the Third Week after Easter
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Daily Devotionals
Discovering Christ Day by Day
Today’s Reading: Leviticus 5-7
Restitution Made — God Glorified
Leviticus 5:16; Leviticus 6:5
Blessed is that enlightened soul who, by the grace of God, is able to see Christ in the Old Testament as well as in the New. Blessed are those eyes that behold the Lord Jesus Christ in all the promises, precepts, and prophecies of the Old Testament as well as in the proclamations of the New. Blessed are those hearts that can see the beauty and glory of Christ in the ordinances, types, and shadows of the law, as well as in the shining light of the Gospel.
It is a sad fact, but a fact it is, that most who read the Bible and most who preach and teach from it see nothing in the Old Testament but historic facts, legal precepts, carnal ceremonies, and moral ethics. To the vast majority of the religious people I know the Old Testament is a sealed Book, without meaning or message. They simply cannot unlock it, because they don’t have the key. They are like those whom Isaiah describes in Isaiah 6. Seeing they see not. Hearing they hear not. Understanding, they understand not the things written in the Old Testament Scripture.
The Key to the Old Testament is Christ. What a great blessing it is to have the Key! Yet, there is no room for boasting here. If we see, hear, and understand the Scriptures, it is because God has graciously caused the light of His glory and grace to shine in our hearts by his Spirit. It is because we have been taught of God. It is because the Lord God has opened our understanding that we might understand the Scriptures (Luke 24:45). It is written, “Blessed are your eyes, for they see: and your ears, for they hear” (Matthew 13:16).
Nowhere is man’s spiritual blindness more evident than in the things written about the Mosaic law and the Levitical sacrifices. The law of God requiring restitution for any wrong done by one person to another and the sacrifices requiring restitution for atonement were not intended merely to teach a moral precept of restitution. Rather, these things were written to teach by precept and by picture that the Lord Jesus Christ would, by his great work of redemption, turn the tables and make a full restitution of all things to the everlasting praise and glory of the triune God. They all testify of that which is written of him in Psalms 69:4. – “Then I restored that which I took not away.”
The long list of laws of restitution given in Exodus 21-23 is introduced by the law of the bond slave. The Lord God has made us holy by the obedience unto death of the Lord Jesus Christ, His voluntary bond slave, Jehovah’s Righteous Servant. Our blessed Lord Jesus, because of His love for His Father and His love to us, His captive wife and children, cheerfully bowed to be Jehovah’s Servant to have His ears opened and would not go out free, until He had accomplished all the work to which He was called and had graciously undertaken. He would not quit His Service until he had, by the sacrifice of Himself, “obtained eternal redemption for us.”
