like him.” In other words, what is at issue is the overthrowing of God, the de-Godding of God, so that I might be God.

We don’t literally say, I’m at the center of the universe, we just act like it.

Meanwhile, because I think I’m at the center of the universe, I’ll reshape God so that he, she, or it suits me. Otherwise, I’ll find another god that suits me a little bit better, since obviously, whatever god is there has to suit me. God exists in order to fulfill my spirituality and give me my full potential. Talk about idolatry.

I’m also now in conflict with all of these other people who want to be at the center of the universe, and there is the beginning of war and

That’s the way we were built. That’s the way we were constituted, and anything less than that is the de-Godding of God. The first commandment, as defined by Jesus, is the one commandment that you always break when you break any other commandment. That’s why it’s the first commandment.

That’s why in any sin, in every sin, the person who is most offended is God.

David understands that. After the sin of Bathsheba and the killing of her husband, after he is found out, he writes Psalm 51. “Against you only have I sinned and done this evil in your sight.”

Unless we see that, unless we believe that with all of our heart, we’re not ready for Romans 3:21–26. That’s why Paul spends so much time on it before he gets there.

After Paul establishes the universality of guilt, he thinks he has gotten his readers to the place where he shares with them a common vision of what is wrong with the human race, of what the problem is.

Propitiation is the action by which God becomes propitious, favorable. The object of propitiation is God. It’s that action by which God becomes propitious, favorable. Expiation is that action by which sin is expiated. The object in that case is sin. Expiation just means cancellation. If you have expiation, you have the canceling of sin. If you have propitiation, you have the turning aside of the wrath of God.

The demonstration of the righteousness of God through the cross of Christ.

Romans 3:25b–26. We’re told, God did this to demonstrate his justice. It’s the same word as righteousness. God did this to demonstrate his righteousness. Why did Christ die on the cross?

Wouldn’t you say to save us from our sins, to display his love, to reconcile us to God? All true, but that’s not what this text says.

This text says God did this, put Christ on the cross as the propitiation for our sins, to demonstrate his justice.

How does that make sense? Well, in the past, in his forbearance, all of the sins of his covenant people, all of the sins of his people in the past … Oh, I know he sometimes chastised them with the demolition of a city or going off into exile, but those were only temporal judgments. Those weren’t the ultimate punishments.

All of those things we’re so afraid of, sword and famine and plague, were only temporal judgments. That wasn’t the ultimate display of God’s punishment. No, he left their sins committed beforehand unpunished. They still hadn’t finally been dealt with. He did it to demonstrate his justice. Now we’re back to the first verse. “But now.” “… at the present time [with the coming of Christ], so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.”

Do you see this? The cross is not only the demonstration of God’s love. It is the demonstration of God’s justice, because God poured out his just wrath by his own decree on his own Son, which is another way of saying that God arranges this to bear it himself. That’s why two chapters later Paul explains further, “God commends his love toward us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.” The death of Christ is the demonstration of God’s love, as it is also the demonstration of God’s justice.

Justice and peace kiss each other, and the cross becomes the ultimate demonstration not only of the love of God but of the justice of God, and all this so that God may himself be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus. If he had just said, “I forgive you,” where would his justice be? But he bears our sin in his own body on the tree. As a poet has put it, the great dilemma of the storyline of Scripture meets in the cross.

chapter 8: “There is now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus.” Instead, out of the cross comes the gift of the Spirit as the down payment of the promised inheritance, and meanwhile, the entire created order is groaning in travail, waiting for the final adoption of sons, the dawning of the new heaven and the new earth. All of it coming from the cross.

All of our experience of grace, all of our walk with God, all of our knowledge of God, all of our growth in grace, all of the blessings we now receive, all of the blessings we will one day receive, all of our experience of God comes from the cross.

Why trust a cross?

To whom else shall we go? He has the words of eternal life. Amen.