Laws of Worship Prefiguring Christ

I confess to being old enough to remember the . . . Don McNeil Breakfast Club on radio. The program . . . was something of the equivalent of television’s Today show. . . . During each day’s program there would be a time when Don would say, “It’s prayer time around the breakfast table. . . . Each in his own words, each in his own way, bow your heads and let us pray.” It’s moving to recollect such a thing being included on a nationwide, secular program! And yet there was something about the Breakfast Club’s invitation to worship that was much more “American” than it was scriptural. We have a national disposition to emphasize our right to worship “in our own way.” While I’m grateful for that freedom, . . . it misses an essential fact about true worship: biblical worship is on God’s terms, not ours. . . . Once I choose the Living God as my God, I give up the right to worship “in my own way.” In the very act of naming God God, you and I are granting to Him alone the right to prescribe how He wishes to be worshiped. (The Heart of Praise, 13–14)

Hayford is correct. Determining the way God’s people worship Him is God’s prerogative, not ours. God illustrates that fact in His worship commands in the book of Leviticus with all their particularity. The first 16 chapters of Leviticus are replete with God’s specific instructions about how to offer sacrifices, how to prepare incense, what parts of sacrificial animals to discard, what priests were to wear, and so on.

We no longer follow these rules about how to offer sacrifices. We no longer offer sacrifices at all. God has abolished His old covenant laws about worship, and He has initiated the new covenant. Jesus, God the Son, offered Himself as the final, once-for-all sacrifice, and He is our high priest. Through Him, God has made the old covenant worship system obsolete. However, God gives worship commands in the new covenant too.

In Hebrews 10:25 God tells us that He does not want us to neglect getting together with other believers for worship. So we gather for worship with brothers and sisters in Christ to obey God’s command. In John 4:24 Jesus said God is looking for people who will worship Him in spirit and in truth. So we worship God according to His truth in His Word, not according to our opinions or preferences. We also worship God with our spirits, not just in appearance or in external compliance. In Romans 12:1 God tells us to present our bodies as living sacrifices to God. We figuratively lay ourselves on the altar and offer ourselves to Him in worship. Psalm 95, verse 1 is one of many places in the Bible where God tells us to worship Him with musical praise. It says, “Come, let us shout joyfully to the Lord, shout triumphantly to the rock of our salvation!” In Hebrews 13:15 God tells us to offer our sacrifice of praise through Jesus. We worship the one true God through Jesus, who is God the Son and our Savior. God commands us how to worship Him. When God commands, we obey. God’s people say and write so many things about worship that relate to their preferences, not God’s commands. Followers of Jesus, though, are obligated to learn everything God says about worship and conform our worship to His Word.

God Commands Us to Worship through Blood

In Leviticus 17:10,13-14 God did not permit His people to eat blood. Verses 11 and 14 state a principle that is important in the Old Testament and in the New Testament. Verse 11 says,

For the life of a creature is in the blood, and I have appointed it to you to make atonement on the altar for your lives, since it is the lifeblood that makes atonement.

Verse 14 says, “The life of every creature is its blood.” We could express that statement as an equation: blood = life. The blood represents the life. In the modern age we now know that statement is more than metaphorical; it is physical. If an animal has no blood, it has no life. The blood equals the life. So blood given = life given. Since the blood is the life, when we give blood we give life. To understand the sacrificial system God commanded, it is essential to understand this truth. When God’s people offered sacrifices, they shed the blood of the sacrificial animals. When the sacrificial animals shed their blood, the lives of the animals were being given in the place of the lives of the worshipers.

What is the significance of the connection between the blood of the animals and the lives of the animals? God’s immutable, eternal law is that sin leads to death. God’s perfect holiness and justice requires sin to lead to the death of the sinner. However, in His mercy God allows a sacrifice to die in the place of the sinner. That is the heart of the old covenant sacrificial system.

The shedding of blood is also the heart of the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross for our sins. In the old covenant the sacrifice was the blood of an animal. As the worshiper shed the blood of the animal, the animal died as a substitutionary sacrifice for the sinner to atone for sins and reconcile the sinner to God. In the new covenant the sacrifice is the blood of Jesus, God the Son. When Jesus shed His blood, He died as the substitutionary sacrifice for sinners to atone for sins and reconcile us to God. The writer of Hebrews wrote the following contrast between the blood of Jesus and the blood of sacrificial animals in the old covenant:

He entered the most holy place once for all, not by the blood of goats and calves, but by His own blood, having obtained eternal redemption. For if the blood of goats and bulls and the ashes of a young cow, sprinkling those who are defiled, sanctify for the purification of the flesh, how much more will the blood of the Messiah, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without blemish to God, cleanse our consciences from dead works to serve the living God? (Heb 9:12-14)

The blood of goats and bulls substituted for the blood of old covenant worshipers, atoned for their sin, and reconciled them to God. The blood of Jesus accomplishes the same substitution, life for life, perfectly and eternally for all who put their faith in Him.

Years ago I had lunch with a pastor friend named Bill Farris. During lunch he asked me, “Allan, have I ever told you about my name?” When I told him he had not, he said, “My full name is William Ott Farris. My father’s name is Ott Farris; I’m named after him and a man named William Caddy. William Caddy was my father’s best friend during World War II. They fought side by side in the Marines in the Battle of Iwo Jima. One day William Caddy said to my father, ‘Ott, you’re the best friend I’ve ever had.’ The next day, my father and William Caddy were in a foxhole together. A hand grenade landed in the foxhole between them. William Caddy jumped on the grenade. It exploded and killed him, but he saved my father’s life. When I was born, my father decided to name his first child after the man who died to save his life.”

The message of the Bible is that all of humanity is in a war, and a hand grenade landed next to all of us. That hand grenade is sin, and it will destroy our lives and send us to everlasting condemnation. Jesus, who is the best friend we could possibly have, has jumped on that hand grenade for us. When He died on the cross as our substitutionary sacrifice, He was dying in our place, taking our sin and its penalty on Himself so that we might live. He could have chosen to let us die for our own sin; we deserve it. Instead, He gave Himself as our sacrifice, even though it cost His life.

This section is entitled “Laws of Worship Prefiguring Christ.” Those words are taken from the Westminster Confession of Faith. The Westminster Confession of Faith refers to ceremonial laws in the Old Testament, old covenant laws concerning worship. It says,

God was pleased to give to the people of Israel, as a church under age, ceremonial laws, containing several typical ordinances, partly of worship, prefiguring Christ, His graces, actions, sufferings, and benefits; and partly, holding forth divers instructions of moral duties. All which ceremonial laws are now abrogated, under the New Testament.

Old Testament laws relating to worship were given by God, and God knew that one day He would declare those laws obsolete because they would be fulfilled in Jesus and superseded by Jesus. They also prefigure Jesus.

How do the worship laws in Leviticus 17 prefigure Jesus? In Leviticus 17 God says to worship only Him. Jesus is that God whom we worship, and He repeated God’s command to worship only Him (Matt 4:10). In Leviticus 17 God says to worship Him in the way He commands. Jesus commanded the same thing, and Jesus is that way. He said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me” (John 14:6). In Leviticus 17 God commands us to worship through blood. Jesus said that when He died on the cross and shed His blood, He was establishing the new covenant in His blood (Luke 22:20).

The Westminster Confession of Faith says that the Old Testament laws of worship prefigure Christ—His graces, actions, sufferings, and benefits. This is why we worship Jesus. First, we worship Him because of His grace. Second Corinthians 8:9 says, “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ: Though He was rich, for your sake He became poor, so that by His poverty you might become rich.” We also worship Jesus because of His actions. What action did He perform for us? Jesus said in John 10:17-18, “I am laying down My life so I may take it up again. No one takes it from Me, but I lay it down on My own.” We also worship Jesus because of His sufferings. First Peter 3:18 tells us to regard Him as holy, “For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, that He might bring you to God.” Finally, we worship Jesus because of His benefits. Romans 5:9 says of Jesus, “Much more then, since we have now been declared righteous by His blood, we will be saved through Him from wrath.” The shed blood of Jesus gives us an eternal benefit: we are saved from God’s wrath against past sin; and we are saved for a future in glory. The wrath of God was poured out on Jesus when He died on the cross in our place as our sacrifice. Praise His name! We praise Him because of what He did on the cross. We also praise Him because in Leviticus, written 1,400 years before the incarnation of Jesus, “God was pleased to give . . . laws . . . of worship, prefiguring Christ, His graces, actions, sufferings, and benefits.” (Westerminster Confessions)

Reflect and Discuss