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Scripture Reading: Lev. 3:1-7, 11, 13, 17; 7:11-14, 28-34
In this chapter we come to the matter of the peace offering. We have given messages on the peace offering in the past, but this time we will apply it to the meetings.
We all have to realize that in the Old Testament typology there are three main categories: the tabernacle, the offerings, and the priests. These three categories cover most of the types in the Old Testament. In the book of Exodus it is mainly the tabernacle with all its utensils and furniture that is revealed. Of course, Exodus also gives some record of the priests’ garments and food. But the main thing that is revealed in Exodus is the tabernacle with all its furniture. The next book, Leviticus, is a record of the offerings and of the activities, or services, of the priests.
To get into the details of the typology is just like entering into a big forest. It is deep, it is spacious, and it is somewhat mysterious. The more you get into it, the more you may get lost and the more you will get many puzzles. Once you get into the forest, it is so easy to get lost. So in coming to the types, we need to stand back from a distance and have an overall look at the situation. This will make it easier to be clear.
All three of these categories are types of the different aspects of Christ. Christ is too rich! Christ is so all-inclusive, and Christ is so all-extensive. He needs these three categories of things to illustrate Him.
The tabernacle shows us how Christ came from God. This is based upon John 1. John 1:1 says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Then verse 14 says, “And the Word became flesh and tabernacled among us.” This means that Christ is the tabernacle. To be the tabernacle He needed to come from God. Actually, He came as God. This is a mystery. Is God the tabernacle, or is He the Dweller? God is both. God in Christ with the flesh is the tabernacle, and God as the Spirit is the Dweller. The very God became the tabernacle for God to dwell in.
Christ as the tabernacle is God coming to us. When He came, God came. Without His coming, God had no way to contact man. God was God, far away from man, and man was man, far away from God. Then God Himself became the tabernacle. That means He came in the way of being a tabernacle. He came and tabernacled among man, so solid for man to contact Him. Would you contact God? Then come to the tabernacle. You can come to the tabernacle and contact the tabernacle, and you can touch the tabernacle. Even you can enter into the tabernacle. You can travel through the tabernacle and enjoy its contents. You can enjoy the table of the bread of the Presence for nourishment, the lampstand for enlightening, the Ark for fellowshipping, and even the incense altar for speaking to God.
With the tabernacle which is Christ Himself, you have God. Not only can you touch God and contact God, but you can enter into God. You can travel, you can live, you can stay in God. You can enjoy the contents of God. The contents of God are mainly in three things: the table of the bread of the Presence for life supply, the lampstand for life enlightening, and the Ark for life fellowship. If you enjoy these three things, the incense altar will come out as the center of your experience. The incense altar is the center of the experience and enjoyment of the contents of God. This is why the incense altar was not listed among the other furniture of the tabernacle. It stands alone. If you draw a diagram of the table of the bread of the Presence, the lampstand, and the Ark, you will see that they form a triangle, and in the very center of this triangle is the incense altar. This is quite meaningful. It is the issue of the enjoyment of such a triangular situation. It also motivates people to contact God and to enter into God and to walk through God and to enjoy God. Out of such an enjoyment a prayer life will come out. That is the incense altar. The proper prayer life always comes out of the enjoyment and experience of God in the way of eating the bread on the table and receiving the light from the lampstand and staying with God in the fellowship. Then you become a partner of Christ in His interceding ministry. That is the incense altar.
This is Christ typified by the tabernacle. But without the offerings there could not be any bread on the table. The bread on the table came from the offerings. So there is the need of the second category of types, the offerings. The tabernacle portrays how Christ brings God to us. It portrays how He offered God to us so that we may enter into God and enjoy God. But the tabernacle has no way to get into us. It could only be our dwelling; it could not be our nourishment. The tabernacle may be likened to our house in our daily life. Our house is for dwelling. Christ came to be your tabernacle. He came with God, and He came to present God to you, and you entered into God. Now you have a dwelling place. But if you have a house without any groceries, you are still empty. You are still hungry. You have gotten into the house, but nothing has gotten into you.
As the tabernacle, Christ came to us with God. As the offering, He goes back to God with us. This is a two-way traffic. He came to us with God, and He goes back to God with us. As the tabernacle, He came with God to us, and now as the offerings, He is going back with us to God.
Not many Christians have seen and experienced these two aspects adequately. Many have Christ only as the tabernacle for them to enter into and for them to experience. They do not have Christ as their offerings for them to enjoy as food by eating Him. Not many Christians today speak of how to enjoy Christ. Sometimes they may speak of an experience of God or an experience of Christ. Seldom would they use the word experience as a verb directly. Seldom would they say, “I have experienced Christ.” This means that they do not adequately realize how to have Christ in them. To be in Christ in our experience means to experience Christ as the tabernacle. We can travel through Him and in Him. But to have Christ in you is another aspect. To have Christ in you is not only the hope of glory but the food of today. It is not just a matter of glory in the future but of daily food. Christ in you is the daily food.
This is where many Christians are short today. Some even oppose our declaring that Christ is in us. According to their concept, Christ is too great to be in us. There is a hymn entitled “How Great Thou Art,” which I appreciate very much. Eventually, we wrote a sister hymn concerning how small the Lord is. He is small enough that we can eat Him (John 6:57). Not only is He great, but He is also small enough to eat. He is all-inclusive.
The tabernacle is one category of types showing how Christ came with God to give us a way to enter into God. Now He is the offerings for us to take Him in. He is the offerings for us to eat Him. To enter into your house is one thing, but to get food into your body is another thing. Although we may not buy a house every day, every day we need to eat several times.
These illustrations show us that many of the spiritual things are the same in principle as the physical things. Physically speaking, we need a house to dwell in, and we need food to eat. We need Christ not only to be the tabernacle as our dwelling but also to be the offerings as our food. If you have only the tabernacle without the offerings, it is not adequate. To enter into the house may be considered as a matter once for all, but the offerings are a daily matter. There was a morning offering and an evening offering (Exo. 29:39). It is just like eating.
The tabernacle mainly signifies that God is available for you to experience, not for you to enjoy and not for you to take in. As the tabernacle, God is available for you to enter into Him, but He is not available for you to take Him into you. So there is the need of the offerings. The offerings typify God who is good for us to take in.
The offerings also signify that God can be mingled with us. When you enter into the tabernacle, you are joined to it. But you do not need to be mingled with the tabernacle, and even you cannot be mingled with it. But whenever you eat something, you are mingled with it. Eating does not bring about just a kind of joining. Eating brings about a kind of saturation and mingling. This is why it mentions in Leviticus 7:10 and 12 that some of the cakes were mingled with oil. Whatever you eat saturates your cells and mingles with your fibers. If you were to eat something inorganic, like a piece of rock, that surely could not be mingled with you. But if you eat something of life, something organic, it will be digested and assimilated, and it will saturate your being. It will be fully mingled with your being and even become your being. This is why the dietitians say that you are what you eat. Whatever you eat becomes you. This matter of the mingling is a deeper thought found throughout the entire Bible.
In the second chapter of Genesis after God had created man, He put him before the tree of life, signifying that God Himself was to be man’s life supply. So the thought of eating was there even in Genesis 2. There was the thought of some food to saturate our being, to mingle us with Himself. Then in John 6 when the Lord Jesus came, He indicated that He was the bread of life (v. 35). He went on in verse 57 to say that whoever eats Him shall live by Him.
Paul continues this thought of the mingling by saying that “he who is joined to the Lord is one spirit” (1 Cor. 6:17). How could we be one spirit with Him? It is because He is the Spirit, and we also have a spirit. By regeneration the two spirits are mingled as one. If He mingles with us, it should be a mingling of the Spirit. This thought of mingling is deep, but it is clearly revealed in the Bible. Yet people’s eyes have been blinded and covered by the natural thought, by the religious teachings, and by the traditional theology. Hallelujah! Our God is edible. He is our food. We enter into Him as the tabernacle, and He enters into us as the offerings. We all have to testify strongly that we are in God, and God is in us. Christ is the tabernacle to us, and Christ is also the offerings to us.
But now there is the need of someone to cook the groceries to be the offerings. A single man needs a house, he needs groceries, and he also needs a wife to cook his groceries. You have to realize that Christ as the High Priest is the cook. We have to learn of Him how to cook. Let Christ take the lead in cooking, and you just follow.
Christ is our tabernacle, Christ is the offerings as our food, and Christ is also our Priest preparing the food. Suppose you have the tabernacle and all the offerings but no priest. This means that you do not have a cook. This is like having a house with all the groceries but no cook. I am afraid that many Christians today are in a situation where they have just one broken corner of the tabernacle with nearly no offerings and no priests to cook the food. They are used to worshipping God in that broken corner. They are not used to worshipping God with a complete, perfect, and erected tabernacle. They are not used to having so many items of the offerings to offer to God. Nor are they, as proper priests, used to preparing the food.
Over the past years I have bought a number of pianos, but I have never learned to play a piano in a proper way. I like to play the piano in a natural way. Likewise, we all like to worship God in our natural way. It is so easy for us to have a natural way to worship. We bring our hymnal and sit on the chairs and sing the hymns. It seems too difficult for us to offer Christ as the trespass offering, as the sin offering, as the burnt offering, and all the other offerings. It seems too difficult to labor on Christ and then to bring Christ to the meeting. We like to depend upon others to be our priests. We let them pray in the meetings for us so that we do not need to do anything.
Once when I was in the San Francisco Bay Area, a gentleman told me that today is the twentieth century and that everything is specialized. He said that if you would teach the Bible or you would teach people to sing, you must go to a seminary to study and become a specialist. The others are busy with their jobs or with their studies, so they have no time to learn these things. Sunday should be the day that they can relax and let the seminary specialists do their work. He said that we should not ask the common believers to offer a prayer because they have never learned to do this properly. This kind of concept is the natural way, and this is the prevailing practice among today’s Christians.
If you look at the tabernacle, you can see that the entire situation is not natural. To know how to act in the realm of the outer court, you have to drop your natural way. You have to learn how to kill the sacrifices and how to take care of the blood. You have to know how to take care of the breasts and the shoulders. You have to know what to do with the meat. You have to know how to enter into the Holy Place where you handle the table of the bread of the Presence and where you dress the lampstand. With every point there is a regulation. If you do not act and behave and move according to the regulation, right away you would die. The two sons of Aaron died this way (Lev. 10:1-2). Nothing natural and no natural way are allowed in the tabernacle.
Nearly all of the Christian services today are full of natural ways and natural activities. This is why there is such poverty among today’s Christians. The riches are in the Bible, but they have been neglected.
Now we come to the central and the most meaningful offering, the peace offering. All the other offerings are for this offering. This is the center and the focus of all the other offerings. There are five main offerings: the burnt offering, the meal offering, the peace offering, the sin offering, and the trespass offering. The peace offering is at the very center of these offerings.
In spiritual experiences the burnt offering is for the sin offering. If Christ had never been absolute for God, He could never have been our sin offering. His qualification to be our sin offering was His absoluteness. He was absolute for God. According to the clear word in Hebrews 10:9 and according to the prophecies in Psalm 40, He was a person who lived His life absolutely for God. Every part of His being, His every breath, and every drop of His blood, were altogether absolutely for God. Because of this He was qualified to be our sin offering to deal with our sin, which we inherited by birth, and to take away our sins. This is not a shallow thing; this is not an easy thing. It needs One who lived a life absolutely for God. So the sin offering is supported by the burnt offering. The burnt offering is the backing of the sin offering. This is why in the record of these five offerings sometimes the sin offering could become the burnt offering (Lev. 5:7, 10). Christ as our sin offering is supported by Himself as our burnt offering, as One who lived a life so absolutely for God. The burnt offering is the backing, the support, the base, of the sin offering. Without the burnt offering there is no sin offering.
In the same way the meal offering is for the trespass offering. The meal offering is a type of Christ’s humanity. His human life was just like the fine flour, so even, so perfect, so fine, having no defect and no coarseness. So He is qualified to be our trespass offering. Trespasses are the defects in our human life. We have a lot of defects, a lot of imperfections. We have a lot of shortcomings, a lot of mistakes, and a lot of wrongdoings. We need One who in His human life was perfect, balanced, and fine, One with whom nothing was rough or tough or coarse. This qualifies Him to be our trespass offering. The meal offering backs up the trespass offering.
We can know this by our experiences. When you apply Christ as your trespass offering, at first you may not realize the matter of Christ as the meal offering. But gradually you will begin to realize there are so many defects and mistakes and imperfections and transgressions in your daily walk. At the same time, you will realize that the Lord Jesus is the perfect One. He is so fine and complete and balanced. With Him there is no imperfection. Because of this you realize that He can be your trespass offering. You would begin to realize how the Lord Jesus as a man could die on the cross as your trespass offering. It is because He was so perfect. By reading the four Gospels you can see that His human living was even and perfect, just like the fine flour.
It is in the same way that you can realize something of the sin offering and the burnt offering. Perhaps you have been born again for twenty-five years and growing in the Lord, yet you realize that you are still sinful. Sin, such an ugly and troublesome thing, is still in your nature. Spontaneously, you would apply the Lord Jesus as your sin offering. At the same time, you would realize that He is for God, but you are not. You would realize that you may be partially for God, but you are not absolutely for God. You would realize that He is so absolute for God, so He is qualified to deal with your sin and even with your nature. He was qualified to nail on the cross your sin, including your nature. This means that in your experiential prayer there is something mentioned concerning Christ as the support and the backing of the sin offering. This means that when you experience Him as the sin offering, you realize at the same time that He is so absolute for God that He is qualified to be your burnt offering. His perfection in His human living qualifies Him to deal with our trespasses, and His absoluteness for God qualifies Him to deal with our sin.
Do not take this as a mere doctrine. You have to practice this continually. We have to know the truths not just by teaching but by our experiences, especially realized in our prayer. The kind of prayer we have depends upon our experience.
The first two offerings, the burnt offering and the meal offering, support the last two offerings, the sin offering and the trespass offering. This shows us the offerings from the side of the supports. But there is another side, the side of our enjoyment.
According to our experience, we do not start our enjoyment of the offerings from the first two, the burnt offering and the meal offering, but from the last two, the trespass offering and the sin offering. First, we enjoy Christ as our trespass offering. Even at the time of our conversion, we experienced Christ as our trespass offering. According to 1 Peter 2:24, He bore up our sins, our trespasses, on the tree. But after the experience of Christ as the trespass offering, we discover that we are still sinful. In our nature there is nothing but sin. So we then come to Christ as the sin offering. This was Paul’s experience in Romans 7. He discovered that in his flesh there was nothing good (v. 18). He discovered that sin was dwelling in his flesh (v. 17). At that time he began to enjoy Christ as the sin offering. Paul discovered his sinful nature in Romans 7, and he experienced Christ as the sin offering in chapter 8. Romans 8:3 says, “God, sending His own Son in the likeness of the flesh of sin and concerning sin, condemned sin in the flesh.” J. N. Darby in his notes on Romans 8:3 indicates that the phrase concerning sin refers to a sacrifice for sin, or a sin offering. In Romans 8 the dealing is with sin, not with the sins in our behavior but the very sin in our flesh and nature. When you experience these matters and when you enjoy these things, spontaneously you will realize that to be such a complete trespass offering, Christ needed to be so perfect as the meal offering. Also, to deal with the sin in your nature, Christ needed to be absolute as the burnt offering to God.
This is why I encourage you to practice taking Christ as your sin offering and as your trespass offering. Then you will realize that Christ is your burnt offering for the sin offering and that Christ is your meal offering for the trespass offering.
Suppose we have experienced all these matters. This brings us then to the peace offering. The peace offering is just a composition of all the other four offerings. In the peace offering a part would be burned to God as the burnt offering (Lev. 7:30-31). Another part would be given for a meal offering (vv. 11-13).
Furthermore, within the peace offering the trespass offering is also implied. The peace offering is constituted with the animal life and the vegetable life. First, there is the need of some sacrifice to shed the blood. This shedding of the blood implies the shedding of the blood of the sin offering and the shedding of the blood of the trespass offering. This is an all-inclusive shedding of the all-inclusive blood of the two offerings, the sin offering and the trespass offering.
Then there is the vegetable life with the cakes of fine flour for the meal offering. Also, a part of the peace offering that is offered for a sin offering and a trespass offering is burned on the altar as a burnt offering. This means that with this one central offering, the peace offering, all the other four kinds of offerings are included. In other words, you cannot enjoy Christ as the peace offering if you have not enjoyed Him as the sin offering and the trespass offering based upon the burnt offering and the meal offering.
