This Man [Jesus Christ], after He had offered one sacrifice for sins forever, sat down at the right hand of God.
   - Hebrews 10:12

In the first seven chapters of Leviticus, we see the offerings from the divine standpoint, that is, God gives us that which means most to Him first; so that we begin with the burnt offering, which is the highest type of the work of the cross that we have in the Mosaic economy, and we go on down through the meal offering, the peace offering, and the sin offering, to the trespass offering, which is the first aspect of the work of Christ generally apprehended by our souls.

As a rule, when a guilty sinner comes to God for salvation he thinks of his own wrong-doing, and the question that arises in his soul is, "How can God forgive my sins and receive me to Himself in peace when I am so conscious of my own trespasses?" We shall never forget, many of us, how we were brought to see that what we could never do ourselves, God had done for us through the work of our Lord Jesus on the cross. This is the truth of the trespass offering, in which sin assumes the aspect of a debt needing to be discharged. (Read, for example, Leviticus 5:1-7.)

But as we went on we began to get a little higher view of the work of the cross. We saw that sin was not only a debt requiring settlement, but that it was something which in itself was defiling and unclean, something that rendered us utterly unfit for companionship with God, the infinitely Holy One. It was a wondrous moment in the history of our souls when we saw that we were saved eternally, and made fit for God's presence because the Holy One had become the great sin offering, made sin for us on Calvary's cross. (Leviticus 4.)

But there were other lessons we had to learn. We soon saw that, because of their sins, men are at enmity with God, that there could be no communion with God until a righteous basis for fellowship was procured. Something had to take place before God and man could meet together in perfect enjoyment and happy complacency. And thus we began to enter into the peace offering aspect of the work of Christ. We saw that it was God's desire to bring us into fellowship with Himself, and this could only be as redeemed sinners who had been reconciled to God through the death of our Lord Jesus. (Leviticus 3; note also 6:11-18, where the one bringing the sacrifice also eats part of it himself.)

As we learned to value more the work the Savior did, we found ourselves increasingly occupied with the Person who did that work. In the beginning it was the value of the blood that gave us peace in regard to our sin, but after we went on we learned to enjoy Him for what He is in Himself. And this is the grain offering; for it is here that we see Christ in all His perfection, God and man in one glorious Person, and our hearts become ravished with His beauty and we feed with delight upon Himself. (Leviticus 2.)

And now there remains one other aspect of the Person and work of our Lord to be considered, and it is this which is set forth in the burnt offering. As the years went on some of us began to apprehend, feebly at first, and then perhaps in more glorious fullness, something that in the beginning had never even dawned upon our souls, and that is, that even if we had never been saved through the work of Christ upon the cross, there was something in that work of tremendous importance which meant even more to God than the salvation of sinners.

He created man for His own glory. The catechism is right when it tells us that "the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever." But, alas, nowhere had any man been found who had not dishonored God in some way. He had been so terribly dishonored down here; He had been so continually misrepresented by the first man to whom He had committed lordship over the earth, and by all his descendants, that it was necessary that some man should be found who would live in this scene wholly to His glory. God's character must be vindicated; and the Lord Jesus Christ, the Second Man, the Lord from heaven, was the only one who could do that.

And in His perfect obedience unto death we see that which fully meets all the requirements of the divine nature and glorifies God completely in the scene where He had been so sadly misrepresented. This is the burnt offering aspect of the cross. By means of the cross more glory accrued to God than He had ever lost by the fall. We may say that even if not one sinner had ever been saved through the sacrifice of our Lord upon the tree, yet God had been fully glorified in the respect of sin, and no stain could be imputed to His character, nor could any question ever be raised through all eternity as to His abhorrence of sin and His delight in holiness. (Leviticus 1.)

So in the book of Leviticus the burnt offering comes first, for it is that which is most precious to God and should therefore be most precious to us.

Henry A. Ironside