easy sinning

When I was younger, I used to hunt a lot. I remember the smell and feel of fresh blood. I always cleaned my game immediately, and cooled out the meat, so the flesh and blood were still warm on my hands. On a cold day it sometimes seemed to burn.

I loved to hunt, but I didn’t like cleaning the carcasses. It’s a gross step to a good meal.

I think of that blood odor whenever I read of the temple sacrifices. For example, in Leviticus 4 I read this: "'If any member of the community sins unintentionally and does what is forbidden in any of the Lord 's commands, when they realize their guilt and the sin they have committed becomes known, they must bring as their offering for the sin they committed a female goat without defect. They are to lay their hand on the head of the sin offering and slaughter it at the place of the burnt offering.”

Going to church used to be a bloody affair. Sin, and you have to personally slaughter a goat before you could go inside. If those rules were still in effect, I’d have killed herds of goats by now, and more every week.

It’s easy to see why, though. My sin deserves death. The only possible payment to God, the only attempt at justice or balancing the scales, is blood for each and every sin. It’s only because God loves me, loves all his people, so much that he accepted other blood for my sin.

Since Jesus came, we don’t have to smell the blood any more, or get in on our hands and have to scrub it out from under our fingernails. Jesus’ blood satisfied judgment for all time.

It’s easy to take that for granted, though, to have an entitlement attitude toward forgiveness. It might be good for us once in awhile to get blood on our hands. Maybe if we had to watch some terrified goat die on our behalf, if we had to pull the knife across the throat ourselves, we’d think differently about sin.

Maybe then we’d feel more grateful.