Perhaps there is no term employed in sacrificial service that in one way has come closer to our hearts and our homes than the word altar. It has entwined itself into our domestic vocabulary and into our public worship and ceremony. The family altar is the sacred shrine around which father, mother, and children gather to offer their daily tribute of praise and thanksgiving, and to make known their requests to a loving Father. It is there on bended knees that we renew our vows and pledge our faithful obedience. It is there that we make confession of sin, and seek and obtain forgiveness. It is there that the Spirit speaks to our hearts, makes duty plain, and points out the way our feet should take in the ensuing day.
It is at the marriage altar that our sons and daughters plight their troth to another for life. It is there that public witness is borne to faith in the immortal saying of our Creator, "It is not good that the man should be alone." It is at this altar that young hearts, with hand in hand, take the mutual pledge to leave father and mother and cleave to each other so long as they both shall live. This altar was sanctified forever to a holy purpose, when the Lord God made a woman from an intimate part of the man close to his heart, "and brought her to him" to be a helpmeet for him. That beautiful scene in Eden has never lost its sacredness or significance to the Christian in the rolling of the centuries. So meaningful is the marriage altar that it is carried over in figure to the marriage supper of the Lamb in the New Jerusalem.
From these two sacred usages in the home and in the church, the altar has passed into our general vocabulary, in simile and metaphor, as standing for the great uplifting ideas of devotion and sacrifice. The altar has become a symbol of self-denial and patriotism, as well as of intercession and adoration. So far has it influenced the diction of our best literature that it bears eloquent testimony to the virility of Biblical and Christian ideals.
It is not strange, therefore, that we find the altar set up at the very birth of the human race, immediately consequent on the entrance of sin. We do not find the word altar in the fourth chapter of Genesis, but we do find the idea clearly implied in the first few verses.
Abel brought live offerings from his flock to the Lord, and though no mention is made of shedding their blood, without this they would have failed of significance. Else why should the firstlings of the flock have been acceptable, while the fruit of the ground was displeasing? Yes, truly, Abel looked by faith down the centuries to the cross. Not much of the background is unfolded in the Genesis record, but the essentials of the altar service are revealed. The first actual mention of an altar does not occur till after the flood, when "Noah builded an altar unto the Lord" and made offerings of clean animals that were taken aboard the ark at least partly for this purpose. The pleasing thing about the record is that the Lord smelled the offering as a sweet savor, and pledged in His heart never to curse the ground again as He had in Eden, nor again smite any more every living thing, as He had done in the flood. Nothing is more acceptable to God than recognition of His unfailing promise to lay His own Son on the altar of sacrifice for fallen man. The altar has stood from the beginning as a central idea in the plan of salvation for the redemption of the sinner. Thank God, we can still say, with the writer of the Hebrews, "we have an altar" today. It will now be interesting to look into the word altar for any light we may get on its meaning and use. The Hebrew word, used in its first mention in Genesis 8:20 and in more than a hundred other places in the Old Testament, including both the golden altar and the brazen altar of the tabernacle service, is mizbeach. It is built on the verb root zabach. to slay, and may therefore be rendered "slaughter place" or "place of slaying." It is accurately rendered in the Septuagint Greek, thusiasterion, place of sacrifice, from thuo, to slay. In both languages, usage has given the root idea the turn of slaying for sacrificial offering. This it truly was in the first instance of its Biblical use in Noah's act of worship, and thus it is still called in its last mention in Revelation 16:7.
One idea that is always present in the word altar is that of elevation. From Genesis on we find the altar built up above the ground—as an earthen mound, a heap of stone, unhewn stones laid in order, then of the more valuable materials, of wood, iron, brass, or gold. The very word altar that we use in English comes from the Latin altaria, things used upon the ara, itself a raised structure, even in the practice of idolaters. Thus it always points heavenward, away from the earth and earthly things. So also Jesus on the cross—that great altar of sacrifice—was "lifted up from the earth," as He Himself expressed it.
This brings us to the great lesson of the altar. It stands as a symbol of the death of God's Son for the love of man—of "the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world." Its meaning is "place of slaying" for an offering. From the day that Adam was driven from the Garden of Eden till the tragedy of Calvary, it pointed forward to the great Sacrifice "for every man." Abel caught the vision, doubtless from his father Adam, and brought his offering as an expression of his faith in a Saviour to come, even though it cost him his life, the first human blood to be shed in the tragic story of sin. Noah, as he left the ark, built the first altar of burnt offering for a sacrifice of thanksgiving and adoration.
Following his first interview with the Lord after entering the land of Canaan, Abraham built an altar to which he afterward resorted. Later he built an altar on Mt. Moriah for the offering of Isaac, his son—an act which typifies the most fully in the Old Testament record the offering of the "only-begotten Son" upon Calvary. Jacob, in his later life, returned to Bethel where he had had his ladder dream, and built an altar to the "God of Bethel," that is, to the God of the "house of God," as he had at first called it.
But we cannot follow further these great landmarks in the story of the altar, for we wish to find its place in the typical sanctuary ordinances after the Lord gave His people a complete system of sacrificial service. Moses had built the first altar in the land of Amalek before Israel came to Sinai. Then, following the pattern given him in the mount, he constructed the most elaborate altar the world had seen or was to see till Solomon's time.
First let it be said that the sanctuary in the wilderness was made up of two principal structures—the tabernacle proper with its two apartments, and the altar of burnt offering and sin offering in the court outside. Two things should be here particularly noted. First, the phrasing used to designate the complete service or structure; namely, "the tabernacle and the altar," or "the sanctuary and the altar," or more simply "the altar . . [and] the veil ;" or sometimes in reverse order, "the altar and the sanctuary" or "the altar and within the veil." There is an exact parallel to this phrasing in the New Testament, where in Revelation II a we find "the temple of God, and the altar," and in Luke II :51, the reverse order, "the altar and the temple."* The second important point to note is that when the simple expression "the altar" occurs in the Levitical books, nine times out of ten (to be more exact, all but twelves times out of 133) it refers to the brazen altar in the court.
These two points emphasize the very important part which the brazen altar played in the service. It was the "slaughter place," or "place of slaying," as one scholar puts it in interpreting its name in Hebrew, mizbeach, and its Greek equivalent, thusiasterion. It was used for two principal kinds of sacrifice —the sin offering and the burnt offering. As the slaughter place of the sin offering, it directly foreshadowed the great "offering for sin" on the cross. As the altar of burnt offering, it served for an oblation of substitution, thanksgiving, and adoration for the mercies of the day and the great gift of the promised Saviour. Serving in these two great functions, it seemed sufficient to mention it only as "the altar" to have it understood which one of the two altars was meant. In fact, the golden altar was not an altar in the same sense as the brazen altar, since no slaying was done there, but was rather what Ezekiel calls it. "the table that is before the Lord," or as Malachi says, "the table of the Lord."
On the importance of "the altar," it is hardly necessary to say that it served as the basis of the entire sanctuary service. Without it the service in the tabernacle proper would have availed nothing, for its service could be performed only with blood—the blood of the sin offering. This is in full harmony with the service in the true sanctuary of which the typical was a pattern. It is said of our great High Priest that before He could enter upon His ministry, He must of necessity "have somewhat also to offer." That "somewhat" was His own precious blood shed upon the cross. "Without shedding of blood, is no remission" of sins, and without the remission of sins, there could be no efficacious ministry that involves the remission of sin.
Plainly, then, the basic part of the true sanctuary service was accomplished on the earth. The cross of Calvary was the "slaughter place" for the great Sin Offering. The ministering of the merits of the blood of the Sin Offering must be done in "the true tabernacle, which the Lord pitched, and not man," in heaven itself. Praise God that very work is going on there now, in your behalf and mine. This work in the sanctuary above is possible now because more than nineteen hundred years ago the Son of God voluntarily "offered up Himself" upon the altar, paying the penalty for your sins and mine. In ancient times, the altar, because of its sacred use, came to be regarded as an asylum, a place of refuge for those who were in danger or other trouble. So may we flee to the foot of our cross-altar in time of need, and cast ourselves upon the mercies of a living, loving God.
[End of Series]
* Compare this phrasing with the same in the preceding article, "The Meaning of the Veil," in the November Ministry.
