On the Old Testament Sacrificial System (Bullinger’s third decade, six sermon)

full atonement can it be

[Unless otherwise noted, all quotes are from Bullinger’s Decades and have been lightly adapted.]

There’s a Lutheran Satire sketch that lampoons VeggieTales-style children’s stories and how no one ever teaches children about the theological lessons embedded in the Old Testament practice of circumcision. An excellent and highly recommended use of nearly three minutes. Bullinger isn’t giving a children’s talk in this sixth sermon, but he does think God’s people need to understand circumcision in order to understand redemption. The sermon is devoted to the Old Testament sacraments, circumcision and Passover.

Now circumcision was a holy action in which the flesh of the foreskin was cut away as a sign of the covenant God made with men. Circumcision was a mark in the private members of men, signalling the eternal covenant of God, and it was ordained by God himself to testify his good-will toward those who were circumcised, to point them to their need of regeneration and cleanness, and to make a difference between those were allied with God and other people or nations.

What lessons was circumcision intended to teach?

Circumcision signified that the whole nature of man is unclean and corrupt; therefore, all men have need of cutting and regeneration. For that cause was a cutting made in the member by which man is begotten. For we are all begotten and born the sons of wrath in original sin. Neither can any man deliver us from that damnation but he alone that is without sin, that is, the blessed Seed, Jesus Christ our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary, who with the shedding of his blood (which was prefigured in the blood shed in circumcision) cleanses us from sin and makes us heirs of everlasting life.

In other words, circumcision is both proof of original sin and an object lesson about redemption from original sin. We inherit sin from the very first moment of our existence, and we can’t cleanse ourselves from sin. But God does for us what we cannot do for ourselves. God makes us alive and cleanses us.

Bullinger makes a very important distinction between sacraments and sacramentalism. Sacramentalism is assigning to the sacrament itself what the sacrament is intended to portray for us about God.

We also understand that God’s grace and the justification of the godly is not tied to the sign itself. For if it were, then Abraham wouldn’t have been justified before his circumcision but only after he was circumcised. Furthermore, if it had been so, then the Lord, whose will it is to have mankind saved, would not have given the commandment that circumcision be on the eighth day; for many children died before the eighth day and never were circumcised. Yet they were not damned. We also may add that Sara, Rebecca, Rahel, Jochabeth, and Mary, Moses’ sister, with innumerable other matrons and holy virgins could not be circumcised; yet they were saved by the grace of God through faith in the Messiah that was to come. The grace of God, therefore, was not tied to the sacrament of circumcision, yet it was not despised and neglected among the holy saints of the old church. They used this sacrament to the end for which it was ordained, that is, to be a testimony and seal of free justification in Christ, who circumcises us spiritually without hands by the working of the Holy Spirit.

The second sacrament for the Old Testament church was the sacrifice of Passover, and, by extension, the rest of the sacrificial system.

The Passover was a holy action, ordained by God, in the killing and eating of a lamb. It was ordained partly for the goal that the church might remember the benefit which God did for them in the land of Egypt, to be a testimony of God’s good will toward the faithful, to be a type of Christ, and partly also to gather all those who participated together in this action into the fellowship of one body, and to put them in mind to be thankful and innocent.

There’s an emphasis throughout the sermon on our need to respond to God’s initiation in these sacraments. God designed these rituals for our benefit, but he also designed them with a certain response required in us. We need faith for the sacrament to accomplish its work in us, but that faith is always accompanied by action, as above, thankfulness and the pursuit of innocence. If we simply receive then go our merry way, we’ve neither understood the sacrament nor – in truth – actually approached God in faith. Faith is not by works, but true and living faith requires the appropriate and accompanying works. This is worth considering ourselves today: does our participation in the sacraments flow from faith in God, and does it produce the fruit of faith in our lives? More on this when Bullinger comes to the sacraments of the New Testament church. Back to the Christological focus embedded in the Old Testament sacraments.

Furthermore, these ceremonies contained the mysteries that were to come, of Christ, the Saviour of us all. For in these mysteries were prefigured what Christ should be, what he should do for the world, by what means the faithful should be partakers with him, and how they should behave themselves before him. For among many other beasts there was none thought to be more fit for this sacrament than a lamb; not so much for the signification of simplicity and patience that was in Christ, as a lamb is also quiet, but because a lamb was the daily sacrifice that was offered to the Lord. For Paul says, ‘Christ our paschal Lamb is offered up.’ And a lamb by the law was every morning and every evening offered up in sacrifice. For Christ is the Lamb that was killed since the beginning of the world, of whom John the Baptist testified, saying, ‘Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.’ And because we all went astray like sheep, every one of us after his own way, the Son of God came down to us and became a sheep, of our very substance and nature. Yet he was whole and without spot, without sin and wickedness, conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary…. Likewise, because of the shedding of the lamb’s blood God did bear with the whole church of the Israelites; for the blood of Christ (for which the lamb’s blood was a type) was to be shed that by it all the faithful might be cleansed, and that by the shedding of that blood the anger of God the Father might be appeased, and he would be reconciled again to the church.

There are moments of over-exegesis in Bullinger’s sermon. Is it really all that significant that a stone knife was used for circumcision early in the Old Testament? Does the stone knife really signify that Jesus ‘is the rock of stone out of which flow most pure and cleansing waters’? Was salt in the grain sacrifices a symbol of Christ’s wisdom? Was the fact that the red heifer was a female cow a symbol of the ‘infirmity of man’s nature’ or the colour of that cow a deliberate foreshadowing of Jesus’ blood? Possibly, though I usually find that level of granularity in exegesis a distraction from the larger point. To be fair to Bullinger, given some of the excesses in both early church and medieval exegesis, he is remarkably restrained. He states that he’s not going ‘to run through every particular point of this ceremony but touch only on the important matters.’

And that’s what comes through in the whole of this sermon: Jesus is the sacrifice that takes away the sins of the world. That’s what the whole Old Testament sacramental system was all about. Redemption. Atonement. Forgiveness. Reconciliation. From the garments of animal skin provided in the garden to Christ’s satisfaction for sin achieved on the cross, God himself provides the lamb.

I’ll include one more example of this Christ-soaked understanding of the sacrificial system, not because it’s necessarily Bullinger’s best or clearest, but because long before I’d ever heard of Bullinger this was one of the details that first helped me understand how Leviticus points to Christ: the scapegoat. Once this ritual fell into its proper place in the promise of redemption, at least as I began to understand its purpose in the law, the Old Testament seemed to explode with colour and significance and richness. And Bullinger’s explanation is absolutely heavy with theological fruit.

Aaron drew lots at the door of the tabernacle to determine which of the two goats should be slain for the sacrifice and which should be sent away as the scape-goat into the desert. The two goats do signify Christ our Lord, very God and very man, in two natures unseparated. He is slain and dies in his humanity; he is not slain nor dies in his divinity. Yet he, being one and the same Christ, unseparated, is the Saviour of the world and accomplishes redemption for us mortal men. So in the two goats was a mystery hidden. For because, as Solomon says, the lots are guided by the Lord’s will, it was not without the special will of the Father that the Son was sacrificed and killed on the cross.

For us, and for our salvation. Hallelujah; what a Saviour.

Next, on the judicial/civil law