Religious form of Worship

Whenever I say religion, I always refer first to the Jewish religion, because our style of worship today is patterned after the Jewish religion.

When we talk about religion and the offering of religion, there is nothing that can come close to the offering of the Jewish people in their religious rites. These religious rituals were commanded to them by Moses.

They did not know that this covenant was phased out because it could not perfect the conscience of man. It could not totally cleanse man from the thing that God wanted to deal within him, which is sin.

He gave His Son in the Jewish setting to be able to complete or perfect that which was lacking in their offering to God.

John the Baptist, who was the forerunner of the Son of God, cried in the wilderness, "This is the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world." (Jn. 1:29)

John here was talking about the "Messiah to come", who will be the one who to complete what was lacking in the Jewish religion-the spiritual component of salvation.

The Jewish type of sacrifice was supposed to take away sin, but it did not. It only covered sin for a year. It was not really taken away. The covering up of sin through blood sacrifice did have an effect for a year.

The High Priest would go into the Holy of Holiest yearly to appease the wrath of God against sin, by offering the blood of animals, which was supposed to remit or cover the Jewish people's sins for a year.

But when Jesus Christ, the Son of God in the Jewish Setting came, He did it once and for all. He offered His life as a sacrifice for man's sin, because it was only His blood that could cover and take away sin.

The blood that we talk about here is not physical blood. In biblical language, it is "the life that is in the body."

The life that is in the body of Jesus Christ was a life pleasing to the Father, because it was in total surrender to His will.

He took away the sins of the world, because He was the one who made an example of Himself by Him, being the Word of God-because it is the Word of God that came from the Spirit of God which was sent to us for the first time in the Jewish setting.