Atonement: Lev 16:1-22
Sin is important to God. God goes through cycles of revealing to his
people both his judgment and his mercy in relation to sin. In
Genesis, he shows to Adam and Eve first his judgment (curses), then
his mercy (clothing). To Israel at Mt Sinai, he showed judgment
(slaughter and plague) then mercy (let his glory pass by Moses).
Now, after the death of Aaron's sons (sin, judgment) he explains his
institutional mercy in the Day of Atonement (mercy).
*
Sin is serious
stuff
- Sin is deadly: if you don't treat it seriously, it's like
mishandling some deadly chemical.
- Sin separates us from God (hence the purification required before
this sacrifice can even be made; hence the scapegoat being sent
away). It has to be dealt with before we can approach him (hence the
cycle of sin, judgment, mercy).
- You can't just deal with sin whenever you want. You have to do what
God says.
*
Sin has to be
dealt with both in public and private
- Aaron's own sin and that of his family had to be atoned for, then a
sacrifice was made for the tabernacle and the tent of meeting that
were representative of God with the people.
- Then the other goat had hands laid on it, and was publicly sent
away, representing sin being dealt with and removed.
- Sin is both public and private, personal and corporate.
* Atonement
is needed
- Atonement means making reparations, doing what is necessary to
restore things to how they were.
- But how can one goat atone for the sins of a whole nation?
- These sacrifices don't actually have any force to deal with sin.
They are only as effective as God makes them. In this case, once a
year. Just like God doesn't really live in the Most Holy Place, but
he treats it as so to make the point that he lives with his people.
The sacrifices are a metaphor for God's holiness, sin's seriousness
and its need to be dealt with.
* So what?
- We don't live in a 'Christian nation', but we are still members of
the one Church.
- We don't offer sacrifices of atonement for communities any more.
God dealt with this once for all, so there is no reason to.
- This festival shows us that God takes sin seriously, and even
though he deals with it himself, we still need to deal with it on our
side, not just individually, but as a community. We may not be
responsible for the country we live in, but we are responsible for
our own spiritual community. Things like the child sexual abuse
scandals that have rocked the church need to be dealt with seriously
not just because they reflect on the church to others, not just
because they reflect on God to the outside world, but because we need
to take sin seriously because it's serious!
Sermon words
We don't tend to do much as a nation. We are more usually focused on
our own individual activities. But once every three years or so, an
event does occur that unites Australia, that involves almost every
adult citizen, that brings us together as a people, for one day, to
make a decision as to the future of our country. It is something that
impacts everyone. It is something that crosses cultural, gender, and
religious boundaries. And it's not a sport. And it is compulsory.
That day is voting day.
And once every three or so years, when we have these elections, there
is a little ceremony that takes place, whereby the Governor-General
swears in the new prime minister and government ministers. It is a
fairly simple oath that is taken, but without this ceremony, without
this symbolic gesture, there cannot be a federal government. One
small action has one very large result. After that oath, the prime
minister and government is put in charge of over one trillion
dollars, over 80,000 armed forces personnel, and over 160,000
Commonwealth public servants. After that oath, the wheels of
government can start turning once more.
Well, in ancient Israel, the high priest officiated over a ceremony
that was similarly a symbolic gesture, but that represented an even
greater, more important result for the nation as a whole. Once a
year, he would perform this Day of Atonement ritual, which
represented God cleansing the sin of his people, so that they could
remain in his presence.
Sin is serious stuff
Now, it's hard to really appreciate the depth of importance of this
statement without having a proper appreciation of just how serious
sin is. You see, sin is not just a matter of disobedience that
requires punishment. It is something that prevents us from coming
close to God. Sinfulness is the opposite to holiness, and God is
holy. The Old Testament uses the language of cleanness and purity to
describe holiness – God is perfectly clean and pure. When you're
reading about this cleanness, and all the hard work God's people had
to do to keep themselves ceremonially clean (we read a sample of that
in verse 4), it's easy to mistakenly think that God is like clean,
pure water, and sin is like poison, and you have to make sure that
you're clean, and everything is clean, otherwise it might pollute
God's perfect, clean water.
But that's not how it works. God's holiness is not like pure water
that is in danger of being ruined by our sin. God's holiness is
clean and pure the way disinfectant bleach is clean and pure, and our
sin is like the germs of a disease. Do you think you wear thick
rubber gloves and protective clothing to protect the bleach from
getting contaminated by your skin? It's to protect us from getting
burned! The problem with sin is that it's not just something we do –
sin is part of who we are as human beings. The sickness of sin can't
survive in God's holy presence... but neither can the people sick
with sin. God's rules about ritual cleanness are not to protect him
from the dirtiness of people's sin – they are to protect people
infected with sin from his perfect, holy bleach.
Sin is serious stuff. Like any highly volatile and dangerous
substance, you can't just deal with sin any way you want. You have
to do it right. If you get bitten by a venomous snake, you can't
decide, “Oh, I just want to get some bed rest and take some
Panadol.” You can't decide, “It's not really convenient for me
to get the anti-venom now, I'm going to wait until I've been to the
shops and bought dinner.” But at the same time, you also can't
decide, “You know, I don't like getting headaches. I'm just going
to take enough painkillers now to last me the rest of my life.”
Well, you can, but the rest of your life won't be very long. Earlier
in Leviticus, the sons of Aaron, the high priest, decide they want to
make sacrifices to God when they wanted, rather than when God had
approved them. It was about them, not about God – and that is sin.
The result was God burned them to death. You can read about that in
chapter 10. It turns out you can't just approach God whenever and
however you want. He is too holy, too pure for that. It's not God who
gets burned by sin.
Sin, then, is serious stuff. It's not just bad, it's not just
distasteful, it's not just ugly. Sin is not even just deadly. It
prevents us from being able to come close to God – which is what he
wants, since we're his people – so it has to be dealt with. Just
think about that a moment... is that how you think about sin? Do you
think about its consequences as being so severe, that it makes it
impossible for people to come close to God? When you sin, are you
thinking about what impact it will have on your relationship with
God? And just to make this clear, I don't mean your eternal
salvation. We know that as Christians, even if we sin, we are
forgiven by God thanks to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
We're free from eternal punishment. But sin still has consequences
that aren't eternal. You still have a relationship with God to
maintain.
Think of it this way: if a child swears at its mother and abuses
her, does it stop being her child? No. You're always your mother's
child, simply by virtue of being born to her. But that doesn't mean
you can't ruin that relationship with your actions. That is what sin
is like for us as Christians. God won't stop loving us, no. But it's
like swearing at your mum. It still hurts the relationship. And it's
hard knowing that in our relationship with God, the only person who
ever does anything to screw it up is us. That's why it's so important
to know that God wants us to be with him. That's why he goes to all
this trouble to deal with sin, and to be seen to deal with sin. It is
of supreme importance to God, and it should be of vital importance to
us too.
If you want to see how far away our sin pushes us from God, then look
at the ritual of the Day of Atonement. It really highlights God's
holiness. The high priest has to take a bath. Only then can he put
on the sacred garments to be worn for these special occasions. But
that's not enough. Then he has to make a sacrifice to atone for the
sins of himself and his own family. That's still not enough though.
Then he has to sacrifice to cleanse the tabernacle, because that was
the house of God amongst his people, and the people's sin made it
unclean. Then he had to sacrifice for the most holy place inside that
tabernacle, the place where God symbolically resides where the ark of
the covenant sits. Then he has to make atonement for the altar,
where the sacrifices are made to God.
It's like having to go through multiple security checkpoints that you
see in the movies – you have to put in the right combination on the
keypad, then you have to have a fingerprint scan, then a retinal
scan, then a voice recognition scan, then you have to be X-rayed for
weapons, then searched for bombs and chemicals, and then finally you
are allowed into that most secure place where the most valuable
people or possessions are kept. It is symbolic of how big a barrier
sin is to our being with God.
Atonement, needed?
Finally, once all those steps have been taken, the high priest can
lay his hands on the head of a goat, and he can confess all the sin
and wickedness of God's people, and with that, all the sin of God's
people is put onto that goat. And they don't kill that goat,
surprisingly. Instead, they take that goat, with all the people's
sins, out into the wilderness. And that symbolises the taking away
of their sins, outside of the camp, outside of the people of God –
and with their sins gone away, they can now remain in God's presence
without fear.
I say it symbolises, and I think we have to be clear about this –
the sacrifices in the Old Testament Levitical law do not deal with
sin. They are only symbols. This is called the Day of Atonement, but
really, it is not an atonement in the human sense of the word.
'Atone' means to be 'at one' with each other – that's not a silly
saying to make it easier to remember, the word's provenance is
actually from the saying 'at one'. It means you make reparations to
bring a relationship that has become askew back into accord. But if
the Day of Atonement really made atonement for the sin of the nation
of Israel, then how much was sin of Israel's million or so people
worth each year? How much did it cost? One goat. All the other
animals are sacrifices to cleanse the tent and the altar and the high
priest so he can come to this one, lone atonement goat. This goat is
not a sacrifice – it is donated by all the people of Israel, so it
represents essentially a zero loss on their part. And it doesn't even
get killed – it gets released into the desert.
There is no part of the Day of Atonement symbolism that includes
having to give sacrificially, or pay a cost. The Israelites are not
paying reparations to God for their sin on this day. The Day of
Atonement is entirely a work of God. Sound familiar? “For it is by
grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from
yourselves, it is the gift of God.” Yes, it may have been possible
for some Israelites to mistakenly build for themselves a works based
salvation – just like the church has done in the past. But God's
attitude to sin has always been the same – it is something he
despises, and something he deals with for us. People often think that
God seems to change the rules between the Old Testament and the New,
but really, this is the same God. When the Israelites see that goat
being led off into the desert, they have to trust that God will deal
with their sin. And he did so – at the cross of Christ. Is it any
different for us, reading that Jesus takes away our sin? You can't
see sin, after all. You can't feel it or measure it. God tells us
that Jesus took it away, and we have to trust him – just like the
people of Israel had to trust God would do what he was showing in
this symbolic ritual.
God's People Saved
Which brings us back full circle to the beginning of my talk, about
symbolic actions. The Day of Atonement is a national symbol, one
that includes all of God's people, even if it is only the High Priest
officiating. It takes away the sin of a whole nation, not just the
High Priest. They are freed from their sin together, and that is what
unifies them as a people before God. It's no coincidence that the
scapegoat is taken out of the camp – it symbolises that the
peoples' sin is carried outside the community now, outside of their
camp.
We don't often focus on our sin as a community of God, although
sometimes we're forced to. So we should remember that we are saved
not just as individuals, but saved into the people of God. It is true
that sin is a problem between you and God, but his solution is
between us and God, together. We can spend a lot of our time focused
on our own individual spiritual needs and standing before God, but we
mustn't forget that God relates to us not just on our own, but as
members of one body, which is his church.
In 1 Peter 2:9-10 it says, “[Y]ou are a chosen people, a royal
priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may
declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his
wonderful light. Once you were not a people, but now you are the
people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have
received mercy.”
God's community is a vital part of the Christian spiritual life. It's
not vital because we come and sing and hear sermons. It's about
being a member of a larger community, whose focus is on God. We are
linked not just with God, but with each other, and not just each
other here, but with our brothers and sisters around the world. What
links us is not our denominations, not our worship music, not our
geography – it is our salvation, it is God's mercy. “Once you
were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had
not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.”
If you are not a part of the church, by that I mean if you are not
connected with God's people, then you are missing a huge part of how
God interacts with you. I daresay that this is the biggest selling
point any church should have. If weekly sermons and songs of praise
are what attract people, then we should all be like Hillsong. Those
things are good, but they are only a function of what church is
really about – it's about us coming together as a community of
believers united by God's mercy, and relating to God in that communal
aspect. That's why our church's vision is “To see people engaging
with God in community”. We don't just want people to meet God. We
want them to meet God as a member of his people. We want to provide
communities where you can come and see how salvation works as a
people, not just as a person. We are thinking about this as a
church, and that is encouraging – and we should keep thinking about
it. God chooses a people for himself. He shows them mercy as a
people. We should seek to serve him not just as a person, but as a
people.
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