02.31. THE MEAT OFFERING

THE MEAT OFFERING THE Meat Offering was the bloodless offering.

It presents to us all the symbols of the person and character of our Lord Jesus Christ.

It was composed of fine flour.

It was flour that had been thoroughly ground, there were no lumps in it.

There was no unevenness in it.

It sets forth the perfect, balanced humanity of the Lord.

There is no balance, no equilibrium, no equipoise in the natural man, he is uneven in all his ways. He may have extraordinary qualifications in one direction and none whatever in another. It is this intensification of one quality over another that is called “Genius.” “Genius” in reality is overbalance, it is incompleteness, a failure of all round fulness. A study of genius reveals sharp antitheses, the measure of greatness is equalled by the lack of it in the same person; he may be marvellous as a musician, and incapable as a mathematician, brilliant as an orator and shallow as a thinker, fluent as a writer and hesitating as a speaker, a giant in one degree and a pigmy in another. To be a genius is to be unequally developed, one-sided, there is no better word for it than overbalance—unevenness. No one would ever think of applying this analysis to the Son of God. To call Him a genius, make Him more marked in one characteristic than in another, would be to belittle Him, rob Him of His perfection. The people described Him correctly.

They said:

“He hath done all things well.”

It was true.

He did one thing just as well as another. He lived under law and dealt in grace. He rebuked sin and forgave the sinner. When they brought the woman taken in sin that He might give His testimony against her for stoning, He said to the men: “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her;” and when they went out one by one shamefaced, He turned to the woman and said: “Neither do I condemn thee: go and sin no more;” on the one side He revealed and unmasked the hypocrisy clothing itself with righteousness, acting as a judge and refusing to forgive; on the other, He made Himself manifest as holiness, as the righteous judge and having power on earth to forgive sin.

If He invited the sinner to come to him and said: “Him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out,” He maintained His perfect and judicial balance when He told the story of the rich man hopelessly in hell, neither because he was rich nor neglected the poor, but because he had refused to believe the written Word of God, even the law and the prophets. He would be full of compassion to him who should come and confess Him as the living Word, He would be merciless to Him who denied the written word and in denying it denied Him as the living Word.

He fed the hungry with a few loaves and fishes, and then, although He had baskets full left over, He rebuked those who sought Him just for the loaves and the fishes. When He began His sermon in the synagogue in Nazareth He so spoke that the people” wondered at the gracious words which proceeded out of His mouth; “when He stood in the temple for the last time He so denounced the Scribes and the Pharisees that His words, “woe, woe, ’hypocrites,’ ’whited sepulchres,’ “serpents,’ ’generation of vipers how can ye escape the damnation of hell,’ “sounded like thunders of the last judgment.

If He came into the world that He might bring grace, He came also that He might speak the truth.

He was perfectly balanced.

He spoke the right word, He did the right thing, spoke the word and did the thing at the time ordained; so that He never spoke hastily, nor yet acted till He could say at every step: “Father, the hour is come.”

He was the perfect man. And this the Meat Offering symbolizes and anticipatively proclaims.

Oil was mingled with and poured upon the flour.

Oil is a symbol of the Holy Spirit.

Flour is a symbol of our Lord’s humanity. In the combination of the flour and the oil you have the symbol of—Incarnation. The humanity of our Lord became a fact and got its holiness and sinless perfection by and through the Holy Spirit.

It was by and through the Holy Spirit Mary was enabled to conceive without sin; therefore it is said of the humanity she was to bring forth, “That holy thing that shall be born of thee.”

Oil when poured upon an object is said to anoint it. The humanity of our Lord Jesus Christ was not only conceived by and through the Holy Spirit, but the Spirit came upon Him and anointed Him as a man; wherefore it is written:

“God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and with power.” (Acts 10:38.) Speaking anticipatively through the mouth of the Prophet Isaiah He Himself said:

“The Spirit of the LORD God is upon me…. The LORD hath anointed me.” (Isaiah 61:1.) Frankincense was placed upon the oil and the flour.

Frankincense was a sweet gum. When fire was applied it gave forth a fragrance that pleased. This represents the attitude of the Son of God to the Father.

Concerning His relation to the Father, He says:

“I do always those things that please him.” (John 8:29.) And again He said:

“My meat is to do the will of him that sent me, and to finish his work.” (John 4:34.) Trial, like fire, brought out this quality. The more He was tried the more it was manifest that He sought to please the Father and fulfill His will.

Behold Him there in the garden. It is a night of nights.

Yonder at the gate are the three disciples who have been the most intimate and in the closest touch with Him. He has asked them to stay there and keep watch while He goes into the deeper recesses of the garden to pray.

Lo, they have fallen asleep at their post.

He is now in the darkest, blackest lonesomeness of Gethsemane. The white light of the young moon breaks against the old gnarled trunks of the wide branched olive trees, streams through their openings and falls upon the ground in ghostly bands side by side with the breadths of midnight blackness. The brook Kedron sounds like a strangled voice as its intermittent echoes are borne upon the damp night air, the winds are full of moaning and lament as of one with a broken heart, and a great cry of pain makes every leaf of every tree and bending bush shiver as with mortal fear.

It is the voice of the Son of God. He is praying.

What a prayer is that.

It comes from the edge of a precipice—the edge of a moral precipice. And this is the prayer:

“If it be possible let this cup pass from me.”

I say it is the edge of a precipice, a moral precipice, a precipice that looks sheer down into the bottomless abyss of a tragedy of endless despair and of a hopelessly wrecked and ruined humanity.

Yea! if He should be willing to use His own omnipotence and put aside this cup the blue would go out of the sky and earth be clothed in the rayless gloom of ’a moral and spiritual sackcloth forever.

It is a moment of fire, a moment of trial and it burns and burns into the very soul.

He sees the cup, He sees the dregs. He sees the bottom of it, the unspeakable horror and woe and hell and wordless anguish of the cross––all in that cup; and all His soul, and all the fire of the perfectness of hate against sin and shame in His soul cry out and throb in Him, till every essence of His perfect humanity revolts; and all He is of God and all the claims He has on the Father, and the assurance that should He press for it the Father who has always answered Him will answer Him now––all this drives in in a sharp, stinging torment of justified pain—innocence, purity, holiness, sinlessness, flow upward like a tidal wave of demand to the very throne of God; if He let it roll on the prayer must be answered and He must be delivered––the cup will be put aside. But listen to the most wonderful, “nevertheless” that ever came from human lips.

“Nevertheless! not as I will, but as thou wilt.”

Surely, there is frankincense in that!

What an odour of sweetness ascends like the fragrant white smoke from the golden Incense Altar out of that garden; yea, that garden is as the garden of spices––and these spices are His faith, His love and His surrendered will, wholly surrendered to the Father and for the Father’s glory. The Meat Offering was seasoned with salt.

Salt is pungent and a barrier against corruption.

It is used in Scripture in connection with speech. “Let your speech be always with grace, seasoned with salt.” (Colossians 4:15.) The speech of our Lord was pungent, penetrating, full of sanity and divinest health.

Every word had in it the accent and the breath of the eternal Spirit.

He said:

“The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.”

He did not say, “spiritual,” nor” living,” He said “spirit,” and He said “life.” That is to say, they were neither qualities nor qualifications of spirit and life, they were the very substance, the very essence—very spirit and very life.

After two thousand years not a word He spoke, needs to be forgiven, forgotten, modified, corrected or erased; after two thousand years they remain in the very essence of spirit, the very pulse of life, the very concrete of cleanness, impassable barriers against corruption, against sin in thought as well as deed.

What a contrast is His speech to that of the natural man.

How utterly lacking in salt and filled with corruption is the speech of the natural man. In all the earth there is nothing so unclean, so foul, so full of pestilential disaster as human speech may be; a word uttered in the ear, a word or a phrase on the printed page, may contain sufficient corruption to ruin a human soul or poison a whole community.

It is the careless word, the word without salt that can destroy a soul for time and eternity—the soul that hears it and the soul that utters it.

It is, indeed, the speech of the natural man that ruins the world and is carrying it swiftly on to judgment; as it is written:

“I say unto you, That every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment. For by thy words thou shalt’ be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned.” (Matthew 12:36-37.) In this day when by radio a whisper may be heard round the world, when a word may be picked up out of the air and a thought for good or ill sent in viewless wave lengths across land or sea, the reality and solemnity of the divine warning come back to us.

Yes! Every oath, all cursing, all speech that sows iniquity, every word spoken against God, against the Bible, every word that makes light of Heaven’s grace, the Gospel, the blood, the long suffering and the forbearance of God; every word that denies the deity of the Son of God or shames His Mother as the Mother of God, goes up through the listening air to the throne in Heaven and to God the Son. And He is coming to respond to all these words, to execute judgment against all those whose speech is without salt.

Listen to the warning words:

“Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints, To execute judgment upon all, and to convince (convict) all that are ungodly among them of all their ungodly deeds which they have ungodly committed, and of all their hard speeches which ungodly sinners have spoken against him.” (Jude 1:14-15.) Such is the speech of the natural man. The speech that will bring him to judgment and the wrath of God.

How marvellous the speech of the man Christ Jesus in contrast to all that; so pure, so absolutely vital that once it enters a human soul, that soul is saved from corruption and has all the saving power from corruption every day, if he will; wherefore it is written:

“Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly.” (Colossians 3:16.)

Ah! there is no antidote against the poison of evil thought and the shame of unclean and corrupting words like the word of Christ abiding in us.

It is, indeed, absolute salt.

There was no leaven in the Meat Offering.

Leaven in itself is a sour and corrupt thing.

Because it is so it was banished by the law of God from the Passover observance. He who had it in his house in those days, even though it were the smallest of all portions, even the shadow of a particle, was excommunicated by the decree of God. The Son of God used it as a symbol of false and corrupt doctrine.

It is a symbol of the flesh and its iniquities.

It is not only the symbol of corrupt deeds, but the inhering sin of the flesh— “sin in the flesh.” The exclusion of it from the Meat Offering is not only a witness that the Lord was sinless in deed, word and thought, but that He had no sin in the texture of His humanity. His humanity was as the Angel Gabriel declared it: “That holy thing.”

There must be no honey in the Meat Offering.

Honey is nature’s sweetness.

It is the symbol of that which is attractive and appealing in nature.

Nothing is fuller of honey and sweetness and attractiveness than sin. The honey in sin is “pleasure.”

It is the warning of the Holy Spirit that one of the most attractive and honeyed forms of sin in the closing hours of this age will be “pleasure.”

We are told that there will be the maddest of all mad rushes after pleasure and the” pleasures of sin.” The pleasures that have the heat and fire and crimson of sin. And sin has its pleasures, the honey that is sweet to the tongue.

He indeed is blind or deaf or without his natural senses who does not know it;

Moses was a Prince in Egypt, that Egypt whose wonders, glories and luxuries are now being revealed to us in opened tombs of ancient Pharaohs.

Every pleasure that could appeal was offered to him. He had an opportunity to give himself up to this banquet of honey, and take of it without limit.

He was not deceived. He judged the honey at its true value. He knew it had a horizon, a time limit. There were pleasures of sin, but they were—

“The pleasures of sin for a—season.”

He refused to abide as a prince. He was unwilling to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter. He looked beyond the “treasures” of Egypt to the Judgment Seat of Christ and the rewards of faith, and the pleasures at God’s right hand for ever more; wherefore it is written of him:

“Choosing rather to suffer affliction with the people of God, than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season; Esteeming the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures in Egypt: for he had respect unto the recompense of the reward.” (Hebrews 11:24-26.)

Honey was offered to our Lord when the crowd rushed in upon Him, hailed Him with words of appreciation and with high acclaim would have made Him king.

Honey was offered Him when Simon Peter tried to persuade Him to “pity himself” and not suffer the death of the cross.

There is no sweeter honey than the exhortation to self-pity or the indulgence in it. In no way can the Devil more quickly weaken and overthrow the Christian who seeks to serve the Lord than by leading him to pity himself, to be taken up with himself, his burdens or his cares. Nothing is more acceptable than to have someone to tell us we are working too hard for the Lord, that we ought to spare ourselves, take it easier, go slower. The Lord saw through the honey of this temptation.

He saw behind the honest, sympathizing face of Simon Peter, the leering face of the Devil. The applause of the world is great honey. For the sake of it men charged with high commission and under bonds to speak the words of soberness and truth have softened their speech or held hack the message due. With warning words our Lord has said:

“Woe unto you, when all men speak well of you! for so did their fathers to the false prophets.” (Luke 6:26.)

It is the honey of applause, the pleasure of being well spoken of, that has put the false note into many a prophet’s speech or blinded his vision to duty and to truth.

Sooner or later honey will turn sour.

Sooner or later the most perfect human pleasure, the most exhilarating human joy, will have in it the corroding taste and turn—sour.

. Pleasures of today are the regrets of tomorrow. Our Lord found His joy, His pleasure, in owning and doing the will of the Father. The Meat Offering was an offering made by fire unto the Lord. This is a picture of Our Lord Jesus Christ as the perfect man, perfectly fitted to endure and sustain and satisfy the fire of God’s judgment on the cross.

It is the symbolic and prophetic announcement that though He should come into the world and show Himself the perfect man, He was not coming to so live that men might make Him an example and by imitating Him build up a character that would bring them into favor with God. He was not coming to give foundation to the thought that salvation is by character and not by the blood of sacrifice. The Meat Offering is a rebuke of that thought. It is the open declaration that He came to be the perfect sacrifice, offer up that “holy thing,” His perfect humanity.

After a handful of the Meat Offering had been presented to God the remainder was eaten by the priests in the Holy Place.

“And this is the law of the meat offering: the sons of Aaron shall offer it before the LORD, before the altar. And he shall take of it his handful, of the flour of the meat offering, and of the oil thereof, and all the frankincense which is upon the meat offering, and shall burn it upon the altar for a sweet savour, even the memorial of it, unto the LORD. And the remainder thereof shall Aaron and his sons eat: with unleavened bread shall it be eaten in the holy place; in the court of the tabernacle of the congregation they shall eat it,”.’ (Leviticus 6:14-16.) This is a picture of the Church feeding on Christ after He has offered Himself the perfect sacrifice, entering by faith into the Holy Place, into Heaven, appropriating Him there in all His fulness as the once crucified, but now living one, living for us.

It is not the man exhibited to us in all the details of His perfect life as He lived it here whom we are to contemplate, copy and, by reason thereof, grow strong; but, rather, the man who offered Himself for us as a sweet smelling savour unto God and triumphed, not only over death and the grave in a risen, a glorious and immortal manhood, but by virtue of His death, met all claims of righteousness against us, and thus honored God both in the holiness of His character and the justice of His judgment against us. By faith we are to ascend to Heaven, enter within the Vail, even into the Holiest of all, contemplate our Lord as perfect man there, adore Him because of what He did for us, because of what He is representatively for us, and open our heart for the reception of that life and character which He seeks to give, not only as being perfect man, but very God.

It is in meditating on His sacrifice for us in the perfect humanity which made it acceptable to a holy God (a perfect humanity that was always Godward and never—manward) that we shall receive from Him that life which is both human and divine, because He is Himself perfectly human and absolutely divine-perfect man and very God—even “our great God and saviour Jesus Christ.” In this fashion, and in this alone, we are to feed on Christ as our—Divine Meat Offering.