Fellowship through Sacrifice
And all things are of God, who hath reconciled us to himself by Jesus Christ,
and hath given to us the ministry of reconciliation; To wit, that God was in Christ,
reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them; and hath committed unto
us the word of reconciliation. Now then we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did
beseech you by us: we pray you in Christ's stead, be ye reconciled to God.
For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.
2 Corinthians 5:18ff (Spoke 3, Cycle 3)
The Third Book explains the deeper spiritual meaning of Christ's sacrifice typified by the Passover Lamb of the Second Book.
In Baxter's review of Leviticus, he linked the passage above from 2 Corinthians to the sin offerings:
As for the non-sweet offerings, the Sin-offering typifies Christ as Sinbearer – "made sin for us" (2 Cor. v. 21) –
while the Trespass-offering speaks of sins (plural) and typifies Christ as Expiator,
making restitution for the injury caused by our wrong-doing.
In the discussion on Spoke 2 (BW book pg 140), we saw how God established the meaning of Christ's sacrifice in
the type of the Passover Lamb. Scroggie compared the logical sequence of the Second and Third Books:
The Passover told of the virtue of Christ’s atoning sacrifice, but it did not, and
of course could not then, unfold the doctrine of that sacrifice. ... The simple truth in Exodus xii is that all
who are sheltered by the blood of the slain Lamb are delivered from judgment and bondage. The complex truth of
Leviticus i – vii is that the slain Lamb meets all that is required by a righteous God, and all that is needed by redeemed man.
... The fact of the atonement is in Exodus, and the doctrine of it is in Leviticus.
This is the woof and warp of the Divine Tapestry. Themes develop both sequentially around
the Wheel and radially down the Spokes with everything interweaving to form an absolutely unbreakable theological fabric.
Baxter's high-level synoptic view of each Book exemplifies what we need if we are to see the true
Divine Unity of the Bible as a whole. The details must be studied, analyzed, and applied to our lives,
but we also must be able to condense the whole Book first into a paragraph, then a sentence or two,
and finally a rubric of few words if we wish to clearly perceive the large-scale structure of Scripture.
Case in point: Leviticus is the Book of Fellowship with God, Ministration, and Holiness.
It exemplifies the character of the Third Person of the Trinity and is linked to the symbolic meanings of the
Third Letter as revealed in Scripture and understood in rabbinic tradition for millennia.
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Fellowship by Sacrifice
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