In the very sacrificial system of the Old Testament was the admission that no one could be saved by her own works (morality). Irrespective of the covenant or testament under which a person sojourns, the timeless truth is: without the shedding of blood, there is no remission of sins. This truth is evident but often missed by some believers today in their conception of the Old Testament.

The Mosaic sacrificial system was a bold admittance of Israel’s inability to live up to the moral values (and duties) of a just God. Every time an animal was killed as l not be right with God on his human merit. The offerer was explicitly invoking the merits of an innocent blood both as cover for his own guilt and as grounds of continual worthiness before a Holy God.

The perfomative aspect of that system, with specific regards to animal sacrifice, was an interim shadow of the imminent substantive system to be experienced in the acceptable year of the Lord; a prefiguration of the full bloom of grace. Consequently, the milieu inaugurated by the arrival on earth of the Lord Jesus Christ was the central theme and the anticipated redemptive core rehearsed in the inferior practices of the Mosaic sacrificial schema.

Either under the Old or in the New Testament, no one was given the unconscionable notion that he could work his way to right standing with God all by himself. Since Adam’s fall, humans have been born into and lived in sin. On God’s scale, the way to deal with sin is not to perform a good deed as replacement for the sin. Rather, the sin has both to be expiated and propitiated. The sin has to be taken away from the culprit. And, the offended party – in this case, God – has to be ‘appeased’ or placated.

The popular notion in some enclave, that under the Old Testament – unlike in the New Testament – people were saved primarily on the strength of their morality (works) is a mischaracterization of the explicit argument and teaching of the scriptures. The sustained position of both Testaments is, man can never be good enough to earn his way to God. But of course there are genuine differences between both Testaments.

A major distinction between the Old and the New Testament is that while the sacrifices in the Old Testament pacified God, they did not satisfy Him. Only the blood of Jesus shed in the New Testament satisfies the righteous demand of God’s holiness. Those who (lived) before the cross, (but) came to God through the sacrifices of the Old Testament are now awarded the full benefits of the salvific, atoning work of Christ consummated in the New Testament, because the atonement in Christ is precisely the anticipated concreteness of those repeated bloody ceremonies codified in the Mosaic Law. This explains why Jesus and the Apostles after Him preached the gospel of grace from the Old Testament so effortlessly.

The death of Jesus is efficacious in dealing with the sin problem from Adam to the last sinner at the end of the age. The power of the cross of Christ stretches all the way, backwards in time, just as it remains anchored in the eternal now, and projects gallantly into the future. THE CROSS – which is emblematic of the entire project of redemption through Christ – is God’s only provision for the fall of fallen humanity of all generation.

To be continued…

–Gideon Odoma‎

Scripture references:
Lev 16. Heb 9:15. Heb 9:22. Rom 3:25