Excerpted from Who Killed Christ?
A “sin offering” is not made to God, but to sin. Sin is a beast who wants to devour you. Imagine camping with your family and you come across a grizzly bear out in the wild. First off, let me tell you that if this happens; you had better come baring gifts! You had better have an offering for that bear, or it’s you he will devour. Christ basically threw himself in front of the beast of sin and allowed it to devour him instead of us. He saves us from sin.
Most think that the old covenant sin offering was to God so that He would overlook their sins and refrain from killing them one more day. If you really think about that theology, it doesn’t follow through very nicely. What we’re saying is that God set up a system where people could pay Him off when they sinned. It’s like God was selling indulgences. This is silly on several levels. First off, it implies that there is a price in God’s mind that would make sin worth it for Him. If that price was paid to God, He would be satisfied and the sin wouldn’t matter anymore. Could you imagine there being ANY price where sin would be okay from a fathers standpoint??
Know this; to God there is nothing in this world that would ever make sin worth it. Sin takes from people. It depletes them and leaves them hollow and empty. It strips people of their identity and basically devours their bodies. God would NEVER put a price on that because there is no price that would make it okay for Him. It would be like me agreeing tome allow a man to molest one of my children for the right price. There is NO price that I would accept for that.
Yes, it appears that the people in the Old Testament brought their “sin offerings” "to" God, but it wasn’t an offering that was “for” God. The sin offering was “for” sin. In other words, God didn’t accept the offering and overlook sin because the price was right. He took the “sin offering” and gave it to sin.
It's interesting to note the amount of times in the Old Testament where it says to take the sin offering outside the camp and burn it. It’s almost as though God were saying, “I don’t even want it mixed in with my stuff, take it away and burn it.”
The real answer as to whether a sin offering is for God or for sin, is answered when the truth is revealed in the New Testament. When we read that “when sin is full grown, it gives birth to death” we begin to see that it was sin itself that kills and therefore the slaying of the animal in the Old Testament was to the one who required your life; sin. If scripture said, “when sin is full grown, God will give the sinner the death penalty,” we would know for sure that the Old Testament “sin offering” was meant to appease God. It wasn’t that way though.
The issue wasn’t how to put God’s inevitable wrath on the sinner off another day. It was, how to keep sins inevitable devouring nature satisfied until the time of Christ in order to save the life of the person. This is almost the complete opposite of what most of us have been taught.
So who was it that killed Christ? Was it God or was it sin? The bible says, “The wages of sin is death,” not “The wages of God is death if you sin.” The wages are paid to SIN; not to God.
The rest of Scripture points this way as well. If we look at the James 1:14-15 verses it clearly shows the progression of it. “Each one is tempted when, by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed. Then , after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death.” It is SIN that gives birth to death. It was SIN that killed Christ; NOT GOD.
Romans 6:10 puts it so simply and beautifully: “When he died, he died once to break the power of sin. But the life he lives, he lives to God.”
