Let us imagine Reuben ben Jacob ben Zadok ben Eliyahu. Jacob, Zadok and Eliyahu lived out their lives as faithful Jews, making regular trips to Jerusalem to celebrate God's feasts, offering the appropriate sacrifices when they fell short, praying three times a day and all the rest of it.
As a boy and young man, Reuben planned to follow their examples and be a pious Jew.
One day in late spring, AD 31, he was walking through Jerusalem when he heard a commotion. The city was crowded with pilgrims who had come for
the festival which marked the complete harvest, 50 days after the first fruits of the new harvest were presented in the temple on the day after Passover, which that year had fallen on a Friday. Naturally curious,
Reuben turns down the street and is soon pressed immoveably among a
crowd of people from all around the Mediterranean, listening to an older
man who is shouting from a doorstep.
Reuben, of course, can understand him because he is speaking in good -
if accented - Aramaic, but curiously the swarthy gentleman from North
Africa and the long-nosed man in Persian dress beside him also seem to
be able to understand, as the man shouts out about someone called Joshua
- but then he adds something about this Josua being raised from the dead
and Reuben suddenly remembers the scandal back at Passover time when a popular rabbi called Joshua had been lynched - with Roman connivance -
at the instigation of the temple authorities. It was not, Reuben felt,
one of Judaisms most glorious moments.
Somehow Reuben finds himself at the front of the crowd and when the
shouter seems to have reached his peroration, Reuben asks him, "So, what
do you want us do about all this?"
The man's response is immediate: "Repent and be ritually washed in the
name of Joshua the Messiah, so that your sins may be forgiven and you
may receive the Holy Spirit of God."
Reuben is shocked. "But I'm on my way to the temple to have my sins
forgiven by sacrificing this goat. Isn't that good enough?"
Unfortunately Peter's reply has not been recorded, but I imagine it went something like this: "No, it is no longer good enough. Yesterday it
might have been, but today it is not good enough. If you want to have
your sins forgiven now, you must believe in Joshua the Messiah."
Reuben shakes his head. "But sacrificing in the temple was good enough
for my father and his father and his father; why isn't it good enough
for me? Why do I have to believe in this Messiah of yours?"
"Because," Peter says, "God has predestined you to live at this moment
when things are changing. Because of God's predestination, the rituals
which were effective yesterday are no longer valid. You are predestined
to believe in the Messiah or to be lost. The choice is yours."
Or, of course, perhaps Peter didn't actually use those words. It was
left to St Paul a couple of decades later to tell the Christians in
Ephesus, that God had chosen this generation - and therefore them -
before the foundation of the world, predestining them to be adopted as
God's sons and daughters, not by sacrificing animals but by believing in Jesus.
So if God had predestined Jesus to come in and preach the Gospel of salvation, so that from henceforth salvation no longer required animal sacrifice, why not introduce that very early on, certainly no later than
the flood?-a It serves no purpose
However I find a flaw in your argument.-a Pauls writes "And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified,
and those whom he justified he also glorified"-a Romans 8:30 ESV.
Ephesians 1:11 also suggests the same thing.
Now I'm not a calvinist, simply because I can't align a supreme being
giving salvation for a select people he chose prior to their birth, but
if that's the case then it is God's perogative to do so.
On 13/02/2026 15:08, John wrote:
So if God had predestined Jesus to come in and preach the Gospel of
salvation, so that from henceforth salvation no longer required
animal sacrifice, why not introduce that very early on, certainly no
later than the flood?-a It serves no purpose
On the contrary, in a world without money and a culture where wealth
was counted in cattle, having to sacrifice an animal was the
equivalent of a monetary fine these days.
I think this reasoning is ultimately wrong. 1. Leviticus outlines a
list of monetary fines in terms of the shekhel.
2. Provision is made for
the the pilgrims to convert their holdings to cash to bring to Jerusalem
and then to use it to purchase sacrificial animals at the hands of the
temple bankers.
No doubt cattle was "wealth" and the (corrpout) justice system andIt may well be that the "main point" was as you say, but animals were
priestly would use it as a substitute, but the main point of sacrifice
is the appeasement by the spilling of blood and the taking of innocent
life of the deity which receives the sacrifice. This was of course not modeled on the worship of the "other gods" of that time.
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