The familiar phrase "Jesus died for your sins" is normally stated as if it needs no explanation. Yet to me, it never made any sense. Eventually I learned that the Jews had, for centuries, practiced a ritual of sacrificing goats as "scape goats". The idea goes something like this: "the LORD" demands the shedding of blood for remission of sins:


However, instead of our own blood, God will accept the blood of a substitute, a goat whom we kill instead of ourselves. Apparently the LORD wanted blood, but it was ok if it wasn't our own, as long as someone's blood was shed for our sins. So, contemporary Christians saw Jesus as a scape goat who was killed instead of us, and whose blood absolves us of our sins. Unfortunately, this still made no sense to me. How can our killing of a goat or Jesus make the LORD willing to forgive us of our sins? I wanted to understand this. In fact when I started reading the Old Testament, this was the number one question I wanted answered, and I felt sure it would all be explained in there somewhere. But it wasn't. Instead, what I found is that this ritual of "sacrifice" has its roots in a very simple idea: the idea that the LORD liked roasted meat as much as we do:


and that we could please him by offering him a goat, or other meats. Later, through Moses, he even gave elaborate instructions on preparing the meats, including salt.

Of course, for any of this to make sense, the LORD would have to actually take the offering. And guess what? He did take it, and in dramatic fashion, as the verses below show (for "fire", maybe we should read "beam of light"):






And in this example, the beam of light is used not only to consume the sacrifice but to transport the angel of the LORD back up to heaven!


But now we have a glaring question: If the LORD was a spirit, how could he enjoy eating meat? In the following verses, the LORD and his angels do in fact eat meat with Abraham:


As time passed, however, the LORD stopped consuming the sacrifices, but the Israelites did not stop the ritual. Now the ritual twisted into something which involved the shedding of blood for remission of sins. The idea of the scape goat emerged. Instead of providing food for the LORD, they were shedding the blood they believed he demanded for the remission of sins, in order to get back in his favor. So what started as a simple act of giving the LORD some good food eventually became something completely different: a ritual shrouded in mystery and making no sense, but which nevertheless persists to this day as the basis of our salvation through Jesus. For an alternative basis, see The Passover Event.




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