TEXT: Exodus 32:30-35

SUBJECT: Yom Kippur #1: The Background

Yom Kippur is the holiest day on the Hebrew calendar. When I tell you its other name, you’ll know why Jews in every generation have kept it with the deepest reverence. It is The Day of Atonement. It always fell on a Sabbath in the late summer or early fall. This year, it starts at sundown on September 17, and ends at the same time the next day.

To say Yom Kippur differs from other holidays is to badly understate the case. All Holy Days have their solemn moments, of course, but mostly they’re celebrations, festive times of eating, drinking, dancing, and laughing.

Nobody laughed on the Day of Atonement. Or danced or drank or ate. The calendar has plenty of feast days, but only one day of required fasting: The Day of Atonement.

This was the day Israel’s sins were atoned for—or not. If the Lord accepted the sacrifices that day, the people would enjoy His blessings for a year. If He rejected their offerings, however, they would have nothing but His curses—barrenness and drought, bankruptcy, fear, war, exile, and death.

No wonder there were no parties on the Day of Atonement! Bodies and souls, fortunes, and the nation itself stood on the edge of a knife that day. Yom Kippur is the holiest day on the Hebrew calendar.

You can read all about it in Leviticus 16, and I hope you will this week, because it’s the topic I want to explore today and for the next few Sundays.

Leviticus 16 was not read today, and this was no oversight on my part. Like other deep, mysterious, and important things, understanding the Day of Atonement requires some background knowledge. Some of which was read a few minutes ago and will inform this sermon. What did we read?

• The giving of the Law on Mount Sinai

• Israel’s rebellion in the wilderness

• God’s judgment on Israel

• Moses’ prayer for atonement.

These are the highlights of today’s Bible readings, and the background we need to understand the Day of Atonement—and what it points to.

Israel was encamped at the foot of Mount Sinai. The site is important because it was here the Lord had come to Moses in the burning bush, promising to bring His people out of Egypt to worship Him in this very place. Now, after three months of in the wilderness, Israel learned they could trust God’s Word.

Now that He had proven Himself to them, the Lord had other things to say. He would soon give them His Law, which they were to believe and obey. He didn’t expect them to be perfect and without sin, but they owed Him their loyalty and He must have it!

You mustn’t think of the Covenant made at Mount Sinai as a contract, something like a labor agreement between greedy owners and unions—crooked lawyers on both sides, trying to get all they can for themselves, whatever it costs the other. The Covenant is not like this at all!

What it’s like is marriage vows—the Lord promising to be Israel’s God and Israel promising to be His people. God’s expectations will not oppress Israel, they will free her! For a long time, the Israelites had had a master, now they would have a Husband—

Five hundred years before, God had made the Covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, now He was renewing it with their descendants, who now—as He promised way back when—were, in number—

The terms of the Covenant were not imposed on the people against their will; they accepted them gladly, unanimously, and without a moment’s hesitation—

The Covenant has been offered by God, accepted by Israel, and, a bit later in the story, sealed with blood.

At this time, Israel felt no need for an Atonement, because they didn’t feel guilty. They knew they were not without fault, of course, but that hadn’t done anything all that bad, either.

Their conscience didn’t stay clear for long. Moses went up to the mountain to receive the Law and stayed there about six weeks. For part of that time, the people were excited about hearing more from God, but then they started wondering if it was God up there at all, and if it was He, what had He done to Moses? They got anxious and restless, and—idle hands became the devil’s workshop.

If they didn’t know where Moses was, his brother Aaron was easy to find—

Aaron is often thought of as a weak man, but I think ‘cynical’ fits him better. I think he held the people in such contempt that he figured—‘Why not? They’re all damned fools anyway!’

He made them a Golden Calf—

The next day they celebrated their new gods by conducting a worship service that wound up being an orgy—

They made such a racket that Moses heard them from the top summit of Mount Sinai, and at God’s behest, made a beeline for party. Part of the way down, he picked up Joshua, who had also heard the noise and took it for war. Oh, it was war, all right, but not in the way Joshua meant it! Israel had declared war on God!

When Moses got to the camp, he slammed down the stone tablets and asked if anyone was still on the Lord’s side? The Levites said they were, and Moses told them to strap on their swords and kill everyone worshiping they see worshiping the Calf. 3,000 were still at it and everyone of them was cut down by the judgment of God. We think of the Levites as the chaplains of God’s armed forces. They’re not that; they’re the Marines!

Well, as so often happens to people who party too much at night, the Israelites are really, really sorry the next morning. The Calf had been ground to powder, poured into the water, and the people forced to drink it. Their bellies must have hurt something awful the next day—and the consciences even worse.

For the first time in their lives, the people knew they had something to atone for.

Israel felt dirty and scared and rightly so—they were dirty, and they had every reason to be afraid. They were like a bride who betrayed her husband on their honeymoon! If the Lord annulled their marriage, what would they do—pray to the Golden Calf? Oh, no, they couldn’t do that. He was already in their guts and before long, he would be in their toilets. They turned to Moses for help, and he did not disappoint them—

Atonement. That’s not a word we use every day. What does it mean? Scholars often dismiss the English word as being, well, English, and not Hebrew. Though they know far more than I do, on this point I think they’re wrong. I think the English word, ‘Atonement’ is a very good way of explaining the thing.

What does ‘atonement’ mean? Get the word in your mind, and then break it down: at-one-ment. It is the state of being ‘at one’ with somebody, and—in context—‘at one’ with somebody you used to not be ‘at one’ with. In other words, it means ‘reconciliation’; it means ‘relationship restored’.

What does it take to repair a broken relationship? Let’s not go into the icky and complicated messes that marriages can become after twenty or thirty years of abuse and neglect.

Let’s stick with something easier to think through, say a broken window. You and your friend are playing catch in the street, and one of your throws goes over his head and crashes through your neighbor’s window. The neighbor was sitting on the porch at the time and there’s no way of saying ‘It wasn’t me!’. Everyone knows what happened and who did it.

How do you fix things up with your neighbor?

If the man is a sorehead, nothing will satisfy him. You could fill in the window with gold bars and you’d never hear the end of it.

If the man didn’t care about his home, he might let you go for nothing—Thanks, buddy, now I don’t have to pay for air conditioning!

But, what if the man cared both for you and his home. What would satisfy him? How could you make things right with him? You would have to say you’re sorry, pick up the broken glass and replace the window.

The first part is easy—Sorry!—but it is not good enough. It makes you feel better, but it doesn’t clean up the mess or fix the window.

Promising you’ll never do it again is also good, and your neighbors will be happy to know you’ll never break their windows with your rag arm, but, it doesn’t fix things up with the man whose window you’ve already broken.

You’ve got to meet his terms—not yours—but his. When you do, things will be all right.

But not until you do.

What are God’s terms for making up? The same as the man in our story: you’ve got to pay for what you’ve done. There’s the rub. We cannot pay for what we’ve done. I have never been to an orgy or fallen down before a Golden Calf, but I have worshiped false gods as much as Israel did in the wilderness! By putting myself, other people, and other things before the Lord. Sometimes I have done it accidentally, but not always. Too many times I have known good and well what the Lord wanted me to do (or not) and I have set His will aside for my own.

There’s a word for what I have done—and not only I: idolatry. And since, idolatry is an outrage on the character of God, I’ve got to make it up to Him. But I can’t. What can I possibly do to make up for that?

And so, I’m back to square one. To be right with God, I’ve got to pay for what I’ve done and I cannot do that. If I poked out a man’s eye, I could atone for it by having my own eye poked out.

But what can make up for dishonoring the One True God, and despising His wishes for my life? No confession will do, no promises, no future deeds can compensate Him for that.

THE LAMB OF GOD

To make things right with God, we’ve got to accept His terms. And when we come to the Day of Atonement, we find out what they are. The guilty have to die for their sins. Unless their sins are charged to someone else. If they are, God accepts the death of ‘someone else’ in place of the one who did it. In Israel, that ‘someone else’ was a goat, in fact, two goats. One died in the place of the people and the other carried their guilt away, out of their sight—and God’s!

Today, people would say, ‘That’s not fair to the goats!’ Nobody said that then! Guilty people are not worried about animal rights half as much as they are of getting rid of their sins! This is what the goats did for Israel on the Day of Atonement.

This was the most solemn day of the year for Israel, and when it was over, the most wonderful. But the writer of Hebrews says the Day was missing something, that it was great as far as it went, but it didn’t go far enough. If the goats really took their sins away, why did they have to do it again the next year, and the next, for 1,500 years!

One thousand-five hundred goats won’t fix things up between us and God. Neither will a thousand times 1,500 of them!

The Day of Atonement was a dress rehearsal preparing Israel to see God’s greatest performance. It took place just outside the city walls of Jerusalem, at Passover, about the year 30 AD. On that day, the Lamb of God, Jesus Christ, cleaned up the mess we made and replaced the window we broke.

The work He did for us was so good that God accepted it as payment in full. This means: things are right between us and God—not ‘will be right’ if only we do better from now on or never mess up again or keep saying we’re sorry! He has set us right with God. He has made the Atonement, or better yet, He is the Atonement.

To everyone who trusts Him.

Yom Kippur is the holiest day on the Hebrew calendar, and now you know why. God has atoned for our sins at the cost of His own Son—