The 2 Types of Sin Offerings

After a two-part introduction on why we should study the offertory system (1, 2), I now want to kick off the series with a basic overview of the structure of the system and the primary purpose of each offering. The details of how to perform the 5 main offerings are presented in Leviticus 1-7, and this forms the core of the system. In this post and the next, I will give the main distinctive qualities of each offering and suggest both their Old and New Covenant significance. Also, I would like to present them in a different order than they appear in Leviticus, beginning with the sin offerings.

Offerings for Sin

The single biggest distinction in the different types of offerings is that 3 of them - the burnt, grain, and peace offerings - have nothing to do with sin! Only 2 of them - the sin offering and the guilt offering - deal with forgiveness. For this reason, those 3 are all described as "a sweet aroma to the LORD." Although it is God's great pleasure to extend mercy and grace to us when we have sinned and ask forgiveness, it is a sweet aroma to Him when we come before Him blameless to offer praise and worship. That is why, in order for one or more of these 3 sweet-aroma offerings to be given, one of the 2 types of sin offering was always made first: so that the offerer of the sweet aroma would come before God blameless, having been forgiven because of the sin offering, and the worship or praise would then be acceptable to God.

Christ: Our Guilt Offering

Isaiah 53 prophesies about the coming of Christ, and includes numerous aspects of His life and the suffering He would endure. The phrasing of verse 10 in the NIV caught my eye, where it says “Yet it was the LORD’s will to crush Him and cause Him to suffer, and though the LORD makes His life a guilt offering, He will see His offspring and prolong His days, and the will of the LORD will prosper in His hand.” What does it mean that His life is a guilt offering? We know that Christ was sacrificed for our sins, but is there more significance to this concept?

The “guilt offering” was a particular kind of offering in Israel’s sacrificial system. The provisions for it are given in Leviticus 5:14-19. The guilt offering is similar to the sin offering, and in fact the Hebrew words for “guilt” and “sin” are very similar and sometimes interchangeable. The key difference in the two is that the guilt offering is given instead of the sin offering if there is the opportunity to make “restitution.” It says that anyone who sins “in regard to any of the LORD’s holy things” is to bring a ram for sacrifice, but he must also “make restitution for what he has failed to do in regard for the holy things, add a fifth of the value to that and give it all to the priest, who will make atonement for him… and he will be forgiven.”

Today, Jesus has taken His place as both our High Priest and the Guilt Offering for our sins; however, we are still required to make restitution to God in order to fulfill the law concerning the guilt offering. More plainly, I say again: Christ is the priest and blood sacrifice required to fulfill those aspects of the guilt offering law, but the responsibility of restitution still falls on us to fulfill!  In so far as we had before dedicated ourselves to living an ungodly life, we must also dedicate ourselves with the same fervor plus “a fifth,” so that we may be more zealous for God’s way of life than we ever were for the world’s way of life.