Eating the Guilt: The Law of the Sin Offering Text: Leviticus 6:24-30
Introduction: God's Graphic Novel
We live in a pragmatic and spiritually tone-deaf age. When modern Christians come to a book like Leviticus, they tend to do one of two things. They either skip it entirely, treating it as the Bible's dusty attic, full of strange and irrelevant furniture. Or they try to sanitize it, reducing its bloody and visceral details to bland moralistic platitudes like "be good" or "sin is bad." But God is not a bland moralist. He is a master teacher, and Leviticus is one of His most vivid and graphic textbooks. You could call it God's inspired graphic novel.
The sacrificial system was not given to bore us, but to teach us. It was a massive, divinely-orchestrated audio-visual aid, designed to etch the grammar of sin, holiness, and atonement onto the hearts of God's people. They learned these truths not through abstract lectures, but through the smell of blood and burning fat, the feel of laying a hand on a doomed animal, and the intricate, sometimes baffling, procedures of the priests. Every detail was a picture. Every regulation was a lesson. To ignore these details is to walk past the gallery of God's own art, whistling a tune of our own making.
Our text today is one of those passages that seems, at first glance, to be hopelessly obscure. It is a set of instructions for the priests on how to handle a particular kind of sin offering. But within these verses are profound truths about the nature of sin, the character of holiness, and the glorious work of our great High Priest, the Lord Jesus Christ. We are going to see that sin is not just a legal problem to be dismissed, but a defiling substance to be dealt with. We will see that holiness is not a tame, manageable quality, but a powerful, dangerous, and contagious reality. And we will see that our salvation was accomplished by a priest who did what no other priest could do: He fully consumed the sin He came to bear.
So we must not come to this text with the mindset of a health and safety inspector, wrinkling our noses at the mess. We must come as students, eager to learn the alphabet of redemption from the God who wrote the book.
The Text
Then Yahweh spoke to Moses, saying, “Speak to Aaron and to his sons, saying, ‘This is the law of the sin offering: in the place where the burnt offering is slaughtered, the sin offering shall be slaughtered before Yahweh; it is most holy. The priest who offers it for sin shall eat it. It shall be eaten in a holy place, in the court of the tent of meeting. Anyone who touches its flesh will be set apart as holy; and when any of its blood sprinkles on a garment, in a holy place you shall wash what was sprinkled on. Also the earthenware vessel in which it was boiled shall be broken; and if it was boiled in a bronze vessel, then it shall be scoured and rinsed in water. And every male among the priests may eat of it; it is most holy. But no sin offering, of which any of the blood is brought into the tent of meeting to make atonement in the holy place, shall be eaten; it shall be burned with fire.
(Leviticus 6:24-30 LSB)
The Priest's Portion (vv. 24-26)
We begin with the basic instructions for this offering.
"Then Yahweh spoke to Moses, saying, 'Speak to Aaron and to his sons, saying, 'This is the law of the sin offering: in the place where the burnt offering is slaughtered, the sin offering shall be slaughtered before Yahweh; it is most holy. The priest who offers it for sin shall eat it. It shall be eaten in a holy place, in the court of the tent of meeting.'" (Leviticus 6:24-26)
First, notice the location. The sin offering is to be slaughtered where the burnt offering is slaughtered. This links it directly to the offering of total consecration. The solution to our sin is found in the same place as our dedication to God. You cannot separate forgiveness from consecration. They happen on the same holy ground, before Yahweh.
The offering is declared "most holy." This is the highest category of sanctity. This is not just set apart; it is set apart to the highest degree. But here is the shocking command: the priest who makes the offering must eat it. This is not an optional snack. It is a liturgical duty. The priest must eat the sin of the people.
What does this mean? We get a crucial insight a few chapters later, in Leviticus 10. After the disaster with Nadab and Abihu, their brothers Eleazar and Ithamar fail to eat the sin offering as commanded. Moses is angry and confronts them. He says, "Why have you not eaten the sin offering in the holy place, since it is most holy, and God has given it to you to bear the guilt of the congregation, to make atonement for them before Yahweh?" (Leviticus 10:17). There it is, plain as day. The eating was a form of bearing. The priest, by consuming the flesh of the animal that had the sin of the people laid upon it, was symbolically taking that guilt upon himself. He was identifying with the sin in order to remove it. He was, in a very real sense, metabolizing their transgression.
This is a staggering picture of the priesthood. The priest stands as a mediator. He takes the sin from the people and, in this graphic, physical way, he absorbs it. He eats their failure. This is why it had to be eaten in a holy place, in the court of the tent of meeting. This was not a common meal. It was a holy, solemn, and weighty responsibility, performed in the immediate presence of God.
Contagious Holiness (vv. 27-28)
The next verses deal with the powerful nature of this "most holy" flesh.
"Anyone who touches its flesh will be set apart as holy; and when any of its blood sprinkles on a garment, in a holy place you shall wash what was sprinkled on. Also the earthenware vessel in which it was boiled shall be broken; and if it was boiled in a bronze vessel, then it shall be scoured and rinsed in water." (Leviticus 6:27-28)
Here we see a principle that turns our modern sensibilities upside down. We tend to think of uncleanness as contagious and holiness as something personal and contained. If you touch a dead body, you become unclean. If you have a skin disease, you make others unclean. Uncleanness spreads like a virus. But here, we see that this highest form of holiness is also contagious. "Anyone who touches its flesh will be set apart as holy."
This doesn't mean that anyone who bumps into the priest on his way to lunch gets a free pass to heaven. It means they are brought into the sphere of the holy. They are consecrated, claimed by the sanctuary. They cannot simply go back to their business. They now belong to the holy realm and must conduct themselves accordingly. This holiness is potent. It is active. It radiates.
Now, this seems to be contradicted by a passage in Haggai, where the priests are asked if holy meat makes other food holy by contact, and they answer no (Haggai 2:12). But the difference is in the degree. The sin offering, which has borne the guilt of the people and is handled by the priest, is "most holy." It has a potency that other holy things do not. It is holiness super-charged by the work of atonement.
The regulations about the cooking pots reinforce this. An earthenware pot, being porous, would absorb the "most holy" substance. It becomes permanently saturated with this holiness. And since it cannot be used for common purposes again, and is too fragile to be scoured, it must be broken. It has been permanently consecrated and must be disposed of within the holy realm. A bronze pot, however, is not porous. It can be thoroughly scoured and rinsed, removing the residue of the holy, and can then be used again. This is a lesson in the unyielding nature of true holiness. It cannot be trifled with. It changes whatever it touches, permanently.
The Great Exception (vv. 29-30)
The final verses provide a crucial distinction, a great exception to the rule of eating.
"And every male among the priests may eat of it; it is most holy. But no sin offering, of which any of the blood is brought into the tent of meeting to make atonement in the holy place, shall be eaten; it shall be burned with fire." (Leviticus 6:29-30)
First, it is specified that all male priests may eat it. This is their portion, their food, their work. This is how they are sustained in their ministry. They live by the altar. But then comes the exception, and it is a big one.
If the sin is of such a magnitude that the blood of the animal must be brought inside the Tent of Meeting itself, into the Holy Place, to make atonement, then the flesh cannot be eaten. This refers to the sin offerings for the high priest himself or for the entire congregation (as described in Leviticus 4). In these cases, the sin is so great that it defiles the sanctuary itself. The blood must be presented before the veil and put on the horns of the golden altar of incense. When this happens, the priest cannot eat the flesh. Why not?
Because the priest cannot bear his own sin. He cannot eat the offering that atones for his own guilt. He is the offender. Likewise, he cannot fully bear the sin of the entire nation. It is too great a weight. In these ultimate cases, the animal's body, having borne this unbearable load of sin, must be taken outside the camp and utterly destroyed by fire. It is treated as a thing accursed, completely consumed by judgment.
This exception is the flashing red light of the entire system. It points to the system's built-in inadequacy. It shows us that the Levitical priesthood, for all its God-given glory, had a breaking point. There was a category of sin that it could not absorb, a level of guilt it could not metabolize. It revealed the need for a better priest and a better sacrifice.
The Gospel in the Sin Offering
As with all these Old Testament rituals, this is a shadow, and the substance is Christ. This entire chapter is a magnificent portrait of His saving work.
Jesus is the great High Priest who does what the Aaronic priests could only picture. He comes to "bear our guilt." But He does not do it by eating an animal. Isaiah tells us, "Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows... the chastisement for our peace was upon Him" (Isaiah 53:4-5). He became the sin offering. "For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God" (2 Corinthians 5:21).
Jesus Christ, our priest, fully consumed our sin. He took it into Himself. He identified with it so completely that He was made sin for us. He metabolized our rebellion on the cross, and in His resurrection, He fully digested and defeated it. He ate the curse and transformed it into a blessing.
And what about the contagious holiness? In Christ, this is gloriously fulfilled. The woman with the issue of blood, who was unclean and made everything she touched unclean, came to Jesus. She touched the hem of His garment, and what happened? She did not make Him unclean. He made her clean. His holiness was more contagious than her uncleanness. His life was more powerful than her disease. When we, by faith, touch Him, we are "set apart as holy." We are transferred from the realm of the common and the profane into the realm of His glorious sanctity. We are consecrated, claimed by Him forever.
Finally, consider the great exception. The sin offerings whose blood went into the Holy Place could not be eaten; their bodies were burned outside the camp. The book of Hebrews makes the connection for us explicitly. "For the bodies of those animals whose blood is brought into the sanctuary by the high priest for sin are burned outside the camp. Therefore Jesus also, that He might sanctify the people with His own blood, suffered outside the gate" (Hebrews 13:11-12).
Jesus was the ultimate sin offering. His was the sin of the world, a guilt so massive that it required His blood to be presented not in a tent, but in the heavenly sanctuary itself. He was the priest, but He was also the offering for the priest's sin, and for the sin of all God's people. Therefore, He could not be "eaten" within the system. He had to be taken "outside the camp," outside the walls of Jerusalem, to a place of curse, Golgotha. There, He was utterly consumed by the fire of God's wrath. He bore the unbearable. He did what the old system confessed it could not do.
And because He did, we are invited to a different kind of eating. We are invited to this table. This is not a sin offering, but a peace offering, a fellowship meal. Here we eat, not to bear guilt, but to celebrate the fact that our guilt has been borne for us, once for all, by the one who ate our sin and drank our judgment to the dregs.