“Your word (Torah) is truth.”
Due to the present inexistence of the Temple Biblical texts on offerings may today seem irrelevant. They may feel like text pertaining to a distant people and past having very little to offer us today. The Law of God is perfect, pure and eternal (Psalms 19), so I would be careful about that train of thought.
Some may say that Yeshua initiated a new Temple-less era, but the Bible and other documents pertaining to His times tell us that for forty years after the resurrection of the Master, that is until the roman invasion of Jerusalem, for the most part the Jewish disciples of Messiah continued Temple attendance as a sect of Judaism. Can we learn something from these long descriptions in Leviticus? When compared with our social, moral and legal systems today, much indeed should be learned gleaning and learning from Temple and offering protocols.
Here are some examples. That a court of judges makes a mistake in judgment is understandable, so the Torah acknowledges that appointed judges can sometimes err and therefore cause the people to sin; for these a public admission through an offering is required (Leviticus 4:13). I am thinking of the court convened to condemn Yeshua. God provides for these judges to eventually confess and publicly acknowledge their error which will atone for the Jewish people of the day. We learn that God is also understanding of our financial pressures and makes provisions for cheaper offerings to be made (Leviticus 5:1-11); that thought God understands involuntary mistakes, they still require acknowledgment and retribution. A thief also is required to restore that which he had gotten deceitfully plus a fifth to the person he stole from. He is also supposed to make amends with God fro breaking His commands.
The process by which these things are done is also quite interesting. The person comes to the altar and confesses their sins to God, (not to the priest). He basically transfers his sins on the poor animal to be executed. Then, except for the bird offering, the offerer is the one who has to kill the animal, hear it die, get splattered with its fluids, and feel its life’s warm blood run through his hands. Along with having to pay for a good quality animal, one of the best of the flock, this represents a very good illustration of the horribleness and cost of disobedience and sin according to God which should provoke in us a healthy fear of the Lord.
This makes me wonder though: Christianity at large claims a theology that affirms they are no more sinners. As a result they invalidate the Torah proclaiming it obsolete. Then, as reality dawns of their sinful state, they realize that they are still in need of social structure, moral guidance, and a penal system, so they institute their own sense of law and righteousness. The question is: Why didn’t they keep God’s Laws in the first place?