All of us have traditions that we cling to, out of comfort or because we believe they are required of us.
In our worship we have traditions also. The Jewish people have traditions, some cultural, and others based upon the Mosaic Law.
But the coming of the Lord Jesus was to change a whole lot of traditions!
Animal sacrifices were rendered unnecessary once Jesus fulfilled the type by becoming God's Lamb to take away His people's sin.
The Sabbath was reworked also, because Christ fulfilled all the law for us, and we rest in Jesus. No more must we labor to try to cobble together our own righteousness, but we have the Righteousness of God by faith in Jesus!
Old Testament notions of the presence of God with His people changed as well. A child has been born! A Son has been given! God now lives with His people in Immanuel, God with us!
But under the law, the people were always kept back from the presence of God. They weren't allowed into the Holy Place where God's glory shown. Only the High Priest could enter behind the veil in the tabernacle, only once a year, on the Day of Atonement, and not without a bloody offering.
He also had to burn incense there so that the cloud would obscure the glory of God, lest the priest die.
Leviticus 16 lays out the elaborate tradition the high priest must follow. There was an offering of animals to cleanse the priest, and the tabernacle, and the altar, and the people of Israel from their uncleanness and sin.
But all this tradition had to be set aside once Jesus rose from the dead! It was very difficult for God's people to embrace their new-found closeness unto God in Jesus Christ!
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John Pittman Hey was born in 1961 in Jackson, Mississippi, to Godly parents who from the beginning raised him in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. With child-like faith he came to Christ on his fourth birthday at his mother's knee. He received his education at church...