God's Love Powers Atonement
What offering might I bring?
Guys, I have a problem that you might be able to help me solve. Imagine I have just done something that has got Mable really angry with me. Maybe I said nasty things about her in public. Or maybe I’ve spent a couple of days indulging in a movie marathon with friends while she’s been busy cooking and cleaning.
If I did one of these, or worse, what could I do to get atonement—to make things up to her? (Oh, and I’m assuming an apology goes with all of these possibilities.)
How can I get Mable’s forgiveness?
Bring her a beautiful bouquet of flowers?
Take her out to dinner?
Take her on a romantic holiday?
All of the above?
What do you think? (And no cheating and asking Mable!)
Now some of these may work with Mable, some may work with other husbands and wives, and there are, of course, many other approaches to seeking forgiveness.
But I would suggest that there are at least four common elements that must be present in any appropriately grovelling husbandly apology for it to have any hope of success:
You must be humble. You cannot demand forgiveness, you can only request it. And you cannot prance into the holy presence of an angry wife. You must enter cautiously and with great respect.
You must have your wife’s interests in mind. Your goal is a happy wife, not your own satisfaction. If you buy your wife a ticket to the V8 Supercars then, unless you have an unusual wife, you’re probably not going to get very far. If your wife has severe hay fever, a beautiful bouquet is probably not a good rapprochement gift. Anything you offer her has to be something that she truly desires. It doesn’t have to be something she needs—a new set of socks would probably not be helpful—but rather something she desires.
It must cost you something. If you dig around in your cupboard and find some never-used saucepans, I think you’ll need to be ready to run when you hand them over. Even if you have something she desires, but it doesn’t cost you much, you’ll be disappointed. And the more you have, the more a successful offering will cost you. It’s a proportionate thing. That’s why billionaires buy their wronged wives a new mansion, or perhaps a Pacific Island or two.
Finally, you must repudiate your sin. It’s no good being humble, spending extravagantly, and offering an abject apology, if you turn around and continue in the problematic behaviour. Wives are particularly sensitive to this sort of thing, because they have to live with their husbands. A friend might be able to turn a blind eye, but the person who sleeps in the same bed, shares your bathroom, and (hopefully) plans on growing old with you, is not going to have so much leeway.
Now I am not trying to make wives, or women in general, look petty. I don’t think this is petty behaviour at all. Of course there needs to be some sort of compensation for sin, accompanied by an appropriately abject apology and genuine repentance. This is not unreasonable! It is, in fact, built into the very nature of reality. Sorry, husbands, but you’re not going to get a free pass from me. And, more importantly, you’re not going to get a free pass from God’s Word, either.
The Bible makes it very clear that we need to pay, somehow, for our sins, and to turn away from them. And women, I’m sorry to disappoint you, too, but you are, unfortunately, included in that category of people who sin.
We are all going to have plenty of opportunities to come to God, like a wretched husband, begging his forgiveness.
God vs wife
But there is a difference. Wives, unlike God, are not perfect. God is holy. He has no sin in him. In fact, sin cannot exist in his presence. Psalm 1 says that the wicked are blown away like chaff. So when we human beings approach God, we must approach him with great humility, and great gifts, and great contrition.
This is made even more important by the fact that our sins are so much worse against God than they are against other human beings because God feels the full impact of them. Remember that God created the whole universe, he upholds it all in existence, he knows it all, it is all his. So while our husbands, wives, children, parents, neighbours, and so on, only feel the little bits of our sin that directly affect them, God feels it all. He feels the way it twists and destroys the sinner themselves. He feels the way it echoes down through the generations. He feels how it impacts our society, and even the environment. God feels all of that. And, above all, he feels how sin destroys his precious relationship with us.
I’m sorry to be so gloomy, but the reality is that God’s love doesn’t make sense unless we understand what it is that he is loving. If we think we’re basically OK, we will find God’s love shallow and petty and rather half-hearted, and we will struggle to love him. And many do think that way: they don’t love God, and they don’t believe he loves them. It is only when we know how unlovable we are that we understand how great God’s love is. God doesn’t love us because “we are worth it.” He loves us because he made us, and despite the mess we have made of ourselves. He loves us because he is love. No-one is beyond his love.
And we see all of this so powerfully in the ancient Jewish ritual of the Day of Atonement.
The Day of Atonement
Why do we need atonement?
The context of this central ritual, in Hebrew yom kippur, the Day of Atonement, is that Aaron’s sons had tried to waltz on into the Holy of Holies without any preparation. Remember that God had created a perfect world, but we humans messed it up by trying to seize control from him and go our own way. God had then chosen a family to start restoring his relationship with humanity, and when that family grew into a nation, Israel, he rescued them from oppression. Now he is showing Israel how to obey him, and how sinful humans can live in the presence of a holy, perfect God. God chose Moses and his brother Aaron and his family to be priests—to stand between God and the people and mediate between them. Aaron’s sons forgot who God was, they thought he was just another person. In a rare bit of narrative in Leviticus we read about their mistake:
Leviticus 10:1–2 NLT
1 Aaron’s sons Nadab and Abihu put coals of fire in their incense burners and sprinkled incense over them. In this way, they disobeyed the Lord by burning before him the wrong kind of fire, different than he had commanded. 2 So fire blazed forth from the Lord’s presence and burned them up, and they died there before the Lord.
God is holy. We can’t simply approach him in whatever manner we consider fit. We humans are corrupted by our rebellion against a good God who has done nothing to deserve that rebellion. Therefore we have to approach him on his terms. A chastised husband would understand this perfectly well.
And God doesn’t change. At the very beginning of the church, just after Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit came on all Christians, two other people did the same sort of thing. Ananias and Sapphira wanted to give a gift to the church, so they sold their house, but rather than giving all the money to the church, they kept some and pretended that they were giving everything. They thought they could lie to God and their fellow Christians. Acts 5:9-10 explains what happened:
Acts 5:9–10 NLT
9 And Peter said, “How could the two of you even think of conspiring to test the Spirit of the Lord like this? The young men who buried your husband are just outside the door, and they will carry you out, too.”
10 Instantly, she fell to the floor and died. When the young men came in and saw that she was dead, they carried her out and buried her beside her husband.
So we can’t come to God with our normal, “It’s all your problem” attitude. It won’t work.
Approach with humility
Instead, when we approach God, we need to come to him humbly. That’s why the first thing we read about the Day of Atonement is the type of clothes the high priest should wear:
Leviticus 16:4 NLT
4 He must put on his linen tunic and the linen undergarments worn next to his body. He must tie the linen sash around his waist and put the linen turban on his head. These are sacred garments, so he must bathe himself in water before he puts them on.
In contrast to his normal, jeweled and beautiful outfit, the high priest goes into the Holy of Holies wearing a plain linen robe. It’s a visible expression to everyone of his status as God’s slave. The high priest also has a literal smoke-screen to protect himself from God’s holy gaze:
Leviticus 16:13 NLT
13 There in the Lord’s presence he will put the incense on the burning coals so that a cloud of incense will rise over the Ark’s cover—the place of atonement—that rests on the Ark of the Covenant. If he follows these instructions, he will not die.
It reminds me of the photo of the guy covering his face with the posy of flowers, but God’s even scarier than a wronged wife, because he is completely in the right, and all powerful.
Bring an offering
But it’s not enough to approach with humility, we need to bring an offering. Something that is costly. In the case of the Day of Atonement it is a bull, a ram, and a goat. The ram is burnt on the altar, but the blood of the bull and the goat are sprinkled, purifying the tabernacle and altar.
Now the blood is different from other types of offering, because blood is more powerful than just the cost or the loss of the animal. Why? Because, as God says, the life is in the blood, and, ultimately, because it is a symbol of Jesus sacrifice. In the New Testament book of Hebrews it is explained like this:
Hebrews 10:1–4 NLT
1 The old system under the law of Moses was only a shadow, a dim preview of the good things to come, not the good things themselves. The sacrifices under that system were repeated again and again, year after year, but they were never able to provide perfect cleansing for those who came to worship. 2 If they could have provided perfect cleansing, the sacrifices would have stopped, for the worshipers would have been purified once for all time, and their feelings of guilt would have disappeared.
3 But instead, those sacrifices actually reminded them of their sins year after year. 4 For it is not possible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.
Hebrews 10:10–12 NLT
10 For God’s will was for us to be made holy by the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ, once for all time.
11 Under the old covenant, the priest stands and ministers before the altar day after day, offering the same sacrifices again and again, which can never take away sins. 12 But our High Priest offered himself to God as a single sacrifice for sins, good for all time. Then he sat down in the place of honor at God’s right hand.
Now the Jews didn’t understand how Jesus death would give power to the sacrifices of bulls and goats, but we don’t need to understand something to be able to benefit from it. How many of us understand how WiFi works? And yet we use it all the time.
Repent from your sins
The final part of the Day of Atonement is about confession and repentance. In fact, the only thing the people do is fast and confess their sins. Remember that the high priest sacrificed a goat along with the bull, and now he takes a second goat and symbolically lays all the people’s sins on it, and sends it out to the wilderness, never to return. The first goat that was killed cancels out the result of our sins—separation from God—and the second separates our sins from us, so they will not harm us again. Once again, this symbol is ultimately made real in Jesus. The prophet Isaiah predicted this in
Isaiah 53:4 ESV
4 Surely he has borne our griefs
and carried our sorrows;
yet we esteemed him stricken,
smitten by God, and afflicted.
Jesus both deals with the consequences of our sin (death—separation from God) and frees us from the bonds of our sin.
It is interesting to discover that modern religious Jews, without the temple and its sacrifices, practice yom kippur—the Day of Atonement—as a day of fasting and confession. And yet fasting and confession, without an offering, will not have the effect of restoring relationship with God, will they? We need the offering of Jesus on the cross!
The Holiness of God
As Christians, we benefit so much from the incredible power of Jesus’s sacrifice. It is so powerful in restoring our relationship with God that it’s as if we were naughty husbands who had a magic solution to the problem of an angry wife. And so it’s easy to forget that our sins are still monstrous things. That God is still a Holy God. But God hasn’t forgotten.
In fact, Hebrews 10 continues:
Hebrews 10:26–31 NLT
26 Dear friends, if we deliberately continue sinning after we have received knowledge of the truth, there is no longer any sacrifice that will cover these sins. 27 There is only the terrible expectation of God’s judgment and the raging fire that will consume his enemies. 28 For anyone who refused to obey the law of Moses was put to death without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses. 29 Just think how much worse the punishment will be for those who have trampled on the Son of God, and have treated the blood of the covenant, which made us holy, as if it were common and unholy, and have insulted and disdained the Holy Spirit who brings God’s mercy to us. 30 For we know the one who said,
“I will take revenge.
I will pay them back.”
He also said,
“The Lord will judge his own people.”
31 It is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God.
That sounds like Old Testament wrath and hellfire, doesn’t it? But it’s not. It’s New Testament judgement. God has not changed between the Old Testament and the New. He is still a holy God. He still cannot tolerate destruction of his beautiful and precious creation, especially the most important part of it: us. And he will, ultimately, act to contain that destruction. We don’t want to be people who are bent on destroying God’s creation—rebelling against him—when God finally cleanses this world of evil. And because of the sacrifice of Jesus, we don’t have to be.
Hebrews 10:39 NLT
39 But we are not like those who turn away from God to their own destruction. We are the faithful ones, whose souls will be saved.
God’s Love
And so we see that sacrifice is not a symptom of God’s judgement, but an example of God’s love. Human evil needs a solution—it cannot be tolerated because it is so destructive. And God’s great sacrifice—not just the blood of animals, but the blood of his own Son—stops evil in its tracks. It is a gift of love to us. It’s as if a wronged wife came to her husband and said, “Don’t worry, my love, I have already paid the price for your crime, come home and love me as I love you.”
Let’s watch this Bible Project video which reminds us of this powerful truth in images.