Jesus Christ died a violent death. The Bible is a bloody book. This is not pleasant stuff to talk about, and yet I wonder how capable we are of grasping the meaning behind these powerful pictures without encountering their reality in some way.

That reality woke me up the other day. I was casually reading from my Bible over a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios, and I found a carnage. I mean, it was a bloody mess. I wouldn’t even have been reading this if it weren’t for these annual Bible reading schedules that force me to separate pages in the Old Testament that are still stuck together even though I’ve had my Bible for years.

We don’t often hear sermons or testimonies out of Leviticus. Imagine someone sharing his favorite Scripture verse, Leviticus 4:4: “He is to present the bull at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting before the Lord. He is to lay his hand on its head and slaughter it before the Lord.” I’m sure we’d all be anxious to meet this person after church!

And so I sat there with my cereal getting soggy, thinking about being a priest and looking forward to a day of slaughtering bulls and goats and lambs. He spent his day removing their hides, separating their organs and fat, cutting them into pieces — wringing the heads and tearing the wings off doves — and constantly sprinkling blood everywhere: on altars, and toes, and earlobes of other priests. Imagine the stench, the sight of all that blood, the flies, the mess. And imagine, most of all, that it never stops. A priest just finishes with one bull, and someone comes up to him with another one and says, “Would you please sacrifice El Toro here? I just had an affair with my neighbor’s wife.”

If I were a priest, I’d want to take my knife to him instead. “Why didn’t you think of that before you started fooling around,” I would be tempted to say. After all, what does this guy’s personal life have to do with a poor innocent bull?

Imagine these priests, all day long immersed in blood and

guts and fire — on a hot, humid day in the Sinai, no less. Suddenly, as I read Leviticus over my bowl of cereal, I saw this practice from a priests point of view. The people kept on sinning, and priests kept on cutting into warm flesh. Sinning and ripping open and sprinkling and burning, and sinning, and . . .

Don’t you think at some point one of them might have raised his sticky hands toward heaven and shouted over all the moos and the bleats and the cooing, “WILL YOU PEOPLE PLEASE STOP ALL THIS SINNING!”

For more on this topic, join us on “Between the Answers” with John & Marti by clicking below.