The Grain Offering Series

Offering: Living & Giving for the Glory of God

Study of Leviticus

The Grain Offering

Leviticus 2:1-16

First Family Church

317 S.E. Magazine Rd.

Ankeny, IA 50021

www.firstfamilyministries.com

Transcript of Message by Todd Stiles

January 16, 2011

Let’s continue in that course today as we see what God would teach us from Leviticus chapter two, what I believe is probably the hardest of the offerings to understand, maybe not to understand factually, but just to relate and to kind of get our hands around it. It is significance is important. But it is definitely remote. It is going to seem distant today. But I think the Holy Spirit will give us wisdom no doubt. It is called the grain offering. It is also known as the cereal offering or the meal offering or even the meat offering.

Now what you will find ironic is this. It is called the meat offering, but there is not any meat in this chapter.

So you might think, “What does that mean, Todd?”

Well, meat simply referred to their... to the general word for food. In other words, this is what we are eating. Don’t think of like meat and potatoes. Just think of like food. And so when it was referred to as the meat offering it was referring to the grain they would use for food or what they used to fix food.

So any number of those words could be used to describe the offering of Leviticus chapter two.

Can I give you a brief overview before we kind of dive into the verses? Your Bibles are open there by now, right? Let me show you how the grain offering is discussed. This is just a fly over.

Verses one through three are about the grain offering uncooked. And I will show you, in fact, visually in a little bit how that might have looked. Verses four through 10 are about the grain offering cooked and the three ways you could have brought it, either in an oven or in a pan or from a griddle. And we will talk about those and show you some things that it might have looked like as well. Verses 11, 12 and 13 talk about ingredients for the grain offering and we will discuss their significance and what the point of those things are and then 14 through 16 discuss a variation of the grain offering called the first fruits and so we will see what that is. It is just another aspect of the grain offering.

And so let’s take a minute now and look at these verses more in depth. My goal today is to teach you what the text says and then make just a few applications that I think we can take home with us about the grain offering, ok?

So you are ready to roll, aren’t you? I can tell. That is great.

How about verses one through three. Here is the grain offering uncooked. He says when anyone brings a grain offering as an offering to the Lord, again, notice who we... to whom our offering is made. It is to the Lord. It is not to a person. Even in this culture where there were priests and high priests, they didn’t offer things to the priests. It was to the Lord.

The Bible says, “His offering shall be of fine flour.”

Now I brought some fine flour in this morning. The key word there being the word “fi-ne.” We didn’t or I didn’t go to any trouble for this fine flour. You guys on the sides can see ok. I didn’t... I went and bought it. It was pretty simple. But in that day and age if you were making fine flour whether it was threshed from wheat or barley, you had to take a lot of extra time to grind it. In fact, I will show you a picture of a millstone. You will see it here on the next slide. It is what they used, upper left corner. And they would just use this to grind their flour and keep grinding and keep grinding. And you see the weight of that which makes you think about what someone would experience if they had a millstone tied around their neck. Jesus said that is what happens... that is what should happen to someone who offended a little one where they wouldn’t come to Christ.

He says, “If you have that kind of mentality, a millstone should be hung around your neck and you should be cast into the sea.”

That is a pretty heavy thing. You are not going to swim to the top for air with that around your neck, are you? So this millstone is what they used to grind their grain and the Bible here says that God asked for fine flour which means they took more time and it was high-er quality.