Today offers you a sense of wholeness, sifting through the world’s news to settle yourself on what’s most important and dismissing the rest. Today our Jewish friends observe the Day of Atonement, a special day of great significance for us Christians.
Its ritual included two goats; one called the “scapegoat.” How relevant, people blaming others for their problems. You can make it a verb, “scapegoating” others for our problems, and we do. Scapegoating is always in the news, and we do it in our personal lives. On the Day of Atonement, the scapegoat, was “presented alive before the Lord to make atonement over it, that it may be sent away into the wilderness…” (Leviticus 16:10). That is, the sins of the people against God were symbolically placed on the scapegoat and it was abandoned in the wilderness to be done with sin.
The other goat was sacrificed. ”Aaron shall present the goat on which the lot fell for the Lord and use it as a sin offering” (Leviticus 16:9). Two goats: one killed to atone for the sins of God’s people against Him; the other carries sin away from the life of God’s people. Can we see ourselves in the goats? We have sins that have made us not-at-one with God, sins that call for death and for renunciation, that we go “and sin no more” (John 8:11).
“In this way Aaron shall come into the Holy Place” (Leviticus 16:3). At-one-with God is not of our own devising. God teaches His people how atonement is to come about. Not by church programs, policies, or scholarship. Not by stewardship or evangelism. Not because of faith and good intentions. Those all have their place, but it is only The High Priest who offers the necessary sacrifice and sends sin away. “But when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things that have come…, he entered once for all into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves but by means of his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption” (Hebrews 9:11-12).
There is much we Christians don’t understand, but one thing we get is the wholeness from the One in Whom all fits together. The Day of Atonement reminds us of a principle of Bible reading, “The New Testament in concealed in the Old; the Old Testament is revealed in the New.”
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