Smells are powerful.  Sweet, repulsive, alarming, soothing; smells invite, repel, attract, and remind.   No matter how highly refined, your sense of smell triggers a host of emotions and experiences.  Grief, romance, celebration, and warning are powerfully engaged by our sense of smell.   Hearing and sight are powerful, but smell is utterly compelling.

Bakeries know this, so they funnel smells from the kitchen to the sidewalk.   Natural gas companies add the repulsive scent of rotten eggs to odorless gas to warn us of a leak.  And perfumers create scents which excite romantic, pheromonic attraction.   Smell has a powerful unconscious effect on our brains.  Like the salmon who returns inexplicably to the pond in which it was spawned by ‘smelling’ the chemical signature, no matter how faint, smells add context to our memory.

The smell of a pipe takes me to daddy’s car.   While the smell of chicken frying returns me to Mama’s kitchen.  And the perfume, White Shoulders, transports me to 1986 and early days with my wife.  For most of us, the smell of a Weber Kettle and burgers grilling somewhere puts us at family gatherings, the lake, or happy summer days.   Smells are bound tightly to our memories.   And losing them induces a significant emotional amnesia.

Smells are important in the Bible as well, especially in worship.   Central to worship in the Old Testament were oils for anointing, incense for burning, and seasoned and cooked sacrificial meat and fat.   While no doubt, worship in the Tabernacle, and later the Temple, was visually stunning and audibly engaging, the smells would have imprinted all that was seen and heard deep in the memory of the worshippers.    The formulations for the oils, the incense, and the seasonings were exclusive.  To be used only for worship.   Replication was forbidden.  

There were to be no counterfeit smells from the scents of Old Testament worship.   God was not concerned with trademark infringement, but to ensure that the promised mercy and grace seen, heard, touched, and tasted in worship be deeply imprinted upon the people.   So deeply that the perpetual smell of worship wafting up and out from the Tabernacle would constantly remind them of all God’s promises.

Central to this feast of smells was the altar of burnt offering.   While the principal point of sacrifice is the exchange of one life for another, the Lord commanded that virtually every sacrifice be offered on the altar through burning.   Burning adds important perspective to the sacrificial offering.   The smell rises to God and is accepted as sweet.   The offering is cooked by the fire and eaten as a fellowship meal with the Lord.   Some offerings were completely burned up warning of the consuming judgement of God upon sin.   And every burnt offering would place a strong, sweet smell in the nostrils and memories of the people.   It was the smell of grace.

It was not enough for a sacrifice it be killed and offered.   It needed to be burned.  And the grace it pictured entered into the hearts, minds, and memories of the people through the aroma of the altar.   To smell the sacrifice was to smell the grace of God.   Burnt offerings reminded the people of God’s gracious promises, fellowship, and assurance.   Worship still does this.  Though now there is a sweeter smell.   Not the “smells and bells” of ritual, but the sweet aroma of a clear and complete gospel.   A gospel that sets before us gracious promises, fellowship, and assurance.  

Paul expresses this when he declares.

But thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumphal procession, and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of him everywhere. For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing, to one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life.

2 Corinthians 2:14-17

Join us as we examine Exodus 27:1-8 and consider the instructions for the altar of burnt offering and the sweet-smelling gospel that replaced it.  We meet on the square in Pottsville, right next to historic Potts’ Inn at 10:30 am for worship.  Get directions here or contact us for more info.  Or join us on Facebook Live @PottsvilleARP or YouTube.