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God always wanted to be your friend. That was the plan from the beginning. He created you—and all people—so he could love you. He even built a place to live with all his creations. Then, something went wrong.

Life was good in the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve happily lived there with God. But Satan had his own plan: to separate God from humans. He knew this would happen if humans were sinners because God is holy and can't stand sin. So Satan started tempting Adam and Eve to break Eden's only rule: "Don't eat off the forbidden tree." When they gave in, sin moved into the neighborhood.

Everything changed. God still loved us, but now he couldn't be around us. He couldn't exist with sin. So, he kicked us out of the very place he created for us to live with him. God's plan seemed ruined.

Well, it seemed that way. But God had a plan. As he handed Adam and Eve their suitcases, he looked at Satan (in the form of a serpent) and said, "You and this woman will hate each other; your descendants and hers will always be enemies. One of hers will strike you on the head, and you will strike him on the heel" (Genesis 3:15 CEV).

No, God wasn't talking about gardeners using shovels to kill snakes who get in their tomato plants. He was talking about Jesus. But how could Jesus make any difference?

Imagine God's original plan like a big open room where everyone could just hang around with God. When sin came in, it was like a big curtain that went up in the middle of the room with God on one side and humans on the other. This separation is exactly what we see in the days of Moses.

God wanted a place where he could be near the Israelites. He told Moses to build a home for him, called the tabernacle, where he could live with them (Exodus 25:8). But this wasn't like the Garden of Eden. The tabernacle wasn't a big open room for God and people to hang around in together. Instead, God instructed Moses to put a curtain up (Exodus 26:31-33) to separate God and people. He stayed on one side, they were to stay on the other.

This wasn't what God originally wanted, but this is how it had to be. He knew he couldn't get any closer to humans because of their sin. In fact, if anyone with sin walked onto God's side of the curtain, they'd die (Leviticus 16:1-2). So imagine how shocked the high priest, Aaron, was when God told him to come to the other side of the curtain. He must have thought, Ummm, what about that whole dying thing?

But God had it all figured out. He told Aaron to stand before him once a year to pay for, or "atone" for, all the sins of the Israelites. To do it, God gave Aaron a big long list of cleansing rituals (Leviticus 16). That list is too long to mention here, but there's a pattern to all the things Aaron had to do: There was a lot of blood involved. Bulls and goats had to be killed and their blood had to be smeared around. So why all that blood?

Well, the Bible tell us that "the wages of sin is death." This means that when we sin, we deserve to die. We shouldn't be able to live with our sins. But instead of making people just die left and right when they sin, God allowed them to replace their own death with the death of a pure, unblemished animal. God explains this in Leviticus 17:11 when he says, "Life is in the blood, and I have given you the blood of animals to sacrifice in place of your own" (CEV).

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