The Atonement for our sins

Atonement. Reparation or expiation for sin. Don't ya just love that?
Reparation. Making amends for a wrong one has done through payment. Repairing.
Expiation. To make amends. To atone.
Should probably also know this...
Propitiation. The act of atoning for sin. The act of appeasing. Payment for wrongdoing.

Wow. God, in Grace, gave us Jesus who paid freely for our sins, a sacrifice on our behalf that God accepts such that we could be forgiven and made righteous through faith in Jesus.

But what is this atonement? Take my hand, come for a little walk...

There were two men, Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron. You can find them in Leviticus 10. They decided in their own minds to offer profane fire before the Lord (now they didn't think it was profane; they thought they were doing good). The Lord had not commanded this offering. So, Lev 10:2 -- "fire went out from the Lord and devoured them, and they died before the Lord. (3) And Moses said to Aaron, "This is what the Lord spoke, saying: 'By those who come near Me I must be regarded as holy; And before all the people I must be glorified.' "

In other words, when we go before the Lord we should do so as He commands it, and we should do so in holy praise and worship, not with a glib attitude.

So God began to set in place the commandments for the Day of Atonement. Aaron was the High Priest, and the Lord told him what was expected.

Briefly, the tabernacle was an area, a large tent in essence. It had three courts:
There are other items in each of the areas, but for this discussion this gives a fair picture of the structure.

So in Leviticus 16:1-2 we see that Aaron is told that he should not come into the Holy of Holies or he will die.

So Aaron is to go into the Holy Place (part #2) with a young bull, two goats. The bull shall be used for himself, the goats for the people.

So Aaron will make an offering of the bull. It is a sin offering to atone for his own sins and his house. This makes him clean so that he can make the sacrifices of atonement for the people.

The two goats will have lots cast over them. One lot is for the Lord: the goat that is considered a sweet sacrifice for the Lord; the other is considered the scapegoat -- it will carry the people's sin.

The first goat, the Lord's goat, will be placed on the altar and killed, offered as a sacrifice for sin. The scapegoat will be presented live to the Lord, and it will take away the people's sins.

A little more detail is given here. Aaron will offer the bull for his own atonement. He kills the bull and takes a censer of sweet incense and he will go into the Holy of Holies, inside the veil. He will offer insence to the Lord so that the cloud will cover the mercy seat. He will also take the blood of the bull and he will sprinkle it on the mercy seat. This is an offering of the sacrifice for his own sin to the Lord. It is proof, so to speak, that the sacrifice took place; it is also presented to the Lord for acceptance and approval of the sacrifice.

(continued next post)

Aaron then kills the goat that is the Lord's. This is an offering for the sins of the people. He will take the blood of the goat, as he did with the bull, into the Holy of Holies and sprinkle it on the Mercy Seat. This is to show the blood of the sacrifice for the approval of the Lord.

Aaron will then make atonement for the Holy Place. He will take blood from the goat and from the bull and he will place the blood on the altar all around. This sprinkling will cleanse the altar and the Holy Place.
And here it gets good. Aaron will take the live goat, the scapegoat, and he will lay both his bloody hands upon the head of the live goat, thus transferring the sins of the people onto the goat. The goat shall then be taken out into the wilderness "by the hand of a suitable man" and released.

Verses 23 through the end is then the commandments for how to clean up from this bloody sacrifice.

This was done once a year to atone for the sins of the people. Once a year, forever. Repeated each year -- until Jesus made the final and ultimate sacrifice to end the ritualistic sacrifices.

Now this is all a picture, for the OT is a physical picture of what is spiritually happening in the New Testament. Aaron was the High Priest; Jesus is our High Priest.

Aaron had to make sacrifice to cleanse himself and atone for his own sins. Jesus walked sinless and no such atonement was necessary.

Then we have the sacrifice of the goat on the altar. The altar is a picture of the cross upon which Jesus was crucified. The death of the goat was Jesus on the cross. Just as the goat paid for the sins of the people, Jesus was brutally killed, sacrificed for our sins. His blood was shed just as the goats blood was shed, poured out for the atonement of sins.

But it wasn't over with the goats, and neither is it over for Jesus. The blood was laid upon the scapegoat. A transfer of sin was made from the atoning sacrifice of one goat, to the head of the other goat. This was only a ritual, and this needed to be repeated each year.

Jesus, though, was also the scapegoat. The sins of the world were laid upon Jesus, but it went further.

(continues in next post)

God made Jesus, who was perfect and sinless, to be sin for us. Jesus did not simply have our sin laid upon him, an imperfect act as was done with the scapegoat, but scripture tells us that God made Jesus to be sin for us. Jesus became our sin, suffered our sin, experienced our sin, paid the full penalty on the cross for our sin. It wasn't enough to simply lay it upon him to carry as a burden, but he was made to be sin for us, to fully experience what we should have had to experience as punishment.

Now the scapegoat in Lev 16:22 was taken by a suitable man out into the wilderness. It was taken far outside of camp, away from the people so that it could be released into the torturous desert where it would die.

Likewise Jesus was made to be sin so that He could carry away our sin, away from us far into an uninhabitable place called hell.

Funny thing about the scapegoat. Sometimes, on a rare occasion, it would find itself back to camp. This was equivalent to the sins of the people returning to light on them again. This was an atrocious thought. So the suitable man would take the scapegoat out in to the wilderness, stab it in the side and throw it off a cliff. They did not want their sins to revisit them.

This is the reason that Jesus decended into hell. He was the scapegoat that was to carry away our sins to an uninhabitable place, to a place that we could not get to and where our sins would not return from. As far as east is from west.

The altar in the Holy Place was a picture of the cross. The sacrifices took place on the altar, sacrifices to cleanse us of our sins. The atoning sacrifice. But Aaron would then take the blood of the bull and goat into the Holy of Holies. Where is this?

Glad you asked. Go with me now to the book of Hebrews. Chapter 7 is about the priesthood of Jesus. I won't get into the talk about Melchizedek and the tithe that Abraham paid to him; for this chapter is not about a tithe -- it is about a priesthood. Jesus is a priest forever, according to the order of Melchizedek. He was the surity of a New Covenant, overseen by a priesthood that would never end. A Priest who is holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners. A Priest who does not have to daily make sacrifices, or repeat the atonement sacrifice once a year. His sacrifice was perfect and paid for our sins forever.

Chapter 8. We see in vv 4-6 that the tabernacle and the sacrifices here on earth wer mere copies, shadows of heavenly things. All the items in the tabernacle are copies of items that exist in heaven. Moses made the items for the tabernacle in accordance with the pattern shown to him on Sinai (he was there for 40 days you know).

We now have a more excellent covenant, one not built upon laws, but where the commandments are written on our hearts. Where we do not follow laws as rules, but we live out the principles of the law in Grace through faith. The Old Covenant was imperfect and is old and vanishing away.

Chapter 9 then talks of the tabernacle and the ritual. The items in the tabernacle, in the Holy Place and in the Holy of Holies. It speaks of the limitations that these earthly rituals had, and how it was symbolic: the gifts, sacrifices, the food and drink limitations, the washings, and the ordinances.

And in vv 11-15 we see that Christ took His blood and rose from the dead, He appeared in the perfect tabernacle in Heaven, not with blood of goats but with His own holy blood. He goes into the Most Holy Place in Heaven and he sprinkles it upon the Book of Life and the Mercy Seat in Heaven, just as Moses had taken the hyssop branch and sprinked the copies; and Jesus showed Himself before the Father for approval of the sacrifice and the remission of our sins.

And it is very important to note that the atonement process was not limited to the cross, as the orthodox teaches. But it carries from the cross, yes even the scourging all the way to the cross and down into hell and through the resurrection. It takes the whole of this experience to atone for your sins -- not just the cross. For as Paul tells us:
If Christ did not rise, then you are still in your sins. If the orthodox were right, then your sins are gone at the cross. But scripture is clear: the cross AND the resurrection are both intricately wound together in one full act of atonement. If Jesus did not rise, then all the OT saints, and us today, are lost in our sins.

But Jesus went to the cross, to the altar of atonement. He was sacrificed and He died for us, His blood shed. He was the sacrificial goat that was slaughtered for the atonement of our sins. He was the scapegoat that was ushered to an uninhabitable place to take the sins away from the people, as far away as they could be taken, to a place where the people can not follow. And He rose from the dead, taking His blood to the Father as proof of the sacrifice, for the approval of God of the sacrifice performed...a sacrifice that will never, ever have to be repeated.

(done)

now faith said:

if you google why did Christ have to die the answers stopped short and said because there's life in the blood, I would think so what I still wanna know why?

Click to expand...

I still wanna know why too.

There are many theories and philosophies about this, but the reality is that the Bible does not say why. We know that the animal blood sacrifices were a shadow of Christ shedding His blood on the cross. But again, the Bible does not tell us explicitly why God chose that instead of a wave of His hand, a Word from His lips, a payment of grain, etc. Life is in the blood -- that's the best clue we have.