He [the Lord] commanded the children of Israel to offer their offerings to the Lord in the Wilderness of Sinai.
   - Leviticus 7:38

In the early chapters of Leviticus we have five distinct offerings, all setting forth various aspects of the work of the cross and unfolding the glories of the Person who did that work--a Person transcending all the sons of men, for He was both Son of God and Son of Man, divinely human and humanly divine. We shall get great help for our souls if we meditate upon the marvelous pictures here given us of the great and wondrous truths which are unfolded in the New Testament.

In coming to the study of the types, we should never found doctrines upon them, but discovering the doctrines in the New Testament, we will find them illustrated in the types of the Old.

The five offerings may be divided in various ways. First we notice that four of them are offerings involving the shedding of blood--the burnt offering, the peace offering, the sin offering, and the trespass offering. The meat offering, or as it should read, the meal offering or food offering, was an unbloody offering, and stands in a place by itself.

Then again there are sweet savor offerings, as distinguished from offerings for sin. The burnt offering, the meal offering, and the peace offering are all said to be "a sweet aroma unto the Lord" (Leviticus 1:9; 2:9; 3:5). This was never true of the sin offering or the trespass offering.

The five offerings which are here grouped together present to us a marvelous many-sided picture of the Person and work of our blessed Lord Jesus Christ. They show what He is to God, as well as what He has become in grace to sinners for whom He died, and to those who have trusted Him and now stand before God, accepted in the Beloved.

If there be details, as many there are, which are difficult for us to understand, these should but give occasion for exercise of heart before God and for meditation and prayer. We may be sure of this, that the better acquainted we become with our Savior and the more we enter into what the Word of God elsewhere reveals as to the details of His work upon the cross, the more readily we shall understand the types.

Henry A. Ironside