What these sacrifices promised from a God who sought to bless, came at last – a second Adam – Priest and King of righteousness: son of God, incarnate Savior, son of Man, both Christ and Lord, who in naked shame would offer on the cross His blood outpoured. -LSB 572, Verse 3
The sacrifices and sacrificial covenant of the Old Testament were never intended to be a permanent solution to sin. They were a promise which pointed ahead to the sacrifice that God would send in fulfilment of His first promise to Adam and Eve. For hundreds of years, God’s people waited and watched for the coming of this Savior. As they waited, some of them lost sight of who this Savior would be and His true purpose. When Christ Jesus became incarnate in the womb of the Virgin Mary, was born into this world, and began His ministry, many of the Jewish people did not recognize Him as God. They were looking for a temporal savior- one who would free them from political and religious oppression, and they missed the deeper issue of sin and eternal damnation. They did not understand that all the sacrifices of the priests pointed to this Jesus who now lived and taught among them.
Yet Jesus came to make His people holy before God, not to free them from any temporal condition. Jesus humbled Himself and took on human flesh because this was the only way that sin could be removed from mankind bringing us back into fellowship with God. By living a sinless life, Jesus accomplished what we can never do no matter how hard we try. Imagine never sinning against God or your neighbor. We cannot even begin to comprehend what Jesus’ life would have been like, because we are so corrupted by sin that we cannot escape it even for one moment. Jesus never feared, loved, or trusted in anything apart from God, and He always loved His neighbor as Himself. If He had sinned, He would not have been able to redeem us.
Jesus is the second Adam because He obeyed God’s word whereas the first Adam did not. Adam took the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and immediately enslaved the human race and the world to sin, death and the Devil. Jesus, the second Adam, perfectly fulfilled the law of God, and through His death on the cross He crushed the Devil, broke the chains of captivity, and freed His people from their sins. How was this possible? When Jesus took on our sin, He became sin for us. When Jesus died on the cross, sin died as well. The wages of sin is death and in Jesus’ death, sin’s wage is now paid in full. With Jesus death, the promise of God to Adam and Eve was fulfilled, and the sacrificial covenant ended paving the way for the new covenant God established with His people.
