Description
We often relegate thoughts about altars and holy sacrifices to Old Testament worship and Old Covenant teaching. However, we can discover much about our worship and service of our holy God by remembering how He taught Israel to honor Him and finding connections to our Christian faith. This quarter continues to explore Scriptural themes around worship, sacrifice, and offerings with lessons from both the Old and New Testaments.
Unit I, The Genesis of Altars and Sacrifices, shows that building altars and making sacrifices predates the Mosaic Law. Lesson 1 looks at the first known offerings to God in the Bible given by Cain and Abel. Lesson 2 follows Noah building an altar and offering burnt offerings to God as the floodwaters subsided. Lesson 3 relates Abraham’s most significant test of faith—the willingness to sacrifice his only son, Isaac, to God. Lesson 4 fast forwards to Isaac as a man of faith who builds his own altar and calls on the name of the Lord. In lesson 5, Jacob leads the next generation in faith and builds altars to worship Yahweh.
Unit II, Jesus and the Temple, explores texts from the Gospels that depict Jesus’s relation to the Temple. Lesson 6 recounts Jesus’ amazement of the teachers at the Temple with his keen insights as a youth. In Lesson 7, Jesus declares himself Lord of the Sabbath and greater than the Temple. Lesson 8 explores John’s account of Jesus’s cleansing the Temple and Jesus’ comparison of the “temple” as his own body. Lesson 9 records Jesus’s shocking prediction that the magnificent Temple would one day be destroyed.
Unit III, Christians and Sacrifice, brings the study to a conclusion by exploring what it means to offer sacrifices in the New Covenant. Lesson 10 draws from 1 Corinthians to see what it means for Christians, individually and collectively (as the church), to be the Temple of the Holy Spirit. Lesson 11, based on Paul’s advice to the Romans, challenges believers to be “living sacrifices.” In lesson 12, Paul writes to the Ephesians and again uses the church-as-temple imagery to make the point that God has one Temple, and both Jews and Gentiles are included in it. In lesson 13, the Hebrews writer, having made a grand contrast between the old system and the new, challenges believers in the New Covenant to continue to make sacrifices, but sacrifices of praise and good works rather than of animals. Finally, 1 Peter provides the text for lesson 14, which looks at how each believer is a “living stone” built into a spiritual temple for God’s glory.
