Why Animal Sacrifice?

In the Old Testament, we find animals being sacrificed — thousands and thousands of them. Why did God allow that, or even condone that? I’m going to demonstrate how animal sacrifice was part of the big picture of God’s plan.

And I’m going to show that without the Old Testament, the New Testament wouldn’t make much sense. And without the New Testament, the Old Testament wouldn’t make much sense. Let’s start with an overview of the history of man.

In the Beginning, God made the heavens and the earth. And eventually made a man and a woman, Adam and Eve, and placed them in the perfect environment — the Garden of Eden. And everything was very good! The relationship between Adam and Eve and God was an intimate, beautiful one. That is, until Satan came along and tempted them to eat the forbidden fruit. At that point, sin came into the world.

Because sin entered the world, everything is tainted and affected. Because Adam and Eve sinned against God, all men and women are, in a sense, infected by sin. We will all sin, especially considering Satan’s presence and influence, still active today. 

In this time of a global pandemic with Covid, we can relate to an infection. And when it comes to sin, the entire population of the world is infected, and will always be infected, with sin. There is no one excluded. Sin is our default mode. 

Romans 3:23   “We all sin and fall short of the glory of God.”

When we look at the history of mankind right after Adam and Eve, evil and corruption overtook the entire known world to the point that God was sorry He even created humans and decided to wipe them all out! Well, God did wipe out the entire earth — through the great flood, except for Noah and his family, the only righteous ones. Through them, the earth was re-populated. 

However, sin was still in the world. It was time for God to begin initiating a covenant — a covenant that was established through one faithful man, Abraham. Through him, God promised a kingdom that would never end — the kingdom of the faithful.  Abraham had a son Isaac, and Isaac had a son Jacob. And Jacob had 12 sons, and they would eventually become the 12 tribes of the nation of Israel. 

Because of a famine, Jacob and his sons moved to Egypt where the nation grew very large and became a slave nation in Egypt. That's why Moses came along and led them out of Egypt, crossing the Red Sea, and escaping pharaoh. The nation of Israel remained in the desert for 40 years, but during those 40 years God’s law for the nation of Israel was established, including the 10 Commandments among others. That’s when animal sacrifices began. 

The purpose of offering animal sacrifices was to provide a sin offering, a guilt offering to God — a method of removing and forgiving sin from a person. Sin was actually transferred from a person to the animal to be slaughtered. When a person sinned, an animal, a goat or a lamb, with no defects, unblemished, would be presented to the priest to be slaughtered. 

This continued over the centuries until the time was right for God to send Jesus to earth. Through Him, a new covenant was about to be established that would remove the requirement for animal sacrifices and null and void the law, the Old Covenant, and replace it with a New Covenant of Grace. The New Covenant would be initiated at the Cross.

The old covenant of law and of the sacrifice of animals was a model for the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. Jesus was, as John the Baptist put it, “the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.”

Jesus is our unblemished (sinless) sacrifice, being in a sense, slaughtered on the cross, transferring our sins upon Himself, just as the lamb of the old covenant transferred the sins of a person onto itself so sins would be taken away.

At the cross, the new covenant of grace through Christ was established, and the old covenant was nailed to the cross. Someone enters into the new covenant by simply believing in Him, being baptized into Him, and being faithful to Him. Then we are adopted as sons and daughters of God, are welcomed into the Kingdom, and have the promise of forgiveness of sins, the resurrection from the dead, and eternal life in Heaven.

It becomes clear that God’s plan was consistent throughout time. He wanted from the beginning a right relationship with mankind. That finally was fulfilled through Jesus. You can see that without the Old Testament, the New Testament wouldn’t make much sense. And without the New Testament, the Old Testament wouldn’t make much sense.

If we just had the New Testament, the sacrifice of Jesus as the “lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world’ wouldn’t make any sense. Jesus dying on a cross as a blood sacrifice for our sins wouldn’t make sense. There would be no basis for it.

If we didn’t have the New Testament, the old covenant sacrifice of animals to remove sin would seem gruesome and inhumane. But when we see Jesus fulfilling that as the perfect sacrifice that takes away our sins, it makes perfect sense. Animal sacrifice in the Old Testament set up Jesus as our Savior who died as a sacrifice to take away our sins. 

1 Peter 1:18-20

For you know that God paid a ransom to save you from the empty life you inherited from your ancestors. And it was not paid with mere gold or silver, which lose their value. It was the precious blood of Christ, the sinless, spotless Lamb of God. God chose him as your ransom long before the world began, but now in these last days he has been revealed for your sake.