6-27-21 Grace-Tucson Sermon

Pastor Tim Patoka

God’s Zoo: Year-Old Lambs

June 27, 2021

The Lamb’s Sacrifice Exodus 29:38-46 1) God’s Criteria for the Lamb’s Sacrifice 2) God’s Blessings from the Lamb’s Sacrifice When you think of a sacrifice, what comes to mind? Perhaps you think of an animal sacrifice like we heard about in our verses for this morning. Maybe you think of how we typically use “sacrifice” in our day today in a more general, figurative sense of giving something up for a reasons. But no matter how you use the term, we often determine how good a sacrifice is by what we receive from it. In baseball, it’s considered a good sacrifice when a batter hits a fly ball to the outfielder to give the runner plenty of time to make it home. In order to be present and alert for worship, we often have to sacrifice late Saturday night plans or a bigger paycheck from working on Sunday morning. To no surprise, your pastor considers this a good sacrifice because what we receive from worship of our Lord with our brothers and sisters in Christ is worth far more. There are also those sacrifices we make for family, jobs, dreams, or health. Sacrifices that hopefully consider to be good in the following months, years, and decades.

When we talk about sacrifices this morning, we’re going to talk about the literal kind through which God gives us immense good. As God would outline in the Old Testament, he had some demanding criteria for the year-old lamb’s sacrifice in order for them to be acceptable in his sight. And if it was, then God would bless his people in some wonderful ways. As this was with the sacrifice of year-old lambs, so it also was with the sacrifice of Jesus, the Lamb of God. God has also outlined some demanding criteria for the Lamb of God’s sacrifice. But because Jesus has successfully offered up that sacrifice, God delivers some wonderful blessings to us today.

1) God’s Criteria for the Lamb’s Sacrifice We find the nation of Israel at Mt. Sinai, shortly after their exodus from Egypt, where God gives them a vast and varied sacrificial system. When we talk about this system, our eyes often gloss over because of how confusing it seems to us. But rather than get lost in the detailed “what’s” of all these sacrifices, let us remember why God gave them in the first place. It was to instruct his people how to worship him and to ingrain this lesson in their community – sacrifices are necessary for God to dwell with sinful people. Even though we’re only talking about the morning and evening sacrifices of year-old lambs, we should keep this 1

Pastor Tim Patoka

God’s Zoo: Year-Old Lambs

June 27, 2021

underlying intent in mind since these twice-a-day sacrifices are a subset of the larger sacrificial system.

When it comes to the morning and evening sacrifices of year-old lambs, we learn that God had some demanding criteria for them to be acceptable. The first criteria was what was being sacrificed. It had to be a year-old lamb, not younger or older, without defect of any kind. As such, you couldn’t pawn off your diseased, crippled, or aged animals to the Lord. Rather, you had to give the best of the best, the lambs you would expect to live a long and productive life. The second criteria was how the year-old lambs were sacrificed. It had to be done at morning and at twilight, not when you get around to it or finally remembered. You had to burn up the entire lamb without keeping any of it for yourself. It was only if you met these two criteria that God would find the sacrifice of year-old lambs acceptable in his sight.

As New Testament Christians, we look at the morning and evening sacrifices to see how they (and the entire Old Testament sacrificial system) points us to the person and work of Jesus, the Lamb of God. We heard in our Gospel reading how John the Baptist correctly identified Jesus as this Lamb who takes away the sin of the world. And with that name comes all sorts of connections and significances to the Old Testament sacrificial system.

As God’s criteria demanded what could be offered up in the morning and evening sacrifices of year-old lambs, so it is with the Lamb of God’s once-for-all sacrifice for sins. As the year-old lambs had to be without any defect, so too the Lamb of God. Jesus didn’t simply need to be in good health or pass a psychological test. Rather, he had to be entirely perfect, without a single blemish of any kind on his record. Second is how the Lamb of God was to be sacrificed.

We have Old Testament prophecies stating that the Lamb of God’s sacrifice was to be shameful, unjust, and upon a tree (among other things). For Jesus to be the Lamb of God, he would need to be sacrificed in the exact right manner for it to be acceptable to God. I pray that we all call Jesus the Lamb of God. But that doesn’t stop us from being tempted to at least consider the opposite in any number of ways that make logical sense. Take Jesus’ unblemished record of sin. If you were to go digging in somebody’s past, it would only be a matter of time until you find the skeleton that’s in their closet. To say that Jesus doesn’t have a single sin staining his eternal record is simply impossible!

2

Pastor Tim Patoka

God’s Zoo: Year-Old Lambs

June 27, 2021

Or take how detailed the Lamb of God’s sacrifice was to be. To say that one person fulfilled them all is a tall order. (That doesn’t include the additional prophecies about the Lamb of God’s birth, life, and resurrection.) How often do we fail to follow a clear set of directions when assembling a piece of furniture, following a recipe, or performing a task at work? If we can’t even do these simple things without failure, how much more with the Lamb of God’s detailed sacrifice?

Anyone in their sin-driven, right mind would question Jesus being the Lamb of God when you consider all that God demanded for the Lamb of God’s sacrifice to be acceptable in his sight.

It's a good thing then that Jesus is no mere human. Rather, as the eternal Son of God who later became the Son of Man with his birth in Bethlehem, Jesus has certainly fulfilled the necessary criteria to be the sacrificial Lamb of God. His unblemished record of sin is true. In addition to being born without sin, Jesus also avoided sin in its every form for all eternity. He has fulfilled all the prophecies as told in the Old Testament and fulfilled in the New Testament. This all gives us the same confidence that John the Baptist had – to call upon Jesus as the Lamb of God with all its connotations to the Old Testament sacrificial system.

2) God’s Blessings from the Lamb’s Sacrifice When it comes to this sacrificial system, God doesn’t only outline what makes a sacrifice acceptable, he also promises blessings through them. Exodus chapter 29 lists a few of the blessings that God promises to give from the morning and evening sacrifices of year-old lambs. Not only would God continue to speak with his people at the Tent of Meeting, but also this, “I will dwell among the people of Israel and I will be their God.” (Exodus 29:45 EHV) Think of how comforting that would be for his people given their current circumstances at Mt. Sinai. The Israelites were a people without a country, traveling in the wilderness from Egypt to the Promised Land, and depending on God every step of the way.

Without a physical space to call home, all they had were God’s promises to unite them as one people of God. And God had just promised that he wasn’t going to leave his people high and dry in the wilderness. That’s pretty nice!

As the acceptable sacrifices of year-old lambs ensured God’s continued blessings for his Old Testament people, so the acceptable sacrifice of the Lamb of God ensures God’s blessings for us today. While the morning and evening sacrifices were not technically sin offerings, we often find a connection between sacrifice and the forgiveness of sins. We see this often enough with any number of the other sacrifices in the Old Testament sacrificial system.

3

Pastor Tim Patoka

God’s Zoo: Year-Old Lambs

June 27, 2021

When it comes to the Lamb of God, his sacrifice would pay for the sins of all people of all time. As a sacrificial lamb, Jesus took upon himself all the sins the human race had and would commit and offered himself up to God as a sacrifice for those sins. And we know that God gave it to Jesus in full as evidenced with this death on the cross. As a acceptable sacrifice ensured that the sinner would not face punishment, so Jesus’ sacrificial death on the cross ensures us the same. Rather, we are free from guilt, forgiven of sin, cleansed of all blame. And we can be sure that Jesus’ sacrifice paid for our sins because he wasn’t just any human, he was the Son of God. He wasn’t a year-old lamb, he was the Lamb of God. But there’s more we get from the Word of God’s sacrifice on the cross than simply the forgiveness of sins. God dwells in our hearts today through the gift of faith as surely as he dwelled among his people in the Tent of Meeting. He speaks to us today in his written Word as surely as he did to Moses on Mt. Sinai. He gathers his people for mutual love and encouragement whether they offer up a year-old lamb or call upon Jesus as the Lamb of God as we do in almost every communion service in our song called Lamb of God. No matter how we talk about sacrifices, we often determine how good they are by what we receive from them. God’s Old Testament people had this with their morning and evening sacrifices of year-old lambs. It’s in Exodus chapter 29 where God outlines his criteria for these sacrifices to be acceptable in his sight regarding what and how they are offered up. In the same way, he outlines the necessary criteria for the Lamb of God’s sacrifice to be acceptable as Jesus alone has done.

From these acceptable sacrifices, God then blesses his children in all sorts of ways. For his Old Testament people, God blessed them with his dwelling presence at the Tent of Meeting as he assured his traveling people that they were his. For us New Testament Christians, God blesses us with the assurance that the Lamb of God has truly taken our sins away along with his additional blessings. And even though we do not have the morning and evening sacrifices to direct our worship to the Lord today, may we always look upon Jesus’ death on the cross as the Lamb of God’s sacrifice for our sins and the assurance of our blessings today. Amen.

4