But now there is the need of someone to cook the groceries to be the offerings. A single man needs a house, he needs groceries, and he also needs a wife to cook his groceries. You have to realize that Christ as the High Priest is the cook. We have to learn of Him how to cook. Let Christ take the lead in cooking, and you just follow.
Christ is our tabernacle, Christ is the offerings as our food, and Christ is also our Priest preparing the food. Suppose you have the tabernacle and all the offerings, but no priest. This means you don’t have a cook. This is like having a house with all the groceries, but no cook. I am afraid that many Christians today are in a situation where they have just one broken corner of the tabernacle with nearly no offerings and no priests to cook the food. They are used to worshipping God in that broken corner. They are not used to worshipping God with a complete, perfect, and erected tabernacle. They are not used to having so many items of the offerings to offer to God. Nor are they, as proper priests, used to preparing the food.
Over the past years I have bought a number of pianos, but I have never learned to play a piano in a proper way. I like to play the piano in a natural way. Likewise, we all like to worship God in our natural way. It is so easy for us to have a natural way to worship. We bring our hymnal and sit on the chairs and sing the hymns. It seems too difficult for us to offer Christ as the trespass offering, as the sin offering, as the burnt offering, and all the other offerings. It seems too difficult to labor on Christ and then to bring Christ to the meeting. We like to depend upon others to be our priests. We let them pray in the meetings for us so that we don’t need to do anything.
Once when I was in the San Francisco Bay area a gentleman told me that today is the Twentieth Century, and that everything is specialized. He said that if you would teach the Bible or you would teach people to sing, you must go to a seminary to study and become a specialist. The others are busy with their jobs or with their studies so they have no time to learn these things. Sunday should be the day they can relax and let the seminary specialists do their work. He said we should not ask the common believers to offer a prayer because they have never learned to do this properly. This kind of concept is the natural way and this is the prevailing practice among today’s Christians.
If you look at the tabernacle you can see that the entire situation is not natural. To know how to act in the realm of the outer court, you have to drop your natural way. You have to learn how to kill the sacrifices and how to take care of the blood. You have to know how to take care of the breasts and the shoulders. You have to know what to do with the meat. You have to know how to enter into the Holy Place where you handle the showbread table and where you dress the lampstand. With every point there is a regulation. If you don’t act and behave and move according to the regulation, right away you would die. The two sons of Aaron died this way (Lev. 10:1-2). Nothing natural and no natural way is allowed in the tabernacle.
Nearly all of the Christian services today are full of natural ways and natural activities. This is why there is such poverty among today’s Christians. The riches are in the Bible, but they have been neglected.
Now we come to the central and the most meaningful offering, the peace offering. All the other offerings are for this offering. This is the center and the focus of all the other offerings. There are five main offerings: the burnt offering, the meal offering, the peace offering, the sin offering, and the trespass offering. The peace offering is at the very center of these offerings.
In spiritual experiences the burnt offering is for the sin offering. If Christ had never been absolute for God, He could never have been our sin offering. His qualification to be our sin offering was His absoluteness. He was absolute for God. According to the clear word in Hebrews 10:9 and according to the prophecies in Psalm 40, He was a Person who lived His life absolutely for God. Every part of His being, His every breath, and every drop of His blood, were altogether absolutely for God. Because of this He was qualified to be our sin offering to deal with our sin and to take away our sins which we inherited by birth. This is not a shallow thing; this is not an easy thing. It needs One who lived a life absolutely for God. So the sin offering is supported by the burnt offering. The burnt offering is the backing of the sin offering. This is why in the record of these five offerings sometimes the sin offering could become the burnt offering (Lev. 5:7,10). Christ as our sin offering is supported by Himself as our burnt offering, as One who lived a life so absolutely for God. The burnt offering is the backing, the support, the base of the sin offering. Without the burnt offering, there is no sin offering.