The Rorschach GodSample

What About the God Who Craves Sacrifice?:
To help us understand how deeply ingrained sacrifice was for the ancient Israelites, it’s worth contemplating where they observed and imitated such practices. Between the death of Joseph (see Genesis 50:26) and their deliverance by Moses in Exodus, it is believed that they were enslaved in Egypt for around 400 years. I believe that the sacrificially saturated culture of Egypt certainly impacted the Israelites. How could it not? There were Israelites who were born, lived, and died in Egyptian captivity and likely thought such behavior commonplace in offerings to deities. In addition to the influence of Egypt on sacrificial practices, both human and animal sacrifices were common in nearly all the surrounding ancient Near Eastern cultures of that time period.

There’s disagreement on exactly when Israel began offering sacrifices to God. Moses mentioned the need for sacrifice to Pharaoh in Exodus 8, even though there’s no record of God demanding sacrifice from Israel at that time. So, where did Moses come up with this idea? With one or two isolated examples beforehand, it’s widely accepted and easy to believe that the sacrificial focus of ancient Israel intensified shortly after Exodus 19 with the implementation of the sacrificial system instituted in Leviticus. This makes sense because the Mosaic Law became the great veil of distortion that Israel placed over the face of God, and for whatever reason, the projected images they placed on God were saturated in blood.

The self-sacrificial Lamb completely dismantled the notion of repetitive sacrifice, as we discover in Hebrews 10:12 and 14 (ESV): “But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God. . . . For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified.” Through His self-sacrifice, Jesus dealt with the sin problem for all humanity (see Hebrews 10:17-18; 1 Peter 2:24). He also shattered the delusion of distance and separation between God and man, as we discover in 2 Corinthians 5:17-19 (ESV):

"Therefore, if (since) anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation."

At surface level, the cross was a vile, bloody, and sacrificial death. Jesus, in the natural, bore all the sin imagery that humanity could project on Him. Ponder this: when the first-century Jews beheld the crucified Christ “from a worldly perspective,” similar to how Paul once viewed things, all they perceived was a condemned, God-cursed criminal—indistinguishable from the myriad others whom the Romans crucified. We can further recall these truths when we lean into the prophetic imagery of the prophet Isaiah when he declares of Jesus, “Just as there were many who were appalled at him —his appearance was so disfigured beyond that of any human being and his form marred beyond human likeness” (Isaiah 52:14, NIV).