What we actually find is quite natural to a creative imagination, striking out the broad design of the work and its uses first, and then filling in the outlines. It is not natural at a time when freshness and inspiration have departed, and squared timber, as we are told, has taken the place of the living tree.
The priest, when cleansed, was next to be clad in his robes of office, with the mitre on his head, and upon the mitre the golden plate, with its inscription, which is here called, as the culminating object in all his rich array, "the holy crown" (ver. 6).
And then he was to be anointed. Now, the use of oil, in the ceremony of investiture to office, is peculiar to revealed religion. And whether we suppose it to refer to the oil in a lamp, invisible, yet the secret source of all its illuminating power, or to that refreshment and renovated strength bestowed upon a weary traveller when his head is anointed with oil, in either case it expresses the grand doctrine of revealed religion--that no office may be filled in one's own strength, but that the inspiring help of God is offered, as surely as responsibilities are imposed. "The Spirit of the Lord God is upon Me, because He hath anointed Me."
With these three ceremonies--ablution, robing and anointing--the first and most personal section of the ritual ended. And now began a course of sacrifices to God, advancing from the humblest expression of sin, and appeal to heaven to overlook the unworthiness of its servant, to that which best exhibited conscious acceptance, enjoyment of privilege, admission to a feast with God. The bullock was a sin-offering: the word is literally _sin_, and occurs more than once in the double sense: "let him offer for his _sin_ which he hath _sinned_ a young bullock ... for a _sin(-offering)_" (Lev. iv. 3, v. 6, etc.). And this is the explanation of the verse which has perplexed so many: "He made Him to be sin for us, Who knew no sin" (2 Cor. v. 21). The doctrine that pardon comes not by a cheap and painless overlooking of transgression, as a thing indifferent, but by the transfer of its consequences to a victim divinely chosen, could not easily find clearer expression than in this word. And it was surely a sobering experience, and a wholesome one, when Aaron, in his glorious robes, sparkling with gems, and bearing on his forehead the legend of his holy calling, laid his hand, beside those of his children and successors, upon the doomed creature which was made sin for him. The gesture meant confession, acceptance of the appointed expiation, submission to be freed from guilt by a method so humiliating and admonitory. There was no undue exaltation in the mind of any priest whose heart went with this "remembrance of sins."
The bullock was immediately slain at the door of "the tent of meeting"; and to show that the shedding of his blood was an essential part of the rite, part of it was put with the finger on the horns of the altar, and the remainder was poured out at the base. Only then might the fat and the kidney be burned upon the altar; but it is never said of any sin-offering, as presently of the burnt-offering and the peace-offerings, that it is "a sweet savour before Jehovah" (vers. 18, 25)--a phrase which is only once extended to a trespass-offering for a purely unconscious lapse (Lev. iv. 31). The sin-offering is, at the best, a deplorable necessity. And therefore the notion of a gift, welcome to Jehovah, is carefully shut out: no portion of such an offering may go to maintain the priests: all must be burned "with fire without the camp; it is a sin-offering" (ver. 14). Rightly does the Epistle to the Hebrews emphasize this fact: "The bodies of those beasts whose blood is brought into the Holy Place ... as an offering for sin" are burned without the camp. The bodies of other sacrifices were not reckoned unfit for food.[40] And so there is a striking example of humility, as well as an instructive coincidence, in the fact that Jesus suffered without the gate, being the true Sin-offering, "that He might sanctify the people through His own blood" (Heb. xiii. 11, 12).