Day of Atonement and Christ's Death

As I mentioned yesterday, the Day of Atonement is one of the key Old Testament rituals (along with Passover) that the New Testament writers used to explain Christ's saving death. In this post I will highlight a few of the prominent verses that do this, and explain (in brief!) how they connect the Day of Atonement with Jesus's sacrifice.

John 1:29
The next day he saw Jesus coming toward him and declared, “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!

Here we see John the Baptist combining symbols from Passover and the Day of Atonement. The Passover ritual involved the sacrificing of the lamb to protect God's people from "the Destroyer" and ultimately free them . . . but the Passover lamb was NOT a sacrifice for atonement or purification. So John brings in the Day of Atonement concept by saying "who takes away the sins of the world". We know from Leviticus 16:21 that this is a reference to the "scapegoat" who bears away Israel's sins into the wilderness. Jesus, according to Christian theology, bears our sins and burdens (1 Peter 2:24) in order that we might participate in the "new Passover". So Jesus is our "scapegoat" . . .

Romans 3:23-25
... since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; ²⁴ they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, ²⁵ whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith. He did this to show his righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over the sins previously committed;

This passage is notoriously difficult to translate, because Paul does not say "sacrifice of atonement", but rather says "hilasterion", which is the Greek word used for the cover of the Ark (traditionally translated as "mercy seat"). But what does it mean to say that Jesus is a "mercy seat"? Well, we know from Leviticus 16 that the sins of all the people all cleansed (expiated) on the Day of Atonement by the priest sprinkling blood on the "mercy seat", and through this ritual the people were set right with God. So, Paul is saying that Jesus's body, through His death, became "the place" where people were (or could be) set right . . . His death had the same effect as when the blood was sprinkled on the "mercy seat" in the Tabernacle. So Jesus here is both the sacrificial goat and the "mercy seat" itself...

Hebrews 9:11-12, 23-26
But when Christ came as a high priest of the good things that have come, then through the greater and perfect tent (not made with hands, that is, not of this creation), ¹² he entered once for all into the Holy Place, not with the blood of goats and calves, but with his own blood, thus obtaining eternal redemption.... Thus it was necessary for the sketches of the heavenly things to be purified with these rites, but the heavenly things themselves need better sacrifices than these. ²⁴ For Christ did not enter a sanctuary made by human hands, a mere copy of the true one, but he entered into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf. ²⁵ Nor was it to offer himself again and again, as the high priest enters the Holy Place year after year with blood that is not his own; ²⁶ for then he would have had to suffer again and again since the foundation of the world. But as it is, he has appeared once for all at the end of the age to remove sin by the sacrifice of himself.  

Hebrews offers the largest commentary on the Day of Atonement in the NT, and we'll only just touch on it here. Jesus is here portrayed, first of all, as the true High Priest. Jesus enters into the "Heavenly Temple" and removes the sin generated by humans. Obviously, this is metaphorical. The point is that Jesus has expiated and cleansed all the sin from the earth so that God can issue a pardon to those who repent and ask for it. Jesus though is also said to be the sacrifice (v.26), echoing the previous verses.

1 John 1:5-7
This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in him there is no darkness at all. ⁶ If we say that we have fellowship with him while we are walking in darkness, we lie and do not do what is true; ⁷ but if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.

In our final passage drawing on the Day of Atonement ritual we see Jesus portrayed as the sacrificial goat. BUT, the big twist here is that now WE have taken the place of the Tabernacle. This is critical, and is the point of (almost) all the "washed" or "sprinkled" language in the NT. The import then is not merely that we have been forgiven (which is obviously important too) but that now we (the community of God's people) are the place where God's holiness and Spirit is to reside! We are to be the Tabernacle for the world! (And this, by the way, is also in the background of the coming of the Holy Spirit in Acts 2 . . . remember, the Holy Spirit was supposed to be over the "mercy seat" in the Holy of Holies. The point then again is that the disciples are now the "Holy of Holies", however we make sense of that.)