PUTTING THE HAND UPON THE HEAD OF THE SACRIFICE – Charles Spurgeon
PUTTING THE HAND UPON THE HEAD OF THE SACRIFICE
“And he shall put his hand upon the head of the burnt offering; and it shall be accepted for him to make atonement for him. And he shall kill the bullock before the LORD.” Leviticus 1:4, 5. No doubt there are clear distinctions in the teaching of the burnt offering, the meat offering, the peace offering, and the sin offering. In those various sacrifices, we have views of our Lord’s atoning work taken from different standpoints. On another occasion, it will be profitable to note these delightful lessons and lay them to heart, but at this time I am not about to enter into such matters. These instructive distinctions are the special property of those who, by reason of years, have had their senses exercised and, therefore, can discern not only the great work of our Lord but the details of it. I am not sufficiently strong in mind at this time to bring forth “butter in a lordly dish” for men of robust constitution, but I must be content to serve the little ones with a cup of milk. I cannot carry the great cluster from Eshcol and, therefore, I will bring you a few grapes in my trembling hands. I desire to preach, this morning, so that I may fulfill the prayer of a little boy who, one Saturday evening before he went to bed, said in his prayers, “Lord, grant that our minister may say something tomorrow that I may understand.” I am very sorry that such a prayer should ever be necessary, but I am afraid it is not only necessary for children, but sometimes for grown-up people to pray, “Lord, help our minister to say something that we can understand and that is worth understanding.” Some of my Brothers appear to dwell on high Olympus among the clouds—it were better if they lived on Calvary. Little dew comes from the dark mountains of intellectual dreaminess—far more refreshing drops are found upon Mount Hermon of the Gospel! I feel like Dr. Guthrie when he desired those around him to sing him a child’s hymn—I would like to be a little child in preaching to you. Simple things are the most sublime and, to a sick man, the most sweet. I wish to be plain as a pikestaff in setting forth the way of expiation by the death of Jesus. I also have a reason for preaching foundation Truth of God today which, to myself, is serious, though you may smile at it. It is this—if I have but few shots to fire, I should like each time to hit the center of the target. That is to say, if I may only speak to you once, today, after having been laid aside for three weeks, I desire to speak only upon topics which touch the vitals of godliness. I would plunge into the heart of the matter and deal with the essence and soul of true religion! There are some things that may be or may not be, and yet no great evil will come either way. But there are other things that must be, or all goes wrong! Of these “must-bes” I would now speak. Some things are important for the wellbeing of Christians, but certain other things are absolutely essential to the very being of Christians—and it is upon these urgent necessaries that I shall now speak—namely, concerning the precious blood of the Lord Jesus Christ and our faith in it. These two things are of the highest importance and they cannot too often be brought before our minds. Two matters were essential in the sacrifices of the Ceremonial Law and you have them both in our text—“He shall put his hand upon the head of the burnt offering,” and, “he shall kill the bullock before the Lord.” The appropriation by the offerer and the death of the offering are most fitly joined together and must, neither of them, be overlooked. For our immediate objective, there was no need to have taken our present text, for there are many others of the same effect. Look at Leviticus 3:2—“And he shall lay his hand upon the head of his offering, and kill it at the door of the tabernacle.” Glance at the 8th verse—“And he shall lay his hand upon the head of his offering, and kill it before the tabernacle.” Turn to chapter 4, verse 4, the second clause of the verse—“He shall lay his hand upon the bullock’s head, and kill the bullock before the Lord.” Also at the 15th verse—“And the elders of the congregation shall lay their hands upon the head of the bullock before the Lord: and the bullock shall be killed before the Lord.” To the same effect is the 24th verse—“And he shall lay his hand upon the head of the goat, and kill it in the place where they kill the burnt offering.” All through the Book of Leviticus, the laying on of the hand and the killing of the victim are mentioned in immediate connection. These are, each of them, so important and so full of meaning that we must have a sermon upon each of them. Let us, on the present occasion, look at THE LEADING ACT OF THE OFFERER—“He shall lay his hand upon the head of the burnt offering.” All that goes before is important, but this is the real sacrificial act so far as the offerer is concerned. Before he reached this point, the person who presented the offering had to make a selection of the animal to be brought before the Lord. It must be of a certain age and it must be without blemish—and for this latter reason a careful examination had to be made—for the Lord would not accept a sacrifice that was lame, or broken, or bruised, or deficient in any of its parts or in any way blemished. He required an offering “without spot.” Now I invite all those who seek reconciliation with God to look about them and consider whether the Lord Jesus Christ is such an atoning Sacrifice as they need and as God will accept. If you know of any other atonement for sin, examine it well, and I am persuaded that you will find many a fault and flaw in it. But concerning the Lamb of God, I have no question—you may search, but you shall find no blemish in Him. If there were any fault in Him, either of excess or deficiency, you might well refuse Him! But since there is nothing of the kind, I pray you joyfully accept Him at once. Come, now, and look at the Lord Jesus Christ—both at His Godhead and His Manhood; at His life and His death, His acts and His sufferings—and see if there is any iniquity in Him. He knew no sin—He had no acquaintance or dealing with it! “He was holy, harmless, undefiled.” After you have well examined His blessed Person and His spotless Character, if you arrive at the conclusion that He is a fit and acceptable Sacrifice for you to present before the Lord, then I long that you may take the much more practical step and accept the Lord Jesus to be your Representative, your Sin Offering, your Burnt Offering, your Substitute, and your Sacrifice. I long that every unsaved person here may, at once, receive the Lord Jesus as his Atonement, for this is the main part of that which the sinner must do in order to be cleansed from sin and accepted by God! Happily, you have not to find a sacrifice as the Jew had to supply a bullock—God has provided Himself with a perfect Sacrifice! That which you have to bring to God, God first brings to you! Happily, there is no need for you to repeat the examination through which the Lord Jesus passed both at the hands of men, of devils, and of God, when He was tested and tried and examined, and even the Prince of this world found nothing of his own in Him! You have to attend to this one thing, namely, the laying of your hands upon the Sacrifice provided for you. To the Jew, it was a sacrifice to be slain. To you, it is a sacrifice already offered—and this you are to accept and recognize as your own. It is not a hard duty! You sang of it just now— “My faith does lay her hand On that dear head of Yours. While like a penitent I stand, And there confess my sin.” If you have already attended to this, do so again this morning! If you have never done so, I pray from my inmost soul that you may immediately do that which was meant by laying the hand upon the victim’s head.
I. CONFESSION
What did that mean? It meant four things, and the first was CONFESSION. He that laid his hand upon the head of the offering made confession of sin. I do not care what offering it was that was brought by a believing Israelite—there was always a mention of sin in it, either implied or expressed. “But,” says one, “the burnt offering was a sweet-savor offering! How could there be any reference to iniquity therein?” I know that the burnt offering was a sacrifice of sweet smell and that it sets forth our Lord as accepted of the Father. But let me ask you, Why did the Israelite bring a sweet-savor offering? It was because he felt that in and of himself, he was not a sweet savor unto God, for if he had been so, he would not have needed to have brought another sweet savor! When I accept the Lord Jesus to be my righteousness, it is a confession of sin, for I should not need His righteousness if I had any of my own. The very fact of presenting a sacrifice at all contains within it a confession of the need of a sacrifice, which is the confession of personal shortcomings and a need of personal acceptableness. This is true of the burnt offering, but in other sacrifices—especially in the trespass offering—where the hands were laid upon the victim’s head, the offerer was charged to “confess that he has sinned in that thing” wherein he had trespassed. There was a detailed confession of sin joined with the laying on of hands in the case of the scapegoat. Let us read the passage in Leviticus 16:21— “And Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat and confess over him all the iniquities of the children of Israel, and all their transgressions in all their sins, putting them upon the head of the goat, and shall send him away by the hand of a fit man into the wilderness.” See, then, that if you would have Him to be your Atonement, whom God has appointed to be His Sacrifice, you must come to Him confessing your sin! Your touch of Jesus must be the touch of one who is consciously guilty. He belongs not to you unless you are a sinner. Ah, Lord, confession of sin is no hard duty to some of us, for we can do no other than acknowledge and bemoan our guilt! Here we stand before You, self-condemned—and with aching hearts we each one cry, “Have mercy upon me, O God, according to Your loving-kindness.” Do any of you refuse to make confession of guilt? Then, do not think it hard if, since according to your own proud notions you are not sinners, the Lord should provide you no Savior! Should medicine be prepared for those who are not sick? Why should the righteous be invited to partake of pardon? Why should a righteousness be provided for the innocent? You are the rich and you are sent away empty—the hungry shall be filled with good things. Go away, you that say, “I am clean; I am not defiled.” I tell you that you have no part in the great Sacrifice for sin! For the blackest sinner out of Hell that will confess his sin, there is mercy—but there is none for you—your pride excludes you from pity! It bars the gate of hope against you. You sprinkle the blood of the lamb upon the threshold and trample on it in your arrogant self-conceit by making yourself out to have no need of its cleansing power! O self-righteous man, you make God out to be a fool since He gave His only-begotten Son to die, when, according to you, there was no necessity for His death! In your case, at any rate, there is no need of a sacrifice by blood, no need of an Atonement through the Son of God laying down His life for men. By your refusal to trust in the Lord Jesus you charge God with folly and, therefore, into His holy place, where His glory shines forth in its excellence, you can never come! Many of us come most readily, at this time, and lay our hand upon the head of the appointed Sacrifice, even our Lord Jesus Christ, because we have sin to confess and we feel that we need a Savior, even a Savior for the guilty! We are unworthy and undeserving. We dare not say otherwise! The stones of the street would cry out against us if we should say that we have no sin! The beams of every chamber in our house would upbraid us if we dared to assert that we are without transgressions! Our true place is that of sinners—we plead guilty to the dread indictment of God’s holy Law and, therefore, we are glad to lay our hand upon the head of the sinner’s Savior and Sacrifice.
In this act, there was also a confession of self-impotence. The Believer who brought the bullock did as good as say, “I cannot, of myself, keep the Law of God, or make atonement for my past breaches of the Commandments. Neither can I hope, through future obedience, to become acceptable with God. Therefore I bring this sacrifice because I, myself, cannot become acceptable without it.” This is a Truth of God which you and I must also confess if we would be partakers of Christ and become “accepted in the Beloved.” Oh, Brothers and Sisters, what can we do without Christ? I like what was said by a child in Sunday school when the teacher said, “You have been reading that Christ is precious: what does that mean?” The children were quiet a little while, till, at last, one boy replied, “Father said the other day that Mother was precious, for ‘whatever would we do without her?’” This is a capital explanation of the word, “precious.” You and I can truly say of the Lord Jesus Christ that He is precious to us, for what would we do, what could we do without Him? We come and take Him, now, to be ours because if He is not ours, we are utterly undone! I, for one, am lost forever if Jesus cannot save. There is, in us, no merit and no strength— but in the Lord Jesus Christ we find both righteousness and strength—and we accept Him, this day, for that reason. Because we are so deeply conscious of our own self-impotence, we lean hard upon His All-Sufficiency. If you could read the text in the Hebrew, you would find it runs thus—“He shall put his hand upon the head of the burnt offering, and it shall be accepted for him to make a cover for him”—to make atonement for him. The word is copher in the Hebrew—a cover. Why, then, do we hide behind the Lord Jesus? Because we feel our need of something to cover us and to act as an interposition between us and the righteous Judge of all the earth! If the Holy One of Israel shall look upon us as we are, He would be displeased. But when He sees us in Christ Jesus, He is well pleased for His Righteousness’ sake. When the Lord looks this way, we hide behind the veil, and the eyes of the Lord behold the exceeding glories of the veil, to wit, the Person of His own dear Son! And He is so pleased with the cover that He refuses to remember the defilement and deformity of those whom it covers! God will never strike a soul through the veil of His Son’s Sacrifice. He accepts us because He cannot but accept His Son, who has become our covering! With regard to God, when I am a conscious sinner, I long to hide away from Him and lo, the Lord Jesus is our shield and hiding place—the cover, the Sacred Atonement within which we conceal ourselves from Justice. Even the all-seeing eyes of God see no sin in a sinner that is hidden in Christ! Oh, what a blessing it is, dear Friends, when our sense of self-impotence is so great that we have no desire to make a show of ourselves, but, on the contrary, long to be out of sight and, therefore, we enter into Christ to be hidden in Him, covered in the Sacrifice which God has prepared!
II. ACCEPTANCE
There was a further confession of the desert of punishment. When a man brought his bullock, or his goat, or his lamb, he put his hand on it and as he knew that the poor creature must die, he thus acknowledged that he, himself, deserved death. The victim fell in the dust, struggling, bleeding, dying. The offerer confessed that this was what he deserved. He acknowledged that death from the Almighty hand was due to him. And oh, when a man comes to that—when he acknowledges that God will be justified when He speaks in anger, and clear when He judges and pronounces sentence in justice—when he confesses that he cannot deliver himself, but has so sinned as to deserve to be cursed of God and judged to feel the horrors of the second death, then is he brought into a condition in which the great Sacrifice will be precious to him! Then will he lean hard upon Christ and, with broken heart, acknowledge that the chastisement which fell upon Jesus was such as he deserved and he will be amazed that he has not been called upon to bear it! For my own part, I deserve eternal damnation, but I trust in the Lord Jesus and believe that He was punished in my place. “The chastisement of our peace was upon Him, and with His stripes we are healed.” If you can thus confess sin and bare your neck to punishment—and then lay hold upon the Lord Jesus—you are a saved man! Can your heart truly confess, “I am guilty. I cannot save myself. I deserve to be cast into the deepest Hell, but I now take Jesus to stand in my place”? Then be of good cheer, “Your faith has saved you: go in peace!” May the Spirit of God bless this first point!
III. TRANSFERENCE
IV. IDENTIFICATION