QUITE distinct from the meal-offering of the wave-loaves on the day of Pentecost, wherein leaven was put because it was the needed type of man's fallen nature with its accompanying sin-offering, we have in the closing verses what is more in keeping with the wave-sheaf. Only here it is not the prescribed oblation at the annual feast, but a voluntary offering any time.
“And if thou offer an oblation of first-fruits to Jehovah, thou shalt offer for thine oblation of thy first-fruits green ears of corn parched with fire, corn beaten out of full ear. And thou shalt put oil on it, and lay frankincense thereon; it is an oblation. And the priest shall burn the memorial of it, of the beaten corn thereof, and of the oil thereof, with all the frankincense thereof; [it is] a fire-offering to Jehovah” (vers. 14-16).
It is still a shadow of Christ, but of Christ as man on earth in a point of view distinct from what has already passed before us in this chapter, or from the wave-sheaf which alone from its place in the series of the feasts presented Him risen on the morrow after the sabbath of passover week, on that great first day of the week after the great sabbath day when He lay in the grave.
That any of them represent Him as glorified seems quite a misapprehension. So it is to regard the drying by the fire as the infliction of wrath He bore in atoning for our sins. For whether the meal-offering had a principal place, as in the Feasts, &c., or was only an accompaniment to the holocaust, it had a wholly different aim and character, setting forth our Lord not in bearing our sins but in the perfection of His activities here below, and therefore never said to be atoning as the holocaust or yet more the sin-offering in their respectively distinct ways. But if our Lord was not forsaken of God till He was made sin for us on the cross, He was tried to the utmost through His life and increasingly; so that the divine sifting served only to bring out His entire subjection, devotedness, and obedience, in the face of such difficulties and sufferings as none but He ever knew.
This is what the meal-offering distinctively exhibits. The constituents of His humanity in the abstract, if such a phrase may be used reverently, we have seen in the opening verses; then the concrete man, Christ as He was on the earth; next, the variety of the forms of His trial as here below in the central verses; now we see Him typified, apart from those divine tests, as Christ the first-fruits, offered up to God, yet spared no trial and His life taken from the earth, His days shortened. To the feeble saints in God's mercy it could be said, that no temptation has befallen them but a human one. Our Lord was subjected to far more, to every sifting possible, yet only bringing out perfection as thus proved, and this in dependence and obedience, as became Him Who deigned to become man that He might be God's bondman.
Hence we may observe the plain distinctness of the oblation of the first-fruits from the wave-sheaf which set forth Christ as risen from the dead. We hear nothing of the wave-sheaf but waving it before Jehovah, with its holocaust and meal-offering and its drink-offering. As to our first-fruits we are told of green ears of corn roasted or parched with fire, bruised corn of the fresh ear or corn beaten out of full ear. Yet is it Christ only and none else, and Christ here below, not reigning in righteousness without end of days forever and ever, with gladness of joy in Jehovah's presence, and making all enemies as a furnace of fire in the time of the same presence. Here on the contrary it is the evil day as in the day of the temptation in the wilderness; and on Christ, as the fresh and early grain and moreover rubbed out of full ears, came fiery trial. The Holy One of God, He was a Man in a world at enmity with God, and in the midst of a people still more bitterly hating Him because of their blind self-complacency in an exclusive title to be God's people when God had long written on them Lo-ammi (not My people). Hence again both oil was to be put on these first-fruits, and frankincense; which is not said of the wave-sheaf, whatever might be true of the meal-offering proper.
Thus the difference is clear enough when the word is duly examined.
The Puritan interpretation, as in M. Henry's Commentary, may be as good as that of the Fathers or of the Reformers; but they are all short of the truth, because they stop short at man or even reduce Christ to that level. Hence Henry talks of not expecting from green ears what we may justly look for from those left to grow full ripe, and says of the oil and frankincense added, that wisdom and humanity must soften and sweeten the spirits and services of young people, and then their green ears of corn shall be acceptable. How deplorable is the lowering and the loss when Christ is thus left out! But if this humanitarianism wrought of old grievously to hinder the joy of faith, what is the danger and the evil now when the pride of man is swelling far more portentously?