When Blood Isn't Enough

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Yom Kippur has a limit. The chatat, the sacrifices, they have a limit. It's probably maybe the most important thing about this. If Yom Kippur could handle everything, if blood and toad goats could handle everything, the deep clean, if that could take care of all the moral stuff and absorb all of this rebellion and keep functioning forever, then we have to ask one simple question. Why exile? Why? Why would they be eradicated from the land? Why would they be vomited out of the land if there's a total fix? There is a very misguided idea that Judaism considered Yom Kippur to be the ultimate antidote to everything that ails our interactions between God and man. There is no biblical basis for this, [00:01:05] Speaker B: and this is not what Judaism believes. [00:01:12] Speaker A: This is going to be part six [00:01:15] Speaker B: of a series that's called Atonement Explained. If you're joining us for the first [00:01:19] Speaker A: time here or online, great, excellent. Stick around. [00:01:24] Speaker B: It's going to get really good. [00:01:26] Speaker A: But you'll have to go back and [00:01:28] Speaker B: catch up on the other teachings that came before this to build the foundation. It's very heavy material, no doubt, and [00:01:35] Speaker A: one of the dangers of heavy material [00:01:37] Speaker B: is that you can easily get lost along the way and kind of forget the goal and purpose and get settled down into the minutia and lose your telos, as it's called. The. [00:01:48] Speaker A: The end, the goal. So let me remind you, what is [00:01:51] Speaker B: the purpose of this series? [00:01:54] Speaker A: Some people hear a critique of the [00:01:57] Speaker B: idea of penal substitutionary atonement, and they [00:02:00] Speaker A: say, well, that is a very limited branch, very limited idea within Protestant theology. It is not universal. And at one level, that is actually a fair critique. But the issue is not really the use of the label. The issue is whether it's assumptions that back up this idea have shaped the way that most people think. It's a little bit like replacement theology. We talk a lot about replacement theology and you talk to the average person in church. [00:02:34] Speaker B: And I don't believe any of that. [00:02:36] Speaker A: I don't believe that God has replaced Israel. Many people reject it. And yet the categories are often so deeply baked into scripture that people don't even recognize that the way they read the Bible is from a replacement theology perspective. And the same thing happens here, because assumptions about sacrifice, the death of Jesus, the need for blood to satisfy the wrath of an angry God, often guide the way that people read not only the sacrificial system, but the sacrifice of Jesus, even when they might never call it something like penal substitutionary atonement. That's too much to say anyway. But part of what I'm trying to do in this series is to bring those assumptions into the light and ask, is that really what the Bible is saying? [00:03:32] Speaker B: Because that's a question you should know the answer to. [00:03:35] Speaker A: So what is Scripture teaching? Well, last week we learned specifically what [00:03:42] Speaker B: the Bible teaches about the sacrificial system. [00:03:45] Speaker A: It should be reorienting for some people I know, because atonement in the Torah does not necessarily. It does not mean forgiveness, reconciliation or salvation. It primarily means purging, decontamination. And we went on to expand that to talk about removing the forces of death from sacred space so that the living God can contaminate to dwell among his people. We also established two categories of impurity. What were they? Moral and ritual. Ritual impurity is the natural result of human finitude. [00:04:33] Speaker B: I like that word. [00:04:34] Speaker A: A catalog of things, right? Emissions, childbirth, surat scale, disease, as it's called in the academic literature. Contact with a corpse. Not sins, just the reality of being mortal in the presence of a God who is infinite life. Moral impurity, very different, right? Idolatry, sexual immorality, bloodshed, covenant rebellion. And we learn that when the Torah says that atonement has been made, the sacrifices are purging the sancta, the holy objects, the sacred space itself, not the people. The direct object of atonement is the sanctuary. [00:05:25] Speaker B: The person is the beneficiary, not the target. [00:05:30] Speaker A: Sacred space becomes decontaminated on your behalf [00:05:34] Speaker B: so that God's presence will continue to dwell among you, that relationship, so that [00:05:40] Speaker A: it is not ruptured by the accumulating weight of our human finitude, our ritual impurity pressing against that. So today that's the recap of just last week. [00:05:54] Speaker B: I told you it's heavy. [00:05:56] Speaker A: Today I want to press in a little bit to the chatat. The chatat. Say it with me with a nice guttural hattat, the sin offering. And what is that actually doing? What is in the blood that makes it effective. How does Yom Kippur work? What's the failsafe about Yom Kippur and what happens when the fail safe of Yom Kippur fails? Because we start with the idea that the chatat and I mentioned this last week that causes the most confusion because of the terminology, the nomenclature of calling the chatat a sin offering. That is not a good term. English Bibles often use that term and it has done enormous damage to people's understanding of the system. Because the moment that you call something a sin offering, the logical actual assumption is for everyone it has something to do with sin, right? Why would I call it that? Well, it doesn't. The chatat is a purification offering as referenced in, for one, the Sacks, Chumash [00:07:22] Speaker B: and a lot of other sources. [00:07:24] Speaker A: Purgation, offering. It removes, it purges. And here's something that we discussed last week that is the immediate tip off to that. It's not removing something from the person who brings it. It's not taking sin. The person who brings a chatat offering does not bring the offering while in the impure condition that required them to bring the sin offer. [00:07:55] Speaker B: Let me make that a little bit clearer. [00:07:57] Speaker A: The condition has already ended. That already tells you that the offering is not removing impurity from them. Let me explain that to say in Leviticus 14, the person who has tzarat scale disease, biblical leprosy, they do not walk into the sanctuary with their offering until the condition has been cleared. That would contaminate the sacred space even further. For God to say bring a sin offering while you're in this unclean condition, it's not logical. So the issue for the leper, there's a process. But these people have been, they've been through a cleansing process and then they can come into the sacred space and they can bring this offering. Same thing with the new mother In Leviticus, verse 6 says that when the days of her purification have ended, then she brings a lamb for a burnt offering, a bird for a purification offering. Days are completed, she has waited, she has been through the prescribed period, and now she comes. Okay, and you ask, well, why? If the condition is already resolved, why do they need to bring anything anywhere? Why do they need to bring a sacrifice? Because their offering is not fixing them. Point made. Got it. Good. Let me drive it harder. The offering is dealing with what the impurity did to the holy sacred space. Even from far, far away, during the entire time they're impure, that contamination is reaching sacred space. Remember my term, aerial miasma, right? I'm sure you'll be able to use that multiple times in conversations this week with people. [00:10:09] Speaker B: It's a joke. [00:10:10] Speaker A: The accumulated effect of humanity's limitations. We could say the. The limited life of our death related impurities pressing against that holy object. The sacrifice they bring after being cleansed purges that accumulated effect and it cleans the holy side of the equation. What does the person get out of the deal? Who's it for? What's the deal? They get a lot out of the deal. Namely, they are not considered fully restored until their relationship with God in sacred space has been Restored. They are out of fellowship. They are out of the community. After the offering, atonement is made. [00:11:01] Speaker B: You understand the use of the word here. [00:11:03] Speaker A: Atonement is made. That now they may reenter sacred space into relationship. Impurity has been removed. They are welcoming. That is why in Leviticus 14, when the chatat is brought, it is followed by a burnt offering. Remember what I told you about the burnt offering and the Tamid, that it invites God's presence. So you bring this thing, you cleanse the space, then you offer a burnt offering and you're inviting. It's a tangible, visible indication of your invitation to the God of gods. That ascending aroma drawing near back. [00:11:47] Speaker B: The person is. [00:11:49] Speaker A: They are back. And it's important to also understand that the Israelite cannot do this purging on their own. They do not have access to the sacred objects that need to be cleaned. They cannot walk into the holy place with their cup of blood and sprinkle it or daub it or smear it or do anything. They can't put blood on the altar's horns. They need someone to do that for them. That is why the grammar of the word kyper, atonement. That's why it is something that is done for them. They're not doing it. The priest carries it in on their behalf. Now, Andrew Rilera, who I have mentioned multiple times in this series, has a very. It's a memorable and rather coarse analogy, [00:12:46] Speaker B: but I think it makes this whole system click really well, and I want to share it with you. [00:12:51] Speaker A: Imagine a public park with signs posted everywhere. Okay, pet owners, you're responsible for cleaning up after your dogs. The excrement is the contamination in the park. It is defiling the shared public space. Their responsibility to clean it up. That belongs to the owner. And it's their dog. It's their mess. When they remove it. They're released from their liability here when they notice that if they're not removing it from themselves, right, they are removing it from the public space, even though removing it is what releases them. Now imagine someone walks away from one [00:13:43] Speaker B: of these very [00:13:46] Speaker A: not nice things that have been deposited there. They leave it sitting there, and a witness sees the thing and comes by and picks up the excrement, disposes of it, but also reports this to the negligent, this negligence to the authorities. The contamination is literally no longer defiling the public space. Right? It's gone, but the owner is still liable. They face a fine. Cleaning up the mess and bearing the penalty for neglecting the mess. These are actually two different Things. [00:14:24] Speaker B: Okay, And I'm going to talk about it in just a second. [00:14:28] Speaker A: But the $20,000 question is, what is it that actually purges all the contamination from the sanctuary? What is the active agent in the system? Where does the restoration of life come from? And this brings us to the verse of verses, Leviticus 17:11. Where does the restoration of life come from? One word, blood. Dam, dam in Hebrew. For the life of the flesh is in the blood. And I've given it to you on the altar to make atonement for your souls. For it is the blood by reason of the life that makes atonement. You hear this important. By reason of what? The life. Not by reason of the death. The blood makes atonement because it carries life. Now you think about what we've already established multiple times. Sacred space is concentrated life. God's sanctuary, dwelling place of undiminished, undying life. And the impurities that corrode and contaminate our death, corpse contamination, disease that makes the living resemble the dead. The boundary between life and death. Even the grave, grave moral impurities, the ones that penetrate deepest in they are still fundamentally about the destruction of life, murder, degradation of human beings through sexual immorality, the worship of dead things instead of a living God. The blood is a detergent of life deployed against the forces of death. Every time it's applied to the altar, to the horns, to the sacred furniture, Life, Leviticus 17:11, is being used to counteract death, to make atonement for you, for you, for your soul, that your soul might be fed in sacred space by being in relationship the accumulated contamination, overcome by life, the blood scrubs the [00:16:45] Speaker B: death off, to put it quite plainly, of the sacred surfaces. [00:16:52] Speaker A: Now, there's no mention, and I talked [00:16:56] Speaker B: about it last week briefly, but it's [00:16:58] Speaker A: important to hit it again. There's no mention of the killing. There's no mention the death of the animal is necessary only to release the blood. But we mention, as the Torah barely even pauses on the slaughter of the animal, right? The offerer kills it and then move immediately into what happens next. The atoning power has nothing to do with dying. It's in what the blood carries into sacred space. Life. And you remember, scholar David Moffatt, that I quoted last week with such remarkable clarity? He says the blood is the vehicle of the victim's life and the death of the victim, while achieving nothing other than procuring the blood. It has no particular atoning significance in and of itself. Now, that is incredibly bold. If we overlay that later into the New Testament I'm not gonna ask you [00:18:02] Speaker B: to do that yet, but we will cover that. Listen to the statement. [00:18:07] Speaker A: It is necessary the death to procure the blood, but it has no particular atoning significance in and of itself. That is the death. The death. [00:18:17] Speaker B: A bloodless killing would accomplish nothing. And we said a strangled animal cannot do this. And this is why the entire system is not built around death. It's built around the maintenance of life. [00:18:35] Speaker A: The daily burnt offering, the covenant blood, it bonds two parties, the ordination blood. It transforms a common man into a guy who can walk into holy sacred space in the presence of God. And the purification blood, it's the death, removes the death contamination off of everything so that life can stay. Every single layer of what the blood does all points the same direction toward life, toward presence, toward God coming and staying, remaining with his people despite our own human issues. [00:19:14] Speaker B: And this is also important to realize about the Torah and death. [00:19:17] Speaker A: Nowhere in the Torah is the death of the sacrifice described as some kind of punishment. Nowhere is the animal depicted as suffering on behalf of the offerer. There is no theology of pain in [00:19:36] Speaker B: the sacrificial system, no suggestion that there [00:19:41] Speaker A: must be torment, that the extra suffering makes the offering more effective, or that God's wrath is being absorbed by the [00:19:50] Speaker B: creature on the altar. The opposite is true. [00:19:53] Speaker A: The foundation of proper slaughter in the Torah is that the animal be killed swiftly and cleanly. [00:20:03] Speaker B: It's all about what happens after that. [00:20:08] Speaker A: If sacrifice were ultimately fundamentally about substitutionary punishment, you would expect the Torah to dwell on death, to describe, to describe that, to describe the suffering, to emphasize the transfer of guilt at the moment of slaughter. [00:20:35] Speaker B: But the Torah does none of that. [00:20:36] Speaker A: It just moves past the death into [00:20:39] Speaker B: the blood ride of life. Because the system was never about death paying for sin. [00:20:52] Speaker A: Now I want to make an important [00:20:55] Speaker B: point about these ritual impurities. [00:20:58] Speaker A: When an Israelite chooses to disregard their [00:21:01] Speaker B: responsibility, that is, in other words, to [00:21:03] Speaker A: not clean up after their dog. In our analogy, when they fail to bring the appropriate offering, they clean up the contamination they introduce. And that's something different. What began as a non sin ritual impurity now becomes a willful violation of covenant obligation. In Hebrew, this deliberate rebellion is pesha. It means revolt, defiance. It's a breach of trust with God. It's a severe category of sin in the Bible. It is the description of someone who knows what God requires and instead deliberately chooses to refuse. And these willful rebellions, along with other grave, grave moral impurities, idolatry, sexual sin, bloodshed, these are the things that penetrate all the way into the most sacred [00:22:00] Speaker B: space of the holy of holies, and take up residence there. [00:22:03] Speaker A: There's another Hebrew word we have these. Avon. Avon. Which captures what results from that kind of moral corruption, this iniquity. The root meaning something's bent or crooked, it's out of shape, the sin, the liability, the punishment. These are not really separate things in Hebrew thinking. They're this continuous reality. And so when Aaron confesses over the scapegoat on Yom Kippur, the term that he is using terms Avon, Pesha and [00:22:40] Speaker B: Chet, sin, iniquity, rebellion, failure, the full weight is there. [00:22:46] Speaker A: Which leads to a very important discussion in Leviticus 16, which just so happens to be this week's Torah portion. What a coinky dinky. What is covered in Leviticus 16? Yom Kippur, the largest deployment of blood detergent in the entire system. [00:23:10] Speaker B: Right then, then once a year, the [00:23:14] Speaker A: high priest goes into the holy of holies. He works his way out outward from the most contaminated, the most sacred, purging the accumulated contamination from inner to outer. Everything that's built up over the course of these unaddressed impurities, the neglected responsibilities, even on some level, it seems some degree of moral offense that have penetrated their way into there. All of it gets purged from the sanctuary by blood, by the life in the blood. But the blood of the purification offering, while it purges contamination from the sacred objects, it's a God's house cleaning. It cannot do something else that needs doing. The iniquities, the guilt, the twisted like moral wreckage of your year of utter rebellion and failure, these are not the same thing as contamination that's left on the sanctuary walls. The sanctuary is clean, but those sins have not been carried off. And here's where I learned a beautiful, wonderful new term we Yom Kippur, the scapegoat. This is where the scapegoat enters in. But there's a much better term. Rilera, quoting another scholar named Roy Gain, the tote goat scapegoat. It has a lot of built in baggage to it. The tote goat and the image. It's so right after the sanctuary has been purged by all this blood, Aaron lays his hands on the live goat, the live goat and confesses over it the avanot, the avon, the peshaim and the chatot of the people, the iniquities, the rebellions, the failures, all of this Israel's moral failure that have polluted the sanctuary. And the goat just innocently totes them away. Poor Thothgoat, what a load to bear. Away from the camp away from sacred space, away from the people. The blood purged the contamination from the sanctuary. The tote goat takes the sins that produce the contamination. We have two distinct problems. Purification offering couldn't do what the tote goat does. The people benefit from the sanctuary being cleansed. They benefit from the guilt being carried off. But even still, they were not personally absolved. And Yom Kippur is a little bit [00:26:11] Speaker B: confusing in this regard. [00:26:15] Speaker A: The system maintained sacred space, but it did not, could not, erase the personal [00:26:22] Speaker B: moral accountability for the gravest offenses. [00:26:27] Speaker A: There's a really important idea present in Judaism surrounding all of this talk of [00:26:33] Speaker B: atonement and removal, and I want you [00:26:35] Speaker A: to hear it so very clearly. Yom Kippur provides atonement only to those who repent and purify themselves before they come to God for forgiveness. This is a Jewish idea. It's built on the sacrificial system and a deep understanding of Yom Kippur and what it can accomplish. I'll read it again. Yom Kippur provides atonement only to those who repent and purify themselves before they come to God to request forgiveness. In other words, there is a ceiling. Yom Kippur has a limit. The chatat, the sacrifices, they have a limit. It's probably maybe the most important thing about this. If Yom Kippur could handle everything, if blood and tote goats could handle everything, the deep clean, if that could take care of all the moral stuff and absorb all of this rebellion and keep functioning forever, then we have to ask one simple why exile? Why? Why would they be eradicated from the land? Why would they be vomited out of the land if there's a total fix? There is a very misguided idea that Judaism considered Yom Kippur to be the ultimate antidote to everything that ails our interactions between God and man. There is no biblical basis for this. [00:28:15] Speaker B: And this is not what Judaism believes. It's not what the disciples believed. [00:28:21] Speaker A: If the Day of Atonement could take care of it all, if that's the system God built, then how incredibly unfair [00:28:29] Speaker B: is it of God to remove his presence from there? If they're following all the rules, [00:28:43] Speaker A: Why [00:28:44] Speaker B: would the inhabitants be vomited out? The existence of exile in Israel's story is proof that there was a ceiling. [00:28:54] Speaker A: The Torah is explicit about moral impurity polluting the land. The land. Leviticus 18, it says, do not defile yourselves with these things because the nations before you defiled themselves and the land became unclean and the land vomited out its inhabitants, the land itself. The land absorbs the moral corruption of [00:29:21] Speaker B: the people who live on it. [00:29:23] Speaker A: Innocent blood cries out from the ground. Idolatry is poisoning the soil. Sexual degradation erodes the covenant. It corrodes it between the people and the very place where they put their feet. That is, it's not metaphorical. This is the Torah's literal term for what's going to happen when moral degradation is left unchecked. God will barf you out of the land. [00:30:03] Speaker B: Jacob Milgram, rabbi, scholar, he has this very great analogy. You think of electromagnetism. [00:30:11] Speaker A: The negative charge of impurity is attracted to the positive charge of the sanctuary. And if the negative force builds up enough to spark in the gap, then there's lightning. There's a lightning strike, that happens. Exile. God's presence departs, the system collapses. The land expels the people. But the system was never a failure. It just was never designed. It was never capable of being the final answer to all of this moral corruption. It was designed for maintaining God's presence among immortal people. Under ordinary conditions, with annual maintenance built in, it could hold the line against these forces of death. But it could not overcome an entire corrupted people. Do you understand? This is the gravity. This is why the author of Hebrews says the things that the author of Hebrews says that blood of bulls and goats cannot take away sins. It's not because blood was powerless. It was not powerless. It successfully did the things it needed to do, carrying life in. It did its job. But there were boundaries. It could not transform the conscience of the worshiper. [00:31:42] Speaker B: Hebrews 10 makes it very clear. [00:31:45] Speaker A: The same sacrifices repeated year after year could never make the worshipers perfect. Because if they could have, the sacrifices would have stopped being offered, the worshipers would have been cleansed once and for all, would no longer have any consciousness of sin. Hebrews is a whole other topic. [00:32:00] Speaker B: I'll talk about it at the end of this series. [00:32:03] Speaker A: Sins of conscience, moral awareness. The deep inner knowledge that you have done something so wrong. [00:32:15] Speaker B: Blood could clean the furniture, but not the heart. And when the hearts of the people became so thoroughly corrupted, the moral pollution overwhelmed the system's capacity. And all that was left was exile. [00:32:35] Speaker A: But [00:32:39] Speaker B: when the system reaches its ceiling, there remains a cure. [00:32:45] Speaker A: The cure for what lies beyond this, [00:32:48] Speaker B: though, was not more blood on altars. [00:32:54] Speaker A: In Psalm 51, David, after the gravest [00:32:57] Speaker B: moral failure, adultery, murder. What does he say? I'll tell you what he says. It's really important. [00:33:05] Speaker A: You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it. You do not take pleasure in burnt offerings. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart. O God, you will not despise. [00:33:19] Speaker B: David knows there is no animal in the system who can address what he has done. [00:33:27] Speaker A: Murder is not covered by purification offerings, and yet he still appeals to God directly. Psalm 32. Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Blessed is the one to whom the Lord does not count iniquity. There is no mention of sacrifice. Forgiveness comes because God. God is gracious. Psalm 103. He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities. As far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove transgressions from us. There's no sacrificial language. That's the language of grace. It's the language of a gracious God, a God who forgives because he's a God who forgives. [00:34:20] Speaker B: The cure is God's own mercy. How does it show up? Repentance, water washing and a new heart immediately you should think of Ezekiel 36. Talk about that. Forgiveness is an act of grace. Once in exile, all that is left to purify the people. According to the prophets and other texts like what we just read, this will be accomplished by means of divine water washing and establishing a new covenant. This is really important, but I'm just throwing it in at the end. Does that sound familiar? Water washing and a new covenant. Gosh, that should sound familiar. One seed before we close is that once you understand what the chatat does, [00:35:12] Speaker A: once you understand the purification offering, whose [00:35:15] Speaker B: blood, what blood carries life into these sacred spaces to counteract these forces of death? [00:35:21] Speaker A: Pretty quickly and obviously and easily, you can see why the New Testament authors might attach this to Jesus, that they might use this not because he is literally an animal or an altar on a sin altar or a sin substitution, but because the concept of purgation, of cleansing of life against death, that's exactly what they're trying to say about him, the chatat, the sin offering. It's not arbitrary. There is something in there about how the earliest believers understood what his blood would do. And once you understand also that blood in the system is not about the power of killing, but the power of living, that it is life in the blood that makes atonement, then the question about Yeshua's blood needs to be revisited. It is no longer how brutal was his death. It should have been me up there on that cross, bleeding and suffering. [00:36:33] Speaker B: The question is, what kind of life did his blood carry? [00:36:40] Speaker A: What kind of cleansing power? What kind of bonding power? What kind of covenant, establishing status, transforming sacred space, purifying power did the life of this particular tzadik bring to the world? We have traced his chain, his merited favor. We trace the faithfulness, the pattern of the righteous mediator standing before God. All of that is now converging here on this question of his blood. Not the blood of a brutalized victim offered to satisfy wrath. The blood of the faithful, one carrying a life that the forces of death could not exhaust and offering some kind [00:37:43] Speaker B: of cleansing that the prophets knew was coming. That's where we're going. Stay with me. Shabbat Shalom. [00:37:56] Speaker C: 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're subscribed 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 Macon, 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.