1481 - “The Day of Atonement & 5 things you need to know about Sacrifice & Offering” Leviticus 16

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Welcome to On the Way with Tony Crisp. Each weekday, Dr. Crisp will be discussing biblical passages, people, places, and prophecies. Tune in daily to start your day right and deepen your understanding of how to better walk the way and enjoy the journey. Here's your host, Dr. Tony Crisp.

SPEAKER_00 0:20

Welcome to On the Way. This is Tony Crisp, and this is Podcast 1481. We continue our study of the deep crimson river that runs through the book of Leviticus. And as we go through the great Moed, the great appointed times, the Moedin, then we come to the holiest day of all, and that is the Day of Atonement. Leviticus 16 deals with this in great detail. But we have to get to the Day of Atonement. And so with all of these feasts and festivals that we've talked about so far, we have looked in many podcasts at Passover. I've gone into it in detail. It's the feast of unleavened bread, it's the day of the offering of the first fruits of the barley harvest, it's the promise of more to come. From that day, forty-nine days are counted, that is a week of Sabbaths, of Sabbath days, and then you have the fiftieth day in Greek that is Pentecost, fiftieth. But it is called Shavuot in Hebrew. That is the feast of weeks. That is in early summer. It's usually in May or June, early June, and then you have the summer months. And in the fall of the year, the first day of the seventh month is Yom Turua, the day of the trumpet blasting. And that is the first day of the civil year. Now Jubilee was counted from that. Now I want you to understand that this is a second New Year. This is a civil new year. Whereas with the day of unleavened bread, the Passover, that's the beginning of the year. Nisan, that is the Old Testament pre Babylonian captivity name Aviv, A V I V or A B I B, B as in Boy, and then Aviv, which is the modern pronunciation as in Victor. And that is the name of spring, not spring as in Hebrew Ein or in. Rather it is the spring of the year. It's a new beginning. God said I want you to begin everything in this month, because it is when the grass comes in, when the flowers come, the early and latter rains have now taken place. And God has renewed everything. And that's what Aviv is all about. That's what Nisan is all about. That's what Passover is all about, a new beginning. But there was another new beginning in the fall of the year, in the early fall, and that usually happens in September, October, when Yom Tarua, Rosh Hashanah, it's called the head of the year. Rosh is the word or Rosh for headshana is the word for year. Rosh Hashanah the head of the year. And so it's the beginning. And from Rosh Hashanah, from Yom Tarua, the blasting of the trumpets, when everything starts over again, you count ten days. Now ten days are now called the days of awe. And the reason you count ten days is so that you can come to Yom Kippur, the day of covering. That's what Kafar means. It means to cover. This is exactly what God did. He gave the people ten days from the head of the year to reflect, to repent, to look back over the year, look back over their lives. And he had this every year so that the people would take inventory of where they've been, who they've wronged, how they need to get right. That was impossible without the shedding of blood. The book of Hebrews says, without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness, there's no remission. And so Yom Kippur was an elaborate ceremony, the holiest day of the year, and it is still a holy day. It's a day of fasting. Many times I will share with congregations and studies and conferences that I'm doing that in many ways it is not right and inaccurate to call the feast just that, the feast of Israel. Because some are feasts, some are days of festivities and festivals as we would call them, but other days are fast days when a person is to reflect and repent and examine their lives before God, such as the day of Yom Kippur, the day of covering. And this comes ten days after a period of reflection and repentance, getting right with God, coming to the Lord clean so he can cover us. And so I want to just bring out several things about this concept of atonement and the day of atonement. Number one, whether it is the earlier sacrifices that we've looked at, the five sacrifices of Leviticus one through five, and we've gone over those. You can go back. Each one of the first chapters has a different sacrifice, a different offering is a better way to say it, because some did not involve sacrifice as in animals always being killed. But what happens when there was an animal being killed? Well, I want to just point out, if I could, uh, today, just about five things about the Day of Atonement and the offerings in general that had to do with animal sacrifices. Number one, the sacrifice represented the life of the one who seeks to be right with God. You see, man knows that he's out of joint with God, that we have sinned. All have sinned and come short of the glory of God. That's what Paul told the Romans in chapter three. And that was a conclusion. The Hebrews had sinned, the heathen, those without God had sinned. And according to Romans chapter one, there is an intuitive, subjective, internal voice inside of us, a knowledge inside of us. It's intuitive that we are sinners, and that there is a God. Now we may not know his name, we may not know anything about him, but we know there is a great creator, a great designer, and everyone knows that. And when someone says I'm an atheist, they have chosen that and made a choice about God. And the book of Romans says that when they have a knowledge of God, they're not grateful to him, they don't want to be accountable to him, they don't want to give glory to him, and so they set on that knowledge, they suppress it, they press it down. It's not that they don't have it, they don't want to acknowledge it. That's part of the sinful nature. We want to do our own thing, we want to be our own God. The greatest sin that plagues a humanity today is what has always plagued us, and that is humanism. That man is the center of everything, and that we make the decisions. We're the arbiter of what is right and wrong, and that is nothing more than selfish sin and self-righteousness. The animal sacrifices when a person brought an animal, it had to be a certain kind, it had to be the best of the flock, it had to be pure, without spotter, without blemish. They would bring this to God. It represented their own life. And so the sacrifice represented the life of the one who was seeking to know God, to get right with God. That's number one. Number two, the animal was sacrificed that is, was slaughtered, was killed, in place of as a substitute for the person who was doing the offering. In other words, in the grace of God, God gave them a picture of him sparing their life and some thing innocent, some animal that could never take away sin. Hebrews chapter 10 says, it is impossible. It's not possible that the blood of bulls and goats can take away sin. That's not even thinkable. But it represented the heart of this seeker coming to God, knowing that they've sinned, knowing they cannot save themselves, knowing that they deserve death, knowing that their own blood need to be shed, but they brought this animal as prescribed by God as a substitute, as a payment for their sin. And that brings me to the third thing. There are two concepts associated with sacrifice. One is expiation, the other is propitiation. Now, those are two big words that have not difficult meanings. Expiation has to do with the payment owed. And so when they brought this lamb, this animal, this goat, this ram, whatever it was, a bull, when they brought that before God, it was a certain kind, uh without blemish, without spot, the very best, it represented a spotless offering, a sinless offering. That animal had not done anything. No, it was in place of and in the payment for the sins of the offerer. And so every time that you had this sacrifice uh going on, it was expiation, that is, it was paying a debt that was owed to God. If anything, it was an act of obedience. It could never take away the sin, but it was a a worshiper saying, God, I I I'm I'm offering this, please take this in my stead until Messiah, the anointed one, the promised one comes, and he pays the ultimate penalty as the Lamb of God, not one that we have raised, not one that we have bought, but one that you gave. For God so loved the world, he so loved the world that he gave his one of a kind son. This translated only begotten is the word mono ganace. Mono means one as an only. Ganes, if I use the soft G sound that's in our language, it's spelled G E N E. That's a long E sound as in they Genace, Genais. G-E-N-E-S, the S is an inflection, tells you where it is placed in the sentence as far as syntax and whether it's a subject or whether it is another part of the sentence. But it means gene. What does the gene, G-E-N E, have to do? It has to do with our DNA. It has to do with who we are, it has to do with our very makeup. Well, that is saying to us, for God so loved the world that he gave his one of a kind son, mono one of a kind. Kind comes from the word Ganes, gene. God gave his single gened son, his one of a kind son, one and only. Jesus is unique in that he has God as his father, and he has an earthly mother. And the sin nature is passed on through the father, not through the mother, by the sin of one man, by the sin of Adam, not Eve, but the sin of Adam, the seed is passed on that produces sin in every one of us. Now what does the sin nature mean? What that means is that you and I are born inherently within us, seed within us. We are born with an inclination to sin, with a propensity to sin, with a desire to sin, an openness to sin. And as soon as we can make a choice, we will sin. That's what the sin nature is. Adam was made perfect. He had no sin. He was placed into a world that had never known sin. It was through him that sin came into the world, and the curse came through Adam. But he was absolutely perfect into a pristine garden, and he was privileged to walk with God, to see God, to know God, to hear his voice, to commune with him. But that was all broken, and sin and shame and degradation and decay started immediately when that happened. All of that has to do with a debt that we owe, and the debt is death. For the wages of sin is death. Wages is what you earn. That's what we have earned by our own life, not the life of Jesus. We're not saved by what we can do. Our just desert is hell, is separation from God forever in a place of torment and flame and outer darkness. But by the grace of God, by what we do not deserve, by God giving us in Christ what we do not deserve, God in his mercy withholding from us what we do deserve, he sent Jesus, his one of a kind Son, spotless, sinless, who would have never had to die, but he chose to die to pay for your sins and mine. And so the second Adam, the Lord Jesus, just as all in Adam die, if you come to Jesus, as he draws you to himself, then you will become in Christ. You will be identified with Christ. And as in one man in Adam all die, all who are in Jesus live. We're going to live and spend eternity with the Father in heaven because of Jesus. We are in him. But the fourth thing I want to talk to you about is not expiation, but propitiation. Whereas expiation is an emphasis on payment owed. Propitiation speaks of satisfaction for the just wrath of God being appeased. In other words, God is love, yes, but he's righteous, he's holy, and we can never ever be in his presence and live in his presence. But when Jesus died, Jesus not only paid the penalty for our sin, but he became a substitute, and he took the righteous wrath of God, and it cost him his life. And so he died as a substitute for us. Yes, he paid our sin debt, but he died in our stead. And finally, the laying on of hands of the goat and the scapegoat, the one who died and the one who was taken off into the wilderness representing the resurrection of Jesus. They laid hands. Laying on of hands is identification. This is why the Apostle Paul told his young protege Timothy, he said, Lay hands on no one suddenly. That means don't identify yourself with everybody who wants to be ordained just because they say, I've got a call to preach. They need to first be proven. They need to manifest a life of obedience to God and consecration, dedication to God that evidences salvation, that evidences the call of God, the unique call of God upon a man's life to preach the gospel and to serve Him as a way of life and in the preaching of the Word of God for a special mission. I've given you those five things. Number one, sacrifice represented the life of the one who was seeking to be right with God. The animal was sacrificed in place of as a substitute for to pay the penalty. That's the grace of God in giving us that analogy and that object lesson. Number three, expiation. Number four, propitiation. And number five, I want you to understand the laying on of hands had to do with identification. And we still do that today when we pray for the sick. We anoint them, we put hands on them, we pray for them, and we say, Identify with you in your sickness. We're asking God the Holy Spirit, the symbol of the oil, as we put it on the person that we're praying for, his elders. And as we anoint them, we're saying, May God's Holy Spirit heal you. And so I pray that things are beginning to make sense to you. May God help you to connect the dots. As you walk on the way, this is Tony Crisp.

SPEAKER_01 17:41

Thanks for listening to On the Way with Tony Crisp. Tune in every weekday for information on biblical passages, people, places, and prophecies. Fridays are for your questions. Email your questions to questions at TonyCrisp.org. Then just listen for your question to be answered on Friday's podcast. That's questions at TonyC R I S P dot org. Thanks for listening and have a blessed day on the way.