The Peace Offering

Colossians 1:25-29

COL-437

Our topic is "The Error of Legalism," number 49, in Colossians 2:16-17.

The Meal Offering

The Mosaic Law was a way of life for the Jewish people under their theocracy, with God as their King. The elements of the Mosaic Law symbolized spiritual realities to be realized by the nation in the future with the arrival of the Messiah Savior. The meal offering was one of three voluntary offerings in the Mosaic Law. This offering portrayed the sinlessness of Jesus Christ as the Lamb of God, dying for the sin of mankind. It was made up, therefore, of a mixture, first of all, of very fine, sifted flour, representing the fact that there was no unevenness in the character of Christ. He was sinless. It also included oil, representing the fact that, in His humanity, He was endowed by the Holy Spirit constantly. And thirdly, there was a perfumed substance called frankincense, which represented the pleasure of God the Father in His Son, Jesus Christ. So, they had the sinlessness of Christ; the power of the Holy Spirit; and, the pleasing aroma of the Son to the Father.

The Baked Offering

The meal offering could also be offered, rather than just as a flour combination, as a baked product. It was also, of course, made of fine flour with oil, but this time, without frankincense, because the symbolism was that this cake had to be put under fire. Fire in Scripture represented the judgment of God. So, the frankincense (the pleasure of the Father in His Son) was not included when they made a baked meal offering, because the Son, under the fire of judgment on the cross, was bearing the sins of the world, and thus was in an offense to the Father.

The baked meal contained, furthermore, no leaven, which represented evil. Christ, was sinless. He had no sin nature. And the baked meal could not have any honey in it, which represented the human viewpoint opinions of the sin nature. There were three types of baked meal offerings. There was the oven type, where the cake was simply out of sight. It was representing Christ vicariously suffering for the sins of the world, unseen, as it were, by God and man, as darkness covered Calvary and the Cross. Or it could be made on a griddle. There Christ was represented, again, over the fire that was placed under it, and the judgment of God, but now plainly seen by God and man as God's judgment was poured out upon this innocent person. The third type of the cake could be made in a frying pan, where the sufferings of Christ were seen from above by God the Father, but shielded from human view by the sides of the pan.

The Feast of the Firstfruits

The meal offering was offered also upon one of the great feast of Israel – the Feast of Firstfruits. The meal offering accompanied that feast. The first fruits occurred in the spring when a farmer went to his field, when it was time to cut the barley crop. And he brought a sample of the sheaf of that crop to the priest, who would waive it before the brazen altar in the temple. This signified the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the wave offering, and the New Testament speaks about Christ as our Firstfruits of the resurrection. It declared that the nature of the resurrected body of Jesus Christ, and many more would follow in the same pattern.

Our Bodies in Heaven

The sheaf of grain represented what was out in the field, as the body of the resurrected Christ represented what was out there in resurrection for all of us. Then the sheaf was only a sample. It represented a whole field, so that Christ was just the Firstfruits of many more who would be raised to life with an eternal body – a body that could never sin, free of the sin nature, and a body as perfect as a human body can be.

What about babies who die? The Bible doesn't tell us that. I suspect that they will grow up, otherwise it would be a lot of noise in heaven. So, they will probably grow up to the prime of life. The same is true for children. What about the older folks? Whatever their appearance will be, they will be at prime-of-life capacity. And you will be a human being. You will not be an angel. That is self-evident for some of you – a pure impossibility to begin with. But you will be a human being, exactly like Christ was when He walked out of that tomb. He had the resurrected body.

Salt

So, the meal offering, accompanying the Feast of the First Fruits, was to be made on the Monday after the Sunday following the Saturday of the Passover Sabbath Day, which was Nisan 16. To this particular meal offering, which accompanied the Feast of the Firstfruits celebration, when the farmer brought that sheaf, he also brought the meal offering. One more thing was added: salt. Salt was added to this meal offering. It symbolized the saving effect of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross, preserving one's life in time and eternity. Salt has a preserving effect. Salt also gives flavor to the food, as the Word of God makes daily life tasty. People who do not have the Word of God miss a great deal of satisfaction in life. They do not have God's divine viewpoint. They do not have that guidance to face the devil's world.

Prayer

They do not have the saltiness that prayer gives – the capacity to pray. And when you decide that you're going to walk the walk, and you are not just going to talk the talk, you're going to discover that the Christian life is an amazingly powerful system of living – almost to the place where it is downright awesome. And not the least of which is talking to God, and finding the answers ringing through. This is the reality of the intuitive guidance.

Last night, about 11 o'clock, I was going over the material, and checking it out once more, and polishing it up. And then I thought, "There's something I need a little background to check on the salt, and the Feast of the Firstfruits, and the meal offering that accompanied it." And I remember that I had a book called The Feasts of Israel. It is an excellent book, and a good reference. So, I went to the shelf, and it wasn't there. I looked around. It wasn't there. I consulted the two other reference books, but they didn't come through with what I was looking for. Then I said, "OK, Lord, one more time, I'm going to ask you to show me where that book is, so that I get my hand on it, and get this information for the saints for tomorrow." And I looked down, and there was a piece of paper lying on an adjoining desk. I picked it up, and there was a book: The Feasts of Israel. Wasn't that an interesting accident? No, it was the divine voice of God. You can blow that off if you want to.

The other day I did it again. I had some intuitive thought on something that that the Lord said, "Check this out." And I said to myself, "No, this is all ready to go." But sure enough, it wasn't ready to go. And it gave me all kinds of difficulties. And I learned my lesson again. When the intuitive thought of divine leading comes, you're not going to hear that spooky baloney of the charismatics, where they say that they hear the voice of God. If you are hearing voices, please check with your doctor immediately. Don't even go home tonight. Go right to the clinic, because you have a big problem. But God does speak. And when it's over, you're very much aware that He has spoken. It is such a nice way to live, to have the capacity to have divine guidance. Why not do it that way?

Well, salt is a symbol of the Word of God that makes life tasty, and makes it significant. Eating salt symbolized the acceptance of God's divine viewpoint and eternal life as a friend of God. When you made a deal with the person in the Old Testament, you didn't shake hands. You each took a pinch of salt out of a bowl. And that committed you to the agreement before Almighty God. Believers are to be salty in doctrine. If they are, they will have a preserving influence and motivation of well-being in our society. American society has rapidly lost its salty Christians, and that's because emotionalism is out there. Emotionalism has overcome the wisdom of God, and it's a lot more trouble for the preacher to have to spend hours of preparation week-after-week, to prepare another college term paper, as it were, to deliver two times on Sunday, if he gets that many in. The easy way out is to entertain people; to inspire them; to play on the stories; and. not to say, "I want you to think with me about your life; where you're going; and, what God has for you.

Salty Christians are the ones who preserve us and give us guidance. Christians, furthermore, are to speak with that salty language. That doesn't mean bad language. That means grace language. That's what is beneficial to us.

The salt of doctrine can be lost. Salt can lose its saltiness. It can lose its quality of flavoring. It can lose its quality of preserving. And when that happens, you can't bring it back. And with a carnal Christian, this is the problem. He's off into the world system. He's compatible with the sin nature. He loses the saltiness, sometimes never to return. In some cases, God takes that person home to heaven early. To lose your saltiness as a Christian is not a good thing.

Then, in Leviticus 2:13, there is one other very significant phrase. This the meal offering he's talking about. The wave offering has been performed. It's not put on the altar because it represents Christ in resurrected victory, rather than another judgment. Now, the grain offering that accompanies that is reminding of the judgment upon Christ: "Every grain offering of yours, moreover, you shall season with salt." You're going to add salt to it: "So that the salt of the covenant of your God shall not be lacking from your grain offering. With all your offerings, you shall offer salt."

So, on this occasion, this meal offering included also salt. Why? Well, as we already indicated, in the society of Israel, this is the way you made an agreement with somebody. This is the way you said, "I believe you. I accept what you say. I will do this, and I'll expect you to do your part." So, you could ratify an agreement by eating salt together from a dish. And here, God says, "I've made a covenant with you" (speaking with Israel – to the nation of Israel, under the Mosaic Law system). God is saying, "I have made an offer to you, and I took a pinch of salt, and you took a pinch of salt." In Exodus 19, this particular passage deals with the Ten Commandments moral code. But I only want you to look at Exodus 19:5-8. Moses is told: "Now then, if you will indeed obey My voice." Moses has come down from Sinai. He's reporting back to the people of Israel: their society; and, their government. There's a theocracy. Their social life is now being constructed on the basis of the way of life enunciated in the Mosaic Law.

Now, God is saying to the Israelites, and as always, whatever he says, in dealing with people in other times, Scripture says, "Are for our learning." It is for their spiritual application, though it is not the literal purpose. But here are the spiritual implications: "Now then, if you will indeed obey My voice, and keep My covenant, then you shall be My own possession among all the peoples, for all the earth is Mine."

God's Conditional and Unconditional Covenants with Israel

Now, in first 5, the third word is the killer: Now then, if." This is dealing with the Mosaic Law. He has presented it, and He's telling the Israelites, "Are you going to take this? Are you going to conform to this? Are we going to make a covenant with one another in agreement that we will live under this, and you'll be faithful to this way of life? If you do that, then something good will happen. If you don't do that, then something bad will happen." This is the only conditional covenant that Israel had with God. All the other covenants were unconditional. The covenant relative to possessing the land of Israel forever is unconditional. The covenant about having a king who would reign over them forever is unconditional. The covenant of becoming new creatures eventually, that they would be spiritually regenerated, is unconditional.

However, here it says, "If you do something then God will do something." So, this was a serious offer now. And God says, "Are we going to share the salt? If You will indeed obey My voice, and keep My covenant, then you shall be My own position among all nations, and all the people of the earth, for the earth is Mine. You shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. These are the words that used to speak to the sons of Israel." Moses said, "OK, I'll go down and give him the word" And he does.

So, Moses called the elders of the people, and set before them all these words that the Lord had commanded. He brings in the spiritual leaders, and says, "Here's the word from God. And you are now going to speak in behalf of the people of Israel. God is offering us a covenant deal. He wants to know whether we're ready to share the salt."

Verse 8: "And all the people answered together, and said, "All that the Lord has spoken, we will do." And Moses brought back the words of the people to the Lord. They were a little too quick to speak: "O, yes, Lord. We'll keep the whole Mosaic Law. We'll be very faithful to the moral code. We'll be faithful to the social life; to the caring for the people in need; and, to the honoring of the private ownership principle. The whole bit that's encased in the Mosaic Law as a way of life: we'll do it."

However, there was one problem. They didn't have the capacity to do it. The sin nature in them was going to bring them down, and they were going to learn the hard way that they could not save themselves, and they could not even live a godly life on their own. This had to be an act of God. The fulfillment of that has, of course, come in our time with the arrival of Jesus Christ. But here, God took the pinch of salt, and they took the pinch of salt, and now a covenant had been established between them.

Hebrews 8:7-12 refers to this new covenant: "For if that first covenant (with Moses) had been faultless, there would have been no occasion sought for a second. For finding fault with them, he says." Then he quotes here from a passage in Jeremiah 31:31-34: "'Behold, days are coming,' says the Lord, 'when I will effect a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah.'" You and I as Christians are under the New Testament – the New Covenant. This is not what he's referring to here. He's referring to the fact that the Jews had an old covenant of Moses. And they couldn't carry it through.

God says, "Now I'm going to make a new covenant with the people of Israel. It won't come to its fruition until the end of the tribulation period, when they find that Christ was indeed the Messiah Savior, and they will turn to Him. And then, under that New Covenant, they will find salvation, regeneration, and restoration as His special nation (with the house of Israel, and the house of Judah)."

Verse 9: "Not like the Covenant which I made with their fathers" – the Mosaic Law, which they couldn't keep, though they pretended they were going to, and they were sincere in that: "'On the day when I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt. For they did not continue in My covenant. And I did not care for them,' says the Lord." God said, "We made a covenant of salt. I took a pinch. They took a pinch. I kept My part of instructing them, but they were not able to keep their part." They couldn't do it: "For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel." This is ahead. This is the future – a new covenant: "'After those days,' says the lord, I'll put My laws into their minds (spiritual regeneration – capacity to do right), and I will write them upon their hearts (their minds – they will know doctrine). And I will be their God. And they shall be My people. And they shall not teach everyone his fellow citizen, and everyone his brother, saying, 'Know the Lord.''"

There is going to come a time (this is in the millennium), when you don't have to go around teaching people about who Jesus Christ is; what He is destined to do; and, what He is going to do, because all the world, every day, will see Him in Jerusalem. We'll see Him there, operating out of the capital city of Israel, which will become the capital of the world. They will see them operating on the principles of the Jewish nation, being the leading nation of the world. And at that time, Christ's personal bride, the church, in positions of authority, will be guiding the millennial world.

Have you ever stopped to think that, as a Christian, what job you're going to have in the millennium? It's going to be very much like what you have a yen for now. It's going to be very much like what you're gifted for now. What realm of area are you gifted in? Men and women will be brought to bear their gifts, at a maximum level, in regenerated bodies that are completely free of the sin nature, entirely like Christ. And they will be there, conducting the business of the world. Everyone his brother is going to know the Lord: "For all shall know me, from the last to the greatest. For I'll be merciful to their iniquities, and I'll remember their sins no more."

There's a great spiritual principle. When was the last time that something came into your life that was not a very happy situation? Things were really coming apart. And in the back of your minds, you say, "I know why this is happening to me. It's because of that sin. It's because of that secret thing I did. It's because of that thing that, within my life, is back there. If you have confessed, whatever the sin is, and whenever it was: "I will remember their iniquity no more." And even if you know about it, you never throw it up in a person's face, because immediately that you do this, you're out of fellowship with your Father. You don't call attention to what God says: "If I forgive it, it's out of my radar screen completely. It's off the screen. As far as East is from the West, buried in the deep sea: I don't deal with it. It's gone."

So, even to Israel, who had done the terrible thing of murdering their Messiah Savior, God said, "I'm going to forgive you as a nation. I'm going to forgive you as individuals. And we're going to forget this, and we will speak of this no more. It will be behind us."

Confession of known sins does exactly that. You may have to make corrections for the sin. The fact is that it may even have physical complications, or physical results, that will continue, and that you won't be able to dismiss. You will now walk through life dealing with that particular thing. But then God's grace comes in, and the scene becomes once more a very happy one.

So, God says, "I'm going to make the agreement. And even though it was a conditional agreement, this is the salt of the covenant. We shared salt. We committed ourselves to it. I'm going to come through for you, though you did not for me." This is what God does in eternal life. He makes a covenant with sinners for eternal life. One way to present it would be to ask a person: "Do you want to have eternal life?" You can tell a person: "If you want to have eternal life, you have to pinch salt with God." They may say, "But how do I do that?" And you can say, "Well, it's explained here in the gospel of John 3:16: "For God so loved the world that He gave His Only Begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him should not perish, but have eternal life."

That's God's pinch of salt. He says, "I will agree to cover your moral guilt. I will make a provision for you, so that you may have eternal life. Your moral guilt will be forgiven as a gift from Me." That's His pinch. What is your pinch of salt? Well that's in Acts 16:31: "Believe on the Lord Jesus, and you shall be saved: you and your household" – those who believe with you. So, your pinch is believing the gospel. God's pinch of salt is having sent Christ to the cross, and made the provision. That's why the salt was so important in the meal offering. It was reminding us that we have a deal with the Almighty. And it was included with the celebration of the Firstfruits Feast.

This meat, this particular meal offering also had a very distinct procedure. We need to go back to Leviticus 2:14. The procedure for the meal offering, when the Firstfruits festival feast was being observed: "Also, if you bring a grain offering (a meal offering) of early ripened things to the Lord, you shall bring fresh heads of grain, roasted in the fire, grits of new growth, for the grain offering, of your early ripened things." You take the grain out; you shake out what the actual barley grain, in this case; and, it is roasted. Then, in verse 15: "You put oil on it, and lay incense on it – it is a grain offering."

You take the grain, here again representing Jesus Christ, the God-Man. And what do you do? You shake it out of the head; expose it; strip it as he was stripped; and, then you put it under the judgment of God, as he was placed, and in comes the fire. This is what was in the mind of Isaiah when he wrote Isaiah 53:5: "But He was pierced through for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities." Crushing refers to that stock: to shake out the grain – the chastening for our well-being fell on Him: and, by His scourging we are healed." Here's the dying of the Lord Jesus Christ, pictured on the cross, as the grain, being beaten out of the ear, in which it has grown.

The Jews today look at Isaiah 53, and the rabbis say, "No, this does not apply to the Messiah Savior. This applies to the nation of Israel." The reason for that is, when you read through this passage, some kind of a person, beaten up, grain shaken out of the pod, and so abused, and his face so mutilated, you saw a mass of flesh up there, and that bleeding mess didn't even look like a human being anymore, they said. And that was so exact to what history has recorded about Jesus Christ.

Well, these are these roasted grains are anointed with oil and frankincense. Signifying what? Signifying the resurrection of Jesus Christ under the power of the Holy Spirit, and under the pleasure of God the Father. Leviticus 2:15, therefore says, "You shall then put oil on it, lay incense on it, and it's a grain offering.

Then in verse 16: "The priest shall offer up in smoke its memorial portion, part of its grits, and its oil, with all its incense as an offering by fire to the Lord. Here, the priest burns part of this meal offering as a memorial again to Christ's acceptance as the perfect Lamb of God for the sins of the world." All of this is so clear to us, because we're looking back at it from our vantage point of the information of the New Testament. Yet, there's a lesson for us. By faith, believers today feed upon who and what Jesus Christ is, as the Old Testament priest did on those symbols of His perfect humanity. That priest only took a handful of that grain, and put it on the on the fire of the altar. The rest the priest kept. And the symbol there is inescapable. Here you have God the Father, eating, as it were, as a meal offering, representing the sinless person of Jesus Christ in His resurrected glory. He was giving that to us, and the priest at the brazen altar eating part of that meal too. So, God and man sere sharing the person of Christ – fellowship in the Word of God. This spiritual nourishment through faith in the realities that are portrayed in the Word of God.

Now, if you never were taught the Word of God, none of this has any meaning. If you do not understand what the grace way of life is, none of this has significance. And there are many Christians today. They're in carnality, and they are out of touch with reality. They think that life is just a hustling – whatever you do. They do not understand, nor do they want to understand what it is to walk by faith, to listen to the intuitive guidance of the Spirit of God, because what it does is that it takes you out of the world. And as we saw this morning, James says, "If you're going to be a friend of the world, you're not going to be a friend of the Lord Jesus Christ. If you're a friend of the world, you won't be the friend of God. So, we walk that lonely path ourselves: the wonderful offering – the meal offering.

The Wall between God and Man

Then there was a third voluntary offering that was called a peace offering. This we have in Leviticus 3. This was another offering that you might choose to bring. And what did it portray? It portrayed reconciliation. It portrayed the fact that God has removed a barrier that exists between God and man. This is where the problem comes. Man has a wall that separates him from God. This is the condition in which we're born. We are lost, and we face eternal death. Our destiny is the lake of fire. On the other side of that wall, if you can get through this wall, here you have a condition of being saved – eternal life, with the triune God. Your destiny is heaven. There's no way you can get through this wall. There's no way you can get around it. What is the wall?

The Slave Market of Sin

They can be very cultured. They can be very generous. They can be very significant in society, but they're still slaves of sin. And all you have to do as a Christian with discernment is listen to popular figures, and the opinion makers, and the people who speak with great authority, and you can realize they are the slaves of sin. They are slaves of the sin nature within them. That slavery keeps them from God.

Absolute Righteousness

Spiritual Death

Holiness

Position in Christ

Now, reconciliation has to do (and that's what this peace offering represents) with getting God and man together. How in the world are we going to get through this wall? How in the world are we going to get from the side of the lake of fire to the side of heaven; from the side of being lost, to the side of being saved; and, from eternal death (separation from God), to eternal life, spent in His presence. People are born sinners. And, therefore, they're unfit for fellowship with God or for heaven. Man is inclined toward evil. So, he does not have any peace with God.

What he wants to do is dismiss God. He wants to surely dismiss the Bible. He wants to reinterpret the Bible. He wants to twist it, so that his sin nature can be justified in what it wants to do. Well, OK, you can live that way, if you are that foolish. And for most religious people, nobody's ever told them this problem of the fact by nature: "I want to do what's wrong." So, in come this peace offering, and it stresses the finished work of Christ on the cross for the sins of the world as a basis for peace for all mankind. Nobody can make his own peace. That's the phrase we use. We say, "Somebody is going to die. Well, make your peace with God." You can't do it. Only God can make the peace for you. He had to reach out for us in our sins, to reconcile us to Himself, to bring us to peace.

2 Corinthians 5:19 refers to that – namely, that: "God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them. And He has committed to us the word of reconciliation." In the doctrine of reconciliation, the word means "to adjust to a standard." When you look at your watch, and you see that the time is wrong, then you say, "I've got to adjust this watch." And what you're doing is reconciling that watch to the reality of the time. Man has to be reconciled to God. How is that to be done? A peace offering declares that God has been satisfied (propitiated). His justice has been satisfied relative to human sin. Now the sinner can be reconciled to God. What he is saying (putting this in English) is that the wall separating them has been removed. So, the divine appeal here of this peace offering of Israel, pictured the sinner being reconciled to God, by trusting in Christ as Savior – the Messiah Savior Who was to come.

This is what Paul refers to in 2 Corinthians 5:20-21: "Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were entreating through us. We beg you, on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. God doesn't have to be reconciled to man. Man has to be reconciled to God. He made him (Christ), Who knew no sin, to be seen on our behalf, that we might become the righteousness of God through in Him." Yes, you can become absolute righteousness. It has to be imputed to you.

So, here's the illustration. Man was created in innocence. Man and God were at peace, holding hands with one another. They're friends. Adam foolishly took the advice of Eve, and they fell into sin, and immediately they were dead – stone dead spiritually. And what had happened was that this wall, that we have looked at, all immediately rose up between them and God, so that God and man now were back-to-back, because man was now at enmity with God. He was the enemy of God. God was at wrath. His justice had been violated against man.

So, here you have sin resulting in spiritual death. You have human good. You have divine justice. You're in Adam. You have all of these things here that are now separating them. Along comes Jesus Christ. And He takes the sins of the world (the moral guilt), and He dies on the cross, and the sinner becomes savable. Up to now, he could not be saved. Now there is a basis because the wall has been removed. There's a basis for man to come over, and put his hands once more into the hand of God.

So, here you have the condition that exists for most human beings. The cross has removed the wall. Justification has been performed. Christ died for the sins of all mankind. God now turns and faces the sinner, and extends the gift of salvation. Man is the enemy of God. God is propitiated. This sinner does not believe the gospel. He rejects the potential, the objective reconciliation. But on the other hand, for those who believe the gospel, reconciliation comes into play. It is man who needs to be reconciled. He believes the gospel, and thus across the cross of Jesus Christ, God takes his hand. The result is that God is satisfied; the sinner, who accepts his salvation, who trusts in Jesus Christ, is now given absolute righteousness (imputed to him); and, there man is reconciled. What is this feeling? Peace. He is ready to die. He may not be too eager for that, but he knows what's out there. And he knows, as Paul said: "That when he dies, he will be in the Lord's presence," which, as Paul says is, "much better."

So, this peace offering was trying to teach Israel all of this that we know in such great detail now, that has resulted in this whole marvelous provision of God for reconciliation, so that Christ, who knew no sin, became sin for us, so we could become the righteousness of God in Him.

So, we walk out of here tonight in peace. If we are not at peace, it is because we're out of fellowship. We're running our own program. We're ignoring the fact that we have a mission, and that our time; our treasures; and, our talents are His for us to use. We have the logistical grace provided for the battle. You may ignore the reconciliation, and you may focus upon your own plan. You don't know how long you're going to be around. All of a sudden, everything you are, and everything you have, is going to be left behind, the only thing you can take with you is what came from this reconciliation, such that you got on-track with the plan and the will of God. It is so nice to be reconciled to God. And the procedure of this particular sacrifice (the animals involved) is magnificent as it portrays coming to peace with God. If you're at peace with Him in salvation, the issue is to be at peace with Him in time.

Dr. John E. Danish, 1995

Back to the Colossians index