Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Kippur, okay? Kippur, Yom Kippur, the day of atonement. We have a similar root. That is the word kipper that appears all over the sacrificial system.
Okay?
And that's where the confusion begins.
Because once that single English word atonement at one ment gets attached to Khepair, then we start assuming that when the Torah talks about atonement, it is meaning this in a way, relational, emotional kind of sense, a forgiveness in a moral sense. We did wrong, brought a sacrifice. And morally we're at one again with God or salvation. Even. I've been atoned. Salvation in the eternal sense of that word. But that cannot be right, at least in every case. For instance, if we take Exodus 30, verse 10, Aaron is told to to make atonement for the incense altar every year.
Stop and think about that.
What does it mean for an incense altar to be at one with God?
You know, how does an altar get reconciled to the Holy One of Israel?
What has the altar done wrong to need atonement?
That alone should tell us that where we find kipper in the Torah, it cannot simply mean reconciliation in the ordinary Christian sense of the word.
Well, we have been in a series called Atonement Explained for several weeks now, and we have actually not slowed down to even talk about what the word atonement actually means.
If that's the name of this series, you should know that. But that was intentional. That is, everything we're doing is foundational.
We needed chain, we needed the pattern of the righteous mediator. We needed to understand about sacrifice.
We need the understanding that the twice daily Tamid offering, this burnt offering, how that works, what it does. We need to understand what the system of sacred space looks like in the temple. All of these things had to come first. But now we're finally ready and it's a doozy. We have to talk for a little while today. So I want you to dial in, get your notepads out and get ready.
What I want to show you is the way the word atonement as inherited by most people is something that we don't actually understand.
For most Christians, I would say when they hear the word atonement means forgiveness, it means reconciliation, salvation, substitution, maybe dying in my place, that makes atonement. And there are threads in the scripture that connect to some of these ideas for sure. But the Bible actually uses atonement language in a much wider and actually very strange, unknown way to most people, I think, at least the way they realize. And so we must slow down in a series about atonement to examine what that word is actually doing in the Torah itself.
Because if not, then we just proceed with this forced, backward, thrown in meaning that's taking these earlier Hebrew categories and just kind of throwing them about and throwing them out. So we'll begin at the beginning of the system and people think, oh, great, systematic theology. No, I don't do systematic theology. God's too complicated to fit into a system of theology.
We're going to ask this question, what does atonement mean in the Bible's sacrificial world? Who knows who William Tyndale is?
Tyndale was very, very, very influential.
And his 16th century translation of the Bible, he used the word atonement in the sense of at one ment together, reconciliation, being made one again. That idea has shaped the way that English, Christian, English speaking Christian people hear atonement at 1 ment. But Tyndale and almost all later English translators then use the word atonement to atone, to translate a Hebrew word, kipper is the word, the root K, P, r. You'll see it in English. We're just saying it that way. Kippare, okay? Kippur, Yom Kippur, the day of atonement. We have a similar root that is the word kippur that appears all over the sacrificial system.
Okay?
And that's where the confusion begins.
Because once that single English word atonement at one ment gets attached to kheper, then we start assuming that when the Torah talks about atonement, it is meaning this in a relational, emotional kind of sense, a forgiveness in a moral sense. We did wrong, brought a sacrifice, and morally we're at one again with God or salvation. Even I've been atoned. Salvation in the eternal sense of that word. But that cannot be right, at least in every case. For instance, if we take Exodus 30, verse 10, Aaron is told to make atonement for the incense altar every year.
Stop and think about that.
What does it mean for an incense altar to be at one with God?
You know, how does an altar get reconciled to the Holy One of Israel?
What has the altar done wrong to need atonement?
That alone should tell us that where we find kipper in the Torah, it cannot simply mean reconciliation in the ordinary Christian sense of the word.
We move to Leviticus 17:11. The life of the flesh is in the blood. It's by the blood. It is the blood by reason of life that makes atonement. Now that verse has become the foundation of all kinds of later theology related to sacrifice, to blood, to atonement. And what happens again is the later interpretations imported into this original meeting in Leviticus 17:11 completely change. It's something very different than it was originally saying, and we have to look at that. But then we run into the New Testament, we find other Greek words like helasmos and, and others that we'll talk about. Helasmos, John 2 in the NASB, he himself is the a great word, propitiation.
Say it five times.
He himself is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but for those of the whole world. The propitiation, the in Greek, sometimes translated as the atoning sacrifice.
Jesus, according to this, becomes the sacrifice that makes atonement. So now we have the English word atonement covering all kinds of things, from the altar of incense to Jesus. One word, one understanding. They assume many people, that it means the same thing everywhere. It does not.
So before we can talk rightly about Yeshua's blood, we have to understand the Torah's own logic.
In the sacrificial system, when we come across the word compare, it does not mean save primarily, or forgive or reconcile in a certain way. It's complicated, but listen, in the most basic sense, drawn from its context, from its usage across ancient Semitic languages, even outside of Hebrew, the meaning is much, much closer to purge, to cleanse, to decontaminate, to remove pollution.
Compare, to purge, cleanse.
That's why it can apply to holy objects.
That's why an altar can be atoned for, because the sacred space requires cleansing, it requires purging. And it's imperative to understand that in the sacrificial system, when kheper happens, when we read the word atonement, guess what? The direct object is never a person.
It's never people.
It is the sancta. That's a word you need to remember. The sancta, it's the holy things, the holy spaces, the sanctuary itself.
This is a massively important distinction because it means that the sacrificial system is not primarily operating with this question, how does the guilty person get forgiven?
It is operating with the question that asks, how is the holy dwelling place of God kept pure while sitting within impure people?
Okay, this is. I know there's going to be a lot here. So just even if you are confused, don't give me that look that says, I'm confused because then I'll get messed up.
There are two. Those are two very different questions.
And which one you think the system is asking will change some long held Beliefs about sacrifice and blood, and ultimately about Jesus. The life of the creature is in the blood. I've given it to you on the altar to make atonement for your lives.
Pay attention to the preposition.
The Torah says, atonement is made for you, not to you, not on you.
You are not the direct object.
In Leviticus 4, the priest shall make atonement for him in regard to his sin. Again, for him. You are the beneficiary of this.
You are not the direct object. I'll explain. This sacred space is being purified on your behalf.
You with me.
The action is happening to the sanctuary. You benefit from that action because the purified sanctuary is what allows God's presence to come in among his people.
The Mishnah makes this very, very clear. In Shavuot 1 4, it says, all of the sin sacrifices are brought to effect decontamination for the impurity of the sanctuary and its sancta.
Okay?
The sacrifices decontaminate sacred space. That's their job.
Cleanse, purify, decontaminate, purge. Those are the words. Why do the sacred spaces need purification? This is a good.
They're God's sacred spaces. Why?
And here we need to understand such a wonderful topic to spend a Saturday learning about impurity.
We're in the book of Leviticus right now.
We need to understand impurity from the Torah's perspective, which, by the way, is God's perspective.
Contrary to what you may have been told about the Torah being done away with the. This is God's perspective.
There are two kinds of impurity. They are definitely not the same thing. And the sacrificial system will only become intelligible to you when you understand there are two kinds of impurity. We've studied this before, a long time ago in a series about Hebrews.
One of the difficulties of this and the confusion that comes is that in the Torah, the Hebrew word tamehouse, which means impure, tame can be used to describe two very different categories. Okay? Tameh describes a person or an object that is affected by the impurity.
The related word tumah, tame tumah. That is the condition or category of ritual impurity. So a source of tuma makes you tame. You get it?
Tuma, tame, propitiation.
Please please understand that when people read the word impure, they read it and they say something is wrong with you. If you are impure, something is wrong with you. Right?
That's the assumption. You're impure. All impurity works the same way. It does not. There is an incredible Jewish scholar named Jonathan Clowens K L A W A N S Clowens, who has done some, I would say, essential work on differentiating purities. But he defines and distinguish these categories in two helpful ways. The first category is called ritual impurity.
This is us in Leviticus, chapter 1 through 16.
Ritual impurity. Now listen carefully. Ritual impurity can further be classified into minor ritual impurity and major ritual impurity. You with me?
Ritual impurity. Minor. Major ritual impurity.
Minor impurities.
Minor ritual impurities. They require time and immersion.
Time and water to make them go away. Seminal emission, sexual intercourse. Ordinary menstruation things. But major ritual impurities. And we're just starting to talk about them in Leviticus this week. Major ritual impurities. For instance, childbirth, Tzarat. Biblical leprosy. Darren's five minute Torah was about this. It's also called scale disease. Contact with a corpse. Major ritual impurities right here. Okay?
The bigger deal is that these major ritual impurities require you to bring something to the temple. A sin offering.
Okay?
Sin offering people now say, now we're getting somewhere. He's finally gonna talk about how the sacrifices cleanse us from our sins.
Since when is childbirth a sin?
When is having a baby or burying a relative?
Hold up now here.
Sin offerings for these things doesn't make sense.
A woman has not sinned when she has a baby.
But I want you to notice something.
A person.
These are. They have something in common.
All of these things. A woman giving birth has not sinned. A husband and wife in physical intimacy have not sinned. A son who handles the body of his deceased father has not sinned. A person who develops a skin condition. Tzarat.
Yes. We have plenty of rabbinic commentary drawn from the Torah about why this is related to lashon hara. But in the Torah itself there are not clear distinctions. The person with tzarat is really no different than someone who had a baby. They have a ritual impurity, major, that must be addressed. But here's what I want you to notice. These are realities of embodied human life. Not so much Sehrat. But listen, what is the issue? Why impurity?
Why impurity?
There is an interesting connector to what ties them together. All of them are connected in some way to mortality, human finitude. You will come to an end to the boundary between life and death.
Corpse impurity is very obvious. Right? Death. Very obvious. You've been in the presence of death itself. Scale, disease, surat. This makes a living person resemble the decay of death. The skin breaks down.
Menstruation and childbirth both revolve around the mystery and the fragility of life, the possible beginning of life that did not occur, the dangerous passage of bringing new life into the world. Birth and death are not that far away in these ancient Near Eastern texts.
Now consider human finitude. We are temporary, we die. And these things represent that limit.
Now contrast God and his holy sanctuary.
It is the opposite of all of this. God's sanctuary is concentrated life, holiness, order, permanence. God does not procreate. He has no beginning, he has no ending. The sanctuary is the place where the undying, infinite, undiminished life dwells among a people who decay and die.
You see the contrast.
Now return with me to the fact that our human impurities represent not our sins.
Ritual impurity is not sinful, but it does create a barrier to the sacred space, because sacred space and death cannot coexist.
And this is why the Torah's resolution process is so very prevalent and practical. Throughout the book of Leviticus, many minor ritual impurities are cleared by the easy things. There's a specific period you wash and water, you're restored. There's no priest, there's no sacrifice. Time and water. But the more severe rituals impurities, these major ones, they follow this similar pattern. Time, water, probably. And then a specified sacrificial rite of bringing a sin offering. We should change the word sin offering. Scholars often do. So do many rabbis.
Purification offering.
Purification, A cleansing offering.
And you understand why that is. But notice even in the most serious cases of ritual impurity, there is resolution that is structured and available. The Torah gives this path back. And why? Because God desires to dwell with his people as much as he can.
And the protecting of sacred space from the encroachment of death, that's what it's about. Rabbi Sacks, it was in this week's Torah portion commentary he talks about Judaism is a protest against death centered cultures.
Egypt and surrounding cultures were so death centered Judaism. It is not the dead who praise the Lord. What profit is there in my death? Can the dust acknowledge you? We open the book of Torah and we say, all of you who hold fast to the Lord your God are alive today. The Torah is a tree of life. God is the God of life. Moses says, choose life.
And it follows that the holiness kedusha, a point in time or space where we're actually standing in front of the presence of God in the temple. This is a supreme consciousness of life. There is no room for death.
Now stay with me because the second category is where things get much more serious. And it's a very important distinction to make, to understand sacrifice and atonement. And the second category, according to Clowens and other scholars, we have ritual impurity and we have moral impurity.
Moral impurity. This is not about embodied life. This is about covenant rebellion against God. The Torah identifies very specific transgressions. Idolatry, sexual immorality, bloodshed. These are not ordinary realities of being a human, are they?
They are not. These are willful violations. And there is no sacrifice in the system sufficient to fully atone for that kind of corruption. Hear me say it again. There is no sacrifice in the system that can fully atone for this kind of moral corruption. Now you think about how logical this is. You cannot murder someone, bring a goat, hand it to the priest, and have that blood atone for that life.
Think about how absurd that would be.
A man takes a life and he lays his hands on an animal. The priest slaughters it and the murder is covered.
The life is accounted for. We've balanced the scales with the death of the goat and the death of a human. It cannot be. The Torah does not work that way. This is not death for death. It's not a transaction. And if you think about it for a moment, you realize it just cannot work that way. This would be the most corrupt kind of system in the world. Bring your goat, say your prayers and walk away. All is good that matters because it shows that the sacrificial system is not fundamentally a machine of substitution.
It's not built on the idea that animal life can replace a human life and cancel moral guilt. No matter what anyone thinks about what Jews thought about sacrifice in the Temple. Do you understand me?
Loud and clear.
The Torah is clear.
But I want you to note that beyond the obvious danger associated with immorality, moral impurity is dangerous in a way that ritual impurity is not. Ritual impurity is contagious.
Okay, sounds.
This whole thing I'm about to talk about is so foreign to Western minds, but we're not in a Western mind right now. We're in an ancient Near Eastern Torah sacrificial system, book of Leviticus frame of mind. Ritual impurity is contagious. You touch a dead body, you touch somebody else, they are ritually impure.
The physical contact base transfer of ritual impurity. Moral impurity is not contagious in that way.
You don't become an idolater because you bumped into one.
Okay? You can't have that. It doesn't work that way.
But moral impurity is far, far more dangerous than ritual impurity because it has a reach that Ritual impurity does not.
Now, we can't say that moral impurity is not contagious in any way, because, listen, from a societal perspective, immorality running rampant throughout a society that will penetrate and destroy an entire culture. It is dangerous.
But this loud and clear moral impurity defiles not just the person, not just the sanctuary, but the land itself.
Moral impurity defiles the person, the sanctuary, and even the land itself.
It can literally corrupt the land, which transfers to the holy sanctuary, which in turn transfers to the ongoing presence of the dwelling of God.
And this is a strange consideration, but note that you can be completely morally impure and show up and offer a sacrifice.
You're not wearing it out loud. You don't wear a red letter on your chest when you enter the temple and says, big, I impure Me morally impure.
This doesn't work like this. You can bring your offering while harboring idolatry, while practicing every kind of covenantal sin imaginable.
You can walk right in and so listen, this is what the prophets are thundering on about when you read the prophets. And we have a whole week that we need to spend talking about the prophets. But that's what they're saying.
Malachi, the priest, he's saying, you priests, you're corrupt.
You're corrupting the covenant. Jeremiah calls the temple a den of robbers. Isaiah tells Israel that God is sick of your burnt offerings while your hands are covered in blood.
You can be morally impure and show up whitewashed tombs. To quote our master, the prophets are not attacking the sacrificial system as if God made some kind of mistake with this. They're exposing what happens when people perform outward purity, outward purity with complete moral, internal corruption.
It's radically different concepts, ritual, moral impurity. Now, it makes some of the distinctions clear that we find in the book Leviticus, because chapters one through 16, right, we're reading about all kinds of impurities and sacrifices and details that maintain the holy space, culminating in Leviticus 16 in the Yom Kippur ritual. The second half following that, we read Leviticus, and it comes along to address all this moral impurity. But the problem is both of those things can be called tame, if you remember early on. But you cannot put these into a category of 1. If you assume the Torah treats all impurity the same, you miss it all. Now, here's our last big concept for today.
I alluded to it when I talk about moral impurity, corrupting, polluting the land. Here's the thing. Your impurity does not Stay with you.
Okay?
Your impurities do not remain isolated, private experiences. They have an effect on the sanctuary.
Israel's impurities, both ritual and moral, ritual and moral, transmit contamination to the sacred space.
There's what scholars call an aerial miasma.
An aerial effect. An aerial miasma where the impurities of people accumulate on the Sancta, on the very surfaces and spaces where God is supposed to dwell.
The sins there, this polluting influence, a contamination that spreads through the atmosphere even without physical contact.
Think of it this way.
God's sanctuary is perfectly pure, saturated with life.
The impurities of the people who live around it and approach it cling to these holy things, like grime accumulating on a surface.
It's pleasant, isn't it?
You can understand why God doesn't want it.
Some biblical evidence to make the point. Back to my first introduction. Early on, Exodus 30:10. Aaron is to make atonement upon the horns of the altar once a year with the blood of the sin, offering of atonement throughout your generations. It is most holy to Adonai. I just said a lot. But that's the purification of the altar, right? That is why the altar must be atoned for.
The altar did not sin. That is why Exodus says, you must do this.
Because the altar exists in the middle of an impure people, and the contamination from those people accumulates on sacred objects.
As I said earlier, the question is not about guilty people, how sacrifice gets you off the hook.
How does God continue to dwell among people whose very existence, whose mortality, whose finitude, whose sins are constantly contaminating the space where he lives? How does it happen?
That is the question the sacrificial system is built to answer.
Minor ritual impurities affect the outer layers, outer areas of the sanctuary. More severe impurities penetrate deeper. Those deepest, heaviest, morally wretched move all the way into the holy of Holies and contaminate the very central space where God dwells. It moves inward as severity increases. You keep this in mind as we get to understanding why Yom Kippur occurs the way it does. Why the priest goes first into the holy of Holies and backs his way out through the holy place and out again. There is a ritual purification going on.
So atonement.
Atonement, Atoning sacrifices purge the Sancta from this accumulated contamination. The blood is the ritual detergent.
It's applied to sacred objects, to the altar, to the holy spaces. It is not applied to people.
The person brings the offering. The priest handles the blood. The blood goes on the sanctuary side of the equation. And when the Torah says atonement is made for you. It means that the sacred space has been purified on your behalf.
So that God's presence will remain. So that the relationship between God and his people is not ruptured by the accumulating weight of human impurity. This is another part of what the sacrificial system does. We learned about the daily Tamid offering. We invite God's presence. These atoning offerings, called sin sacrifices, should not be called that. They should be called purification offerings. Because what the burnt offering brings down these purification offerings maintain.
Is that easy enough.
It only took me like 25 hours to write this teaching, so I understand why it's so basic.
It's big stuff. I get it.
In conclusion to a big message, let's pull together what we've established. Atonement in the Torah primarily means what?
Purging, decontamination, removing the forces of death from sacred space.
The sacrifices give life, they restore approach. They maintain the possibility of God dwelling among his people. Now pause with me. Pause with me. Big question.
If the altar and the sanctuary and the sacrifices are about life, does a death centered ritual focused on the innocent suffering of a victim make sense? Here.
He Leviticus 4:29. The one bringing the offering is to lay his hand on the head of the sin offering, the purification offering, and then slaughter it at the place of the burnt offering. The kohen is to take some of its blood with his finger, put it on the horns of the altar. He's to pour out the rest of the blood at the base of the altar. He's to take away all its fat. Just like the fat is taken away from the sacrifice of fellowship offerings. The kohen should burn it on the altar for a soothing aroma to Adonai. The koan is to make atonement for him and he will be forgiven. That's a big word. We'll have to come back to that. Quoting Shalf, the author of Jesus the Sacrifice. When we look at what I just read in Leviticus 4:29, the slaughter of the animal is mentioned only in passing.
The great weight of the ritual text focuses on what is to be done with the animal after it is killed.
And notice who does what. The offerer, the one who has sinned. Who performs the slaughter. The priest. He brings that. The priest carries out all the rituals with the blood and the fat. It's the priest who said to make atonement for the offerer.
And as Andrew Rilera points out, the implication of this is unmistakable. It is the post slaughter, post death rituals.
That are central to the act of atonement, not the killing itself.
If sacrifice atoned through substitution, if the whole logic were that an animal dies so that the offerer does not have to, then death be the main event here.
But the Torah does not treat it that way.
The death is preliminary.
The atonement happens afterwards. And what the priest does with the blood, you should immediately be thinking of Jesus in the Book of Hebrews, but that's somewhere else also a crucial spatial distinction.
The animal, the death is slaughtered beside the altar in the court, not on the altar itself. The death itself occurs at the periphery while the priestly blood is coming in and bringing all this big stuff in at the altar.
In that sense, the ritual's atoning or purgative force is located not in the killing alone, but in the application of blood.
David Moffitt, another incredible scholar on atonement, on blood, he writes this very important statement.
The blood is the vehicle or agent of the victim's life. And the converse of this point is that the death or slaughter of the victim, while necessary to procure the blood, has no particular atoning significance in and of itself. Again, hear me. The death has no particular significance of atonement in and of itself.
Think about this. If all that mattered was the death of an animal, then a bloodless breaking of the neck would suffice as a sacrifice.
But that's not what the Torah prescribes, because blood is not about death. The blood carries life and the life is what purges the Sancta. The whole reality of the sacrificial event is transfigured in the Torah from a thing of death. It's not about death. It's about life. It's about life. It's about life.
And we will return to the idea in Leviticus 17:11. But I know that many people think immediately, oh my goodness, but what about Jesus? But what the sin offering Jesus, making atonement for us by becoming sin, he suffered and died by his blood. The entire book of Hebrews. What does all of this that we cover today have to do with that? What are you going to say about it?
So much I'm going to say, my friends, I'm aware of how challenging, how deeply these scriptures run in the lives of people who have seen and understand Yeshua and all of this for so long. But I want you to know we're nowhere close to done.
We're still easing our way toward the confrontation with penal substitutionary atonement.
But these foundations, what kipper means, what impurity is, what sacrifices actually do how blood functions in the system. These are. These are foundational. This is not some boring Leviticus reading.
These are the ground upon which it is all built. And if we're going to read the New Testament with any accuracy at all, you've got to know this.
So next week.
Why blood?
What is the chatat? The sin offering? What is this? What does Yom Kippur actually accomplish? What can it not accomplish? What happens when contamination exceeds what the system can handle? The final consequence of unaddressed moral impurity is the pollution of the land and the people being vomited out. What is the cure for that?
Stay with me.
[00:40:34] Speaker B: Shabbat Shalom I'm Darren with Shalom Macon. If you enjoyed this teaching, I want to ask you to take the next step. Start by making sure you subscribe to our channel. Next, make sure you hit the like button on this video so that others know it's worth their time to watch.
Last, head over to our website to learn more about Shalom Makin, explore other teachings and events, and if you're so inclined, contribute to the work that we're doing to further the kingdom. Thanks for watching and connecting with Shalom Macon.
