The Spotless Lamb

I stumbled across Leviticus 4:32 this evening and it triggered an old, forgotten memory from my youth. The verse says, “If he brings a lamb as his sin offering, he is to bring a female without defect.”

At a very young age, I came across this passage (or one similar to it) and was very hurt, thinking that God was displeased with my deformities. Having a deformed face, I believed that maybe I wouldn’t be allowed into Heaven because God only approved of physical perfection. My heart sank as I realized that the God who had been eavesdropping on all of my prayers was just as shallow and critical of me as the strangers who stared at me in the grocery store. Then I wondered why God would even create me with deformities if he meant to condemn me because of them. Fortunately, I didn’t let my fears go unspoken for too long and I eventually talked to my mom about it. Truthfully, I don’t remember what she told me, but being as young as I was, I was easily comforted, even though the passage continued to perplex me. Yes, the passage didn’t mean that God didn’t love me, but it still didn’t answer the burning question.

Knowing what a verse doesn’t mean is a far cry from knowing what it does mean. I’ve thought about all of this through the years and have asked a few people about it, but still haven’t had many good explanations. But, I think something struck me tonight (it seems so obvious now)!

My answer here is in no way exhaustive, but just a few fresh, random thoughts.

I see now that my confusion as a child stemmed from a common problem – interpreting Scripture with the assumption that a verse is mainly something important that God has to say about me, rather than assuming it has something to say to me…about God.

The animal sacrifices of the Old Testament era was an analogous system set up to foreshadow Jesus Christ. The blood of lambs, sacrificed repeatedly, temporarily took away sin and this system paved a road of tradition and familiarity so that when the Lamb of God came into the world he would be recognized as the final sacrifice.

If I were to be superimposed into the Leviticus passage, I would not be playing the part of the lamb. I would be the man who had sinned. So, it is an unparallel analogy to say that God did not want deformed animals to be used as a sacrifice so that means he doesn’t value deformed human beings.

In order to be a perfect shadow of Christ, the lambs had to be spotless because the Lamb of God that would come to take away the sin of the world would be. If the traditions had allowed for any old filthy, tattered, sickly animal to atone for sin, then Christ’s deity, purity, sinlessness, and perfection could not be assumed. If his purity could not be assumed, he could not be recognized as the Son of God. If he was not the Son of God, his sacrifice would have been just as temporal as the sheep’s and goat’s. But because the Levitical law was explicit - that only perfect, unblemished lambs could be offered, it gives us the confidence that Jesus Christ was not a mere scapegoat, but indeed, the Spotless Lamb who came to take away the sin of the world.

And so I now finally realize that this passage has nothing to do with me and my imperfections at all, but everything to do with Christ and his perfections.