The Question of Millennial Sacrifices Part 2 -- By: John L. Mitchell

Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 110:440 (Oct 1953)
Article: The Question of Millennial Sacrifices Part 2
Author: John L. Mitchell


The Question of Millennial Sacrifices
Part 2

John L. Mitchell

(Concluded from the July-September Number, 1953)

{Editor’s note: Footnotes in the original printed edition were numbered 23–48, but in this electronic edition are numbered 1–26 respectively.}

Opponents to Animal Sacrifices

Having examined some of the proponents to animal sacrifices we turn now to the opponents, with the latter far outnumbering the former. This is true because the former group is necessarily limited to the followers of literal interpretation, while the latter is open to receive all kinds of Bible scholars without discrimination. The opponents raise two main objections to the restoration of sacrifices in the millennial period: (1) it is not possible for such a literal temple to be built in the land and (2) the revival of sacrifices would be a retrogression in God’s program. These views will be brought out by the quotations to follow.

Oswald Allis. Oswald Allis, in his pointed chapter on the “Future of Israel and the Millennium,” discusses some worthwhile questions in regard to our subject. It need only be mentioned that he is not a premillennialist or a dispensationalist and that he chooses to busy himself in throwing darts at such opposing views of the kingdom.

It would be profitable to have his book by our side at this point and consider his chapter, paragraph by paragraph. At all events, his thesis combats a literal kingdom in the future of one thousand years because of the apparent difficulties such a belief would involve, one of which is animal sacrifices. After giving incongruous distinctions between the kingdom and the millennium, Allis evaluates the dispensational view of the millennial age as essentially Jewish, in contrast with the premillennial view of the millennium as essentially

Christian. The extent of his distinction might be called into question, but it will be passed by on this occasion in order that we might arrive at our problem of animal sacrifices.

Let us begin a series of quotations from the chapter cited: “It is true that the Old Testament predictions of the restoration of the temple and of the Mosaic ceremonial law have occasioned them [literalists] no little embarrassment, and sometimes led them to assign Israel a position in the coming age hardly compatible with Paul’s teaching that ‘all are one in Christ Jesus.’“1

Concerning this very subject and ordinances he states also: “Isaiah and Jeremiah in certain passages speak of the observance of the ceremonial law as obligatory in the kingdom age. Ezeki...

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