"Sacrifice" Does Not Mean "To Kill Something"

Death is not central to the logic of atonement in the Levitical system given by God.

In the rousing eighth chapter of his Epistle to the Romans, the apostle Paul writes, "Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us.” Despite how contemporary Christians in the West isolate the cross as the central salvific event, note how for Paul the crucifixion is but one event in a sequence of events that culminates in the risen Christ’s present-tense, continuous work as our Great High Priest.

The entire sequence of events— not a one of them individually— constitutes the LORD Jesus’ “sacrifice.”

The Book of Hebrews, which the church fathers believed to have been authored by Paul, also displays this sequential, cumulative understanding of the atonement. In particular, the concatenation of incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, ascension, and abiding intercession is precisely what places Christ’s sacrifice in continuity with the sacrificial order the LORD first bequeathed to his Israel. As David Moffitt puts it, “Jewish sacrifice consists of an irreducible ritual process.”