(3) Our Sacrifice gave Himself as a freewill offering to God. ‘He offered Himself.’ The calf, or the goat, was chosen by its owner, and, when chosen, had no knowledge of anything that was before it: it had no voice in the whole transaction, and knew nothing of what it was to bear. But our Blessed Saviour, He foresaw the whole. He knew the whole burden; He realised the whole sorrow; and keenly felt its bitterness. In His human nature He shrank from the cup. It was so oppressive to Him that He threw himself before God ‘with strong cryings and tears, and was heard in that He feared.’ And yet, with the whole horror of the dreadful burden fully before Him, and with the full and entire knowledge of what it was to be forsaken of God, He was so resolute in carrying out the great plan of the covenant of life, that He yielded up His own will, and offered Himself as a sin-offering to God. (4) Our Sacrifice was ‘without spot.’ It was required that the poor kid should be without blemish; partly to show that God does not accept blemished gifts, but chiefly because it was typical of the coming Christ. But the fact that there was no spot, either within or without, did not add to its real value: the spotted kid would have fetched as much as the unspotted, in the market. But when it says of our Sacrifice that He was ‘a lamb without blemish and without spot,’ what a tale it tells of His sinless holiness! His perfect sinlessness had stood the test of the whole of pre-existent eternity. We all know how first impressions of character become modified by time: imperfections, unseen at first, soon begin to crop up; there are very few of whom you can say that you have known them for twenty or thirty years, and never heard a word escape their lips that you would be sorry to speak in your dying hour. But there was a oneness for all eternity between the Father and the Son; yet eternity itself could discover no flaw, so that when the time came for the great sacrifice, He was without spot, even before God. He that was the sin-bearer was Himself sinless; and if you think what is involved in the statement that ‘He knew no sin,’ then you may form some idea of the great fact that sin, even our sin, was imputed to Him; or, in other words, that ‘God made Him to be sin for us.’ Looking then at the contrast between the sacrifices, the one, in comparison to the other, is infinitely little. The poor calf, or kid, was nothing,—far less than nothing in comparison of the Son of God. There was nothing in it that could stand comparison for a moment. If you look at the sacrifice of the Son of God, the voluntary offering through the eternal Spirit of the spotless and Holy One, the sacrifice of the kid vanishes. It disappears altogether; it is no more than a grain of dust on the side of a mountain.