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Leviticus 16
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Welcome tonight. My name is Jeremy and I'm part of the team here at Commons. And thank you for spending at least part of your weekend with us. We are in the middle of an extended series in the book of Leviticus. And I know that some people may still be asking the question why?
Speaker 1:In fact, every week in this series so far I have highlighted one of the major ways that things are different now in the Christian story. But if that's the case, then the question could be asked, well why do we even need to study Leviticus? Well today we are going to get to something called the day of atonement. And part of what we need to explore here is how these ancient Levitical rituals informed the imagination of the early Christians and how they thought about the death and resurrection of Jesus. Now part of what we're going to see is that Jesus is not just a sacrifice in the vein of what we read in the book of Leviticus.
Speaker 1:Everything is different now that we have the full image of the divine that we see in Christ. And if you remember back to our opening series this fall, we spent a few weeks in the book of first John. But one of those weeks was all about how everything we need to know about God we can see by looking at Jesus. That was not just a coincidence. That is what we need always in the back of our minds when we read a text like Leviticus.
Speaker 1:That God has been seeding the story even in this ancient primitive culture. But the story would only fully blossom in Jesus as God pulls the blinders off so to speak. So one of the easiest ways to imagine this is to think about a parent speaking to a child. I expect that the way that I speak to my son today at three years old will be very different than when he is 12 or when he is 22. At least I hope so.
Speaker 1:Even though as a father I'm not really changing and even though the values and the journey that I want to invite him into and lead him through aren't changing. Being a good parent means speaking in ways that your child can understand in that moment. And so we are not reading Leviticus because we have any intention of going back to this frankly repressive culture where sacrifices were part of the deal and slaves were kept and women were largely property. We're not going back to that. We're reading this to help ourselves understand how God has slowly and progressively revealed himself within the human story.
Speaker 1:So you don't judge a story on where it starts. You judge the beauty of a story on where it takes you. And this chapter that we call Leviticus is part of what takes us to Jesus. Now last week, we talked about the priesthood and the start of the purity code. And we will be coming back to both of those themes next week.
Speaker 1:And so because there is a lot on the agenda today and some fairly heavy theology, I'm not gonna do a recap. But as always, you can head over to commons.church and you can find links to our podcast on our YouTube feed if you want to backtrack there. Okay. Let's pray and then today we are gonna jump into some good old atonement theory. Almighty God, to whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hidden.
Speaker 1:As we speak today about your day of atonement, the idea that we might be made at one with you. Would you cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the grace of your son? Would you direct the actions of our hands by the inspiration of your spirit? Might you, Father, welcome us so that we might truly live and love and move as you have created us to in your world. If we feel close to you today, the words that have been spoken, the prayers that have been offered, the music that has been sung has made us sense your presence in a powerful way this night and we thank you for that.
Speaker 1:Inject God, if in this moment we feel distant or cold, if we struggle to imagine that the universe could actually be this place of love and grace that you ask us to trust, then would our conversation today bring about more than intellectual ascent? May it invite us even one step closer to you so that we might experience the divine proximity that each of us long for in the depth of our soul. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen. Okay.
Speaker 1:Before we can talk about the day of atonement, we need to go back and remember all of the previous offerings that we have talked about so far in the book of Leviticus. Because even though these earlier sacrifices and offerings are not about sin and forgiveness in the way we think about them in Jesus, they are all part of the atonement theology of Leviticus. Remember back to chapter one. The very first offering, it's called the burnt offering. It's described there.
Speaker 1:Verse four says that that offering will be accepted on your behalf to make atonement for you. The thing is that Leviticus has this very concept concept that all of this feeds into something called atonement but there are multiple different aspects of it. And so the burnt offering, the first offering doesn't finish everything. It was the start of a system that leads to the day of atonement where once a year sins were wiped clean in the nation of Israel. So you brought a burnt offering to announce yourself before God.
Speaker 1:You brought a grain offering to show that you remembered God's promises. If you wanted to, you could bring a peace offering to say thank you to Yahweh. You bring a sin offering which probably should be better translated a cleansing offering. But you bring a cleansing offering to ensure that you don't contaminate God's space. You bring a guilt offering if you have accidentally touched something holy that you shouldn't have touched.
Speaker 1:And all of this leads now to a community ritual called the day of atonement which we're gonna look at today where sin is now finally sent away. Now, in Christianity all of this, all of these different ideas get condensed into our relationship with God through Jesus. But, one of the things that I think we need to take away from Leviticus, one of the things I actually think we need to hold onto from this text is that atonement, a truly being made at one with God is about far more than just a transaction around sin. Now yes, that's central. That's the center of the story.
Speaker 1:That's the climax of Leviticus. But in Jesus we are welcomed before God. We come to understand the heart of God's promises to us. We offer our thanks and our gratefulness to God. We acknowledge that all space is now sacred space.
Speaker 1:Every place belongs to God. And we come to understand that the holy tabernacle of God has always actually been this living breathing temple that he has entrusted to our care. Now of course, we are forgiven and we are transformed and we are invited into this eternal life of God that we spoke about in first John. But all of this is the at one ment. And so it would be a shame to do anything to dismiss or minimize or lose sight of everything that God is offering to us in Jesus.
Speaker 1:And with that in mind, let's open our text today. And we're gonna start at verse one in chapter 16 of the book of Leviticus. Where we read, the Lord spoke to Moses after the death of the two sons of Aaron who had died when they approached the Lord. Now, the background here is that in chapter 10, Leviticus gives us a story of two priests who don't follow the rules and they die. That is how seriously these people took these ancient rituals.
Speaker 1:But the story continues, the Lord said to Moses, tell your brother Aaron that he is not to come whenever he chooses into the most high behind the curtain in front of the atonement cover on the ark or else he will die. For I will appear in the cloud over the atonement cover. And so basically what we've got here is a big tent where people come to offer their sacrifices to God. And then inside the tent is the holy place. This is where only the priests can go.
Speaker 1:And farther inside you have another curtain. And behind that curtain is the Holy of Holies where God actually lives. Now according to Leviticus, God appears in a cloud above the cover of the Ark of the Covenant. Now, the high priest is only permitted to enter that space once a year on the day of atonement. And so some rabbis took this wording to mean that God would appear on that day when the priest went in.
Speaker 1:Other rabbis thought that what this meant was that God was always visible sitting in a cloud on top of the ark all the time waiting for the one day when the priest would enter. But regardless, the idea here is that this is God's throne room in a sense. I think that's actually the best way to think about this image here. God is the king of Israel and in many ancient cultures coming before the king without permission carried a penalty of death. That's a very big part of the story of Esther.
Speaker 1:She risks her life to appear before the king of Persia without his permission. That's the image that the ancient Israelites have in mind with this holy of holies here. God is a king And so you can't just walk into his space, you need to approach him very sacredly, very carefully. So in Exodus, there's this story where Moses wants to see God. And God says, well you can't see me directly or you'll die.
Speaker 1:So here's what we'll do. I will pass by and I'll let you see my backside. That's a little odd. We can admit that. Right?
Speaker 1:The idea that you can't see God but you can see his backside, that's going to be okay. But the language in Exodus actually has a temporal element to it. And so it could be translated, I will pass by and you can see where I was. The idea being that God is so holy, so beautiful that even to witness where he was, this is a gift. But here on the day of atonement, the idea is that Yahweh is going to allow himself to be seen face to face by the high priest in Israel.
Speaker 1:So this is a very beautiful, sacred, precarious moment in the minds of the people. In Exodus, there's even a reference to the high priest having bells sewn onto his cloak. That's how he announces himself before God. And so what happens is you get this story that develops over the years in Israel What the high priest would do is he would actually tie a rope around his leg before he went into the holy of holies. And so if the bells stopped, then everyone would know that he had died and then they could pull him out.
Speaker 1:Because what do you do if the high priest goes in there and he dies? You can't keep sending people in because then they'll die and we've a whole problem here. Right? It's like the woman who swallowed a horse to swallow the goat to swallow the cat to swallow the fly. I mean, this is gonna be a disaster.
Speaker 1:So we yank him out by the foot. Well, that seems to be a myth. There's really no evidence for that kind of practice in ancient Israel. But you can certainly see how that idea develops over time. Point is, this is a very sacred moment and they took this very very seriously.
Speaker 1:I go back to our conversation two weeks ago. We don't need to be scared of the presence of God. We know that we are welcome now to come into his space but that doesn't mean we should ever lose sight of the fact that we are now always in the presence of the Most High. There is nothing that you do that is not before God. That should be sobering.
Speaker 1:But in light of all this, verse three now starts to talk about how the high priest should prepare to enter God's space. It's interesting because the high priest who wears all of this fancy paraphernalia that we looked at last week now takes it all off. He is to put on the sacred linen tunic with the linen undergarments next to his body. He used to tie the linen sash around him and put on the linen turban. Apparently God loves linen.
Speaker 1:These are the sacred garments so he must bathe himself with water before he puts them on. So the most sacred garments in Israel, the ones that the high priest actually wears before God are the same type of undyed plain linen that any normal person in the ancient world would wear every day. Ephods and gemstones and golden emblems are for show, but for worship and for the presence of God the status symbols need to be stripped away. Cultures care about status symbols. God doesn't.
Speaker 1:Now verse five, From the Israelite community, the high priest is to take two male goats for a sin offering and a ram for a burnt offering. Aaron is then to offer a bull for his own sin offering to make atonement for himself and his household. Verse seven, he has to take the two goats and present them before the Lord at the entrance to the tent of meeting. He has to cast lots for the two goats. Some people think this might have been one of the places that the Urim and Thummim were used.
Speaker 1:We talked about them last week. But Lunlot will be for the Lord and the other for the scapegoat. Aaron shall bring the goat whose lot falls to the Lord and sacrifice it for a sin offering. But the goat chosen by Lot as the scapegoat will be presented alive before the Lord to be used for making atonement by sending it away into the wilderness. There's actually four animals mentioned here.
Speaker 1:Two goats and a ram from the community and a bull that has to come from the high priest's own property. And the bull is used to cleanse the high priest. The ram will be a burnt offering after this is all done to say thank you. But these two goats that are used in the day of atonement ritual, these are different. And so what happens is that the first goat is sacrificed as a sin offering just the way that we have read before earlier in the book and the blood is used to cleanse God's space.
Speaker 1:Verse 20 actually says that when he has finished making atonement for the most holy place, for the tent of meeting and the altar, then he'll bring forward the live goat. So the sacrificed goat makes atonement for the space. And I recognize that the common misconception is that sacrifices forgave your sins in the Old Testament. No. God forgives sins.
Speaker 1:But in a world view that imagines God local and contained to a sacred space, what is the first step if you want God to come and forgive you? You have to make ready the space for his presence. That's what the first goat is doing. The priest is making atonement for the holy place as he prepares for God to meet with him. Now verse 21 says that he shall bring forward the live goat.
Speaker 1:He is to lay both hands on the head of the live goat and what? It says he is to confess over it. All the wickedness and rebellion of the Israelites, all their sins he is to put on the head of the goat. What's the key here? The wickedness, the rebellion, the selfishness, the arrogance, the hurt that the people have caused, all of the sins of the people are now confessed in front of God.
Speaker 1:Again, sacrifices don't forgive sins. God does. Think first John one nine, if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just. He will forgive us and purify us from all unrighteousness. Think Hebrews ten:four, the blood of bulls and goats could never take away sins.
Speaker 1:Think Hosea six:six, I desire mercy not sacrifices. I want acknowledgment not burnt offerings says the Lord. If we think that the Levitical system was all about how the death of an animal could somehow cleanse people from their mistakes. We are missing the point. Because the second half of verse 21 says that he shall send the goat.
Speaker 1:This is the one that the sins have been confessed over. He shall send it away into the wilderness in the care of someone appointed for the task. The goat will carry on itself all of their sins to a remote place and the man shall release it into the wilderness. Now this is called the scapegoat. The word here is in Hebrew.
Speaker 1:Literally means the goat that goes away. However, it's possible that you may have heard the term before. Later in Hebrew literature the word Azazel starts getting used as a proper name. In the Dead Sea Scrolls 4Q180 that just means it was the one hundred and eightieth fragment they found in Cave 4 near the community of Qumran. Azazel is referenced as a type of demon.
Speaker 1:As if the first goat is for Yahweh and the second goat is for Azazel. Now to be clear, there's no implication like that in the Bible. In fact, Leviticus seventeen:seven says that you must no longer suffer sacrifices to these goat idols. So at some earlier point, it does seem like they were offering sacrifices to goat idols and it does seem like at some later point certain Jewish sects returned to thinking about these goat idols, but that is not what's happening here in Leviticus. What's happening here is an ancient ritualization of something that humans have participated in almost instinctively since society came together.
Speaker 1:We scapegoat each other. We blame each other for our mistakes. We pick the weakest among us and we make them the focal point for our frustration with each other. We pick on someone and we drive them out and we push them away. We have been doing this since the very beginning.
Speaker 1:Think about the story of Adam and Eve. You have the two first archetypal humans and they are living in an idyllic garden with one rule, don't eat the fruit off this one tree. And God does not seem particularly overbearing in this story. And yet Genesis three says that the woman took the fruit and she ate it. She also gave some to her husband who was with her at the time and he ate it.
Speaker 1:Now if you read the story, it is pretty hard to lay all the blame at the woman's feet here. I mean they are both pretty complicit in this decision. But then God comes along and he says listen, have you guys been eating the one thing I told you not to eat? And the man says well, the woman you put here with me, she gave me the fruit from the tree. It's her fault.
Speaker 1:And so God turns to the woman and she says, he says, is that true? And she says, well the serpent that you put here with me, he tricked me into it. It's his fault. See this is our natural human tendency to find someone else to blame for our shortcomings. Here in Leviticus, it's almost like God says, you've got your ritual around sin.
Speaker 1:Why don't we try something else? Instead of blaming someone else, you recognize your own culpability. And instead of pointing out someone else's mistakes, how about you confess your own sin. And I will come and I will forgive you, but then together we will send that all away. And the table will be reset.
Speaker 1:The community will be restarted. It will all be wiped clean once a year and we will start again. Even this word atonement, it's the word kapar in Hebrew and that means to cover, but it actually comes from the Acadian kapuru which means to wipe away. And so it's as if this brokenness and this hurt, this tension that threatens to tear the community apart as they scapegoat each other for their own mistakes. All of that is now driven out into the wilderness away from the community.
Speaker 1:Now, when we get to Jesus and he comes on the scene in the Gospel of John and John the Baptist is preaching about repentance and forgiveness and he sees Jesus for the very first time. What does he say? He says, behold the lamb of God who what? Who takes away the sins of the world. If we fast forward through the life of Jesus to the end of the story, which by the way is a terrible way to talk about Jesus.
Speaker 1:Jesus' death only ever makes sense in the light of his life. But for the sake of the connection here, if we go to the end, John 19 at the end of the story, Jesus has been arrested and brought to Pilate. And the Jewish leaders want him executed, but Pilate doesn't think there's enough for him to get involved in this situation. And so he brings Jesus out in front of the mob and he says to them, here is your king. What do you want me to do with him?
Speaker 1:And what does the mob say? See we tend to remember crucify him, but what the angry mob actually says is take him away, send him away, crucify him. The writer of John is making connection here to the scapegoat in Leviticus. This is why understanding Leviticus is important even for us as Christians. Because if we have this overly simplified view of the Old Testament sacrificial system that tells us killing goats meant the forgiveness of sins, then we will end up with this overly simplified view of Jesus' death that leads to a very strange theology that says God killed God so that God could forgive.
Speaker 1:Let me say this as clearly as I possibly can. God did not murder Jesus. We did. God came to us in Jesus and we scapegoated him. We blamed him.
Speaker 1:We rejected him. We drove him away. We directed our anger and our violence and our frustration at him. We did the worst thing that we could possibly do to him. In the words of the prophet Isaiah, he was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering familiar with pain.
Speaker 1:Like one from whom people hid their faces. He was despised and we held him in low esteem. Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering. Yet, we considered him punished by God. We thought he was stricken by God and afflicted, but he was pierced for our transgressions.
Speaker 1:In fact, a more literal translation of the Hebrew word min here would be from. He was pierced from our transgressions. He was crushed from our iniquities and in that, through that pain and suffering somehow he brought us peace. See in Leviticus, God says that if you prepare the space for me, I am faithful to come and meet with you in ways that you can comprehend. And if you confess your sins then I am just to forgive you and if you need a symbol of all that forgiveness then we will enact a ritual together.
Speaker 1:And we will take a goat and we will send it away so that you can see, you can visualize, you can begin to comprehend this incredible idea of grace and mercy. But trust me on this. This is just the beginning because one day I will come myself and I will let you put your sin on me and I will let you drive me away and I will still come back and I will still forgive you. See, God wants to do more than reset the table once a year with a ritual that we need to reenact ad nauseam. He wants to fundamentally transform his creation.
Speaker 1:So this is why the atonement in Christian thought can't just be reduced to the death of Jesus. Because it's in his death that our sins are sent away, but it's in his resurrection that everything changes. That's how we know things are different. Resurrection is why we don't do this over and over and over and over again. Resurrection is why we don't rely on priests and shaman anymore.
Speaker 1:Resurrection is why we stand in the presence of God in the divine all the time in every moment even right now. The resurrection of Jesus is the sign that God has fixed the world. It is the new Monday morning, the eighth day of creation where everything begins all over again. Now, is everything perfect? Of course not.
Speaker 1:Do we still make mistakes? Of course we do. But the story has turned and the world is now in the process of being brought back to life through resurrection. See, in Leviticus, to be made at one with God. The people offered a sacrifice to announce themselves before God.
Speaker 1:They offered another sacrifice to remember His promises to them. They offered another sacrifice to say thanks. They offered another sacrifice for unintentional sins. They offered another sacrifice for profaning sacred symbols. They offered another sacrifice to cleanse the space so that God could come and meet with them.
Speaker 1:But when they confessed their sins, he forgave them and then they sent a goat away so that they would know their sins had been wiped clean. In Christianity, all of that gets collapsed into Jesus through his life and death and resurrection. Paul even says that Jesus became sin for us. He became your selfishness and he became your arrogance. He became every hurtful and horrible thing you have ever done to another person.
Speaker 1:He became your scapegoat so that you could push him away and keep him at a distance, but at the end of it all he says, I would still come back for you. Because that's what love looks like. That's the good news of the gospel that we can push and we can fight, we can drive God away and yet he still returns to us with grace and forgiveness. So we don't have to participate in these rituals anymore because in a single perfect act of love God overcame our choices and he made the rituals obsolete. We don't do this a lot around here because we trust that the spirit of God is present and working in and through you without our meddling.
Speaker 1:But there are times where it is appropriate to point out the invitation of God in a very clear and tangible way. You see the ritual of atonement that we observe in Leviticus is gone. It's over and it's done. We don't live in that ancient world and we don't imagine God in those terms anymore. But there is still very much hurt and pain and brokenness that we need to know can be wiped clean.
Speaker 1:The beautiful thing is that we don't have to drive a scapegoat away anymore to experience that. We tried it and he came back to us. Today, we simply name our brokenness. We trust that God is faithful and just to welcome us at his table. Because this, all of creation sitting at the table of God and sharing a meal together, this is what God has been building to since the foundation of the world, since the days of the Levitical code.
Speaker 1:So if you need to respond to that invitation in some way, If you have spent your life blaming others for your shortcomings or maybe you have been blaming yourself for your mistakes, scapegoating yourself instead of recognizing just how deeply loved you are. And you know that you want to be free of that, you want to sense forgiveness, you want to know that somewhere deep inside you have been healed and recreated through this story of Jesus and resurrection, Then in whatever shape that needs to take for you today, a prayer, a conversation, a moment of repentance and then unexplainable gratitude and joy, then know that God is not hiding from you behind some ancient ritual. God is not bound by your ideas of justice and who is worthy or unworthy of his presence. God is love and he is grace and God has done everything and more to close the gap that you imagine separates you from Him. If you have never acknowledged that invitation to come and sit at the table of God, if you have never understood just how costly it was for Christ to come to us and then be driven away, then perhaps today, even a conversation in Leviticus could be the start of something beautiful for you.
Speaker 1:Let's pray. God, help us as we imagine this incredible mystery that we call atonement. That we could actually be made at one with you. That we could enter your presence. That we could remember your promises.
Speaker 1:That we could thank you for everything that we have. That we could acknowledge sins unintentional or otherwise. That we could know that our space is clean and that you are here to meet with us and that we could know that everything that we have done that has hurt or damaged the people around us or your creation could now be sent away. God help us to understand the fact that you came to us full of truth and grace and love and we pushed back. And yet instead of turning your back and walking away, you turned back to us.
Speaker 1:You faced us. You came back to us to show us what love looks like. So God, if we have experienced that connection before, then by your spirit, would you be present to us so that we might experience the joy and the excitement of what that was like the first time we realized who you were. If we had been watching from the edges wondering about the divine, trying to decide if this story was for us, then God might you make it real in some way in whatever way we need to hear. That this story of grace and forgiveness is the story of the universe and is the story that every single one of us have been created to enter into.
Speaker 1:Might we have the courage and the trust to take that step today if we need to. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen. Alright. Day of Atonement.
Speaker 1:Three more weeks in Leviticus. We will end here as we always do with this. Love God, love people, tell the story.