Introduction
So far in this Before the Cross series, we’ve seen two stunning prophetic pictures from the Old Testament of Jesus and his sufferings.
Two weeks ago, we saw in Genesis, the first book in the Bible, a loving father gives up his only son. And the last Sunday, we saw in Exodus, the second book in the Bible, the blood of an innocent lamb on crossed planks of wood turns away God’s wrath. Today, we come to the third volume of holy scripture. Hands up those of you whose favourite book in the Bible is Leviticus…
If you’ve read it, you’ll have struggled perhaps to see anything about Jesus there at all. If you’re not yet familiar with Leviticus, let me whet your appetite by telling you it’s packed full of instructions concerning sacrificial offerings, regulations about infectious diseases, directives about festivals, laws regulating ritual cleanliness and exhaustive lists of what you mustn’t eat and who (or what) you cannot have sex with. Leviticus is, for 21st Century Western minds, a pretty challenging read, let’s not pretend otherwise.
So it might help a little to take a look at the outline of this strange book. It’s actually a seven-layer sandwich.
The first section corresponds to the last section; before Jesus came, how did people have to deal with sin and what are sin’s consequences?
The second section relates to the sixth section; before Jesus came, how was worship to be led and by whom?
The third section is echoed by the fifth; before Jesus came, how could what is unclean be purified to become clean before God, and how could what is common be consecrated to be made holy?
It’s very carefully constructed but, as you can see here, the pivotal section and central focus of the book is chapter 16.
Everything before builds up to it, and everything after flows out from it. This is the most hallowed day in the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur, or in English, the Day of Atonement. Some rabbis simply refer to it as “The Day.”
This is the chapter we’re going to look at this morning, because it points ahead to Jesus and his sufferings in the most vivid way.
We’re not going to read all of it because it’s quite long and a bit repetitive. So I’ll read selected verses, starting at v6.
Aaron is to offer the bull for his own sin offering to make atonement for himself and his household. Then he is to take the two goats and present them before the Lord at the entrance to the tent of meeting. He is to cast lots for the two goats—one lot 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 shall be presented alive before the Lord to be used for making atonement by sending it into the wilderness as a scapegoat.
On to v15:
He shall then slaughter the goat for the sin offering for the people and take its blood behind the curtain and do with it as he did with the bull’s blood: He shall sprinkle it on the atonement cover and in front of it. In this way he will make atonement for the Most Holy Place because of the uncleanness and rebellion of the Israelites, whatever their sins have been. He is to do the same for the tent of meeting, which is among them in the midst of their uncleanness.
On to v20:
When Aaron has finished making atonement for the Most Holy Place, the tent of meeting and the altar, he shall bring forward the live goat. He is to lay both hands on the head of the live goat and confess over it all the wickedness and rebellion of the Israelites—all their sins—and put them on the goat’s head. He shall send the goat away into the wilderness in the care of someone appointed for the task. The goat will carry on itself all their sins to a remote place; and the man shall release it in the wilderness.
Then v29:
This is to be a lasting ordinance for you: On the tenth day of the seventh month you must deny yourselves and not do any work - whether native-born or a foreigner residing among you - because on this day atonement will be made for you, to cleanse you. Then, before the Lord, you will be clean from all your sins.
The Problem of Sin
All the way through our passage, and I highlighted it for you, is this repeated word “sin.” But more and more in our God-rejecting, self-exalting culture, this word is going out of fashion.
People feel less and less comfortable speaking about good and evil, preferring words like appropriate and inappropriate. But that’s not the language God uses; he tells us the uncomfortable truth about our human nature, spoiled by the fall.
There are three words in Leviticus 16 that show how serious a problem sin is for us.
The first word, and it comes in v16, is “uncleanness.” Our behaviour, our thoughts, our words bring a kind of spiritual pollution into our lives. So, when the New Testament speaks of the blood of Christ cleansing us from the stain of sin it means God loves us and wants to wipe away everything that’s dirty and impure from our conscience.
The second word, and it appears in v21 is “wickedness.” This word carries the idea that there is a perversion wired into our human nature. We have, from birth, an inclination to treasure idols over finding our spiritual satisfaction in the perfections of Christ.
The Anglican Book of Common Prayer, published in 1662, had a very keen sense of this. Every Sunday, the congregation wouldpray the following words on their knees:
“Almighty God, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Maker of all things, Judge of all men: we acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness, which we from time to time most grievously have committed, by thought, word, and deed, against thy Divine Majesty, provoking most justly thy wrath and indignation against us.”
And this wasn’t a special service for crooks and thugs and chainsaw murderers. This was genteel spinsters and upright gentlemen at Evensong in country churches! That liturgy was written by proper theologians who knew from scripture that of us have fallen short of the glory of God and are, by nature, unless restrained by grace, predisposed to spiritual decay.
The third word, and it also appears here in v21 is “rebellion.” Sin is not just a little slip up here and there, sin is rebellion against God. We all, at times knowingly and wilfully, choose paths that are the wrong ones. But the New Testament speaks of peace with God through Christ, meaning God is turning that hard, rebellious heart of mine into a softened, willing heart.
Derek Tidball in his book The Message of the Cross calls sin “a catch-all word” for any offence, “serious or trivial, deliberate or unintentional, conscious or unconscious, visible or invisible, an act or a disposition, consisting of commission or omission.”
All that to say we have to militate against our culture’s apathy and scepticism towards this deadly reality the Bible calls sin. Sin opens up a chasm, a seemingly unbridgeable gulf, between us and God. It’s usually the root cause of why people say, “God seems so far away from me at the moment.” That’s because sin distances us from God.
That’s the problem then. Sin. And it’s massive. We badly need a solution. And the Day of Atonement points forward to what that solution is. Atonement is all about the solution to the problem of sin. It’s about how our offences are forgiven and forgotten by God.
Guilt and Shame
To sum up what we read a few moments ago, Aaron the priest first has to take a young bull, and this innocent life will die. Why? Its blood will be shed and it will breathe its last to remind Aaron in graphic detail how deadly serious his own sin is before he can presume to minister on behalf of the entire nation.
Once purified from his own personal sin, Aaron must then take two goats. Why two? Why is one not enough? It’s because our sin has two terrible consequences, guilt and shame, and this goes right back to the Garden of Eden.
Remember back to Adam and Eve, firstly they brought guilt on themselves by tasting the forbidden fruit, and secondly, they hid from God, embarrassed by their nakedness, because of the shame they felt.
Every time we sin, or are sinned against, we follow the exact same pattern; we become aware of our guilt and we becometroubled by our shame.
So, on the Day of Atonement, the first goat is all about the guilt we carry, and the second is all about the shame we feel.
And the Day of Atonement points ahead to a Messiah, an innocent life, who will not only totally wipe away the guilt of sin from us for the wrongs done by us, but also forever lift from us the shame that results from the wrongs done to us.
The blood of bulls and goats could never permanently take away sin, it never lasted long, but Christ made on the cross, once and for all, a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world.
So next time Satan points at you accusingly and mockingly and says, “Just look at your sin!” God, our defender, can talk back to him “Yes, but just look at my Son!”
I heard last year about a Christian young woman who sobbed as she described the night she had given her virginity to her boyfriend, instead of waiting for marriage.
Although it happened years earlier, tears rolled down her face as she offloaded her story. She had been troubled for weeks by a sense of guilt. “I went into the bathroom and vomited all night,” she said. But she knew she could be forgiven. What had haunted her though and driven her away from God for, not weeks but years, was the shame.
“I would be so mortified if any of my Christian friends found out,” she said. “I felt I couldn’t go back to church. I felt so uncomfortable because of the secret I hid away. So I have spent years away from God in a spiritual wilderness, paralysed by a suffocating blanket of shame.”
She was responsible for her sin - she never resisted her boyfriend’s advances - and then she felt guilty. But at the same time, her boyfriend sinned against her. He should have defended her purity, which is what deep down she really wanted - but he didn’t do that. Being sinned against is what brought that sense of shame; it was a defilement in her soul.
We all experience guilt, and we all know what shame feels like.
The Goat for Guilt
Once a year then, the Israelites were commanded to sacrifice a goat, the first of the two. It represented the life of the whole nation. When its blood was shed in the Most Holy Place, the sacred presence of God would symbolically bring cleansing and release from all that guilt. Aaron would then come out trembling from the Most Holy Place and declare to the people that their sin had been removed.
Just like that first goat, but far more effectively, Jesus shed his innocent blood to atone for the guilt we feel. Pilate declared Jesus not guilty of any offence, and no one could find any fault in him, and yet he took the blame for all our offences, all our wrongdoing, all the sorry mess we make of our lives, all of it. By faith, we are made right with God, and our guilt is taken away forever.
The Book of Hebrews shows how much better Christ’s atonement is than anything we read about in Leviticus. The Day of Atonement, Hebrews says, “can never, by the same sacrifices repeated endlessly year after year, make perfect those who draw near to worship” (10.1). “But Jesus entered the Most Holy Place once for all, [six times the inspired author uses that expression in Hebrews] once for all by his own blood, thus obtaining eternal [not temporary, not provisional, not momentary] but eternalredemption” (9.12).
The Goat for Shame
Then, Aaron would place his hands on the second goat, again symbolising the sins of the entire nation. But this time, he would drive the poor animal away to die outside the city bearing the shame of the people’s sin.
In 1854, the Pre-Raphaelite artist William Holman Hunt painted a picture of this ill-fated beast. You can see it if ever you visit the Lever Art Gallery in Liverpool.
Look at the scapegoat, (this where our English word comes from by the way, from Leviticus 16). Look at him, doomed down by the Dead Sea, surrounded by the bones of last year’s victim. Look at his sunken eyes, his panting mouth, dry and thirsty, as Jesus was on the cross. Look how his legs seem to be giving way; he is barely able to stand, such is the exhaustion of his being burdened by the weight of a whole nation’s sin.
This innocent life died carrying away the people’s shame into the wilderness and in doing so it prefigures the Lord Jesus, who died, abandoned and exposed, outside the city walls.
You are looking at a prophetic portrait of Christ.
There are over 40 verses in the NT that specifically emphasize how the death of Jesus is “for us,” in the place of us, as a substitute for us.
Here are some of them:
While we were yet sinners Christ died for us (Romans 5.8)
Christ suffered for us (1 Peter 3.18)
Jesus was a means of propitiation for our sins (1 John 4.10)
This is my body/blood given for you (Luke 22.20)
Jesus died for us (Romans 14.15)
God made him who had no sin to become sin for us (2 Corinthians 5.21)
Christ became a curse for us (Galatians 3.13)
Christ Jesus who gave himself up as a ransom for all (1 Timothy 2.6)
Christ loved us and gave himself up for us (Ephesians 5.2)
By the grace of God he might taste death for us (Hebrews 2.9)
He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only, but for the sins of the whole world (1 John 2.2)
Ending
Atonement brings cleansing and forgiveness and healing and peace with God. It’s the most powerful force on Earth.
In 2015 the BBC news website carried a news feature called “My 25 Years as a Prostitute.” It was about a woman called Brenda Myers-Powell who was just a child when she became a prostitute in the early 1970s. She grew up in Chicago.
Her 16 year-old mother died when Brenda was six months old. Her grandmother, who drank heavily, took care of her. I say “take care of her,” in fact she did anything but. Brenda’s grandmother would bring drinking partners home from the bar and after she got intoxicated and passed out these men would do unspeakable things to Brenda as a little girl.
It started when she was just four or five years old and it became a regular occurrence. “These were not relationships,” she said, “no-one's bringing me any flowers here, trust me on that - they're using my body like a toilet.” By the time she was 14, she'd already given birth to two baby girls.
Over 25 years, she was manipulated, raped, locked in a closet, trafficked, shot 5 times, stabbed 13 times, but couldn't go to the police because if she did she wouldn't be taken seriously.
When she was nearly 40 years old, a customer threw her out of his car. Her dress got caught in the door and she was dragged six blocks along the ground, tearing the skin off her face and the side of her body. She went to hospital and they immediately took her to the emergency room. A police officer looked her over and said: “Oh I know her. She's just a hooker. She probably beat some guy and took his money and got what she deserved.”
They pushed her out into the waiting room as if she was worth nothing. And it was at that moment, while she was waiting for the next shift to start and for a different hospital staff to attend to her injuries, that she looked up and said to God, “These people don't care about me. Could you please help me?”
And this is her testimony: “God worked real fast. A doctor came and took care of me and she asked me to go and see social services in the hospital. They admitted me to a place called Genesis House. It was a safe house, run by the Church. They told me to take my time and stay as long as I needed - and I stayed almost two years. My face healed, and then my soul healed.”
She started to do some volunteering in a ministry to sex workers and she helped a university researcher with her fieldwork. She told the girls, “That's who I was, that's where I was. This is who I am now. You can change too, you can heal too.” At the time of the article, 13 girls were either in University or had full scholarships. At 11, 12, 13 years old, they were totally damaged. And now they're reaching for the stars.
After three years, Brenda met a man who wooed her and loved her and married her. She says, “He didn't judge me for any of the things that had happened before we met. When he looked at me, he didn't even see those things - he says all he saw was a girl with a pretty smile that he wanted to be a part of his life.” They celebrated 20 years of marriage last year.
In 2012, she became the first woman in the state of Illinois to have her convictions for prostitution wiped from her record. Her two daughters, who were raised by her aunt, grew up to be, in her words, “awesome young ladies.” One is a doctor and one works in criminal justice. “So” she says, “I am here to tell you - there is life after so much damage, there is life after so much trauma. There is life after people have told you that you are nothing, that you are worthless and that you will never amount to anything. There is life - and I'm not just talking about a little bit of life. There is a lot of life.”
“The blood of Christ,” as Charles Wesley wrote, “makes the foulest clean.” And, brothers and sisters, there’s a lot of life because one innocent man, the most beautiful life ever lived, shed his blood, taking on himself all our guilt and all our shame and removing them – forever.
Sermon preached at King's Church Darlington, 16 March 2025
