If Christ Fulfilled the Law, Why Temple Sacrifices?

Question 7199.

If Jesus fulfilled the law, why did Paul still offer temple sacrifices in Acts 21, why will sacrifices return in the millennial temple, and why do certain things carry on from one age to the next?

The question of temple sacrifices after the cross is one of the genuinely hard knots in Scripture, and I have no intention of pretending otherwise. On the one hand the letter to the Hebrews could not be plainer that the sacrifice of Jesus was offered once for all and needs no repeating. On the other hand we read of the apostle Paul, decades after Calvary, walking into the temple in Jerusalem and paying for temple sacrifices to be offered, and we read of the prophet Ezekiel describing a future temple in which a full sacrificial system is up and running. If the cross finished the matter, what on earth are these temple sacrifices doing there?

I want to take you slowly through this, because the easy answers about temple sacrifices on both sides fail. The amillennialist waves Ezekiel away as symbol, and the careless dispensationalist waves Hebrews away as if it only applied to one era. Neither will do. The truth holds together a finished cross and a continuing witness to it, and once you see how, a great deal of the Bible about temple sacrifices falls into place. So let us not flinch from the difficulties. Let us walk straight into them.

The tension we are not allowed to dodge

Set the two halves of the problem side by side and feel the weight of it. The writer to the Hebrews says of Jesus, “he has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself” (Hebrews 9:26), and again, “by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified” (Hebrews 10:14). He then draws the conclusion that lands like a hammer: “Where there is forgiveness of these, there is no longer any offering for sin” (Hebrews 10:18). No longer any offering. That is about as final as language gets.

Yet the same New Testament that contains Hebrews also contains Acts 21, where Paul takes part in a temple rite and foots the bill for the temple sacrifices of four men under a vow. And the same Bible that contains Hebrews contains Ezekiel 40 to 48, eight detailed chapters describing a temple, an altar, a priesthood and a calendar of offerings, set in a future age. Sacrifices before the cross we understand. But temple sacrifices after it, and temple sacrifices a thousand years after it, are a different matter. If we are honest readers we cannot simply pick the verses we like.

My conviction is that the apparent contradiction dissolves once we grasp what a sacrifice was actually for, what the word fulfil really means, and how God has run His house through different administrations across history. None of that is a dodge. It is the patient work of letting Scripture interpret Scripture, which is the only way I know to read the Bible honestly.

What actually happened in Acts 21

Let us start with Paul, because his case is the sharper of the two. He arrives in Jerusalem at the end of his third journey, and James and the elders give him a warm welcome and then a worried briefing. “You see, brother, how many thousands there are among the Jews of those who have believed. They are all zealous for the law” (Acts 21:20). A rumour was circulating that Paul taught Jewish believers to forsake Moses, to stop circumcising their children and to abandon the customs. To scotch the rumour, James proposes a public gesture. Four men in the congregation are under a vow, almost certainly the Nazirite vow of Numbers 6, and James asks Paul to join them, share in their purification, and pay the considerable expenses of the temple sacrifices that complete the vow.

Paul agrees at once. “Then Paul took the men, and the next day he purified himself along with them and went into the temple, giving notice when the days of purification would be fulfilled and the offering presented for each one of them” (Acts 21:26). Here is the part that troubles careful readers. The Nazirite offerings of Numbers 6 were not symbolic flowers laid on an altar. They included burnt offerings, a peace offering, and a sin offering, the blood of animals shed at the temple. Paul, who wrote that the blood of bulls and goats cannot take away sin, paid for sin offerings to be made. That is the difficulty, and I am not going to soften it.

Before we judge it, notice what kind of vow this was. A Nazirite vow was a voluntary act of devotion, never a condition of salvation, never a means of being justified before God. A devout Israelite took it freely as an expression of consecration. So whatever Paul was doing, he was not submitting himself to the law as the ground of his righteousness. The question is whether a believer who knows the cross can take part in such a rite at all, and if so, on what footing. That is where the interpreters part company.

Did Paul sin, or was this wisdom?

Three main readings are on offer, and a responsible answer has to weigh all three. The first says plainly that Paul got it wrong. On this view the Holy Spirit had twice warned him not to go up to Jerusalem, through the disciples at Tyre (Acts 21:4) and through Agabus (Acts 21:11), and Paul, against that warning, walked into a trap and then compounded the error by a fleshly attempt to placate the legalistic Jerusalem church. Those who hold this view read the riot and the long imprisonment that followed as the unhappy fruit of a wrong step. I respect the honesty of this reading, and I will not dismiss it with a shrug.

But I do not think it survives the wider evidence. Luke, who is no flatterer, narrates the episode without a hint of rebuke, and Luke is perfectly capable of recording the failures of apostles when they occur. More telling still, Paul later stands before his accusers and says, “I have lived my life before God in all good conscience up to this day” (Acts 23:1), and insists he has done “nothing against the law of the Jews” (Acts 25:8) and “nothing against our people or the customs of our fathers” (Acts 28:17). A man who believed he had betrayed the gospel in the temple would not speak like that. The Spirit’s warnings, moreover, read more naturally as forecasts of suffering than as prohibitions, of a piece with the warning to Jesus Himself that the cross lay ahead. Knowing what awaited him is not the same as being forbidden to go.

The second reading appeals to Paul’s own stated policy. “To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews” (1 Corinthians 9:20). Paul was a free man in Christ, and his very freedom let him stoop to Jewish custom where it might open a door, just as it let him sit loose to that custom among Gentiles. The vow was not a denial of grace but an exercise of liberty, a refusal to make a needless enemy of the law where the gospel was not at stake. On this reading Paul kept the custom as custom, not as a way of earning anything, exactly as a believing Jew remained free to observe the feasts or the sabbath as a matter of conscience under the freedom of Romans 14.

The third reading, which I find the most illuminating, sets the whole scene inside a transition. The cross had inaugurated the new covenant, but the old order had not yet been swept from the stage. The temple still stood. Its courts still functioned. A whole generation of Jewish believers still worshipped there, and God in His patience allowed it, for the writer to the Hebrews describes the first covenant in his own day as “becoming obsolete” and “ready to vanish away” (Hebrews 8:13), language of a process under way, not an event already finished. Paul lived in that overlap, the decades between Pentecost and the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70, when the shadow had been answered by the substance and yet had not quite faded from view.

Put the second and third readings together and the episode makes sense without dishonouring Paul. He did not offer those temple sacrifices to be justified, for he knew justification was his already in Christ. He took part as a free man becoming as a Jew to win Jews, within an era in which the temple still stood and Jewish believers still kept its customs as their ancestral way of life. The sin offering he paid for never touched his conscience as the ground of forgiveness, because it never could, and he knew it. It was a fading rite in a fading economy, performed as custom and courtesy rather than as the means of salvation. I hold this view, but I want you to feel that it costs something to hold, because the discomfort is part of the truth. The letter to the Hebrews was written precisely to wean believers like those four men off the temple before God Himself closed it in AD 70.

That historical full stop matters. Within a few years of Acts 21 the temple was rubble, the temple sacrifices ceased, and the ambiguity of the overlap was resolved by the providence of God. The question of whether a believer may join in temple sacrifices became, for nearly two thousand years, a question with no temple in which to ask it. If you want to go deeper on the underlying issue, I have written separately on whether Christians are still under the Mosaic law, and the answer there governs everything here.

Christ the end of the law

To make sense of all this we have to be clear about what the cross did to the law. Paul states it without hedging: “Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes” (Romans 10:4). The Greek word telos means both goal and termination, and both senses are true. Christ is the target the law was always aiming at, and He is therefore the point at which its career as a covenant comes to a close for the believer. The Mosaic law was given to Israel at Sinai as the constitution of a nation, a single covenantal package, and it is as a package that it has reached its end.

This is why I do not divide the law into moral, civil and ceremonial parts and keep one while discarding the others. The law came as a whole and it ends as a whole. The writer to the Hebrews says flatly that in establishing the new covenant God “makes the first one obsolete” (Hebrews 8:13). The believer is not under the Mosaic law in any part, not even the Ten Commandments considered as the summary document of that covenant. What carries over into the Christian life is not a surviving slice of the code but the moral character of God Himself, which was true before Sinai and remains true after it, and which the Spirit now writes on the heart. I have set this out more fully in answering the relationship between law and grace.

Hold that firmly and the temple sacrifices of Acts 21 stop looking like a relapse. Paul was not creeping back under a covenant the cross had closed. He was moving, as a free man, through the last days of a temple that still stood, in an age God had not yet brought to its appointed end. The law as a way of righteousness was finished for him the moment he trusted Christ on the Damascus road. What remained was a fading national institution and a pastoral question about how to live wisely among brethren still attached to it.

What the word fulfil actually means

A good deal of confusion springs from a thin idea of the word fulfil. Jesus said, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfil them” (Matthew 5:17). To fulfil is not to cancel and it is not only to obey. It is to bring a thing to the goal it was always straining toward. A prophecy is fulfilled when the event it pointed to arrives. A pattern is fulfilled when the reality it pictured appears. The whole sacrificial system was a vast prophecy in blood, and Jesus fulfilled it by being the reality every lamb had been pointing at.

Paul says the festivals and food laws “are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ” (Colossians 2:17). A shadow is not a lie. It is a true outline cast by a real body. When the body arrives the shadow has done its work, yet a shadow can still be shown to teach what the body is. This is the hinge on which the whole question turns. Fulfilment does not necessarily abolish the sign. It can transform what the sign now means. A type that once pointed forward can be displayed afterwards to point back, and it remains truthful in either direction because it always referred to the same Christ.

Keep that principle in your hand as we turn to the future, because it is the key that unlocks the millennial temple. The same act of sacrifice can serve as anticipation in one age and as memorial in another, exactly as a wedding photograph means something different on the wedding day and on the fiftieth anniversary, while picturing the same marriage throughout.

What a sacrifice was ever for

Here we must be more careful than popular preaching usually is. We talk as though Old Testament sacrifices took away sin and then Christ came and did the same thing better. But the writer to the Hebrews denies the first half of that sentence outright: “it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins” (Hebrews 10:4). The animal sacrifices never removed guilt before the judgment seat of God. Not one of them ever saved a single soul. Salvation in every age has been by grace through faith, and the Old Testament believer was justified by faith in the God who would provide, looking forward to a redemption he could not yet see clearly.

So what did the temple sacrifices accomplish, if not the removal of guilt? Two things. They taught, by pointing forward in vivid blood to the substitute who would come. And they cleansed in a ceremonial sense, purging the sanctuary and the worshipper of ritual impurity so that a holy God could dwell among an unclean people. The Jewish scholar Jacob Milgrom spent a lifetime showing that the purification offering of Leviticus works chiefly upon the sanctuary, scouring away the defilement that the presence of sinful people leaves on holy space. The evangelical commentator Gordon Wenham makes the same point from within a believing reading of Leviticus. The sacrifices kept the dwelling fit for the glory, and they preached the coming Lamb. What they never did was save.

This is the insight most Christians have never been taught, and it is the missing piece in the whole puzzle. Once you see that animal blood was always ceremonial and pedagogical rather than savingly efficacious, the return of temple sacrifices in a future age stops being a denial of the cross. A sign that never saved cannot, by returning, threaten the only sacrifice that ever did.

Why temple sacrifices return in the millennium

Now to Ezekiel. From chapter 40 to chapter 48 the prophet is given a minutely measured vision of a temple that has never yet been built, served by a priesthood, with an altar on which burnt offerings, sin offerings and peace offerings are presented, the full apparatus of temple sacrifices, and a prince who provides them. I take this, as I take unfulfilled prophecy generally, in its plain sense. The literal hermeneutic that I apply to the prophecies of Christ’s first coming, which were fulfilled with startling precision, I must apply with equal honesty to the prophecies of His reign. When Ezekiel describes a future temple and renewed worship, I do not treat it as an allegory of the church. I treat it as a description of the kingdom age, the thousand years during which Christ reigns from Jerusalem. You can read my fuller account of what the millennium is and of whether the temple will be rebuilt alongside this.

That immediately raises the obvious protest. If the church already struggles to explain Paul’s offerings, how can we possibly defend a whole system of temple sacrifices operating after the second coming? The answer runs along the track we have already laid. The millennial temple sacrifices are not a reinstated way of salvation and not a fresh covenant of law. These temple sacrifices are the same kind of sign they always were, blood that teaches and blood that ceremonially cleanses, now set in an age with a particular character. Dispensational interpreters have offered two main explanations, and I think both contain truth.

The first and older explanation is the memorial view. On this reading the millennial temple sacrifices look back to Calvary in the kingdom age much as the Lord’s Supper looks back to it now. The Supper is a memorial ordinance, proclaiming the Lord’s death until He comes, and when He has come the church age ordinance gives way to a different memorial suited to a different administration. A worldwide population, including the vast numbers born during the thousand years in ordinary mortal bodies, will see the cost of redemption set before their eyes in unmistakable form. Charles Feinberg, John Walvoord and Dwight Pentecost all defended versions of this view, and it fits the deep biblical instinct that God loves to give His people tangible signs that preach the cross.

The second explanation is more recent and, I think, more exegetically careful at one point. Ezekiel repeatedly says the temple sacrifices are “to make atonement” (for example Ezekiel 45:15, 45:17, 45:20), and the memorial view has always strained a little against that language, since a pure memorial makes atonement for nothing. Jerry Hullinger has argued, building on the very understanding of sacrifice that Milgrom uncovered, that the millennial temple sacrifices function to remove ceremonial uncleanness from the sanctuary. In the kingdom the visible glory of the Lord returns to dwell on earth in the midst of a people who, though the King reigns in person, are still mortal and still capable of defilement. The sacrifices purge the holy place so that the glory may remain, exactly as they did under Moses. They are efficacious in the realm of ceremony, Hullinger insists, and never in the realm of conscience or salvation, which is precisely the line the writer to the Hebrews himself draws.

I lean toward holding these two together rather than choosing between them. The millennial temple sacrifices can both purge the sanctuary in the ceremonial sense Ezekiel’s atonement language demands and serve as a standing memorial that preaches the once-for-all death of Jesus to the nations who stream up to Jerusalem. What I will not do is flatten Ezekiel into symbol to escape the difficulty, because the same method, applied evenly, would dissolve the literal return of Christ to the Mount of Olives and a hundred other promises I am not willing to surrender. I have written more on this in addressing millennial worship and whether Ezekiel’s sacrifices are memorial.

Facing the hardest objection

Now to the verse that the amillennialist plays as his trump card, and rightly presses hard. “Where there is forgiveness of these, there is no longer any offering for sin” (Hebrews 10:18). If there is no longer any offering for sin, how can Ezekiel’s altar smoke in the kingdom? It is a fair and forceful question, and it deserves a real answer rather than a shrug.

The answer is that Hebrews is speaking about the one thing animal blood could never do, namely deal with sin before the throne of God and cleanse the guilty conscience. In that decisive realm there is no longer any offering, because Christ has made the only offering that reaches it, once and for all and for ever. Hebrews is not denying that animals will ever again be killed on an altar for any purpose whatever. It is denying that any sacrifice other than the cross can take away sin in the saving sense. Read the millennial temple sacrifices as ceremonial purgation of the sanctuary and as memorial proclamation of the cross, and they do not trespass one inch onto the ground Hebrews defends. They make no claim to cleanse the conscience. They point to the One who did.

I want to be candid that this requires us to take the word atonement in two senses, a ceremonial sense in which animal blood purges holy space, and a saving sense in which only the blood of Christ purges the soul. Some readers find that distinction too convenient. I would simply point out that the distinction is not invented to rescue Ezekiel. It is already there in Leviticus and already assumed in Hebrews 10:4, which says the animals never reached the deeper realm at all. We are not bending the rule for the millennium. We are applying the rule the whole Bible already follows.

Why certain things continue from age to age

Stand back now from Paul and Ezekiel and ask the bigger question you raised. Why do certain things continue across the ages while others fall away? The answer is the principle that has been running quietly under everything I have said. What continues is never the covenant administration as such. The administrations change. What continues is the unchanging character of God and His single, unvarying way of saving sinners.

God has governed His house through different arrangements at different times. There was an age of innocence, an age of conscience, an age of human government, an age of promise to the patriarchs, the age of the law from Sinai to Pentecost, this present age of grace, and the coming age of the kingdom. These are not different gods or different gospels. They are different administrations of the one household, suited to different stages of God’s unfolding plan. The Mosaic law belonged to one of those administrations, and when its administration closed, the law as a covenant closed with it. To miss this is to make the whole Bible contradict itself. To see it is to watch the contradictions melt. You can read how this framework shapes my reading of the purposes of the Mosaic law and of how the new covenant operates in the millennium.

Within that changing structure, two things never move. The first is the moral nature of God, which was binding before Moses, was crystallised at Sinai, and remains binding now, not because the Sinai code survives but because God does not change. The second is the way of salvation, which has always been by grace through faith resting on substitution. Abel brought a lamb. Abraham believed and it was counted to him as righteousness. The Israelite at the brazen altar looked forward in shadow. We look back to the cross. The millennial worshipper will look back across a thousand years to the same cross. The blood of bulls and goats never saved anyone in any of those ages, and the blood of Jesus has saved everyone who was ever saved in any of them. The centre never moves.

That is why temple sacrifices can appear and reappear without ever rivalling Calvary. They are satellites, not suns. Before the cross they orbited it in anticipation. In the strange overlap of Acts they still circled the temple courts as a fading custom while the new day dawned. In the kingdom they will orbit it again in memorial and ceremonial cleansing. Throughout, the sun at the centre is the once-for-all offering of Jesus, and the temple sacrifices have only ever borrowed their meaning from Him. Continuity and change are not enemies. The continuity is Christ. The change is the scenery God arranges around Him to teach each age what it most needs to see.

So, now what?

Let this settle three things in you. First, your standing with God rests on nothing you do at any altar, and never has for anyone. It rests on the finished work of Jesus, received by faith. If Paul’s sin offering could not be the ground of his acceptance, then neither can your church attendance, your good record or your private devotion be the ground of yours. Lean your whole weight on the cross and on the cross alone.

Second, guard your freedom and do not let anyone drag you back under a system of religious observance as the measure of your acceptance. The Galatian error was to add law to grace, and Paul fought it with everything he had. Keep customs if they help and conscience permits, as Paul did among the Jews, but never as the price of God’s favour, for that price is paid.

Third, do not lose the wonder. We sometimes imagine that once we are in glory the cross will be a faded memory. The millennial temple says otherwise. God intends the cost of our redemption to be set before the eyes of the nations even in the age of the kingdom, smoke rising as a perpetual sermon that the King on the throne is the Lamb who was slain. If the redeemed will still be made to gaze on that, how much more should we, who live in the very age of grace it purchased. When you next come to the Lord’s table, remember that you are doing in miniature what a whole world will one day do in a rebuilt temple, proclaiming a death that will never need repeating and will never be forgotten.

For Further Study

Those who wish to dig further should know whom they are reading and why I commend them. On the future temple, Charles L. Feinberg (1909 to 1995), a Hebrew Christian scholar of Semitics who taught at Dallas and Talbot and wrote The Prophecy of Ezekiel, gives a careful dispensational defence of the literal reading. John F. Walvoord (1910 to 2002), president of Dallas Theological Seminary for over thirty years, and J. Dwight Pentecost (1915 to 2014), whose Things to Come of 1958 remains a standard survey of biblical prophecy, both set out the memorial understanding of the millennial temple sacrifices with care. Arnold G. Fruchtenbaum (born 1943), a Messianic Jewish teacher and founder of Ariel Ministries, is especially worth reading on how these temple sacrifices relate to the restored nation of Israel.

For the harder exegetical work on what the temple sacrifices actually do, Jerry M. Hullinger, a Baptist professor of Bible who has published a series of studies in the journal Bibliotheca Sacra, argues the ceremonial cleansing view and engages the atonement language of Ezekiel head on. His case rests in part on the lifework of Jacob Milgrom (1923 to 2010), a Jewish scholar and Conservative rabbi who taught at the University of California, Berkeley, and whose great Anchor Yale commentary on Leviticus established how the purification offering scours impurity from the sanctuary. Milgrom was no dispensationalist and no evangelical, yet his account of how sacrifice functions fits the biblical theology of cleansing remarkably well, which is why I commend him on that narrow and important point. The British evangelical Gordon J. Wenham (1943 to 2025), in his New International Commentary on Leviticus, reaches similar conclusions from within a believing reading and is the safer first port of call for most readers.

On Paul in Acts, F. F. Bruce (1910 to 1990), the Plymouth Brethren scholar who held the Rylands chair at Manchester and wrote standard commentaries on both Acts and Hebrews, handles the tension of Acts 21 with sobriety and fairness, and he is a good guide precisely because he feels the difficulty rather than explaining it away. Reading him on Acts beside Hebrews will repay the effort. None of these writers agrees with the others at every point, and I do not agree with all of them at every point either, but together they will furnish you to think the question through for yourself, which is the whole aim. If you want the groundwork on the law that underlies all of this, begin with whether Christians should obey the Levitical law.

Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath. These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ.

Colossians 2:16-17