10th September 2026 Question box

OK, today’s question is:

What are the different offerings in the book of Leviticus? e.g. burnt offering, sin offering…

Now this question came in before we started our sermon series on Leviticus, but I thought tonight is a good time to answer it. There are five different kinds of offering in Leviticus:

• The burnt offering
• The grain offering
• The fellowship offering
• The sin offering
• The guilt offering

In practise, they all follow fairly similar steps, and in their meaning they all point forward to Christ’s sacrifice on the cross for us. And yet they each point us to different aspects of what Christ’s death achieves.

Broadly speaking, there are two main outcomes:

• The burnt offering, grain offering and fellowship offering are voluntary offerings – and the outcome of each is described as “a pleasing aroma to the Lord.”
• The sin and guilt offerings are things you bring in response to particular sins, and the outcome of these is “forgiveness.”

Each of the offerings has a unique feature:

• The burnt offering is completely burnt up – its a symbol of a life completely offered to God.
• The grain offering is a vegetarian variant of the burnt offering – it shows that the things of everyday life are also for God.
• The fellowship offering – well we’re doing that tonight – but the unique thing is that the person who brought the offering, gets to eat the meat (and we’ll have to think about what that teaches us).
• The sin offering – comes with confession.
• And the guilt offering is a variant of the sin offering, but it also involves paying compensation to the person you sinned against.

Now remember we don’t literally do any of these sacrifices as Christians, These were all part of worship in the Old Covenant, they were part of the system of approaching God through the temple. But each of them teaches us something about: the richness of what Jesus accomplished on the cross, and also, about what it looks like for us to live our lives for Him, as living sacrifices. And We’ll explore one of these offering in tonight’s sermon.

---

This question was originally answered by Andrew Vines in our evening service on 21 June 2026. I’ll aim to post another question and answer next week. You can read about how our question box works here.