THE ATONEMENT OF CHRIST MANIFESTED, DISC. V. ance, because by the sacrifice and death of, the living creatures, therewas an acknowledgment made ofsin, and ofsinful man's desert ofdeath, `by some intimation from' heaven : and this was accepted of God as an atonement or substitute, in the room of the sinner, or a typical pro- pitiation for sin. This seems to be implied in that ques- tion óf Balak to Balaam ; Micah vi. 6, 7. " Wherewith shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself-before the high God? Shall I come before him with burnt-offerings, with calves of á year old ? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, &c. Or shall I give my, first born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul ? It is very natural for man, under a sense of the guilt of sin, to enquire how he shall appear before a holy God with acceptance ? And God,. as it were in answer to such asupposed enquiry, directs Adam to the sacrifice of beasts, as an atonement for sin ; i. e. as a sort of ransom for the forfeited life of man. And this is the most natu- ral and most easy sense of things, and the best account of the original of sacrifices, and of the prevalence and continuance of that custom almost all over the world: And this is the fairest account of the original tradition of Adam's first sacrifice after his fall from God, and the sense of his anger*. 4. It was in the view Of the atoning sacrifice of Christ, the Lamb of God, that all the schemes of the Jewish sacrifices, all the slaughter and burnt- offerings of the animals, and the pourings-out and sprinklings of blood, and the washings wits water in the Jewish sacri- fices, were first appointed as figurative methods, tq * As it'is generally supposed by our divines, that it was Jesus the Son of God, who, in the name of his Father, appeared toAdam in the garden after his sin, and tad this conversation with him ; so it is not unlikely that God, in the person of his Son Jesus, taught Adam how to manage these sacrifices, by taking offthe skins, and cutting the beasts into proper parts, and burning them ; of which there is a hint given in theGreek translation of the septuagint; Gen. iv. 7. which is not foundlin the Hebrew original at present, where God says to Cain, if thou hurt rightly offered, but liest not rightiy divided the sacrifice, thou hast sinned. And if this is supposed' to be a`true account Of the matter, then Jesus Christ himself, in a prelu- áium to his incarnation was the first high-priest, and he that taught'Adam first to offer a sacrifiçe,'and so, in the sight of God; it was accepted, from the hands of him, whom God had constitutedan everlasting high-priest ; though, at the same time, the sacrifice of Christ,theLamb of God, might be typified by the slaúghter and sacrificeof the beast'itself
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