FEBRUARY 6 LEVITICUS 16-17

Leviticus 16-17

Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is perhaps the highest, holiest single day of the year in the Jewish calendar. As the Jewish scholar, Jonathan Sacks, once said,

Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is the holy of holies of Jewish time. It is that rarest of phenomena, a Jewish festival without food. Instead it is a day of fasting and prayer, introspection and self-judgment when, collectively and repeatedly, we confess our sins and pray to be written into God’s Book of Life.

When God instituted this special day in Leviticus, it included these special features:

• A once-a-year atonement visit to the Holy of Holies where the Ark of the Covenant was kept by the High Priest.
• A strange double offering: two goats, separated by lot, one for a sacrifice of atonement, the other presented alive to the Lord as the “scapegoat.”
• At a special moment in the day’s proceedings, Aaron was to lay hands on the scapegoat, confess the sins of the people over it, and send the animal out into the wilderness, a vivid picture of carrying our sins as far from us “as the east is from the west.” (Psalm 103:12)

The whole point of the day is to sort out the sin, confess it and find forgiveness and cleansing. And Leviticus 17 teaches us why animal sacrifices, and the blood rituals connected with them, were necessary for this. One phrase: For the life of the flesh is in the blood.

In New Testament language: Our sins earn nothing but death for us, and it takes a death to pay for them. On the Day of Atonement, and, indeed, every day in ancient Israel, this meant the death of animals. But Jesus ended this by giving himself up to death, even death on a cross. Praise His Name!

Until tomorrow,
Pastor Gary