I'll Have Two Sin Offerings and a Side of Potato Salad

Leviticus 6:24-30

So God has Moses tell Aaron to tell the priests about the sin offerings. There are some added details here though. The priest offering the sacrifice, eats it. This could turn into quite a feat. That's my seventh goat today, you people have got to stop sinning!

A little further into the section it says that any male in the priest's family could eat it- so I assume they had a pretty strict famliy exercise regiment to offset all the hearty meals. If I'm reading this right, these are the sacrifices where all the fat is cooked too, so it doesn't sound like the healthiest menu items for Israel's rock stars.

A few other specifics. It has to be eaten in a holy place in the courtyard of the tent of meeting. Does this indicate that this feasting is a spectator sport. Hey honey, let's go watch Aaron's kids eat all the goats. Years before Kobayashi, is Aaron's family offering the first food endurance competition?

The food also becomes a holiness conduit. In fact, anything the food touched becomes holy. If any blood gets on any garment, it has to be washed in a holy place. If the meat is cooked in a clay pot, it has to be broken. If it's a bronze pot, it has to be scoured and rinsed. If the blood of a sin offering is brought into the tent of meeting, you can't eat that offering. You have to burn it.

Apparently this offering is pretty significant. It's enough to cause pots to be destroyed, enough to cause food to be burned. And I guess that's the point of these rules. God is serious about the holiness of the blood. He's serious about sin too. He wants a public showing of the results of sin. Not so much a "yup, you sinned, and now watch us eat your livestock." But more, a way to keep the concept of the burdening of sin and the process of forgiveness in the minds of His people. But honestly, this is a rambling guess. The process itself is a bit head-scratching.

I have no idea about how much food or how many priests we're talking about. It could just be that this was how the priests were provided for. And maybe this is God showing us that He uses bad for good purposes. The people sinned- they had to account for their sins, but through their sins, the priests' physical needs are taken care of.

And maybe when I don't get it quite right, there are good results too. Don't misunderstand- there are also bad consequences, and sinning for the eventual good isn't a wise choice- it's that whole should we continue in sin so grace can abound idea- but sometimes when we sin we learn more about reliance on God, and each other. We grow stronger, a little more humble, and maybe even a little more understanding of others failing to get it right too.