The meat offering here, which was offered with the firstfruits, would tell us of the fact that Christ is a real Man at God’s right hand, and then, while thinking of this, how we delight to consider Him also as the Lamb that was slain, just as the children of Israel offered their lamb here. He will always have the marks of the nails in His blessed hands and feet and the spear mark in His side, and surely we delight to think of seeing Him thus—perhaps today! Faith can look up and see Him there even now, and our hearts rejoice to “wave Him before the Lord,” and that in a special way each first day of the week. Not on the sabbath, we notice, but on the morrow after the sabbath, His resurrection day.
This meat offering was of two tenth deals of flour. It is “two” because although the Lord Jesus came to the lost sheep of the house of Israel He was rejected by them, and now in resurrection He has made in Himself of twain (of both Jew and Gentile) one new man, so making peace. (Eph. 2:1515Having abolished in his flesh the enmity, even the law of commandments contained in ordinances; for to make in himself of twain one new man, so making peace; (Ephesians 2:15).) The realization of this by the Spirit (for the meat offering was “mingled with oil”) gives real joy, like the drink offering of wine here.
The children of Israel were specially charged not to eat of the good things of the harvest until they had brought their offering to the Lord, and so blessing could not come to us in any other way but through Christ, the risen One. How many in Christendom today are seeking to partake of the blessings of Christianity apart from. God’s appointed way. They are like one of the children of Israel who would reap the harvest for himself without bringing the firstfruits to the Lord, and such will surely come under God’s judgment. Our only title to salvation is through Christ, and so Israel too will not share in “the harvest” until they own Christ as the true Firstfruits.
The next feast was Pentecost, or “fiftieth.” The children of Israel were to count seven sabbaths from the feast of firstfruits, and then the day after the seventh sabbath, which is the first day of the week, they were to offer a new meat offering to the Lord. How beautifully this type was fulfilled (as to the Church) on the day of Pentecost in Acts 2. The Lord Jesus, the true Firstfruits, had risen and shown Himself as the risen Man, to His disciples, for forty days and then gone back to heaven. Ten days later, on the day of Pentecost, we find them gathered together in one place, and the Holy Ghost came, sitting upon each one of them as cloven tongues of fire. They were now to be brought into new creation in association with Christ, like the new meat offering which the children of Israel were to bring to the Lord at the feast of Pentecost. But although we are already a new creation in Christ (2 Cor. 5:1717Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new. (2 Corinthians 5:17)), we do not have our new bodies yet, and the old nature is still within us, just as the two loaves of the new meat offering in our chapter were to be “baken with leaven.” They typify Jew and Gentile who are now made one in Christ, and would also tell us that although the flesh (the old nature) is still in us, we are not to allow it to work. This we-see in the word “baken,” for the heat of the oven would stop the working of the leaven, just as self-judgment with us would stop the activities of the old man within. It is only as the old man is kept in the place of death that we can go on happily together in the unity of the Spirit.
ML 04/29/1951