Joel M Bradshaw

27And the bull for the sin offering and the goat for the sin offering, whose blood was brought in to make atonement in the Holy Place, shall be carried outside the camp….33He shall make atonement for the holy sanctuary, and he shall make atonement for the tent of meeting and for the altar, and he shall make atonement for the priests and for all the people of the assembly. 34And this shall be a statute forever for you, that atonement may be made for the people of Israel once in the year because of all their sins.”–Leviticus 16, with emphasis

REST OF YEAR: Sinners bring their animal substitutes to have their sin placed upon and that sin is transferred from the OUTSIDE to the INSIDE. They come from the assembly of people, interact with the priest, sacrifice on the altar, and then that priest takes that blood into the sanctuary. I underlined here to match what I underlined in the verses above, just reverse order. God takes the sin from each repentant sinner symbolically and spiritually into His sanctuary and it ‘builds up’ for a year.

DAY OF ATONEMENT: Think of this like spiritual ‘spring cleaning’. God empties His inner sanctuary from the sin and that atonement passes from the INSIDE to the OUTSIDE. Atonement then goes to the tent of meeting and then outside to the altar and then to the priest and finally to the assembly of people. In a full and final way, the sin is taken outside of the camp, to be symbolically dealt with most ‘away’ from God’s inner sanctuary as possible.

The high priest carries the blood of animals into the Most Holy Place as a sin offering, but the bodies are burned outside the camp. And so Jesus also suffered outside the city gate to make the people holy through his own blood. Let us, then, go to him outside the camp, bearing the disgrace he bore. (Hebrews 13:11-13, emphasized)

The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him and said, “Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world! (John 1:29, emphasized)

Enter Jesus. What the annual Day of Atonement symbolized was fully accomplished once for all in the sacrificial death of Jesus on behalf of repentant sinners.

I have found it helpful to think of the Day of Atonement in terms of the flow of evil. The arrows symbolize from one to the other. When I teach this chapter, I draw a graph on the marker board and show an arrow flowing from the outside all the way into the sanctuary and a second new arrow flowing from the inner sanctuary to outside the camp. That is the way the text symbolically pictures what happens.

FLOW OF EVIL:

-Throughout the year: SINNER —> GOD

-Day of Atonement: GOD —> AWAY FOREVER

Grateful for Jesus!–JMB