AP

Numbers 29:16  Include one male goat as a sin offering, in addition to the regular burnt offering with its grain offering and drink offering.

The Jewish Feast of Tabernacles (Booths/Succoth) is one of the Annual Festivals that the Mosaic Law requires all Jews to celebrate.  Its purpose is to recall and remember the way the LORD their God cared and provided for his Covenant People during their 40 years of wandering in the Wilderness/Desert during their journey to the Promised Land.  It lasted for 8 days (Orthodox Jews today celebrate it by living in makeshift shelters made with tree branches).

On each of the days they were required to offer burnt offerings of multiple numbers of of bulls, rams and male lambs, “all without defect,” as well as grain offerings and drink offerings – all celebrating the LORD’s abundant generosity and his continual presence among them in close, personal fellowship.

But the LORD is a holy God, and they were sinful people.  So, in addition each day there was to be the sacrifice of a male goat as a sin offering.  This was to provide them with a constant reminder of the enormous gap and barrier their sin had put betweem them and him – a chasm that could only be crossed by the substitutionary shedding of blood in their place.  Later, when they reached the Promised Land and Solomon built the elaborate Temple where, symbolically, God would ‘dwell’ among them, he would have a ‘Holiest Place’ (‘Holy of Holies’), behind a thick heavy curtain, which only the High Priest could enter once a year (on the ‘Day of Atonement’) after a very complicated sacrificial ritual involving the shedding and sprinkling of animal blood and the sending off of a ‘scapegoat’.

As we reflect on all this, and realise that our hearts are no different from theirs, and that God is still just as holy, what an amazing blessing it is for us that Jesus, the pure ‘Lamb of God’ without sin, became that once-for-all sacrifice for our sin, validated by the splitting of the curtain ‘from top to bottom’ as he died on the cross; and that by his institution of the Lord’s Supper the night before he died, he showed us that we are welcome to share regular table fellowship with our holy God, that “Elders, martyrs, all are falling down, prophets, patriarchs are gathering ‘round; what angels longed to see now man has found, God and man at table are sat down” (Robert Stamp).

  So everything that the Mosaic Law required is now completed fulfilled for us in the finished work of Jesus, to which every aspect of that Law was so clearly pointing!

– Bruce Christian