LESSON TWENTY-ONE The Ancient Sacrificial System Found Its Fulfillment in Christ

1. The Passover lamb was a type of Christ. Exodus 12:3-14; 1 Corinthians 5:7.TDOC 57.2

2. The continual burnt offering was a type of Christ. Exodus 29:39-42; Hebrews 9:25, 26.TDOC 57.3

3. The sin offering was a type of Christ. Leviticus 4:32, 33; Isaiah 53:6, 7; John 1:29.TDOC 57.4

4. The tabernacle was itself a type of the incarnate Christ. Exodus 25:8; 29:43-45; 40:34; John 1:14; 2:19-21.TDOC 57.5

5. All other ceremonial observances were as shadows of the reality Christ. Colossians 2:16, 17; Hebrews 10:1.TDOC 58.1

6. The typical system was abolished by the incarnation and death of Christ. Matthew 27:50, 51; Colossians 2:14; Hebrews 10:4-9.TDOC 58.2

NOTES: Fact-prophecies of Christ

“Sacrifice, altar, priest, temple, spoke of Him.”TDOC 58.3

“The whole elaborate ritual of the Jew had sacrifice for its vital center, and the prediction of the Great Sacrifice for its highest purpose.”TDOC 58.4

“Their temple and all that was done in it, their law, their prophets, their institutions, their history, and their daily life, all spoke to them of God, and reminded them that God dwelt among them and would come to his own.”TDOC 58.5

The shadow

“Those symbolical and typical ministrations of mediation were a shadow of the good things to come. They serve to illustrate and in their measure reveal the greater and more perfect sacrifice of Christ, and the nature of his divine-human mediation.”TDOC 58.6

High priest and victim

“Christ is the high priest of the human race who is offering a victim in expiation of human sin, and that victim himself. He is the one real sacrificer of whom all the Jewish priests had for those long centuries been only shadows, and his sacrifice is the one offering which throughout all ages has power in heaven.”TDOC 58.7

Incomplete services

“The redemption yearly commemorated by the Passover lamb; burnt offerings and sin offerings, day by day; and, more than all besides, the great day of atonement by specific priestly act gathering up and carrying through the veil, and to definite issue, an expiatory service, altogether extraordinary and unique, inclusive of the entire nation these all, incipient and incomplete in themselves, looked forward to and came at last to their full atoning significance in the awful tragedy of Calvary.”TDOC 58.8

The true sacrifice

“Christ is the dwelling place of Deity, the meeting-place of God and man, the place of sacrifice; and, built on him, we in him become a spiritual house. There are none other temples than these.TDOC 58.9

Christ is the great priest, and in his presence all human priesthood loses its consecration, for it could offer only external sacrifice, and secure a local approach to a ‘worldly sanctuary.’ He is the real Aaron, and we in him become a royal priesthood. There are none other priests than these. Christ is the true sacrifice. His death is the real propitiation for sin, and we in him become thank offerings, moved by his mercies to present ourselves living sacrifices. There are none other offerings than these. So the law as a code of ceremonial worship is done to death in the cross, and, like the temple veil, is torn in two from the top to the bottom.”TDOC 59.1

Through his blood

“The impossibility of drawing near to a holy God without the intervention of an ordained, and so acceptable sacrifice of atonement, the principle that without shedding of blood there is no remission (Hebrews 9:22), these were to be deeply and lastingly imprinted. in the conscience of the Jewish race, and through them on that of mankind; in order that so the necessary moral foundation might be laid, in the inner conviction of sin and in the sense of guiltiness before God (Romans 3:19), for the joyful acceptance of the gospel of salvation; i.e., of forgiveness and justification through faith in the blood of Christ. Hebrews 9:25.TDOC 59.2

“To this great object tended the special institutions of the sin offering, as an addition to the primitive whole burnt offering and peace offering; of the tabernacle, with its holy of holies, unapproachable save by the high priest alone; of the peculiar and significant ritual of the great day of atonement; and of the constant daily morning and evening sacrifice. All spoke, in striking and varied. ways, of One who was to come; of One who should be at once ‘himself the victim and himself the priest,’ at once the Lamb of God without blemish and without spot, and the one true and only and abiding priest, the true Aaron and the true Melchizedek, in whose one offering of himself, made once for all, ‘single and complete,’ this whole elaborate and complicated, this burdensome, yet highly significant and expressive, system should be completely fulfilled and realized; its whole substance and essential purpose absolutely secured forever; so completely, so absolutely, as to render its longer actual continuance first needless and then mischievous; while the standing record of its divinely ordained, though only temporary, provisions, was still preserved in the inspired volume of the Pentateuch, to teach the abiding principles which underlay them, and to point forever, as the Christian student sees it to point to him who is the sum and substance of them all; and so to throw a most instructive and always needed light on the whole redemptive, work of the Christ.”TDOC 59.3

A compacted prophecy

“In every page, whether history or precept or prophecy, the Old Testament Scriptures are irradiated with the glory of the Son of God. So far as it was of divine institution, the entire system of Judaism was a compacted prophecy of the gospel. To Christ ‘give all the prophets witness.’ John 3:17. From the promise given to Adam down through the patriarchal line and the legal economy, heaven’s glorious light made plain the footsteps of the Redeemer. Seers beheld the Star of Bethlehem, the Shiloh to come, as future things swept before them in mysterious procession. In every sacrifice, Christ’s death was shown. In every cloud of incense his righteousness ascended. By every jubilee trumpet his name was sounded. In the awful mystery of the holy of holies his glory dwelt.”-The Desire of Ages, 211, 212.TDOC 59.4

Type and antitype

“The ceremonial system was made up of symbols pointing to Christ, to his sacrifice and his priesthood. This ritual law, with its sacrifices and ordinances, was to be performed by the Hebrews until type met antitype in, the death of Christ, the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world. Then all the sacrificial offerings were to cease. It is this law that Christ took out of the way, nailing it to his cross.” Patriarchs and Prophets, 351.TDOC 60.1