Sacrifices (11): The Minchah, or Meat Offering, Continued

Not Just an Expression of Gratitude

Leviticus 2 contains the law for a bloodless sacrifice, which sacrifice goes by the name “meat offering” in the King James translation of the Bible. This peculiar sacrifice has received similar names in other English versions of the Bible, such as “meal offering” or “grain offering” or “cereal offering.” Although these names are certainly more descriptive of this sacrifice than “sacrificium,” which is what Jerome called it in his Vulgate, the translators should have followed the lead of the Septuagint, which uses the Greek word doron for the name of this sacrifice. Doron means gift. And gift is exactly what God called this sacrifice in the Hebrew tongue. God did not name this sacrifice according to its material substance. Rather, God said to Israel, “This is how you must think about the fine flour that is mingled with oil and frankincense, sprinkled with salt, and free from any leaven: It is minchah—a gift!”

The common interpretation of the so-called meat offerings is that they represented the Israelites’ gifts of gratitude that they desired to offer unto God, especially in connection with their daily necessities and seasonal harvests that God provided for them in Canaan. Certainly, this interpretation contains an element of the truth about the meat offering, as long as we remember that the idea of gratitude is not this: God gave the land, provided the seed, sent forth the rain and the sunshine, and produced a bountiful harvest, but the Israelites had to be grateful for those things. Not at all. The proper idea of gratitude is this: The Israelites had to thank God that they could even thank God. That the Israelites might even desire to praise God for God’s goodness was itself a free gift of God’s grace to his elect people. Man in Adam has forfeited the right to be thankful to God. All that man can do in Adam is consume the good things of God’s creation as a thief and incur for himself greater condemnation with the use thereof. Gratitude is not, first of all, man’s gift to God, but gratitude is God’s gift to man, seeing that God has purchased with the blood of his own Son the right for his people to praise him and that God also works in his people both the willing and the doing of that praise.

The meat offering undoubtedly belonged to Israel’s new life of gratitude, even as we ask for and receive our daily bread through prayer, the chief part of our thankfulness that God requires. The meat offering acknowledged God as the overflowing fountain of all good. The meat offering acknowledged that God’s gifts could not profit Israel without his blessing. The meat offering, inasmuch as its material was gathered from the harvest, was presented with all the joy and thanksgiving of the harvesttime. One can envision a grateful Israelite, ascending up into God’s holy mount, having in his hands a meat offering of grain and oil that he had just reaped from his fields, and singing with joy, “He waters the hills with rain from the skies, / And plentiful grass and herbs He supplies, / Supplying the cattle, and blessing man’s toil / With bread in abundance, with wine and with oil.”¹

However, we must not content ourselves with this bare interpretation that many commentators assign to the meat offering. As we observed last time, the meat offering was much more theologically rich in its meaning. The full significance of the meat offering is set forth in Isaiah 66:20, wherein the seer prophesies concerning the ingathering of God’s church throughout the new dispensation into the new Jerusalem. In this prophecy we see that the meat offering is representative not merely of thanksgiving but also of a thankful people. “They [God’s messengers] shall bring all your brethren for an offering [minchah] unto the Lord out of all nations upon horses, and in chariots, and in litters, and upon mules, and upon swift beasts, to my holy mountain Jerusalem, saith the Lord, as the children of Israel bring an offering [minchah] in a clean vessel into the house of the Lord.”

The truth that God embodied in the meat offering and the truth that God revealed to Israel through the law for the meat offering was this: “I have eternally prepared for myself a gift merely of my good pleasure. I am the sower and the husbandman. And this gift—a gift that is of and through and unto me—is the gift of a new humanity. I have set my favor upon a peculiar people, so that though these people deserve in themselves to be scattered to the four winds of heaven, I will gather them into my barns. I will sow them in the earth. I will nurture them by my blessing. I will reap them in the time of harvest. I will thresh them clean of all the undesirable chaff. I will prepare them as something wholly agreeable to my holy palate. This is my minchah: A people to show forth my praises as the one who has called them out of darkness into my marvelous light.”

But Foremost a Confession of Faith

It was this very truth that the believing Israelite confessed when he brought his meat offering into God’s sanctuary. What stood behind that sacrifice of the meat offering? Surely it was gratitude. But more fundamental yet, what stood behind that sacrifice of the meat offering was a confession of the Israelite’s faith. The Israelite entered God’s courts, thinking and speaking God’s own thoughts after God. And the desire to bring a meat offering to the priest was the fruit of the truth dwelling in the Israelite’s heart by faith. By faith the Israelite gave a spiritual confession that he was what the meat offering testified about him.

That we may better understand the idea of this, permit me to draw a loose analogy between the sacrificial worship of Israel in the old dispensation and our liturgical practice of reciting the Apostles’ Creed in public worship. When the Israelite ascended God’s holy hill and drew near to his sanctuary, the Israelite was in essence confessing, “I believe in God the Father, Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.” And when the Israelite stood before God’s holy priesthood and God’s bloody altar and the bullock or goat that was slaughtered in the Israelite’s behalf, he was in essence confessing, “I believe…in Jesus Christ, [God’s] only begotten Son, our Lord.” When the Israelite presented his meat offering to the priest, the Israelite was in essence confessing nothing different than what is found in the third part of our apostolic confession: “I believe in the Holy Ghost. I believe an holy catholic church; the communion of saints; the forgiveness of sins; the resurrection of the body; and the life everlasting” (Apostles’ Creed, in Confessions and Church Order, 9).

Therefore, the Israelite, by means of those meat offerings, confessed the church as a spiritual organism that God has chosen unto everlasting life; confessed that Jesus Christ through his Spirit and word gathers, defends, and preserves that church unto himself; confessed that believers—each and every one—as members of Jesus have communion in him and partake of all his treasures and gifts; confessed the happiness and blessedness that belongs to the church, upon which is bestowed the spiritual fullness of Jesus Christ; and the Israelite confessed that he was, and forever would remain, a living member of the holy, catholic church.

The truth of those meat offerings was the same truth that we publicly confess in worship today. Certainly, our understanding of the church as God’s minchah is much greater in the new dispensation. But the truth never changes. The truth that dwelt in the heart of the Israelite by faith was the same truth that dwells in the hearts of God’s people today. Among the assembly of the elect—whether that assembly was found three thousand years ago in the courts of the temple or whether that assembly is found today in the local church institute—God’s people confess, “Here is the minchah that God gathers for himself.”

Belonging to that confession of faith is the acknowledgment of and delight in how God forms his gift. When God in eternity freely and sovereignly decreed a gift to present unto himself, that decree formed and organized his gift in highest wisdom. And that wisdom is on clear display in the specific requirements regarding the material and preparation of the meat offering.

Fine Flour and Oil

The fine flour and oil, although distinct ingredients, cannot be considered apart from each other. That oil was not a mere accompaniment with the flour.² That oil was not just sprinkled on the flour. No, if raw, fine flour was brought for a meat offering, then the flour was thoroughly mixed with oil. Or if the meat offering was prepared as a cake, then oil permeated that cake’s dough. Or if the meat offering was prepared as a wafer, then that wafer was smothered with oil. Note in Leviticus 2:4–7 how the law for the meat offering brings flour and oil together:

4. If thou bring an oblation of a meat offering baken in the oven, it shall be unleavened cakes of fine flour mingled with oil, or unleavened wafers anointed with oil.

5. And if thy oblation be a meat offering baken in a pan, it shall be of fine flour unleavened, mingled with oil.

6. Thou shalt part it in pieces, and pour oil thereon: it is a meat offering.

7. And if thy oblation be a meat offering baken in the fryingpan, it shall be made of fine flour with oil.

In these verses we observe that the meat offering, in addition to being presented to the priest in the form of raw, fine flour (Lev. 2:1), could be prepared in three different ways. Verse 4 speaks of cakes (loaves) or wafers (something like our pancake) baked in an oven. Verses 5 and 6 speak of the meat offering being “baken in a pan,” which J. H. Kurtz describes as consisting “of a thin layer of dough baked crisp, which was broken in pieces and dipped in oil.”³ And verse 7 speaks about the meat offering being “baken in the fryingpan,” about which Kurtz observes that “translators could not agree whether by this we are to understand broiled upon the gridiron, or stewed in a saucepan (in oil), or fried in a frying-pan.”⁴ However, the differences among these various methods of preparing the meat offering are not important. What is important is that every method used flour and oil. The flour was saturated with oil. The flour was cooked in oil. The flour was anointed with oil. The flour was lumped together by oil. The flour was prepared with oil.

Fine flour and oil belonged together, for that was how God formed his gift.

The fine flour represented the organism of the church as the spiritual body of Jesus Christ. The oil was figurative of the Holy Spirit, who would become the Spirit of the ascended Lord Jesus Christ and would be poured out upon the church. And for the church to serve such a glorious purpose as God’s minchah, there must be the Spirit. He is what makes the offering up of the church acceptable unto God (Rom. 15:16).

Indeed, it is the Spirit as the third person of the holy Trinity who is personally the gift of the Father to the Son and the gift of the Son to the Father. It is the Spirit who was given to Jesus Christ without measure, so that Christ could give himself as a well-pleasing sacrifice to God. And it is the Spirit of Pentecost who is poured out upon the church to make the church what she is. The church is a Spirit-saturated organism. The Spirit does not dwell in the members of the church as we dwell in our houses, but the Spirit so cleaves to the church that the members of the church can never be separated from Jesus Christ, their head, or from one another. The Spirit is given to abide with the church and to never depart from the church.

And just as oil bound those granules of flour together to form one lump, so the Spirit forms a spiritual communion in Jesus Christ. “I believe in the Holy Ghost. I believe an holy catholic church; the communion of saints.”

Why did God represent his elect people with fine flour? The answer to this question is very familiar, for it has already been expounded for us in the Reformed Form for the Administration of the Lord’s Supper:

Besides, that we by this same Spirit may also be united as members of one body in true brotherly love, as the holy apostle saith, For we, being many, are one bread and one body; for we are all partakers of that one bread (1 Cor. 10:17). For as out of many grains one meal is ground and one bread baked, and out of many berries being pressed together one wine floweth and mixeth itself together, so shall we all, who by a true faith are ingrafted into Christ, be altogether one body, through brotherly love, for Christ’s sake, our beloved Savior, who hath so exceedingly loved us, and not only show this in word, but also in very deed towards one another. (Confessions and Church Order, 271)

“For as out of many grains one meal is ground and one bread baked…so shall we all, who by a true faith are ingrafted into Christ, be altogether one body…” This truth the Israelites confessed when they presented their meat offerings to the priests.

That confession stands in stark contrast to how many scholars explain why God required fine flour for the meat offering. Many teach that when the Israelites presented their meat offerings to the priests, they were presenting the fruits of their sweat and toil. The Israelites had to work their fields in the heat of the day. They had to till the ground. They had to pull out the weeds. They had to take care of and nurture their crops. They had to harvest the crops when they ripened. What is more, the Israelites could not bring a raw product from the ground. No, they had to further process the grain by their own industry and skill. They had to sift the grains of wheat from the chaff. They had to grind the grains into meal at a stone mill. And maybe, if the Israelites were feeling especially industrious, they would bake the flour into a cake or prepare a wafer in a frying pan of oil. “Oh, Israel relied upon God’s blessing for all of this!” these scholars say. “But do not overlook that man worked very hard to present his minchah to God!”

For example, here is J. H. Kurtz’s quotation of an “admirable exposition” from another scholar:

Bread and wine…were not merely products of the soil, not merely articles of food growing up ready for man’s eating through the goodness of God; they were wrought out by man himself, his production, acquired through his own labour in the sweat of his brow. Yea more, they were also wrought by man; they were not gifts of God remaining in their natural form, not raw productions, that is to say, but something which man had produced by his own diligence and skill out of the gifts of God and through the blessing of God. Thus the materials of the Minchah represented not merely everything that man receives through the goodness of God, but everything that he produces by his own labour out of the gifts of God, and through the assistance and blessing of God, his labours and their results.⁵

But this is a corruption of the truth embodied in the meat offering. According to this teaching, the thought of the Israelite’s mind when he entered God’s courts would have been, “Look, O God, at how much I labored! Consider how much sweat equity I put into this gift! Examine my diligence and skill, and see how well I followed every jot and tittle of the law! Are you not pleased, O God, with me? Surely, I must have your blessing and favor!” In short this teaching brings the boast of man into his worship.

In fact it is this very corruption of the truth about the meat offering that explains the degeneration of Israel’s worship in the old dispensation. When the Israelites brought their meat offerings unto God, they used those meat offerings to lift themselves up in worship. And the prophets had to come to the proud Israelites and say, “Thus saith the Lord, ‘All your worship is an abomination. I do not care that you exhaust yourselves to conform these offerings to my law. I do not want any more of them because you only use them to boast about yourselves in worship. All your worship is disgusting to me. I hate it. Your confessions stand antithetically opposed to the truth that I embodied in the meat offering.’”

That is what worship so often becomes today too, when people show up to church and think within themselves, “I have worked really hard this past week. I have put in a lot of sweat equity for God’s covenant. Maybe it was not perfect, but I did a lot. I kept the law quite well. Lord, are you not pleased? Surely, my way of obedience must be blest and receive thy favor!”

And God says to them, “All your worship is an abomination. It is disgusting to me. Your thoughts are not according to the truth, and your confessions are wicked.”

God did not require fine flour to emphasize man’s abilities, labors, and skill, thereby giving an occasion for man to boast.

Why did God require fine flour? Because he takes many puny and insignificant grains—thousands upon thousands—and he forms for himself a single lump through the Spirit. One grain alone does not make a lump, a cake, or a wafer. One grain alone does not fill a man’s belly. No. But when many grains are crushed under a heavy millstone and ground into one meal, then you have something that is useful, something that is desirable, something that can be enjoyed. And that unity of the lump becomes even stronger when the meal is kneaded and baked into a cake or fried into a wafer. There is no independence of a grain in flour or pastry but only intimate fellowship with the rest of the lump. God required fine flour or cakes or wafers for the meat offerings to illustrate the fellowship that he forms by his own hands among the members of his minchah. God’s minchah is not a group of grains but a single loaf.

Thus it was impossible for an Israelite to bring his meat offering while confessing that he was something in himself. Not only was an Israelite’s confession this: “I am not a gift unto myself. I do not live unto myself. That is not why I am here in the nation of God. That is not why I am here as a member of God’s church. God formed me for himself.” But also, an Israelite’s confession was this: “I am utterly insignificant in myself apart from the church and the body of Jesus Christ. What am I? A puny, insignificant grain. What worth is a grain apart from the lump?” It was impossible to bring the meat offering as a mere individual. The one who brought that offering considered himself a churchman in communion with Christ and all his members.

In the language of today, if you present the meat offering but are opposed to joining a true church institute, you expose yourself as a hypocrite. If you present the meat offering but live apart from the assembly of the church, you manifest yourself as a liar. If you present the meat offering but refuse to spend yourself—your time, resources, abilities, and strength—for the sake of the church, your confession is one big lie. Anti-institutionalism and individualism are not the works of the Spirit of Jesus Christ.

The wisdom of God ordained a meat offering of fine flour and oil to pattern the true spiritual unity and fellowship that belongs to his church.

Free from Leaven

Not only does the Spirit form a unified lump, but also the Spirit forms an unleavened lump. What God demanded for his minchah was that it be free from all leaven: “No meat offering, which ye shall bring unto the Lord, shall be made with leaven: for ye shall burn no leaven, nor any honey,⁶ in any offering of the Lord made by fire” (Lev. 2:11).

Scripture makes abundantly clear what leaven symbolizes. Leaven represents sin and iniquity, malice and wickedness, and ungodliness and impiety. Leaven represents that which is opposed to God, that darkness which God decreed as the object of his hatred in order that his glorious light might stand out in stark relief.

Furthermore, scripture speaks of two specific forms that leaven takes. The first form is false doctrine. “Take heed and beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees,” the Lord warned his disciples, referring to “the doctrine of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees” (Matt. 16:6, 12). “A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump,” the apostle warned the Galatian churches, referring to the doctrine of the circumcision (Gal. 5:9). The second form of leaven is a wicked and impenitent life within the sphere of the covenant. “Purge out therefore the old leaven, that ye may be a new lump, as ye are unleavened,” Paul commanded the members of the Corinthian church, after he had rebuked them for their proud toleration of impenitent fornication within their midst (1 Cor. 5:7). These two basic forms of leaven are inseparable. Where there is false doctrine, impenitent lives of wickedness will follow. Where there is lawlessness and lasciviousness, there will also be an insatiable craving for false doctrine.

These two forms are inseparable because they are both energized by the lie out of hell that “ye shall be as God.” Even as leaven is an active power to permeate the whole lump, so false doctrine and an impenitent life of wickedness, being fed by the lie, will also corrupt the entire organism into which leaven settles. Sin is not in the mere act. Sin is a corrupting power. Sin is a wretched principle that, being established in an organism, must work itself out in all its implications. A “little” false doctrine or a “little” wickedness in a single impenitent member of the church always works to leaven the whole lump.

Thus when the Israelites presented their meat offerings to the priests, speaking with God the truth about those sacrifices, they confessed, “Let there be no leaven among us. Let there be no fellowship with sin. We must detest sin with all our beings. Let leaven be put out, that we may be a new lump.”

You must understand the weightiness of that confession. For old testament Israel, that confession meant that if parents had a son or a daughter who blasphemed the name of God, then those parents were determined to stone their child (Lev. 24:11–16). If a brother, son, daughter, the wife of one’s bosom, or a dearest friend enticed a man secretly, saying, “Let us go and serve other gods,” then that man was not to have pity or to conceal what had been done but was to have that person killed (Deut. 13:6–11). If a man continued impenitently in a wicked and ungrateful life, then his presentation of the meat offering at the altar was one big lie. If a man presented the meat offering and then departed to have fellowship with those who hated the truth, his confession was a lying confession. To bring the meat offering was a confession that the church must be purged of old leaven and be made a new lump.

In today’s language, if a church assembles for worship but will not discipline for impenitence in doctrine or life, that church cannot confess the truth: “I believe in the Holy Spirit; I believe an holy catholic church and the communion of saints.” The worship of such a church that will not rebuke sin and will not deal with iniquity is sheer hypocrisy. The truth of the meat offering implies a zeal for Christian discipline. To utter the confession “let there be no leaven among us” while rejecting the antithesis in any aspect of one’s life is deception. The truth of the meat offering implies a continual turning from sin, both individually and corporately.

God’s decree concerning his minchah is this: It is purged from all old leaven and made a new lump.

And Scented

The Spirit forms a unified lump. The Spirit forms an unleavened lump. The Spirit also forms a fragrant lump. What God demanded for his minchah was that it be scented with frankincense: “When any will offer a meat offering unto the Lord, his offering shall be of fine flour; and he shall pour oil upon it, and put frankincense thereon” (Lev. 2:1).

If leaven is symbolic of all that stands at enmity against God and from which the church must be free, then frankincense represents the positive life of the church as God’s minchah. More specifically, frankincense in its burning state upon God’s altar symbolized man’s whole new life as a life of prayer. Both the Old Testament and the New Testament describe frankincense this way.

For example, the psalmist in Psalm 141:1–2 petitions,

1. Lord, I cry unto thee: make haste unto me; give ear unto my voice, when I cry unto thee.

2. Let my prayer be set forth before thee as incense; and the lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice.

In the New Testament the angel who appeared to Cornelius by a vision speaks of Cornelius’ prayers and alms in this same sense. The angel said, “Thy prayers and thine alms are come up for a memorial before God” (Acts 10:4). In that word “memorial” the angel compared Cornelius’ prayers and alms to that portion of the meat offering that was placed upon God’s altar, upon which portion all the frankincense was applied: “He shall bring it to Aaron’s sons the priests: and he shall take thereout his handful of the flour thereof, and of the oil thereof, with all the frankincense thereof; and the priest shall burn the memorial of it upon the altar, to be an offering made by fire, of a sweet savour unto the Lord” (Lev. 2:2).

It is not difficult to understand why God required frankincense with the meat offering. Prayer is the “chief part of thankfulness which God requires of us” (Heidelberg Catechism A 116, in Confessions and Church Order, 134). Like breath spontaneously arises out of the lungs of an earthly man, so prayer arises from the heart of the spiritual man. For the man who is redeemed and renewed, prayer encapsulates his new life from this point of view: that he lives in the presence of God continually, conscious of who God is and of his own utter dependence upon God. The prayer-life is a life of ever drinking from God’s fountain of life and drawing all things necessary for body and soul while having nothing to give in return to remunerate God for all his gifts. The prayer-life is a life where God must uphold you every single moment by his grace and Holy Spirit and that God does everything for you because you have no strength or wisdom of yourself. The prayer-life is a life where you lack nothing because you receive Jesus Christ your salvation; in him you have the favor of God, righteousness, and eternal life. It is on this account that the apostle says in 1 Thessalonians 5:16–18, “Rejoice evermore. Pray without ceasing. In every thing give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you.”

Thus what stood behind the meat offering was a new life of prayer that manifested itself in every comportment of life with these words: “My whole hope is only in Thy exceeding great mercy. Give what Thou commandest, and command what Thou wilt!”⁷ What stood behind the meat offering was the must of perfect freedom, the new life of heaven that is begun already now in the Spirit.

Consider the eternal wisdom of God that he stamped into the ingredients of this old dispensational shadow!

The Lord willing, the next article in this series will conclude my treatment of the meat offering by examining why God required that “every oblation of thy meat offering shalt thou season with salt; neither shalt thou suffer the salt of the covenant of thy God to be lacking from thy meat offering: with all thine offerings thou shalt offer salt” (Lev. 2:13), and also why the meat offering was always accompanied with a drink offering of wine.