Exodus 29:10–30
The Bible4Jesus.com Podcast
About this episode
We live in a sterile, shrink-wrapped, and deeply sentimental age. Our meat comes in tidy plastic packages, disconnected from the reality of the abattoir. We prefer our religion to be abstract, intellectual, and clean. We want a God of gentle thoughts and inspiring feelings, a God who would never demand something so visceral, so messy, so profoundly bloody as what we read here in Exodus. And so, when the modern Christian comes to a passage like this, the temptation is to tiptoe around it, to allegorize it into a bloodless metaphor, or to dismiss it as part of a primitive and superseded system. But to do this is to cut the heart out of the gospel. The God of the Bible is not a Gnostic deity who disdains the material world. He is the Creator of flesh and bone, of fat and sinew, and He has ordained that the path from defilement to holiness runs directly through a slaughterhouse.