24 And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying,

25 Speak unto Aaron and to his sons, saying, This is the law of the sin offering: In the place where the burnt offering is killed shall the sin offering be killed before the Lord: it is most holy.

26 The priest that offereth it for sin shall eat it: in the holy place shall it be eaten, in the court of the tabernacle of the congregation.

We gain a new detail on the sin offering in these verses. First, though, to recap all that we have learned of how the offering was performed so far, we first learned how the blood of the animal was smeared on the horns of the altar and the fat and kidneys were consumed by the flame. We elsewhere also heard that the skin, flesh, and dung of the animal was burned outside of the camp. And now, here for the first time, we also hear about a portion of the offering being eaten by the priest. In Leviticus 10 it will also be made explicitly clear that this was a part of the ritual for a common sin offering, and it will state there that the representation of this was that the priest was to bear the iniquity of the sinner.

However, the priest taking the burden for all that is wrong, is not the only symbol in this act. Notice how in today’s verse 25 it mentions that the slaughtered animal is also a vessel of purification, and tomorrow’s verses will go even more heavily into that theme.

This makes sense when we consider the ultimate sacrifice, Jesus Christ. On the one hand we are told, “Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us” (Galatians 3:13), which matches the idea of Christ taking the burden of every man’s evil, but at the same time, his innocence and purifying power are made clear when we are told, “he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter…with his stripes we are healed” (Isaiah 53:7, 5). He is both the condemned and the redeemer all at once, and so is the meat of this offering.