Building on the Foundation

  A day of great wrath and fierce battle, a day of celebration and a day of mourning, a day that is a thousand years. The day of Atonement has so many layers to it that one study or explanation would be offensive if it were to suggest that’s all there is to the meaning of the day. It’s the same for all of the feast days; as soon as we settle on what they picture and wrap it up all neat with a bow, we prevent further learning about those days. We like to have things all neat and decided and finished, but there are so many more deeper layers to these days. We shouldn’t be surprised by this; after all, God created the Holy Days, and anything He creates is wonderfully complex in its makeup. The thing we have to remember is that different Holy Days can picture and point to things that do not actually happen on that day.  As with all the Holy Days, Atonement is not so easily or neatly tied up with a bow. There is a lot of discussion about what different things mean or represent, and there i

  “[God] has not dealt with us according to our sins, nor punished us according to our iniquities. For as the heavens are high above the earth, so great is His mercy toward those who fear Him; as far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our transgressions from us” (Psa. 103:10-12). The Day of Atonement includes just such a picture of sin being removed far away. Under the Old Covenant, there were two goats: one to die for the sins of the people, and one to carry those sins far away. Here’s Lev. 16:8: “Then Aaron [the high priest] shall cast lots for the two goats: one lot for the LORD and the other lot for the scapegoat.” “Scapegoat” is a poor translation. The Hebrew word used here is azazel (Strong’s # H5799), which derives from two other Hebrew words: az (# H5795), or goat, and azal (# H235), “to go away.” So the azazel is the “goat to go away,” or, as some Bible translations render it, the “goat of departure.” The goat on which the lot of the LORD, or YHWH, fell wo

  Among those of us who keep God’s Sabbath and Holy Days as He commanded, most also understand that these days picture God’s plan of salvation. The apostle Paul told us plainly that God’s Sabbaths — the weekly Sabbath and His seven annual Sabbaths — “are a shadow of things to come” (Col. 2:17). What are these things to come? God’s Kingdom; His eternal Sabbath rest. The Book of Hebrews devotes several verses to the correlation between the Sabbath and God’s Kingdom. We’re told that the seventh-day Sabbath pictures God’s rest (Heb. 4:4), but also that we have not yet entered into that rest: “Therefore, since a promise remains of entering His rest, let us fear lest any of you seem to have come short of it. Let us therefore be diligent to enter that rest” (Heb. 4:1, 11). The weekly Sabbath pictures God’s Kingdom. The seven annual Holy Days picture the path to get there. The straight and narrow path to eternal life. As we’ve seen previously , the apostle Peter laid out the first three steps