12: He Covers Us

[00:00] Stephanie: Season 2, episode 12. Today we are continuing our Lessons from the Wilderness series with a look at the Day of Atonement.

Hello, Father.

[00:09] Marcus: Hello, Daughter. Here we are at the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur.

[00:14] Stephanie: Oh, it’s a very good piece of Leviticus, which we were just talking about last week. I was really enjoying that conversation. That was really, really good.

[00:24] Marcus: Probably why we went long.

[00:27] Stephanie: Before we jump in, I have another Would-You-Rather icebreaker. This one is not quite genealogies and law. I went hobbies for this one so would you rather take a pottery class or a woodworking class?

[00:47] Marcus: Ah, excellent question. I’m gonna go woodworking, I think primarily because my dad was very much into woodworking, and so it sounds fun to learn how to do that. So I’ll lean that direction. How about you?

[01:02] Stephanie: Mm hmm. Same. I like both directions. I would have fun doing either class, but I had the same thought of grandpa and even just thinking about the lovely bookshelves that he made and how I can never quite find a bookshelf exactly how I want it, and I should just make my own. So yeah. All right, well, thank you.

Let’s start with the basics. When we say Day of Atonement, some people might just not understand what that is or have a basic understanding. So what do we mean?

[01:34] Marcus: The basics. The Day of Atonement was the one day of the year when the high priests could enter the holy of holies. So, you know, the tabernacle is laid out in three parts. There’s the general court. Then there’s the holy place that has the menorah candlestick. It’s got the altar of incense. It’s got a table where they replace the bread every day. And then in the holy of holies is the ark. And the ark has the two stone tablets in it. At this point, that’s all it’s got in it. Eventually, other things will be added.

But the Ark of the Covenant, it’s got the two tablets of the Covenant in it. It’s got the cherubim wings over it. And this was the only day of the year that the high priest would come in. He would offer a sacrifice and pour blood on what’s called the mercy seat and God himself would appear over this mercy seat, and he would essentially extend to Israel the guarantee of his presence for the year to come. So it was a very important day. It’s also the only required fast day in the Hebrew calendar.

I find it kind of interesting because there are three whole weeks of feasting that are required. It’s like, you must have a good time. It says it in the law you will have joy and you’re going to eat, and you’re going to drink, and you’re going to be with neighbors and friends, and this is going to be a party. There are three weeks of mandatory parties in the Old Testament, but there is one day of fasting, and it is Yom Kippur.

So people, at 06:00 p.m., would begin their fast until the next day at 06:00 p.m. And remembering that days in that culture did not start at midnight, they started at 06:00 p.m. and went to the following day, so that would have been the one day fast. Which actually means, the way we think of it, if it started on Wednesday at six and ended Thursday at six, they might have actually eaten on Wednesday and Thursday both, but there would have been a 24-hour period there.

[03:41] Stephanie: Mm hmm. Very good. Interesting. So, in terms of people who do talk about the Day of Atonement, we tend to see two mistakes people make in interpreting it. Is that diving too quickly?

[03:58] Marcus: I don’t think so, because atonement is in some ways the core doctrine of the Christian faith. When we talk about Jesus making atonement for the sins of the world, that’s huge. That is the foundational doctrine on which everything else is based. So what Jesus did at the cross is that he shed his blood to make atonement for our sins. Well, that’s as basic to the Christian faith as you can get.

And so when you have a day in the Old Testament that’s called the Day of Atonement, it is easy to read back into it everything that Jesus did at the cross as being a part of what happened in the Old Testament, and that’s simply not the case. And you can do it both directions. You can start with the Old Testament and go, well, based on what they’re doing here, then maybe this is what’s happening with Jesus. Both words are used, but they have a slightly different meaning.

Atonement in its core is not so much about morality as it is about ceremony. And again, this gets back to the idea of holiness and dealing with the sacred. And what atonement did is atonement dealt with cleanness and uncleanness issues. It was dealing with anything that would have made you ceremonially unclean. I’m having trouble saying that today!

[05:20] Stephanie: See, now I want to try.

[05:21] Marcus: I know it’s hard. And then that would keep you from being permitted into holy space and into the presence of a holy God. And so it wasn’t fundamentally about sin in the moral sense that we think of it. It was fundamentally a sin in the sense of what has made me unclean this year, and how do I, once again, get back to a state of cleanness so that God and I can be in infinite fellowship with one another?

For example, atonement in the Old Testament isn’t about moral sins in the sense that if I commit adultery, there is a penalty and it is death. I am to be stoned to death if I sleep with another man’s wife. Now, I can’t get out of that death penalty by running to the tabernacle and offering a sacrifice and saying, “Atonement was made, I’m good.” That’s not how that worked. Atonement didn’t get you out of penalties for sin like that. So if I kill somebody and murder them, I can’t run to the tabernacle, offer a sacrifice, make atonement, and I’m good.

Because again, atonement in that setting should be thought of more ceremonially, that it should be ceremonial as opposed to moral. In the New Testament, there’s both. There’s both this ceremonial and moral aspect to it, that Jesus is making atonement for all sin. That is, in every way that we fall short and everything that would keep us from the presence of God. And so there is a cleanness factor in the New Testament, but there’s also a moral cleanness factor that isn’t quite as present in the Old Testament.

[07:08] Stephanie: Yes, that’s a good comparison. There’s a lot of overlap in what is meant by atonement, but it’s not a one to one correlation. So we shouldn’t just, anything we learn about atonement in the Old Testament, read it into the New Testament, and we shouldn’t, anything we learned about atonement in the New Testament, read it into the Old Testament. They can inform each other but they’re not a one to one.

[07:26] Marcus: Right.

[07:28] Stephanie: So do you want to talk about the intriguing warfare element in both Old Testament and New Testament?

[07:36] Marcus: Yes. So I grew up studying the NIV pretty much through most of my twenties, thirties and forties. That was the pew Bible in the church. In the NiV, when you get to Leviticus 16, talks about the scapegoat. And it’s this idea that there are two goats, and the high priest lays his hands on one goat’s head, and there’s this substitutionary thing taking place. It’s usually taught as all of the moral sins of the people are placed on this goat. One of them is killed, and then the other one is taken out into the desert, never to be seen again, and that one, in the NIV, is called the scapegoat.

And so I heard a lot of preaching on this idea that this scapegoat represents how our moral sin is taken away as far as the east is from the west, never to be seen again. And that’s true. And I find this has been true of a lot of teaching, and that is that the final point that the preacher was making was true, but how they got there wasn’t completely biblical. It’s one of those things that we run into now and then. So if you read the ESV, instead of translating that ‘the scapegoat’, or like here’s Christian Standard Bible calls it ‘the uninhabitable place’, the goat that’s going to the uninhabitable place. Well, scapegoat, uninhabitable place. And then the ESV translates this ‘Azazel’, and you’re like, “What?”

[09:06] Stephanie: That’s just a transliteration.

[09:08] Marcus: Yeah, they just transliterate the Hebrew. And what they’re realizing is that we know from both the Book of Enoch and other intertestamental literature and from archaeology that there was a god that was worshipped named Azazel. In fact, according to Enoch, he was one of the original watchers who descended from heaven and mated with women to create the Nephilim, and so the idea is that Azazel is sort of like this demon spirit out in the wilderness.

And so this raises all kinds of questions. Was one of these goats for Yahweh and one of these goats for Azazel? And what’s going on with that, if that’s the case? The idea is not that Azazel needs to be placated, that he needs to be worshipped, but that, in a sense, he gets the refuse and he gets the junk, and God is sending all the junk his way. It’s like, “Here.”

[10:02] Stephanie: “Here’s your due.”

[10:02] Marcus: “Here’s what you’re due. You get all the trash and all the garbage.” So the spiritual warfare element here is that I do lean in this direction. That is probably the correct interpretation, that you had one goat that was a sacrifice to Yahweh, and you had another one where Azazel is being given all the trash. “Here’s all the stuff being sent out to you.” And so that’s a very different way of looking at it than some of us were probably taught, especially if you’re comparing it to uninhabitable places and scapegoats.

[10:35] Stephanie: Mm hmm. It’s very fascinating. I also just want to take a moment to explain what transliteration means, which is just where you take the letters from one language, and then you transpose them, you bring them into the next. You could probably simplify this better than I am right now.

[10:52] Marcus: Yes, it’s easier than the other word. So to translate is to bring something from one language into another. To transliterate is just to bring the letters from that language into the other. So, for example, the word demon is basically a transliteration from the Greek letters daimon, but when we bring them over, we get the word demon. So in the same way azazel is actually the letters that we would find in Hebrew. Just like that.

[11:23] Stephanie: That’s how you would pronounce it.

[11:24] Marcus: That’s how you would pronounce it. It also brings up another translation point that’s worth pointing out. That is, whenever you’re interpreting the text, as we just saw from this, the first act of interpretation is how you translate the words. In other words, words don’t just have one meaning. I mean, even in English, when you go through it, you look through there and it can have five different meanings. We call it a semantic range of meanings for a word.

And one of the interpretive decisions you have to make is, out of all of this semantic range of what a word could mean in this context, what is the best translation? And it’s one of the reasons why we have such a wide variety of translations, even in English. There are other reasons for it, but that’s one of them, because that’s actually the beginning of the interpretive process. “Okay, which one of these am I going to go with? Am I going with Azazel, scapegoat, or uninhabitable places?”

[12:21] Stephanie: I know this is a little in the weeds, but I want to linger there just a little bit longer.

[12:25] Marcus: Weeds on the trail.

[12:28] Stephanie: One, I mean, that’s the primary reason why I went to seminary because I’ve always wanted to be able to read the Bible for myself because the translations are an interpretation. And then on that note, I have just gotten it into my mind recently how much I would like for Bibles to have, you know how on food you have food labels that will have the ingredients in here, or here’s the calories or whatever, you have information about it.

I want Bibles to have an index in them that says, on the scale of paraphrase to literal, where is this translation? Because there is benefit and use for every kind. To have a translation that is more of a paraphrase is very useful in certain contexts. And to have a translation that is very literal, word for word, you know, it might be a little bit wooden in its translation. That’s very useful.

But there are so many people who don’t understand that range of, on the scale of literal to paraphrase, where is this Bible translation and how should I approach it or use it? And I just think that would be so helpful for the common Bible study person to know and understand.

[13:41] Marcus: Absolutely true. The way I was taught it, basically, you get things like the New American Standard, the King James, New King James, are basically written at a high school level. And then people realized it’s hard to just read those in public and be understood, and so the NIV was translated partly to have a readable Bible, something that was a little more paraphrastic, so that you could read it and understand what was being said in the public reading. And they also capped their use of vocabulary at what they considered a 6th grade reading level.

And so there was a philosophy behind that, The New Living translation, even lower. It’s like third grade level vocabulary here. We’re going to break this up. And so everybody’s got their own philosophy. It’s one of the reasons why there are so many English translations. The other reason there are so many English translations is that from a pure dollars and cents point of view, publishing companies need to have their own translation of the Bible because that is the best selling book in the world. And so if I, as a publishing company, have my own translation, and that becomes popular, it will pay for an awful lot of what else goes on.

Now, it’s not just monetary. Therefore, we need to come up with a translation that is of value, and that plays a role for which there is a demand. But there’s a lot to that whole translation process. It’s one of the reasons why it is great to have people who can study the Greek and the Hebrew and dive into those things. And the next best thing, too, is, like even in The Christian Standard Bible here, where it says uninhabitable place, if you go down to the footnotes, it says, literally, “For Azazel.” So it gives you that information, but sometimes you’ve got to go digging for it.

[15:25] Stephanie: Well, I’m not saying everybody needs to go learn the original languages, but it can be useful if you want to do a Bible study to look at the various different translations and maybe to choose a translation that is paraphrastic, I say, one that’s more paraphrased, one that’s more literal, and you can study them that way. So anyway, in the weeds, but I think they’re important weeds.

So where were we? Oh, yes, we talked about Azazel in the Old Testament, and then New Testament spiritual warfare regarding the atonement.

[15:57] Marcus: Yes. So in the New Testament, atonement is about sin. And sin is not just what makes us ceremonially unclean. Still can’t get it. It’s not just what makes us unclean, it is actually about morality and the deficit and falling short of the glory of God. And atonement covers all of that. Whereas in the Old Testament my adultery wasn’t covered by atonement, in the New Testament it is. In the Old Testament, my murder wasn’t covered. In the New Testament it is. All of my sin is covered by the atonement of Christ.

Now, also, the other thing that atonement did is it wrapped up and it satisfied all of the demands of the law of Moses so that the law of Moses as a covenant that was over us came to an end. Obviously, it didn’t disappear, we’re studying it right now. But it is no longer the covenant authority that is over us. And I’m like, that’s a really good thing, because on the day of judgment, when I stand before Jesus and they pull out the book of all of my deeds, I don’t want them pulling out the law and judging me by the law, or I will be condemned.

I want them pulling out the gospel of grace. I want them bringing out the new covenant which says, “These are all covered,” which is the core meaning of the word atonement. “These are all covered by the blood of Jesus. They cannot be held against him.” And so that’s why it’s so important. Am I under law or am I under grace? That’s why that is so important. And so atonement in the New Testament, by taking us from being under law and putting us under grace, what it also does in a warfare way, is it removes Satan’s claim on me as being his prisoner and belonging to him.

[17:50] Stephanie: It’s why we can, when we go through our CCCC paradigm, we can cancel. We can rip up the permission.

[18:00] Marcus: Atonement is what gives us the right to command the enemy to leave and gives us the right to cancel agreements and permissions we have given.

[18:13] Stephanie: So on that note, we’re in the midst of this long series on the healing journey, and we were talking about Leviticus and holiness, and now we’re diving into atonement. Why? What does atonement have to offer the healing journey?

[18:33] Marcus: Well, at multiple levels, the atonement, first of all, is focused on the idea that God wants to solve the problems that have our life all messed up. He’s like, “Okay, sin has created this big mess, you are a part and have had to suffer from all the big mess that’s going on.” So God made atonement through Jesus as a crucial part of solving the whole big mess that is going on in this world.

It also lays a foundation for us to see the character of God and understand that when it comes to suffering, Jesus entered into that suffering with us. By becoming a sacrifice, by letting himself be beaten, by letting himself go through all the pain and actually dying, he did something that you don’t find in any other religion, and that is God himself coming down, entering into our suffering, experiencing that suffering, taking all of that on himself.

All of the guilt of everybody’s put on Jesus, and then you kill the one person. It’s like transferring all the debt to one person, and then that person goes away. We actually see that in an episode of The Chosen, where one person said, “I just bought my whole family’s debt, now I’ll take the penalty.” That’s the picture of substitution. “I’ve taken it all now.”

And so this is crucial. It’s crucial to understanding the heart of God and crucial to also understanding at a practical level that atonement is our pathway out of bondage.

[20:09] Stephanie: Yeah, it strikes me. He didn’t just pull out the stone tablets again and write a divine addendum that says, “Okay, actually, never mind.” He didn’t change the rules. He fulfilled them.

[20:23] Marcus: Right. Good way to put it.

[20:26] Stephanie: Very good. Well, I’m going to take a pause for an announcement.

[20:30] Marcus: I’m going to work on the word ceremonial.

[20:32] Stephanie: Ceremonially. Every now and then you just get a word.

All right, announcement. We are excited to announce that we are joining the Disciple Making Forum, May 1 & 2, for an event where the theme is Disciple Making Culture, (let me get this right) Where Everyone is on Mission with Jesus. We’re really excited, for Deeper Walk is going to have four sessions there.  And you can actually get a little bit of a taste of things where Dad just recorded a podcast with them on helping people deal with demonic strongholds. You can see our description for a link to that. So. Yeah. Excited about that.

[21:17] Marcus: I was curious. I was on with a Disciple Making Ministry and they didn’t want to talk about disciple making per se. They really wanted this spiritual warfare, which makes sense. It’s a topic not a lot of people get a lot of info on. And he did a good job with the interview. So if you’re interested in getting a quick overview on how spiritual warfare works, that’s a good podcast.

[21:37] Stephanie: And hey, maybe we’ll see some of you in Indianapolis on May first and second. All right, final thoughts for this episode.

[21:44] Marcus: Yeah, so the book of the Bible in the New Testament that has the most to say about atonement and all these things is the Book of Hebrews. It’s one of the books that could be harder for the average Christian just to read and dive into because it has so many Old Testament overtones. It is very epic. So one of the things that I just want to encourage people is, when it comes to the study of scripture, one of the things that we’re doing is we’re tracing themes.

And we trace themes partly through tracing vocabulary and key words like atonement and covering and blood. We’re looking for the connections. And it is a very worthwhile study to kind of go through and say, what was the role of blood? Because Hebrews says almost everything was cleansed with blood. And it was interesting, non-living things like the tabernacle and pieces of pottery and pieces of silver were cleansed with blood. People were cleansed with blood.

This is why I say it’s not just about the morality. It’s about cleansing something so that what is unclean about it is covered, is removed. The goal of all of this is to make it an acceptable place for God to dwell. And that’s what happens with us. In Christ we are made clean by the blood of Christ so that the Holy Spirit can live within us, so that we can have a relationship with God.

And in the healing journey element to this, so many of us feel so unclean, we feel so unworthy, we feel so dirty, we feel so marred and scarred and worthless. To understand that I have, in Christ, been made worthy of the presence of God to be with me. And I don’t earn that. I’m given it as a gift. That’s key to the healing journey and it’s key to life itself. And it’s all right there in the atonement.

[23:39] Stephanie: Well, there you have it. Very good. Thank you.

Thanks for joining us on the trail today. Did you like this episode? Would you like more people to see it? This is the part where I ask you to, like, comment, subscribe, share with a friend.  And hey, do you love this channel? One of the best ways that you can support us is by becoming a Deeper Walk Trailblazer.

Thanks again. We’ll see you back on the trail next week.