The Stench of Yesterday's Grace Text: Leviticus 19:5-8
Introduction: The Grammar of Fellowship
We live in an age that despises rules, particularly God's rules. To the modern mind, the book of Leviticus is a dusty collection of bizarre and arbitrary regulations, a testament to a primitive past we have thankfully outgrown. We want a God of abstract love and vague spirituality, a God who would never concern Himself with the details of butchery or the expiration date on a sacred meal. But this is a profound misunderstanding, not only of Leviticus but of God Himself. God is a God of detail. The God who knit you together in your mother's womb and who numbers the hairs on your head is intensely interested in the particulars. And in those particulars, He reveals the grammar of reality, the structure of our relationship with Him.
The laws in Leviticus are not arbitrary. They are living parables, acted-out theology. They taught Israel, and they teach us, fundamental truths about holiness, sin, worship, and fellowship. To neglect them is to neglect the foundational vocabulary of our faith. You cannot understand the symphony of redemption in the New Testament if you refuse to learn the musical scales in the Old.
Here in Leviticus 19, in the midst of the Holiness Code, we find this peculiar regulation about the peace offering. The peace offering was unique among the sacrifices. While the guilt offering dealt with sin and the burnt offering signified total consecration, the peace offering was a meal. It was a time of communion, of table fellowship with God. A portion was burned on the altar for God, a portion was given to the priest, and the largest portion was returned to the worshiper to share in a celebratory feast with his family and friends. It was a picture of reconciliation, joy, and shared life. It was a foretaste of the Lord's Supper. But this fellowship came with a strict time limit. It had a shelf life. And in that time limit, God is teaching us something of immense importance about the nature of our acceptance, the danger of presumption, and the finality of the work of His Son.
The Text
'Now when you offer a sacrifice of peace offerings to Yahweh, you shall offer it so that you may be accepted. It shall be eaten the same day you offer it and the next day; but what remains until the third day shall be burned with fire. So if it is eaten at all on the third day, it is an offense; it will not be accepted. And everyone who eats it will bear his iniquity, for he has profaned the holy thing of Yahweh; and that person shall be cut off from his people.'
(Leviticus 19:5-8 LSB)
Accepted Fellowship (v. 5)
We begin with the purpose of the offering.
"'Now when you offer a sacrifice of peace offerings to Yahweh, you shall offer it so that you may be accepted.'" (Leviticus 19:5)
The central issue in all of worship, in all of life, is acceptance before a holy God. How can a sinful man stand before a righteous God? How can there be peace? The world offers a thousand different answers. Be a good person. Follow the golden rule. Meditate. Give to charity. But all of these are attempts to build a tower to Heaven with the crooked bricks of our own works. The Bible's answer is entirely different. Acceptance is found through a sacrifice offered according to God's precise instructions.
The peace offering was not the means of atonement; the guilt offering was for that. This offering was about the enjoyment of a peace already established. It was about communion. But even this communion had to be entered into on God's terms. "You shall offer it so that you may be accepted." This is not a negotiation. The worshiper doesn't get to set the terms of his fellowship with the Almighty. We come to God the way He prescribes, or we do not come at all. This strikes at the very heart of all man-made religion, which is always an attempt to domesticate God, to make Him manageable and predictable according to our sensibilities. But God will not be managed. He is the one who accepts, and He sets the conditions for that acceptance.
The Two-Day Limit (v. 6)
Next, God gives a very specific timeframe for this meal of fellowship.
"It shall be eaten the same day you offer it and the next day; but what remains until the third day shall be burned with fire." (Leviticus 19:6 LSB)
The worshiper brings his offering, the priest does his work, and the meat is returned. The man then has a party. He eats with his family, with the poor, with the Levite. He rejoices in the peace he has with God. This is to be a lavish and generous feast. The time limit itself encourages this. You have a lot of meat and a short time to eat it, so you had better invite a lot of people. This fellowship with God was never meant to be a private, hoarded affair. It was designed to spill over into generous fellowship with others.
But the limit is strict: today and tomorrow. Anything left over on the morning of the third day is no longer acceptable food. It has become garbage. It must be utterly destroyed by fire. Why? On a practical level, in a world without refrigeration, this was a matter of public health. But God's laws are never merely practical; they are always theological. The physical reality points to a spiritual truth. The grace of the sacrifice, the joy of the fellowship, is fresh and vital. It is for today. It is for tomorrow. But it is not something that can be preserved and stored up, to be relied upon later apart from the Giver. It is not a talisman. You cannot put yesterday's grace in a box and take it out on the third day. Fellowship with God is a living, moment-by-moment reality.
The fire here is not the fire of the altar. It is the fire of disposal. The same meat that was a means of grace on day one and day two becomes a source of contamination on day three. The blessing, when presumed upon, becomes a curse.
An Abomination on the Third Day (v. 7-8)
The consequences for violating this command are severe and startling.
"So if it is eaten at all on the third day, it is an offense; it will not be accepted. And everyone who eats it will bear his iniquity, for he has profaned the holy thing of Yahweh; and that person shall be cut off from his people." (Leviticus 19:7-8 LSB)
The language here is incredibly strong. To eat the meat on the third day is an "offense," a foul thing, an abomination. The act is not just a minor infraction; it retroactively nullifies the entire sacrifice. "It will not be accepted." The fellowship is broken. The joy is turned to judgment.
The one who eats it "will bear his iniquity." Instead of feasting on God's grace, he is now choking on his own sin. Why? Because he has "profaned the holy thing of Yahweh." To profane something is to treat a holy thing as if it were common. The meat was set apart, consecrated for a holy purpose and a holy timeframe. To ignore God's command regarding that timeframe is to treat His holy gift with contempt. It is to say, "My appetite, my schedule, my convenience is more important than Your Word." It is to take the sacred and drag it down into the mud of our own autonomy. This is the essence of profanity. It is not simply about using certain words; it is about a posture of the heart that despises God's holy distinctions.
And the result is excommunication: "that person shall be cut off from his people." This is not a small thing. To be cut off from the covenant community was to be cut off from the presence of God, from the means of grace, from the people of God. It was a sentence of spiritual death. This is what happens when we presume upon God's grace, when we treat His holy things as common trinkets to be used as we see fit.
The Resurrection and the Third Day
So what is the great lesson here? Why the focus on the third day? As with all Old Testament sacrifices, this points us directly to the Lord Jesus Christ. He is the true peace offering. Through His blood, we have peace with God (Colossians 1:20). He is the one who invites us to the great feast of fellowship.
The sacrifice of Christ was offered once, on a Friday. He lay in the grave, a holy thing, for the remainder of that day and for the next. But what happened on the third day? On the third day, He rose again. His body, the ultimate holy thing, did not see corruption (Psalm 16:10). It did not decay. It was not left to become an offense. On the third day, God the Father declared His absolute and total acceptance of the Son's sacrifice by raising Him from the dead.
The resurrection on the third day signifies the finality and perfection of Christ's work. There is no leftover business. There is nothing that remains to be done. The peace He secured is an eternal peace. The acceptance He won is a permanent acceptance. The fellowship is forever.
To eat the Levitical peace offering on the third day was to act as though the sacrifice was not quite finished, that its efficacy could be extended by human action or desire. It was to treat the symbol of fellowship as something that could become corrupt and foul. Spiritually, it was an acted-out denial of the resurrection. It was to remain in the realm of death and decay when God had commanded life and fellowship.
This is why the punishment was so severe. To profane the peace offering on the third day was to trample on the very type and shadow of Christ's perfect, finished work. It was to prefer the stench of decay to the fresh air of resurrection life. To be "cut off" was the logical consequence for someone who, by his actions, was cutting himself off from the life that God provides only through the accepted sacrifice.
For us, the application is this: we do not live on stale grace. We do not try to carry the benefits of Christ's work into a "third day" of our own making, a day governed by our rules and our pride. We live in the power of a resurrection that has already happened. Our fellowship with God is not based on a past decision we are trying to preserve, but on a living Christ with whom we commune daily. When we come to the Lord's Table, we are not partaking in a stale memorial. We are feasting with the risen Lord, who is alive forevermore. His sacrifice will never decay. His acceptance will never expire. On the third day, He rose, and because He rose, our fellowship is secure. To attempt to live the Christian life on any other basis is to eat stale bread on the third day, and it is an offense to God.