The Meal Offering - PH90-01
Advanced Bible Doctrine - Philippians 4:14-19

© Berean Memorial Church of Irving, Texas, Inc. (1976)

We've seen that the Jewish way of life under the dispensation of the law included five basic sacrifices by which the Jews were to approach God in worship. Three of these were voluntary sacrifices that a Jew at any time could elect to bring. They were classified as fragrant aroma sacrifices in the eyes of God. They were a great pleasure. They were a great satisfaction to God Himself to see these sacrifices being performed.

The first was the burnt offering which portrayed the work of Jesus Christ in redemption, a work which satisfied the justice and the righteousness of God. The second that we are now looking at was the meal offering. This was a bloodless offering. It portrayed the person of the God-man, Jesus Christ in His perfect character, fulfilling the holy demands of God. Then there was a third sweet savior offering, and that is the peace offering which portrayed the work of Jesus Christ in reconciliation; that is, in removing the wall that sin had created between God and man. This was God's way of portraying to the Jews of the Old Testament that the time was coming when all a person had to do was simply step across the line to eternal life, and that there was nothing between himself and God that God had not already removed and taken care of.

There were two other offerings which we will be looking at. They were compulsory; that is, a person had to bring these, but these were not fragrant in the sight of God. They were non-fragrant offerings. One was the sin offering which portrayed restoration to temporal fellowship for some unknown sin that an individual had committed. Then the final one was the trespass offering which portrayed restoration of temple fellowship when it was broken by some deliberate known sin that the individual performed and was guilty of.

Some of these are called fragrant aroma (these first three) because they portray what is acceptable to God. That is, they give the picture of Jesus Christ as the perfect Lamb of God dying for the sins of the world, but not because He is in a place of sin, but because He is the perfect one. This presentation of Christ in this aspect is a pleasing aroma to God.

The reason we're studying these sacrifices is because Paul has told us that we, as believers in the church age, also bring sacrifices because we are priests, and we'll be looking at that a little more in detail. But one of the sacrifices we bring is our money. God actually calls this a fragrant aroma, using the identical description that He uses for these first three offerings that portray the beauties of His Son in His sinless perfection in His sacrificial Word for us. What we're trying to show you is that, when God says that giving money is a fragrant aroma in His nostrils, He is using and comparing this to what he thinks of His Son.

So in other words, here is our simple earnings that we give to support God's work placed in God's mind and in God's sight on the highest level imaginable – on the level equivalent of God's pleasure that He finds in His own perfect Son. That's the beauty of giving by grace, and how God feels toward that. So the sacrifice of substance, one of the sacrifices that Christian priests bring, is a very significant sacrifice. It is, indeed, on the level of these tremendous Old Testament preview pictures of what God was going to do with the coming Messiah.

The non-fragrant sacrifices are non-fragrant aroma to God because they portrayed the Christians carnality. They portrayed the Christian who is insulting and humiliating the Son of God who is a fragrant aroma to Jehovah God. The carnality of the believer is an insult to Jesus Christ. Every time we step out of the inner circle of temporal fellowship, and step out into carnality, we are creating a non-fragrant odor in the nostrils of God.

The Vindication of God

The burnt offering, the first one we've looked at, displayed the work of Jesus Christ in behalf of the sins of the world. I want to remind you again that this offering was more significant to God the Father than it is to sinners. It was more significant to God the Father because it vindicated the Father's character in the fact that He had created mankind to begin with. He created mankind for the purpose of bringing glory to Himself. Then suddenly, man turns around and humiliates God and disgraces Him by sinning in the Garden of Eden.

All the while, Satan and the angelic hosts are standing around on the outside, jeering and laughing, and pointed at Adam and Eve and saying, "There you go, God. Boy, you really did a great thing, God. You really did a wonderful thing. You made this clod out of dirt; You gave him a living spirit; You gave him a soul; You brought his body to life; You gave him a life; You gave him a perfect environment; and, You taught him doctrine every day, You came into the garden in the evening; You sat down; and, You ran a Bible class. Look at this clod. He's turned against You. He has surely brought some glory to you. You can really be proud of him, God."

You must understand that that's exactly what Satan and the demons were doing. They were sitting there jeering at God and the faithful elect angels (those who had remained faithful to God) over what seemed like a monumental failure on God's part when He created man for the express purpose of bringing glory to Himself. Man was doing no such thing.

So when Jesus Christ, again, a human being without an old sin nature, absolutely perfect, came upon this earth and lived a normal human life for 33 years, never sinning once in thought or deed, and never violating His obedience to every precept of the Word of God, and to every facet of the will of God. Jesus Christ, that perfect person, vindicated God's creation of humanity. And the jeering was stopped. And Satan had to eat his words. For now, not only had Jesus Christ, as pictured in this burnt offering, performed a service that completely vindicated the character of God, but in that act had made it possible for all the rest of us who followed Adam in humiliating and disgracing God because of our sins, to have all that reversed, so that each one of us is an equivalent element of bringing glory to God (would you believe it?) as was Jesus Christ.

Each of you is as equal a trophy of glory of the grace of God as is the Son of God Himself, because what He did, as portrayed in that burnt offering, reversed all that we had done in humiliating God and detracting from His glory. So the burnt offering was far more important to God the Father than it was to the sinners themselves who were going to be able to be saved because of what that burnt offering represented.

The Unemotional Four Gospels

The four gospels describe the person of Jesus Christ, and I want to point out something very significant about the four gospels that you may have overlooked, because it is a very important factor for you to understand in your own approach to God, and how God views His Son. Has it ever occurred to you to notice how unemotional the four gospels are? Do you understand how they portray the story about what Jesus did; who He was; and, what he said, and that it is just straight forward unemotional presentation? Don't you consider that odd? It is one of the divine stamps upon the four gospels. If a human being had written that, it would have been written with many emotional words involved. It would have used words that draw forth emotion. It would have used words that excite in some way. It would not have moved along as the Spirit of God moved those writers in a simple, unemotional presentation of the facts.

The reason we know that human beings would have done it differently is because the liberals have looked at this record of the four gospels written in such a way without any attempt to elicit any emotional response to Jesus Christ in order to be the basis of establishing a relationship to Him. There were no words to try to make people get excited about Jesus Christ. The writers of the gospels just don't talk that way. They simply spoke in such a way that you understood who He was; you understood what He was doing; you understood His claims; you understood what people said about Him; you understood how they treated Him; you understood His mission; and, you understood what had happened to Him.

This unemotional presentation of the gospel is all we know of Jesus Christ. From secular history, we have a little bit of evidence that He actually was there, but no information about Him. All we know is this unemotional presentation of the gospel. Liberalism says that this is a dull, dry, lifeless presentation. They say that the gospel writers were not alive to Jesus Christ. So liberalism, all along, has sought to discover what they call the "historical Jesus." They write about the historical Jesus. When they write about Him, they don't do it the way the gospel writers do it. They do it with emotional terms. They do it filled with words to draw out some kind of response emotionally from the hearer, in order to establish a relationship to Jesus Christ.

The result has been that they have distorted the truth about Jesus Christ, and actually done what they were out to do in the first place, which was to neutralize the record of the Bible. What they were trying to do was to tell you that the gospels and the Bible present an insufficient, dry, and lifeless portrayal of the Son of God, Jesus Christ. And they then produce the historical Jesus, which puts, as they say, flesh upon the bones. They say that they make Him come alive, by which they mean that they speak of Him in such a way that they elicit humanly devised emotions out of the human heart (out of the mind.)

So the rallying cry, for example, of liberalism and of the ecumenical movement has been, "Jesus is Lord." That is a cry to elicit a certain emotion to get people to move toward a person, but not on the basis of the record of Scripture as to who that person actually was; what He did; and, who He is. Actually, the liberal presents an historical Jesus which is stripped of all supernatural qualities. It is a Jesus who is not a deity. It is a Jesus who is a good man. It is a Jesus who ended up as a martyr for whom we weep. But it is not the Jesus that is pictured as per the simple, unemotional, unadorned facts of the gospel. It is not a Savior in the form of the God-man to whom we are drawn.

But those who read the gospels, and we learn to meditate upon the presentation of Jesus in the gospels; what He thought about Himself; and, what the gospel writers recorded about him, find that we develop under the guidance of the Spirit of God an emotional attachment for the true Jesus. Out of dry, unemotional records, there comes a genuine emotional attachment to the person of Jesus Christ.

The Levitical offerings, in their time, had the same emotional presentation about the facts of Jesus Christ. This, in a way, is a little hard series of sermons to preach. It is a very critical and important series to understand the Old Testament and sacrifices. It removes a lot of misconceptions that people have about being saved through animal sacrifices and one thing and another. It does present a fantastic evaluation of what God thinks about His Son. You can see what God thinks is important as you study these sacrifices.

But the very fact that they are such clear cut, unemotional presentation of facts makes it hard for us sometimes to concentrate and to realize what an enriched feel of understanding these sacrifices bring to us, and what a channel they are of the closeness of our relationship to the living God. The Levitical offerings presented facts which form the basis for the worshiper to come near to the coming Messiah Savior; to come near to Him in truth, as He really was; to understand Him as God understood Him; and, to feel toward Him what God the Father felt toward Him, not some humanly devised emotion.

Our Love for Jesus Christ

For example, let's take the emotion of love – your concern for whether you love Jesus Christ. Somebody recently said this to me: "I just wish I could love the Lord like so-and-so," and he mentioned somebody else that he felt demonstrated a warmth toward Jesus Christ: "I just wish I could love the Lord like that person does." Obviously, this individual was concerned about, "Do I really love Jesus Christ? Do I really have an attachment to this person?"

Jesus says that there is a very simple test to answer that question. There is a very simple way for you to determine whether you love Jesus Christ or not. He gives us that test in John 14:15. So you can immediately answer that question, and answer it on a true basis – not on some mystical, psyched-up, emotional basis. John 14:15 says, "If you love Me (Jesus says), keep My commandments."

So my answer to this person was, "The way you will determine whether you love Jesus Christ is not whether you have the same kind of expressions of emotional warmth or emotional expressions of this individual you mentioned, but whether, to the extent that you understand doctrine, which are the commandments of Jesus Christ, you do obey those commandments – and that you obey the principles of the Word of God that you have learned. The Bible is the divine record of the commandments of Christ. We've got to learn them. When we learn them, we are then able to obey them. If we obey them (we are positive toward them), we have expressed love for Jesus Christ.

It has nothing to do with what you feel. It has nothing to do with whether you stand up in a testimony meeting and can emote in some way. There's nothing wrong if you want to stand up and say something that has moved you deeply, and may bring tears to your eyes while you even speak. But that does not demonstrate in any way whatsoever that you have a love for Jesus Christ. What the Levitical sacrifices were trying to do was to say, "Here is what God is picturing for you, which is true about the coming Messiah; and here is how you want you to think about this Son; and, this is the basis upon which you are to relate yourself to this His Son." Now, if a Jew loved God, what would he do? He would perform these sacrifices. That's what he would do. He would delight to take these three fragrant aroma sacrifices. Nobody told him to do it. There was no specific routine that he had to do. He was simply delighted to come into God's presence and perform these three sacrifices.

When he came to doing something that was sinful, and later on he discovered, "That was a terrible sin I was doing. I didn't even realize that I was sinning when I did that," he would rush in with delight to bring the sin offering. When he calmed down, after deliberate willful sinning, and he was ready to come back into fellowship, he would delight to come and bring the trespass offering, and thereby to make his confession. He would relate himself on the basis of the simple information conveyed via these sacrifices. When he did this, he would be demonstrating his love for God.

John 15:10 tells us the fellowship with Jesus Christ, the person, is not some mystical psyching of yourself, but it is in obedience to these doctrines: "If you keep My commandments, you shall abide in My love, even as I have kept My Father's commandments and abide in His love." And you may change the word "abide" to "fellowship:" "If you keep My commandments, you shall have fellowship in My love. You will be in fellowship with Me. You will be in love with Me, just as I have kept My commandments, and My Father is deeply in love with Me as I am with Him. That's what fellowship is.

How do you have Fellowship with Jesus Christ? How do you come close to the person? Well, you do it through the Word of God. You must understand that. As the Jew of the Old Testament had to approach God through the information portrayed through those sacrifices, so you must approach and express your love toward God through the information of Bible doctrine. And there is no other way to do it. As a matter of fact, even love for other Christians (the Bible makes it very clear to us) is simply a fact of obeying, again, the Word of God.

In 1 John 5:2-3, we read, "By this we know that we love the children of God (other believers), when we love God and keep His commandments. For this is the labor of God that we keep His commandments, and His commandments are not burdensome." We love God by keeping His commandments. How do I know that I love believers? When I keep God's commandments, then I'm also loving believers. You might say, "Well, I don't feel any emotion toward this person." That's OK. You don't have to feel any emotion toward that person. You won't toward a lot of believers, but that does not mean you don't love them. You may not even be the type of person that has any emotional expression toward God.

There are whole groups of denominations, like the charismatics, that deliberately psych people into the concept that they must have an emotional outpouring in what they call "praising the Lord." They say that you must have an emotional outpouring in order to demonstrate that you love the Lord Jesus Christ. What they do is that they deliberately get together; they psych themselves up; and, they crank up out of their old sin nature this revolting sewage of pseudo love that God turns from. It's a stench in His nostrils, and they think that they are doing something that is pleasing God. The Levitical sacrifices gave the facts – the dry, dull (if you want to call them that), unemotional facts about Jesus Christ. But these are the facts that form the basis for drawing near to Him in an experiential relationship. It is the same unemotional presentation of the facts of doctrine that are the basis of our drawing near in love to Jesus Christ.

So what we are talking about here in these sacrifices is the attempt (the pathway, or the channel) by which the Jew came to a relationship in his experience, day-by-day with the living God. That's important. I'll tell you something else. Do you know who promotes that kind of an idea of being related to Jesus Christ in your experience more than anyone else? His majesty the devil. Satan is the greater promoter of having an experience with the person of Jesus Christ. He proceeds to promote that on the basis of pseudo, humanly-created emotions.

Our missionary from Alaska, the last couple of days, was observing this very fact. He said, "One of the things that we suffer from in the Christian community is the fact that we do not differentiate our creating of emotions as being an expression of love and relationship to Jesus Christ." He said, "You can do that through music." He used to play a pretty slick trombone here in the Berean band when he was our youth director. He said, "You remember how we used to play in the band Men of Harlech with those booming lyrics. Boy," he said, "you play that at offering time and everybody loosens up – because they love the Lord. What have we done? Where have we moved them to?"

I said to him, "That's right, Bob. You've given me a great idea. I'm going to get Men of Harlech back out and start playing it." We haven't played that in a long time. So we practiced yesterday at band practice. We'll begin the evening service with it, and everybody will be moved. Why? Because they love the Lord so much. Because they just feel so close to Him. And if you don't know better, you'll think that you've had an experiential relationship with Jesus Christ because you heard the brilliant band kick off an evening service with the stirring music of Men of Harlech, with all of its capacity to create emotions within us. Nothing is farther from the truth.

Now understand that. God says, "You're going to come to Me in the Old Testament on the basis of these offerings because they tell the facts. Now the gospel has come along, and you're going to come to Jesus Christ on the basis of the facts, and you are going to approach on this ground. Anytime you get away from the road, you don't love Me. I don't care what feelings you have or what you created through music; through clapping your hands; through getting up and weeping; or, through some preacher telling you some story that moves you emotionally. You don't love Me; you're not walking with Me; and, you have not found Me the person. The devil has caused you to think you have found Me. The devil even put in your mind to seek Me. And then he took you and twisted you off to seeking Me in a way that I'm not to be found."

Do you know the sign that the devil is behind the thing? It's when you hear somebody degrading and belittling the Word. Any time you hear somebody say, "Oh, you know, the doctrine; the teaching; and, just the learning of the Word – that's not what I want. I want the warmth of the person of Jesus Christ." Remember that that's exactly where the liberal begins. He says, "The writers of the gospel missed the boat because they did not present Jesus Christ in emotional terms that people could respond to. They just presented it as dull, lifeless facts."

The Meal Offering

We've been looking at the second offering, the meal offering, which is an offering that has no blood involved. It's a non-blood offering. It was made up of fine flour, oil, and frankincense.

Fine Flour

We pointed out to you that the fine flour pictured the evenness; the stability; and, the sinlessness of the humanity of Jesus Christ.

Oil

The oil in Scripture is a symbol for God the Holy Spirit. So this pictured the sinless humanity of Jesus Christ finding its power through the Spirit of God.

Frankincense

The frankincense pictured the pleasure of God the Father in the perfect humanity of the Son.

The Water Baptism of Jesus Christ

All three of these elements of the meal offering were present at the water baptism of Jesus Christ, as we read in Matthew 3:6-17. Jesus Christ, in His sinless humanity, was there in the water; the Holy Spirit came down in the form of a dove and rested upon Him; and, the voice of God the Father declared from heaven that this was His Beloved Son in whom He was well-pleased. So here we have all three elements of the meal offering present.

The steps in presenting the meal offering we have described in Leviticus 2. This mixture that a person prepared at home of fine flour, oil, and frankincense was brought to the priest at the brazen altar. Remember that the construction of the tabernacle was rectangular in shape; it had a section up at the top that was called the Holy of Holies; and, it had a lower section called the Holy Place. Then outside of the tabernacle there was a place called the laver, which was simply a pool. It had water, and it was for washing the hands and the feet of the priest before he went inside the tabernacle to minister. And before the laver stood the brazen altar on which the offerings were actually burned.

We're talking about that brazen altar, that first thing that you come to as you approach the tabernacle itself. You brought this mixture. The priest reached out and he took a handful (a full fistful) of the mixture you had brought, and he put it upon that brazen altar ‐ that altar of brass on which the sacrifices were burned. Remember that this offering pictured the sinless person of Jesus Christ given in sacrifice on the cross for salvation. In this way, the Jews portrayed approaching the holy God for salvation on the merits of the sinless Messiah. That was the point. He was approaching God on the fullness (and that was signified by the fistful that the priest took and put on there) of the sinless humanity of Jesus Christ.

The Bible says that this meal offering was a memorial. It was in the form of a memorial. That's the word it uses, meaning that it was a memorial to what? Well, to who and what Jesus Christ was. When we gather in the Lord's Supper meeting, that's also a memorial. We do it in remembrance, but of what? In remembrance of what He did. Well, when the Jew brought this meal offering, he was acting also in terms of a memorial, in that this was in remembrance of who Jesus was as a person. This was a memorial of the sinless Son of God, and for this reason, this offering was a fragrant aroma to the Father. He delighted in the Son who was so dear to Him.

The remainder of the meal offering mixture, which the offerer brought to the brazen altar, was given to the priest. The priest kept the rest of it. It was for him (for the sons of Aaron) to eat. So God and man in this way shared the blessings of the sinless humanity of Jesus Christ, thus portraying divine and human fellowship.

A person prepared this mixture at home. It represented the sinless person of Jesus Christ. He brought it to the priest at the place of worship. The priest took out a handful; he put it on the altar of burning; and, then the priest ate the rest of it in time. So here God and the priest were in fellowship one with another – man and God in fellowship about the person of Jesus Christ. What about the person? His sinlessness – the simple historical fact of a person born without an old sin nature, and never guilty of an individual act of sin.

The Word of God

Today, you and I as believer priests of the church age, also enter into fellowship with God on the basis of this sinless person of Jesus Christ, because He is the only qualified mediator that brings us together into fellowship with the sinless God. Christians who have gone to full spiritual maturity know the joy of fellowship with such a sinless indwelling Christ. The Holy Spirit is there to guide the believer into fellowship with Christ. The food that we share as believer priests with God now is no longer a handful of flour permeated with oil and sprinkled with frankincense perfume. What we share now as believer priests is the Word of God.

So what this represents to us, again, is that we share a mutual meal with God. How? When we study the Word of God. The Bible is God's food. The Bible says, "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God." God's food has become our food. As the Word of God is what God feeds upon, because that's what He is – the truth of the Word, we feed upon it. Thus we enter into fellowship with Him.

This picture of communicating the Word of God to God's sheep is the work of the pastor-teacher. We read about that in 1 Peter 5:2, Matthew 4:4, and 1 Peter 2:2. So the written bible is the channel to fellowship with the living God. That's what we began with earlier. How do I know I love Jesus Christ? How do I have this relationship of love to Him? Well, first I learn the Word of God. First I learned the principles of doctrine. And then, I obey them. When I do that, I am expressing love toward Jesus Christ. There is no other way to do it.

You can get yourself in an awful lot of trouble, and Satan will egg you on into some kind of a mystical relationship with Jesus Christ; some kind of a warm, emotional way of praising Him and of being associated with Him; and, he will destroy you spiritually. He will strip you of the expression of your spiritual gifts. He will throw you upon the junk pile. He will take you out of a point of significant ministry, and he'll make a nobody out of you in the Lord's service, if you try to bypass the Word of God; if you belittle the Word of God; or, if you badmouth the approach to God via the facts of doctrine. God the Father and His priests enjoy together the perfection of His Son, Jesus Christ.

This meal offering was brought in three types. You're going to have to do some picturing here now. There were three ways that this was brought. One was that it was offered in an oven. Envision something that had a bottom; it had a top; and, it was closed. This meal offering was the perfect Jesus Christ in the oven, hidden from view as He bore the sins of the world. For all of these symbols, we have to go back to the New Testament. We have to permeate our thinking with the Word of God from the New Testament about Jesus Christ again, and about what He did. Then we go back to these offerings. He's the anti-type. The New Testament is the anti-type. That is the fulfillment. But the type (the original picture, and the original symbolic portrayal) is back there in these offerings. So to interpret the symbolism, we go back to these Scriptures, and we see how these things are fulfilled.

This is just as the people who live in the tribulation are going to be able to answer the question that you like to ask so often. What does 666 mean? How does this fulfill anything? What does that mean? How will that identify the antichrist? People who are living in the tribulation will have no trouble interpreting it, because they will see what has happened. They will have the fulfillment. They'll be able to look back and they'll say, "Oh, that's what that meant back there." So we do living this side of the cross, and knowing what we know about Jesus Christ and the records that we have a Scripture, we can look back and say, "Well, that's what they were portraying back there. That's what God meant when He told them to take this meal offering and to prepare it inside of an oven – in darkness.

Here is the sinless Christ out from human view. When did that happen? Well, it happened from 12:00 noon to 3 o'clock in the afternoon on crucifixion day when there descended upon the city of Jerusalem and the surrounding countryside the intense darkness of night. Jesus Christ, who was hanging on that cross: denuded; bruised; beaten; humiliated; and, so physically abused that he didn't even look like a man in his facial features. We would say, "He was beaten to a pulp." He was crying out in the agonies of the fact that He was undergoing spiritual death. God the Father and God the Holy Spirit had separated themselves from Him, and He screamed out, "My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?" He was addressing each of them in turn. It was that moment that God brought darkness to hide that humiliation from human view. You had to get right up close to be able to see what was going on in that middle cross on Calvary that day. If you were any distance away, the darkness was so intense you could not see it.

That was portrayed by this part of the baking in the oven of the meal offering, because the humiliation that Christ was going through could only be seen by God the Father. Only He could see how the sins of the world had been poured out on His Son at that point. The fire that was applied under the oven to bake this mixture was, of course, again, in Scripture, the divine judgment of God upon Him as He bore the sins of the world. Fire in the Bible is a symbol of judgment.

The meal offering in the oven was in the form of cakes of fine flour and oil. The cakes of fine flour had been mixed so they were mingled with oil, and they pictured the virgin birth of Christ. Christ had been conceived by the Holy Spirit with His humanity united to His deity. So when you have this fine flour with the oil mixed in, you have a picture here of the God-man conceived of a virgin, having a special supernatural birth.

But the other way of making them in the oven was to make wafers without the oil. Then when they were baked, the oil was poured on top of them. All of you are acquainted enough with Scripture to know that kings of old were anointed to their office by pouring a little vial of oil on their head. This was a way of identifying and designating a person to a certain mission. So the other way that a worshiper could honor God was by baking the little cakes in wafer form, and then pouring oil over them, thus anointing the fine flour (representing the sinlessness of Jesus Christ), being poured on with the oil of the Holy Spirit, and thus separated (appointed) to His mission.

Leaven

This took place at His baptism. This was exactly what the Holy Spirit was doing, and it was portrayed in this way. One thing, as you read through Leviticus 2, you will notice is that it says that there must not be any leaven. Leaven was a substance like yeast. It produces fermentation. Leaven is what makes the bread dough rise. Leaven is what will take grapes and turn them into wine. It will take grains and turn them into alcohol. Leaven in the Bible is a symbol of evil, whether it is sins or human good. Either kind of evil is represented by leaven. There was no old sin nature in Jesus Christ, nor were there any acts of evil in Him. Therefore, leaven was not permitted in this meal offering, and the Scriptures very carefully say, "Be careful when you bring this meal mixture, and do not have any yeast in it. Do not permit any leaven inadvertently to get into it because it would violate the symbolism." Leaven in the bible represents all kinds of evil.

The reason I stress this for you is because the amillennialists do not like to think of leaven in the Scripture as a symbol of evil, because the amillennialists are obsessed with the notion that the gospel is going to go out farther and farther into the world until all the world is permeated with the gospel. They base this upon the scriptural story in Matthew about the woman who hid leaven in three measures of meal until all the meal was leavened. They say, "You see, this is the gospel, and it is going to be put into society, and it is going to permeate the world."

That is a hard-core amillennial belief. When I was in Baylor University in the Bible Department right after the war, I remember the Bible professor saying we have entered a new era of opportunity for the gospel entrance; the gospel will go out now as leaven; it will permeate all of our society; and, the world will come to know Christ as it has never before. If he is still living, I'd like to talk to him about that remark today in relationship to where the world has gone morally since World War II, relative to its interest in the things of God, and where this country has gone in that direction.

So leaven is not a symbol of something good. It is, for example, in Matthew 13:33 related to the evil of apostasy in the tribulation. That's what the woman is doing. She's interjecting apostasy into society. In Matthew 16:6, the leaven of the Sadducees is their rationalism – their human viewpoint. The Sadducees were the people who rejected anything supernatural. There were the liberals of the day. In Mark 8:15 and in Luke 12:1, we have the leaven of the Pharisees, which is their religious self-righteousness and hypocrisy. In Mark 8:15, we have the leaven of Herod, which is the evil of worldliness and of political corruption. In 1 Corinthians 5:6-7 and 1 Corinthians 5:1-2, we have the Corinthians' leaven, which is antinomianism and licentiousness – freedom from any rules and regulations. In Galatians 5:9, we have the leaven of the Galatians, which was legalism – salvation by works.

So the Bible, no matter where you search, never uses leaven as a symbol of anything good. So when it came to this meal offering, because leaven very clearly stands for evil, there could be none in this meal that went into the oven, because it represented the perfect Jesus Christ. Of course, the oven for Him was the cross. No one else was qualified. Acts 4:12 indicates to us that nobody else under heaven can qualify as this Savior.

Frankincense

There was no frankincense either in this particular part of the meal offering. When it went into the oven like this, there was no frankincense. What did frankincense portray? It portrayed how pleased God was with His Son at that moment. When He was under the darkness of night on that cross, God was not pleased with His Son. Therefore, the symbolism was carried through – no pleasure of frankincense, for now he was under God's condemnation.

A second way that you could bring this offering was on the griddle. Leviticus 2:5-6 tell you about that. The griddle was, of course, a flat metal plate heated with fire from underneath. The offering was again in the form of fine flour and oil, but including neither leaven nor frankincense. What did this portray? A griddle is like when you fry a pancake. That's out in the open. It's just the opposite of this oven type where it was hidden. This is what people saw.

An offerer could present the meal offering in a way that portrayed how Jesus Christ was on the cross to those who stood about and watched Him, particularly from 9 to 12, when it was full daylight, and they could fully observe Him. What did they see? Well, they saw the mental, the physical, and the emotional stability of Christ as He bore suffering at the hands of the Jews and of the Romans. People saw an innocent man receiving monstrously unjust punishments. Yet, they saw a man who did not rail at them. He did not taunt. He did not reply to his abusers while they were doing this to Him. Isaiah 53:7 tells us that He just did not respond. Luke 20:34 tells us that He actually prayed that they be forgiven because they didn't know what they were doing, and who it was they were doing this to.

Some of the people who saw Jesus Christ (the meal offering on the griddle – the pancake style) were saved, including one of the thieves on the cross and the centurion who stood beneath in charge of the 16 soldiers who were on the detail of the crucifixion.

This flat cake presentation was broken into small pieces, and oil was poured on these cakes. The breaking of the flat cake into the small pieces indicated the physical death of Christ on the cross, bearing our sins in His body as per 1 Peter 2:24 and Matthew 26:26. Oil here is used in the sense of anointing again, symbolizing the Father's appointment of Christ to the cross.

God's Holiness

Then there was a third way you could bring this offering, just to tie this up, and that is the frying pan type. The frying pan is neither covered completely, nor is it flat like a griddle. It has sides on it. So it is partly visible and partly hidden, depending on how you look at it. It is part open and part closed. Again, the offering was fine flour because, remember, this offering is presenting the sinless humanity of Christ. It has the oil present because of the presence of the Holy Spirit. This one pictures Christ on the cross as both God and man saw Him. What did God see? Well, God was seeing the work of propitiation taking place. God the Father emotionally was able to respond to the fact that His justice was being met against sin, and that His righteousness was going to be transferred from His Son to every sinner. God the Father is Holy. Remember that holiness is God's justice and God's righteousness. That justice says, "I must condemn sin, and I must punish it." God's righteousness says, "I can't accept anything less than absolute perfection." This is God's holiness.

Propitiation

God's holiness was satisfied. That's what propitiation means: satisfied. From God's point of view, the frying pan presentation presented Christ as satisfying the holiness of God. But that was hidden from the people who stood at the cross. What did they see? They simply saw the suffering factor of an innocent person. So this type brought the two together. God was seeing propitiation taking place – the hidden part, and people were seeing the suffering which was making that propitiation possible. Again, there was no frankincense, since now the Son had become sin for us. He was the bearer. He had become sin so that we could become the righteousness of God. But there was no leaven because there was no evil in Christ, either inwardly or outwardly.

So the meal offering represented the humanity of Jesus Christ, and it was brought in these different ways: the oven type; the griddle type; or, the frying pan type. Each of them was portraying something to the Jews that was most significant about what God was going to do some day with His Son.

Dr. John E. Danish, 1973

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