The priests’ and animal sacrificing laws God gave to Moses, found in Exodus through Deuteronomy, point to Jesus’s death on the Cross. The purpose of all of the rituals and animal sacrifice schedules were simultaneously completed with Jesus’s trial, suffering, and crucifixion. Because it was completed, death lost its grip and Jesus rose from the dead. Now, Jesus offers resurrection to all of us.
The purpose of these laws were “spiritual”—that is that one would need to literally see angels and the spirits surrounding a human’s body in order for the laws to make plain sense. The presumption is that demons, angels, and disembodied evil spirits all exist.
Israel entered Canaan, the Promised Land, under Joshua’s leadership. The people who lived there were committing heinous acts of human sacrificing, along with other disgusting practices. These things gave power to demons over the land and invited evil spirits to rest on people, to influence their lusts, and derail their emotions. The laws of priests and sacrificing animals in a very specific manner temporarily broke off the power of these evil spiritual forces, keeping Israel free from demonic control until Jesus could complete the final sacrifice once and for all.
Sacrificial laws are gruesome, but more gruesome was the evil they defeated. Those laws were a gift to humanity. In the spiritual realm, as angels saw things, Mosaic sacrificing made perfect sense, making the world a better place.
The whole world had been shrouded in darkness concerning knowledge about God. Satan worship was alive and well. Empires taught that the Creator was evil and should be overthrown or else that an “upper class” should oppress and either literally or nearly enslave the masses. After Jesus’s time, governments in Europe exploited the Bible to achieve much of this anyway.
In this darkness, God would bring hope to all humanity. For reasons God only knows, Jesus would be a descendant of Abraham, live his life in that land Abraham did, and break evil’s grip on Earth. Israel needed to survive and prepare until the timing aligned. To do that, demons had to be held at bay. Moses’s sacrificial laws protected Israel and the world until Jesus finished everything.
Genesis 15:16, Deuteronomy 9:4-6, John 17:4; 19:30, Hebrews 10