the meaning of blood sacrifice

If you think that the above image, showing several slaughtered sheep hanging over a pool of their own blood, is offensive; what would you think if I could somehow include the awful stench of that place where mass killing of animals routinely occurs, with this image?  I have never visited a real slaughterhouse.  But I imagine it would be an unforgettable, stomach-turning experience.

Under the economy and the Covenant of the Old Testament, the Temple in Jerusalem was a large-scale slaughterhouse, and the priests--in their lily-white garments, were full-time butchers.

Have you ever understood the Jewish Temple, in terms as just described?  For, truly that's what it was.  Even the sacred area within the Temple where only the priests themselves were permitted to enter, called the holy place or the Sanctuary, was stained here and there with the blood of sacrificed animals, sprinkled upon the several pieces of furniture and vessels within that secluded room.

The Christian Church today is so far removed from any kind of experience even remotely resembling the ceremonies which transpired in the Temple in ancient Jerusalem.  The great majority of modern-day Christians, in fact, have never been anywhere near a slaughterhouse.  Thus, the great and essential meaning, which God desired to convey by means of the larger-than-life object lesson embodied in the system involving blood sacrifice, in the Old Testament, is practically lost to modern-day Christians:

We fail to appreciate the true meaning of the fact, that the Lamb of God was brutally slaughtered, and his blood poured out, to make atonement for our sins.

What did it mean, the seemingly perpetual slaughter of untold thousands--even millions, perhaps, of animals, at the Jewish Temple?  What did it mean, the shedding of so much blood: blood, doubtless splattered upon the walls and the floors; blood, upon the priests garments; blood, even purposively sprinkled around upon all the instruments and vessels of Temple service?  What did it mean, the unrelenting stench of DEATH permeating every part of the Temple compound?

It was a reminder to all the people, of:

the consequences of sin--

and the price of our redemption.

I would to God that Christians, today, could be made to spend some time in a slaughterhouse, to witness the killing of innocent animals and to smell the sickening odors in that place, in order that we all might thereby come to better understand and appreciate the horrific ugliness of sin and its awful price:

"The wages of sin is death..."

The professing Christian Church, for the most part, treats sin with such casualness--bordering on indifference, today.  Christ died on the cross.  hallelujah.  Now, the whole matter of sin is behind us forever.  Oh, no, we dare not even suppose that God may expect Christians to live above sin!  Much less dare we imagine that truly holy living is even possible to those who are yet in bodies of flesh!  I have even heard so-called ministers of the Gospel say things like the following: "One man, only, lived a perfect, sinless life, so that you don't have to, in order to go to heaven."

Whether or not any professing Christian will consciously endorse such an hideous statement as being true, nevertheless, it appears--judging from the conduct of professing Christians--that many if not most of them evidently believe it is true, whether they will admit it or not.  "Grace," to many would-be Christians, has lately come to mean not the Presence and power of God to overcome and to put away sin but, rather, "grace" now means that all sin is simply overlooked by God, because it is pardonable, that is to say, sin is excusable to those who live in the flesh--because, they "love Jesus".

So, the stench of death fills the house of God, while rivers of Christ's blood pour through the Sanctuary, to cleanse away the filth and the abominable practices of those who come to 'worship God' therein.  Yet, most of them leave that bloody place no more clean before God than when they came in.  For, they love their sin.  

Do you, dear Brother, do you precious Sister, REALLY want Revival?  Leonard Ravenhill, an aged man whose life was devoted to God and who only recently passed from this world, said, that those who set their face to seek God for genuine Revival, had better first dedicate their own heads to heaven: for, they thus make themselves to be the objects of the world's most extreme hatred.  I believe that's true.

If you prefer to be well liked among this present world, though, you may as well carry on with what may properly be called the culture of American Christianity.  It displays all the accouterments  of the Christian religion, but it demands nothing of its principles and precepts.

Revival.  It is washed in the Blood of Calvary's Lamb.  Cherish it, walk in the fear of its meaning; and, so, you may possess all that for which the Son of God was willing to sacrifice his own life's blood.