The Day of Atonement
The one, true living and holy God has come to be with his people within a fallen world of death.
Every sermon in Leviticus so far has repeated some expression of that main point. Last week we saw that, spiritually speaking, we’re all moving in either one of two directions. We’re either moving closer to God, toward Eden, OR we’re moving away from God, further out into exile — into a “fallen world of death” because that’s what this world is.
Now, we’ve said that about this world every week — we’ve said this is a fallen world of death — but if you don’t think it is, you just need to get out more.
Now, look, there’s all kinds of beauty in this world! The heavens declare the glory of God (Psalm 19:1) — and it’s amazing — but if you go where people are, before long you will see brokenness — and usually the more people in one place, the more intense the brokenness.
Fallen World of Death
This makes me think about places like the slums of Dhaka, Bangladesh — one of the most densely populated cities in the world. I don’t know what comes to your mind when you think about extreme poverty, but pretty much any image from Dhaka will do. Just Google it. There are 12 million people on top of one another in horrible living conditions where disease and crime and abuse prevail.
And there are actually countless places like this across the world in different sizes and degrees — I’m talking about places of obvious despair and misery, even within our own nation.
In America, the problem of homelessness and drug addiction has only gotten worse in recent years. Back in 2018 the government said officially that we had an opioid epidemic, and every year since then the number of deaths due to drug overdose have just increased. More people are dying of drug overdose today in our country than at any point in our history. And so looking at this world — whether it’s evil that is done or good that is left undone; whether it’s violence against one another or disease we can do nothing to stop; whether it’s hurt children or broken families; fluke injuries or mental illness; damaged relationships or irreparable bitterness; whether it’s homicide, suicide, infanticide, or genocide; whether it’s iniquities or transgressions or sins — we live in a fallen world of death. This world is crap.
And if you’re here this morning, congratulations. Because it means that somehow you have survived another day. We should give God thanks! None of us deserves to be here. We need to know that when we come to the Book of Leviticus. This world is not the way it’s supposed to be, and God could have just ended it. God could have justly condemned the entire world because human beings are not entitled to exist. And yet here we are. And here they are, the people of Israel, in Leviticus, called by God to be his own people — a people God has chosen to be with as part of his redemptive plan.
Welcome to the Day of Atonement
The holy and living God has made a way to be near his people, through the tabernacle and the priesthood and this newly established levitical system. That’s what we’ve seen so far:
How do we live in this world of death but not be acclimated to it?
How do we orient our lives that way, facing Eden, moving closer to life with God?
That’s what Chapters 1–15 have addressed, and now today we come to the culmination of these chapters in Chapter 16, which is all about the Day of Atonement.
And so for this sermon, we’re gonna just look at three questions all about this day:
1) Why did Israel need this day?
2) What happened on this day?
3) Where is this day pointing?
Now let’s pray:
Father in heaven, by the power of your Holy Spirit, through your ancient words, we ask, do a fresh work of grace in our hearts. Show us your glory, in Jesus’s name, amen.
1) Why did Israel need this day?
The people of Israel needed the Day of Atonement because they needed atonement.
Now the meaning of the word “atonement” is to cover over sin in order to reconcile two parties. In the Bible that means reconciling holy God and sinful man. And what’s implied here is the incompatibility between the two. There’s a gap — an estrangement — between the holy and living God who is the Creator and sinful, rebellious humans who were created. And atonement is what God does to “take care” of that gap.
And Israel needed this atonement because not only were they sinners separated from God, but they were also constantly threatened by this fallen world of death around them. The threat was that this gap between them and God would widen. And in fact it did.
See although the people of Israel were instructed to orient their lives away from death, toward Eden — the pull of exile and death never lets up. There was a constant tug on Israel from exile.
Or — let me change the metaphor — rather than thinking of exile as a constant pull away from life with God, imagine instead that exile is a flooding ocean encroaching upon life with God.
Encroaching Flood Waters
A few weeks ago I was down in eastern North Carolina, near the Cape Fear River. The Cape Fear is the largest river system in the state, and it’s a tidal river — which means it comes straight from the Atlantic Ocean and it ebbs and flows according to the tide. And that means that when there’s a hurricane, this river is notorious for flooding.
Basically all the rainfall and wind and waves, together with the high tide, makes the Atlantic Ocean push up and overwhelm the river paths and so for miles and miles it just spills over, and does what floods do. It destroys things. It trashes whatever’s around it. And what’s crazy is to go places like this and see markers way high up on trees that say things like, “This was the waterline in Hurricane Florence.”
And what’s especially crazy to me is that when you see a waterline way high up like that you know it didn’t get there instantly, but it happened gradually. The rain falls, and the winds blow, and the oceans rage, and little by little the water rises and rises and rises and spills over the banks, and then keeps rising. And that’s what this fallen world of death is like.
See, God had instituted for the people of Israel a daily system to confess their sins and make atonement and be purified through the priesthood. But then what about the sins that were missed?
Of the half million people who were responsible as individuals for keeping up with all of their own sins, and seeking purification for each one, what if somebody forgot one? Not just that, but what about the effects of sin?
The sins themselves are one thing, but then there is the pollution that was caused by sin. Sin trashes things. All year long the raging waters of exile and death were pushing up, and the flood waters would rise and encroach upon even the tabernacle itself.
The tabernacle is here, and then all around it, outside the camp, is exile and wilderness and death, and it’s just raging and rising and threatening. And what does God do about that?
Now he could bring judgment, because he’s done that before in the flood in Genesis 6. That was God saying, basically, Fine then, I’ll start over.
He has the authority and power to do that. God could just condemn the whole thing, but instead, God provides a way to clear all that sin and pollution.
The Day of Atonement was the day to basically reset everything as purified and made clean. The high priest and his family and the tabernacle itself, and the entire people. It was all cleansed. The pollution inside the camp was put back into order. This was the day when the flood waters were pushed back.
Israel needed that. They needed this Day of Atonement.
2) What happened on this day?
Both a summary of the Day of Atonement, and the process and details for the day are described in Chapter 16. I want us to look at this, but first, let me make one quick note on the terminology:
As we’ve explained the two different parts of the tabernacle, we’ve used the terms “Holy Place” and “Most Holy Place” — and the Bible talks this way. That’s the way Exodus 26 explains it when God gives the instructions for building the tabernacle; that’s also the way Hebrews 9 explains it in the New Testament — but, sometimes other terms are used. Sometimes the first part of the tabernacle is called broadly the “tent of meeting” or the “sanctuary.” Sometimes the Most Holy Place or literally “the Holy of Holies” is called the inner sanctuary, or “inside the veil”, or sometimes it’s actually just called the Holy Place. And that’s the case in Chapter 16.
In this chapter, the “tent of meeting” is the broader term used for the first section and the whole tabernacle, and then the Most Holy Place is just called the Holy Place. So heads up as we’re reading, when you see “Holy Place” that’s referring to the inner holy of holies where the ark of the covenant was.
Because, remember, that place is the setting and occasion of Chapter 16. Chapter 16 is continuing the story of Chapter 10. Back in Chapter 10, that’s when the two priests — the two sons of Aaron — died in the sanctuary, the first section of the tabernacle. And we infer from Chapter 16 that their main offense was that they had attempted to enter into the Most Holy Place. They were in the first section, and they tried to go into the second, inner section, and Yahweh consumed them with fire.
So now in Chapter 16, Yahweh, by his grace, is going to give details on how exactly someone is to enter that most holy place. You can’t just go in at any time however you want or you’re gonna die, and God doesn’t want priests to keep dying, so he gives these details. This is all grace. This is God making a way for atonement to happen. And before he explains the process of atonement, he clarifies the place of atonement.
Clarifying the Place
What is actually happening in the inner-most section of the tabernacle, behind the veil, at the ark of the covenant?
Well, the ark of the covenant had a lid, a slab of gold, that was called the mercy seat. And this was between the two cherubim on both sides of the ark. And that was the particular place where Yahweh said he would appear here on earth for this people. He says this in Chapter 16 verse 2,
“For I will appear in the cloud over the mercy seat.”
And this cloud is reminiscent of the pillar of cloud that went before Israel in their exodus from Egypt, and also it reminds us of the smoke at Mount Sinai (Exodus 13:21; 19:9).
This is the glory of God appearing in physical, visible space. Another word for this is that this is a “theophany.” That’s what it’s called when God appears to humans through intense visual contact. That’s what God is going to do in the holy of holies, right above the mercy seat of the ark of the covenant.
And this is important because, get this: within the Bible’s storyline, after the Garden of Eden, in the Old Testament this is the closest human approach to God’s presence there is. This is a big deal.
And with our imagination we can picture what it was like: God said he would appear in a cloud in verse 3. And then the high priest himself, in verses 12–13, would bring incense to put on the fire, which creates smoke. So this room, the Most Holy Place, was filled with incense smoke to cover the mercy seat and above that was the cloud. So imagine: this little space was full of smoke, and the symbolism was that the high priest was entering the heavenly realm. It’s in this world, but it’s so not of this world. That’s the idea! And that helps us make sense of the process.
Understanding the Process
Understandably, you don’t treat this place like any other place. Of all the places on the planet, this was where a human would encounter God, and so it required the most stipulated holiness. We see all the details for this beginning in verse 3:
It starts with how the high priest must prepare to enter in verses 3–5; then we see an overview of the atonement ceremony in verses 6–10; then in verse 11 we read the details of the ceremony. Then at the end of the chapter, starting in verse 29, we read a summary of the whole day as a statute for Israel going forward.
This Day of Atonement took place once a year — on the tenth day of the seventh month — which was a “Sabbath of sabbaths” for Israel. It was the most solemn day of the year. Nobody could work; everyone fasted. And only the high priest could enter the Most Holy Place while nobody else could even be in the tabernacle.
And there were all kinds of guidelines for the high priest. He had to take off his extravagant priestly vestments, bathe his body, and then put on simple linen garments. He had to find a bull and a ram for himself and his house, and then two goats and a ram for the people of Israel. And he had specific instructions about what to do with each of these, and in what order. And of these things “we cannot now speak in detail” (Hebrews 9:5), because I do want to focus on one part, verses 15–22.
The Real Center
That’s because verses 15–22 are the center of Chapter 16. And remember, Chapter 16 is the center of Leviticus, and Leviticus is the center of the Pentateuch. Which means, what we’re about to see is literally the center of the center of the center of the center.
And well what do we find here?! We need a drumroll!
We find two goats.
We first read an overview of these goats in verses 7–10. In verse 8 we read that there were two goats: one is sacrificed to Yahweh as a sin offering, and the other is sent to Azazel (verse 8 and 10). And what is Azazel?
Well, there’s a lot of debate on what this word means. Most English translations translate that word as “scapegoat,” but the English Standard Version, which many of us read, transliterates the word “Azazel” — “Azazel” is the actual Hebrew word. And whatever it means exactly, whether it’s a place or a thing in the wilderness, the main idea is that it’s in the wilderness. It’s way outside the camp, in exile. That’s where this goat is sent.
So again two goats: one sacrificed to Yahweh; the other sent away outside the camp into the wilderness. That’s the initial overview, and then verse 15 explains how it works.
The high priest had already entered behind the veil with the incense for the smoke, and then he took the blood of bull, which he sprinkled on the mercy seat to make atonement for himself and his house (verse 14).
Verse 15 is when the high priest performs the sin offering for the people. He kills the one goat and brings its blood inside the Most Holy Place, and he sprinkles it over the mercy seat and in front of the mercy seat. And by doing this, the high priest is making atonement for the Most Holy Place, and the whole tabernacle, and for all the people of Israel (verse 17).
And then the high priest goes out to the courtyard, to the Bronze Altar, and he sprinkles the goat blood mixed with the bull blood on the horns of the alter seven times to the cleanse that (vv. 18–19).
This is the way God prescribed atonement. It’s the covering — it’s how to close the gap between God and his people, and push back the waters. The idea is that purification is happening from the inside-out. From the inner-most section of the tabernacle, the Most Holy Place, to the whole tabernacle, to the altar. The pollution of sin — the floodwaters of a fallen world of death that have been rising — are being pushed back. This blood ritual of the one goat was about cleansing, but remember that’s just one part. The second part has to do with the second goat, the live goat.
Verse 21 says that Aaron, the high priest, is to take this live goat and lay both his hands on the head of the live goat and confess over it,
“all the iniquities of the people of Israel, and all their transgressions, all their sins.”
The high priest transfers all that sin to the goat, and verse 22, the goat shall “bear all their iniquities” and then the goat is led outside the camp, in exile, and is banished out in the wilderness. And the symbolism here is that all of these sins are removed.
The blood of the one goat cleanses from the defilement of sin, and the exile of the other goat symbolizes the removal of the sins themselves. In both cases, the goats are a substitute for the people, making atonement, bridging the gap, pushing back the flood waters.
When Yahweh Proclaimed His Name
And this is absolutely central to the Pentateuch because it answers the question of how God can justly forgive sin. Sin is real and the effects of sin are real, and God doesn’t overlook that. Forgiveness doesn’t mean ignoring sin. It means dealing with it righteously. So this is crucial to the heart and character of God!
Look at verse 21 again. This is important. Look at that phrase,
“all the iniquities of the people of Israel, and all their transgressions, all their sins.”
See that? There’s only one other place in the Pentateuch where the three words show up together. It’s back in Exodus 34, when Yahweh proclaimed his name to Moses. Do y’all remember that? It was another theophany. Yahweh shows Moses his glory. He declared his name. Listen to this, Exodus 34:6,
Yahweh passed before [Moses] and proclaimed, “Yahweh, Yahweh, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty"
So God says that’s who he is! That’s his glory! He forgives sin righteously. He forgives iniquity and transgression and sin while also not ignoring the guilty. How?!
Leviticus 16 shows us. He transfers the iniquity, transgression, and sin to a substitute. These goats are stand-ins, both as a blood sacrifice for the guilt and as a removal of the sin.
That’s what happened on the Day of Atonement.
3) Where is this day pointing?
The entire levitical system required the people of Israel to have faith in Yahweh. The point of the high priest only wearing linen garments, and the point of the Sabbath and the fast, was that the people were surrendering themselves to God. They were humbling themselves, showing their trust in God.
Any kind of heartless, faithless repetition of these blood rituals doesn’t work, which is why it didn’t.
We’ll skip ahead in the Old Testament storyline a little, but the the tabernacle became the temple, and Israel grew as a nation. The Day of Atonement continued to be observed, but the flood waters also continued to rise, until eventually, because of the people’s faithlessness — because of their sin and rebellion and idolatry — the whole thing was under water, and Yahweh removed his glory from the temple (Ezekiel 10:18–19). God’s presence left. The people’s faithlessness proved the utter failure of the old covenant.
And the world as we know it, basically, flooded with the pollution of sin. It seemed as though this fallen world of death had prevailed, but for the promises of God.
Because like God had promised to Adam and Eve, and to Abraham, and to Moses, and to David, and the prophets, God, in the fullness of time, sent a Savior into this world. God sent the Messiah, Jesus, his Son, the second person of the Holy Trinity.
And do we know what this means?
The New Testament makes this clear. Jesus means that the glory of God, the very presence of God that descended in a cloud above the mercy seat, now in Jesus that dwelled within a person. God himself, in all of his glory, became a human like us.
See, Jesus is the embodiment of the Most Holy Place and rather than push back the flood waters, he actually stepped into the flood waters. He stepped into this fallen world of death. And the purpose was to make atonement. He came here to be the covering, to be the bridge of the gap, to end the flood waters — not for ethnic, physical Israel, but for everyone who believes in him.
Jesus is the Day of Atonement, and we can see his comprehensive fulfillment of that day, as the New Testament Book of Hebrews shows us. Jesus is both our High Priest and he is our substitute. He is the goats.
That’s what Jesus did when he died on the cross. He was the blameless substitute who died for us. He shed his blood in our place to cleanse us and as our scapegoat, he removed all of our sins. The New Testament writers say over and over again that Jesus bore our sins — which is language from Leviticus 16. All of our iniquities and transgressions and sins were put on him, carried by him, removed by him.
He died for us, and he was banished into exile, into the grave, into death itself. But then what happened?
On the third day Jesus was raised from the dead. And he ascended into heaven, and when he entered the presence of God, that heavenly Most Holy Place, Jesus entered as our high priest, and he brought not the blood of bulls and goats, but he brought his own blood. He is our High Priest who makes atonement and he is our atoning sacrifice. He is the one who sprinkles the blood, and the blood he sprinkles is his own. And the Book of Hebrews tells us that because of this Jesus secured our eternal redemption.
Christian, do you have any idea how forgiven you are?
God, who could justly condemn you, has forgiven you — not a little bit, not for a temporary time, but he has forgiven you completely and forever in Jesus Christ.
What a Savior! Hallelujah, church, what a Savior! Lord Jesus, we praise you! We honor you! To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever! And all God’s people said Amen!
The Table
And now we come to this Table, which is the New Covenant ritual to remember what Jesus has done. This bread represents his body. This cup represents his blood, which was poured out for you.
So this morning if you trust in Jesus, if you have put your faith in Jesus and received God’s forgiveness, take, eat and drink.
