The first people, Adam and Eve, were disconnected from God, their Creator. This grieved God because He is a relational being who longs to be in communion with His children. However, because He is righteous and holy, He could not be close to them because of their sin. So He gave them Ten Main Commands to teach them to be righteous. The Ten Commandments included things like: don't worship other gods, honor your parents, don't lie, and don't murder. But even with these guidelines, Adam and Eve's descendants could not meet God's expectations for holiness. In fact, the laws only highlighted how far away from God people actually were.

Do you know what it feels like to fall short? To continuously hurt someone you love? To be unable to meet the requirements? To feel so isolated and alone? How can you fix that relationship? How can you earn back their love and trust?

God saw that His people could not ever be good enough to restore that relationship. So He set up a system of repayment so that the people's shame could be removed. It was like what He did to cover Adam and Eve's shame: the sacrifice of an animal. Every year, each person had to bring a completely clean and perfect, first-born male animal to sacrifice to God. God would accept this pure animal's life as payment for the shame that the person had brought on herself, her family, and God. In this way, God forgave her, and her relationship with God was restored.

But this ritual had to repeated year after year. There was no end to the cycle of shame and payment. But God had a plan. It just wasn't time yet, and until then, God, in His great mercy, offered a way for His people to have a relationship with His holy self.

(A summary of Exodus 20 and Leviticus 4)

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Note: This model is wearing what we call "white henna." White henna is just body paint applied henna-style. It doesn't stain the skin and washes off.