Here’s how we picture salvation. If we were to draw a circle around who we think is going to go to heaven we tend to put ourselves within the circle (naturally), because we believe the sacrifice of Christ saves us, and we believe in that sacrifice. We put everyone else outside the circle of salvation because they do not believe in that sacrifice. I would like to offer a way in which we can view the sacrifice of Christ so that we can include some, or even many, non-Christians within the circle of salvation. There are other scriptures which seem to indicate only Christians are saved, things that Jesus said, but that will have to be addressed at another time. For now, let’s just focus on the Cross: what it did, how it saves people, and who can we include within that circle of salvation.
Because we have narrowed salvation down to only believers in Christ in a post-Christ world we then must figure out a way in which God could have also saved people who existed prior to Christ. How was anyone saved in Old Testament days? The lamb sacrifices provide a ready answer it would seem.
It seems reasonable to think that if a Jew had a lamb sacrificed for him then he was putting faith in his future Messiah to save him, albeit through a symbol that preceded the Messiah. The lamb “stood in” for the Messiah, who we now believe stood in for sinners to take a punishment for them because of their sins so they don’t have to take it themselves. A Jew prior to Christ could trust in God’s provision for him in the annual lamb sacrifice and that faith justified him.
Since that symbol was supposed to point him to Christ, when Christ actually came the Jew who formerly got saved by obeying the Law of Sacrifices could now demonstrate his faith in God by having faith in Christ. His rejection of Christ would only indicate he was not the kind of person who ever had genuine faith in God, no matter how faithfully he followed the Law.
Reject the Messiah, you’ve rejected God. Therefor your lamb sacrifices are null and void, not even worth an old rusty shekel. To hammer that message home to the Christ deniers, God sent the Romans to destroy the temple and the whole sacrificial system that went along with it in 70 A.D.
This is fairly standard thinking in Evangelical Christianity, but instead of looking at the sacrifices the way a Jew would have looked at them at the time what we end up doing is taking our ideas about what we think Jesus accomplished on the Cross and read that back into what we think was accomplished for a Hebrew as he witnessed the annual Passover festival where a lamb was sacrificed.
Still with me? Let me put it more simply: We think a Jew looked at the lamb sacrifice the way we look at the Lamb sacrifice. Let’s turn that around and look at the sacrifice of Christ the way a Jew looked at the lamb sacrifice.
We assume – I repeat, assume – that a Jew was saved by this act of the lamb sacrifice, and he went to the annual sacrifice thinking it was his salvation. It doesn’t help when we read in the Old Testament that this was done for the “atonement” of the people, and then assume (once again) that “atonement” means “salvation.”
Let’s answer this question: “Did the lamb sacrifice save the Jew?”
The short answer is: No, it didn’t. And more importantly, he didn’t think it did. That’s not why he went.
You can continue reading at Did the Lamb Sacrifice Save the Jew