NOTES for Lev 3:1-17
The peace offering is a special kind of offering, distinct from the offering of firstfruits or the sacrifice for sin. Beyond the many ways in which man depends on God—his need for God's blessing, forgiveness, and help in everyday and spiritual life—he needs something greater, something that cannot be defined in terms of particular needs. It is the state that Scripture calls peace: not merely the absence of hostility or war, but the beginning of the restoration of a ruptured relationship of love and trust with God, a foretaste of what the apostle Paul would call “the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding” (Phil 4:7). After the fatal rupture of the filial relationship with God, the state of peace also requires blood—for the time being, the blood of cattle...