All these sacrifices were meant to point their minds to the ultimate sacrifice of the Savior, the Redeemer of mankind. When they neglected to keep their covenants, he commanded them to make animal sacrifices to symbolize atonement for their sins. He commanded them to create a place of holiness to the Lord. Although they had known only captivity for generations, the Lord sought to make his people holy by giving them covenants and laws that, when kept and obeyed, would change their very hearts. “Ye shall be holy: for I the Lord your God am holy” ( Leviticus 19:2).
It was not even future prosperity in the land of promise that was God’s eventual goal for them. According to one's faith, either a divine revelation of religious truth was at hand or the punishment of God was being loosed upon a sinful world.As miraculous and important as leaving Egypt was, it did not entirely accomplish God’s purposes for the children of Israel. Consequently, on the eve of the Wars of Religion, the triumph of French Protestantism seemed not just possible but, to many, inexorable. By the 1560s, perhaps 1,250 churches were serving an adult population of 2 million so-called 'Huguenots', about 10 per cent of the total population of the State, including amongst them a third of the French aristocracy. Churches burgeoned and congregations swelled as the Calvinist movement grew in spectacular style, attracting followers from every social class.
His ideas were never to find a natural home in France, but a different form of the religion, stemming from Calvin's Geneva, won supporters and gained coherence from the middle of the century. Within 20 years of Martin Luther pinning his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, a Protestant Reformation had begun to take shape in northern Europe.
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