Day 24 – October 3, 2023: Leviticus 1-4 and Hebrews 1-2

We begin today with two very, very different books of the Bible. Leviticus begins our journey through the many sacrifices which had to be made in order for the people of Israel to be made right with God. There are very specific guidelines on how these sacrifices are to be made and which animals are to be used for the sacrifices. Obviously we no longer make sacrifices before our God. Hebrews, in fact, explains to us why we no longer sacrifice animals to God. It is because Jesus was the final sacrifice and he was sacrificed for our sake once and for all.

Hebrews is one of those books of the Bible that doesn’t get a lot of notoriety and yet contains essential truths of our faith. The first concept that we find mentioned is that the author wants to make sure that we understand that Jesus wasn’t just an angel, or a prophet, or anything less than God Himself. There my be a lingering thought in some of us that Jesus was just a good guy whose example set for us the type of life we ought to live. No, he was more than that. Or maybe because he did not sin then God exalted him to a higher status than we are, similar to the belief that saints are on a bit of an upper echelon because of their lives. No and no. Jesus is God, was God from the beginning, as Hebrews states even as the Son had a hand in creation as part of the Trinitarian understanding of who God is. This is a crucial concept with which to begin and from that we can launch ourselves into understanding the sacrifice that he made as God.