Episode 7: The Day of Atonement

Dree Hogue: Erin, I want to hear about how the seven feasts captured your attention in your heart. 

Erin Davis: Well, I wanted the women in the church where I was a women's ministry director to love their Old Testaments. I decided we'd teach the seven feasts. I knew almost nothing about them, but I knew they were in the Old Testament. So, my team and I created this experiential journey through the seven feasts. For example, during the Feast of Firstfruits, they brought in these bamboo shoots and sang “Bringing in the Sheaves” together. During the Feast of Trumpets, everybody blew a kazoo. But during this feast, the Day of Atonement, the activity was much more somber. They were invited to come into the sanctuary of our church. Picture 200 women coming in one by one into the silent sanctuary of our church. We had two curtains, two heavy curtains on the stage, and they were invited to step in between those curtains.

Dree: This is The Deep Well with Erin Davis, a podcast from Revive Our Hearts.

This season, Erin has been walking us through Leviticus 23. The Old Testament is where God commanded His people to observe certain feasts, the seven feasts. Erin has been exploring these feasts together with us in detail, and we see the gospel in every single part of them. These insights change us, they change our perspective, and they point us over and over and over again to the hope that we have in Jesus. Today we're going to continue this exploration and look at the Day of Atonement.

Erin: Well, several years ago I walked through the seven feasts with the women at my home church. I wanted to find a way to move our knowledge of the sixth Feast, which we’ll talk about today, the Day of Atonement, from our heads to our hearts. So, I got creative.

The sanctuary in my church has a large platform, maybe a lot like your church. On that large platform there is a set of double curtains, and in-between those curtains it’s usually full of things like drums and guitars and microphone stands. But for this event when we were studying the seven feasts, we cleared the space. Leaving only an empty void—large platform, two big curtains, and nothing in-between. 

As the women read about the Day of Atonement, I sent the women out all over our church campus to read about the Day of Atonement in quiet corners around the church. As they were reading, they got to a part where they were sitting and were invited to back into the sanctuary and enter the space behind the curtain, one at a time. 

I knew what was about to happen, and I knew I wanted a front row seat. I sat on the front row of the sanctuary and I watched as the women I love, my closest friends, the women I go to church with, my mom, my aunt, my sister . . . I watched as one by one they stepped on that stage and they stepped behind the curtain.

Now, there was nothing magical happening. God’s Spirit was present on both sides of the curtain, but almost every woman emerged from that experience in tears. I choke up a little bit when I think about that moment. I hope that I never forget it. 

I hope that I never get over the wonder of watching women get waylaid by the grace of God. Cause that is what God was doing in their hearts behind the curtain. Now, going behind the curtain might not mean anything to you, as I am describing it. They went behind an empty curtain, and then they came out crying, what’s that about?

Well, I hope that it soon will as we discuss the sixth feast together. So, all of the seven feasts are recorded in one chapter in the book of Leviticus, Leviticus 23. Keep your Bible handy as we talk about the feast. You’re going to need it. I am going to read us this description of the sixth feast, the Day of Atonement. 

It’s found in Leviticus 23:26–32: 

And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, “Now on the tenth day of this seventh month is the Day of Atonement. It shall be for you a time of holy convocation, and you shall afflict yourselves and present a food offering to the Lord.” 

This is consistent with most of the feasts. The Lord is giving Moses the commands for how the people are to observe the feasts. This word “afflict” is used in most of them. It's this idea that this is going to require some sacrifice and some offerings are required for most of them. But some parts of the Day of Atonement are very, very different from the rest of the feasts. 

"And you shall not do any work on that very day, for it is a Day of Atonement, to make atonement for you before the Lord your God. For whoever is not afflicted on that very day shall be cut off from his people. And whoever does any work on that very day, that person I will destroy from among his people.” 

Again, the language here is a little different from the other feasts. Some of the feasts are very celebratory. It's about food and being with family and prolonged times of Sabbath, but this we can see is severe. If you decide not to participate in this feast, there’s punishment. 

“You shall not do any work. It is a statute forever throughout your generations in all your dwelling places. It shall be to you a Sabbath of solemn rest, and you shall afflict yourselves. On the ninth day of the month beginning at evening, from evening to evening shall you keep your Sabbath.” 

The Day of Atonement was the most sacred day on Israelite calendar. You can sort of feel that even though some of the things we’re reading about feel a little strange to us, as you read it slowly you can feel the weight of this one, I hope. 

That word “atonement” the Lord uses several times as He’s giving Moses the description of this feast. It means “at one meant,” to take what is separate and bring it back together. Literally means “agreed on” or “at one.” Because sin separates us from God, all of us. 

That’s true of the Israelites, and it's true of you and I. So they had to have a way to come back together. Their sin separated them from Him, and they had to find a way to be at one again, and that's what the Day of Atonement is about. 

One day every year the High Priest would enter the Holy Place within the Tabernacle to atone or make amends for the sins of God’s people. Now, the guidelines for this feast are outlined in greater detail in Leviticus 16. 

So Moses would have already had that very long description of what the Day of Atonement was supposed to be, and this is a reminder. It's grouped together with the other seven feasts. This is your year and remember the Day of Atonement. 

Leviticus 16 gives the instructions for the priests on the Day of Atonement. And here in Leviticus 23 we get the instructions for the people on the Day of Atonement. Let me read to us Leviticus 16:1–2. As you follow along with me, I would like you to keep a pen handy. I’m going to give you some words to circle or underline in your Bible. 

The Lord spoke to Moses after the death of the two sons of Aaron, when they drew near before the Lord and died, and the Lord said to Moses, “Tell Aaron your brother not to come at any time into the Holy Place inside the veil, before the mercy seat that is on the ark, so that he may not die. For I will appear in the cloud over the mercy seat.” 

Here’s what I want you to circle, that phrase “mercy seat.” It’s there twice. Because once again, God is showing us His heart through the feasts. He designated the most holy place within His sacred Temple as a place of mercy. 

God is the One who called it the mercy seat. It’s not a man-made description; it’s a God-given description. He could have called it the “judgment seat.” He could have called it the “wrath seat.” But instead, when God was handing out the rituals for the Day of Atonement, He established the intent, to show mercy to His people.

And yet, as we’ve already seen in so many of the other feasts, in order for God’s people to experience that mercy, death was required. Leviticus 16 includes a long list of the animal sacrifices for this feast, and its staggering. 

I’m a farm girl myself. I have cows in the field, sheep in the field, pigs sometimes, rabbits, chickens. I know a little bit about animals and what is required to slaughter those animals. And when you read the sheer number and diversity of animals required to be killed for the Day of Atonement, it’s mind boggling. 

It was rams; it was bulls; it was goats. And not like some feasts where one was required. Many, many, many animals were required to be sacrificed for this day. The priests had to be covered in blood. If you read the description of this feast, there’s a lot of talk about what the priests had to wear at certain times. That's because there had to be moments on the Day of Atonement when their garments were dripping with the blood of the animals they had slaughtered.

The Day of Atonement provided a way for the Israelite sins to be cleansed through the death of sacrificial animals, rather than through their own lives. But I don’t want you to miss something that’s important, it was a gory, bloody day.

To deepen our understanding of this feast, we need to flip backwards a little bit in our Bibles to Exodus 25. I hope as you’re studying the feasts you’re doing a lot of flipping to lots of places in your Bible, and recognizing that these feasts connect to the Old Testament to the New Testament, all of Scripture. 

In Exodus 25, verses 10–22 describe this most holy place, and I would encourage you to read that description. It's going to give you a visual for what’s happening on the Day of Atonement. Also notice that God is very specific about the measurements of this place, and the materials of the mercy seat, this clearly matters to Him. 

And then in Exodus 26, God gives instructions for the curtains that would make up the Tabernacle and then a second set of curtains that would surround this mercy seat. Both the curtains and the Bible’s description of them are extremely detailed, and the details matter. 

In Leviticus 16 Aaron was instructed to go behind the veil on the Day of Atonement. I hope you’re not picturing some wispy curtains that might be hanging in your living room; that’s not what this was. It was very thick; it was very heavy. God had given very clear instructions about what it was supposed to be like. 

As the Levitical priests performed the rituals of the Day of Atonement, they were proclaiming the miraculous truth that God would mercifully forgive the sins of His people that year. Not because they had earned it, they hadn’t, despite their continued sin. In fact, on the Day of Atonement, I’m sure they were continuing to sin. And yet, this day was God showing them His forgiveness, His intent to give mercy. 

Try to imagine, knowing just the brief description I’ve given you of all the blood and all the slaughter, and that Holy of Holies, and the whole nation of Israel gathered to watch holding their breath knowing that this was the day their sins were atoned for, and not just them. I think as a mother how desperately I would want my sons’ sins atoned for. And knowing that because of this day, my sons’ could once again be one with God.

Listen, I know they’re sinners. That verse that they’re sinners since birth is true. That becomes obvious about the time they start talking. I would want to know that they could be one with God despite their sin. This was a terrible and wonderful day. But I want you to picture what’s happening. I want you to imagine the impact on their families, on their culture. 

Try to imagine our culture having one day a year where we knew we could be atoned for, and all that was required watching it happening. Try to picture the impact. Try to picture standing outside the Tabernacle. I picture being there with my four boys and whispering to them, that the priest was going inside the holy place to meet with God so that they could be forgiven.

I picture us all holding our breath and maybe holding hands, because it was so significant until that priest emerged, cleansed. And we could breathe, because we knew our sins had been atoned for.

It was a solemn day, and on some level they must have understood the significance. What could not have known was that they were foretelling the story of Jesus on the cross. 

Each year when he entered the holy place, the High Priest was proclaiming the gospel. Matthew 27:45–54, you can go ahead and flip there in your Bibles, it is one of places where Scripture records the details of Christ’s death. I force myself to read it every Easter season, but otherwise I can barely stomach it.

I’m tempted to skip it now. It's hard to read, but we need to read it, just like we need to read the details of the animal sacrifices in the sixth feast in order to understand how they connect. 

Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour. And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” that is, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” And some of the bystanders, hearing it, said, “This man is calling Elijah.” And one of them at once ran and took a sponge, filled it with sour wine, and put it on a reed and gave it to him to drink. But the others said, “Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to save him.” And Jesus cried out again with a loud voice and yielded up his spirit.” And behold, the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. And the earth shook, and the rocks were split. The tombs also were opened. And many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised, and coming out of the tombs after his resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared to many. When the centurion and those who were with him, keeping watch over Jesus, saw the earthquake and what took place, they were filled with awe and said, “Truly this was the Son of God!”

It was a gory, bloody day. Let’s zero in on what happened the moment Christ gave up His Spirit. It’s recorded in verse 51, 

And behold, the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. And the earth shook, and the rocks were split. 

Without the Old Testament we could not understand that the veil separated God’s people from His wrath. And without the New Testament we’d never know that the veil was torn when Christ was crucified, satisfying God’s wrath against our sin. We didn’t need that heavy curtain anymore, Jesus became the bloody sacrifice. 

Once again, we see the Old Testament and the New Testament were working together like interlocking pieces of the same puzzle. They’re pointing us to Jesus and His redemptive work in our lives. 

And once again the feasts remind us that the redemption of our sins through Jesus was not God’s plan b. Though the Israelites could not have known it, because Jesus had not sacrificed Himself for the sins of the world, they were proclaiming gospel hope every year. 

It makes me feel a little bit of longing. I wish that we had a date on our calendars that proclaimed gospel hope every year. I know we have Christmas and what a beautiful holiday that is, that celebrates Christ’s coming. I know we have Easter that celebrates His resurrection. We have Good Friday, but do we sit in the weight of it?

Do we celebrate what He did for us on that day? I’m jealous for them because they had a calendar that pointed them to Jesus, pointed them to God’s mercy over and over and over. Every year they obeyed God’s commands for the Day of Atonement, they were teaching a lesson about who God is.

And without both pieces of the puzzle, the Old and New Testament, this picture would be incomplete. We would read that list of sacrifices required by God and we would not understand it. It might even seem cruel to us. But we need to picture all of that blood everywhere; we need to picture the cost to fully understand what Jesus did.

Now, many of the feasts have a New Testament counterpart. 

• The Feast of Firstfruits correlates with Easter. 
• The Feast of Unleavened Bread with the Lord’s Supper. 
• The Feast of Weeks with Pentecost. 

But the day of Atonement doesn’t have a correlating day like that, because we have no need for a yearly sacrifice for our sins, because Jesus was the perfect sinless sacrifice. His death did not atone just for a year of our sins, but once and for all.

I find such hope in knowing that Jesus has atoned for every sin I’ve ever committed and every sin I will ever commit. Every sin my sons have committed, and every sin that they will commit. Listen to Hebrews 7:27, “He has no need . . .” This is talking about Jesus of course. “He has no need like those high priests . . .” Which high priests? Those high priests here in Leviticus 23. “. . . to offer sacrifices daily, first for his own sins and then for those of the people, since he did this once for all when he offered up himself.”

That phrase, “once for all,” is so beautiful and so powerful. Yes, the Day of Atonement is about sin, and the bloody sacrifice required to atone for it. But even more, the Day of Atonement is about grace. It’s about God’s grace in our lives.

Maybe as you read this description of the sixth feast and of Christ’s sacrifice, your heart defaults not to rhythms of worship and gratitude, but to rhythms of guilt and fear. Maybe instead of sitting in the weight of your sin and being grateful that Jesus carries it, you’re feeling squashed under the weight of your shame. 

I know that because those are my rhythms. I am driven by achievement and his ugly twin, perfectionism. And when I think about the Day of Atonement, I think about how fearful I would have been that I was the one woman that all that blood wasn’t going to be enough to cover.

And for those of us who are wired that way, we don’t need reminders of our sin today. We’re already thinking about our failures 24/7. For women who are wired like me, the harder pill for us to swallow is the extravagance of God’s grace and the Day of Atonement is for us too.

Let's revisit the description of the Day of Atonement found in Leviticus 23, and there’s a little nugget there that you might of missed the first time. Let me read us Leviticus 23, verse 28, 

And you shall not do any work on that very day, for it is a Day of Atonement, to make atonement for you before the Lord your God. 

“You shall not do any work” on the Day of Atonement. It was not just the offerings of grain and livestock that were required by God for this feast. They also had to lay down their work and rest on the Day of Atonement. Both the giving of the offering and the commitment to stop working were meant to be physical expressions of the Israelites’ hearts toward God. 

God did not need their gifts, and God did not need their rest. He was asking them to take steps of humility as an outward expression of their grief over sin. When we struggle to accept God’s gift of grace, it might appear that we’re being humble. In reality, failure to accept that Jesus has fully atoned for your sins, for mine, it’s a sneaky form of pride. 

When we fail to accept that God’s grace is enough to cover our sin, to transform us into His image, we’re living in pride because the focus is ultimately on us. We’re hyper-attentive to our sins, our failures, our short-comings. Listen, there was no missing God on the Day of Atonement. 

Let us not miss that Christ is the One who did the work required for us to be at one with God. We don’t do that work, we can’t. It’s Jesus who does it. So many women I know and love, live as if the Day of Atonement is still written on their calendars. They afflict themselves with shame and guilt and fear and dread and anxiety. They’re hoping and they’re praying that their meager offerings are going to be enough to earn God’s acceptance, and He’s already offered it to them.

If that’s you, I want you to listen to me right now. You are not the one person the cross is not big enough for. You’re not the one woman in the crowd on the Day of Atonement that cannot be at one with God. You are the recipient of over the top, elaborate, permanent grace. 

Let’s revisit Leviticus 23 one more time, verses 29–30, 

For whoever is not afflicted on that very day shall be cut off from his people. And whoever does any work on that very day, that person I will destroy from among his people.

God’s command to rest is especially severe on this day. Perhaps that's because we’re all tempted to keep working towards salvation. And the sixth feast is a precious reminder for every woman familiar with shame, for all of frustrated with our chronic failure, for every one of us who just can’t imagine that God’s grace can cover our sin, for every time we miss the mark, for every moment that spiritual amnesia wipes our memories clean—the sixth feast is for us. 

We’re free to stop living as if the Day of Atonement is required and rest in God’s elaborate grace. 

Erin Unscripted

Dree: Erin Davis has been helping us understand the depths of the truth of the Day of Atonement. When we study the seven fFeasts described in Leviticus 23, we get so many important insights. I want to encourage you to get your own copy of Erin's Bible study, Seven Feasts: Finding Christ in the Sacred Celebrations of the Old Testament. To get Erin’s study, visit ReviveOurHearts.com/TheDeepWell. Well. I promise these Old Testament feasts will deepen your understanding of God's plan, His purpose, His intention, and His deep love for you.

Erin: Dree, I have so loved spending this time together with you digging into the seven fFeasts. I wish we were together. I so love being with you. Instead, you're at your house recording. I'm at my house recording. It's less than ideal. But this segment where we just talk about the questions we had as we were reading the Bible this week, or thoughts that were on our heart, or even somebody we know that might struggle with this, has become a segment that I really enjoy. What questions did you have, Dree, as you were digging into the Day of Atonement?

Dree: This is a hard study to swallow. I think first of all, it confronts us with the truth that God has the authority to call sin, sin. In the Feast of Passover, we already talked about sin, and Jesus was the sacrifice. He took the punishment of our sin. I felt like the Day of Atonement took us to another layer of His grace, of His mercy, of really what we're facing and final judgment. I don't think that when I talk to people about Jesus, I dive straight into the, “Are you ready for the final judgment piece?” You know, we've kind of eliminated that. We've eliminated it because it makes us uncomfortable. Are we ready? What does it mean? There's so many questions about it.

Erin: I was that girl in youth group that the youth pastor would say, “Hey, if anybody needs to talk about anything after youth group, I'm here,” and about every other week, every third week, I would hang back and my youth pastor, Barry, would say, “What do you need?” I would say, “I don't think I'm going to heaven.” It doesn't matter how many times he explained it to me, I had that worry that I wasn't going to make the cut or that my sins hadn’t been forgiven. I think many of us have versions of that.

Dree: I remember you saying one point that you did not identify with people who said, “I just know that I know that I know that I know I've been saved.” I remember listening to you, and I didn't necessarily have that. I think my response was different in that I was like, “Oh, I sure hope it's true. I sure hope I don't have to earn this, because I will for sure mess it up.” We were much younger, probably, when we had that conversation, and we've both grown in our understanding of what it means to be truly atoned. 

Erin: Yeah, I know that I know that I know that I know, now. 

I'm so grateful for that, because that part of me was so bound up in anxiety and worry and fear. I wasn't fearful because of my sin. That's the deal. You know, the Day of Atonement is a sobering gut check about how serious our sin was. That wasn't what was tying me up in knots. What was tying me up in knots is really a misunderstanding of the gospel and thinking, there's got to be some way I earned this, and I don't think I've earned it. The Day of Atonement makes me remember how serious my sin is, how much I've been saved from, and what a gift it is that I can know that I will not face eternal separation from Jesus because of His sacrifice for me.

Dree: I was looking at the gospel analogies. We've had the gospel story of Jesus, His death, His resurrection, the Holy Spirit, and then the second coming of Christ with the blow of the trumpet. And now we're looking at the final judgment, the judgment seat of Christ. In your Bible study, you describe what it was for the priests to go into the Holy of Holies. On top of the Ark of the Covenant, if I'm not wrong, there was a chair that represents the judgment seat of Christ. That's a very real thing the Lord not only told us about, but gave us very visual explanations of. But Hebrews, in the New Testament, tells us we can approach the throne of grace with confidence, right? That's a very different place to come from then, where the priests, the Levitical priests, were coming from in the story of the Day of Atonement.

Erin: The Day of Atonement was an extremely bloody day. My pastor has been to the Holy Land; I haven't. But one of the things that struck me upon his return is he talked about these ditches or these troughs that are on the sides of some of the streets there. Their purpose was for the disposal of the blood. The blood would pour out of the temple on days like the Day of Atonement, when so much sacrifice was required, that as they built the infrastructure, they had to have a way to divert all of that blood. 

And that is really hard to think about and also really essential for us to understand—that Jesus' sacrifice was not clean, was not sanitary, was not quick. It was so bloody and so gory, and the gore of the Day of Atonement, like all the feasts, points forward to that reality. And I think we need that check pretty frequently. Yes, we are washed in that blood. Yes, we are free from those sins. Yes, Christ has given us His righteousness. On that day of judgment, we are going to be declared not guilty because Jesus is not guilty. 

But I will just forget, and I'll get amnesia about all Jesus has done for me. I'll sanitize it, I'll forget to praise Him for it. I think I need to look at the gore of the Day of Atonement and the crucifixion, as I think forward to what's coming next. And even as I live my everyday life, I know that we don't necessarily want to consider the Day of Atonement with our morning toast, but I think it would change the trajectory of so much if we did.

Dree: One of the things that struck me that I felt reminded of, and then also convicted of, was my response to other people's sin. It paints a picture of all that God has atoned for believers. And I think it confronts us with the holiness of God. Either He's holy, and judge, and righteous, and what He says goes and sin is sin, or He's not. And if we decide that He is holy and the righteous judge, then we fall under that, and under His judgment for other people, whether their sins against us are so grievous we can't wrap our brain around it, or the brokenness we're facing, the struggle we're facing, is so hard. We can't imagine that anything could make it okay. I mean, gut wrenching, the hard things, the broken places of this world. It just confronts us with that—that He is good in the midst of those things, and that His blood has atoned for all of those things. Those streams of blood were necessary because of the fall.

Erin: I have this mental picture if I'm an Israelite woman observing the Day of Atonement. The whole nation gathered outside the tabernacle, I think with, probably, bated breath, knowing that that moment, the sacrifices were going to atone for their sins. I know me, I think I might be the one standing outside the tent thinking that wouldn't be enough for me. No amount of blood could cover what a sinner I am. 

The gospel helps me flip that on its head. But you know what I might also do? I might also look sideways at my neighbor and think it's not enough to cover hers, or it’s not enough to cover his. 

Just the grit, for lack of a better word, the grit of the Day of Atonement helps us see, “Oh, this is significant enough to cover the sins of that person and that person, and I don't have to have my own Day of Atonement for them where I expect them to atone to me or atone to somebody else because it's been taken care of with this really gory feast.”

Dree: We don't have to do that feast anymore because we have a Savior who has come and atoned us once for all. Again, in Hebrews and the New Testament, as you teach in your lessons, it points us to the High Priest who knows all of our struggles. That is a place of great comfort for me. We don't have a Savior who never had to put on flesh, who never had to struggle, who never felt hurt, or deceived, or sad, or grieved.

Erin: Who was never sinned against. He didn't sin, but certainly He was sinned against.

Dree: Right. He knows. Because I have a Savior who knows what I faced, it makes all the difference in the world to me, all the difference in the world, how significant it is that He was spotless—spotless—so that I could be again with the Father who loves me in heaven. 

Erin: It's a little bit jarring to go from the Feast of Trumpets, which is a celebratory feast celebrating the return of Christ, to the Day of Atonement. It's like, “wait a minute. I thought we were having a parade like we talked about.” But that is the reality: there will be the Feast of Trumpets, and then there will be this judgement. We've said it over and over here, Dree. There's other parts of the stories we sometimes leave off or we feel uncomfortable sharing. But God didn't, and they are essential to our understanding of the gospel and essential to our living out what the gospel has done for each of us.

Dree: There's a bit of mystery to these because we haven't yet experienced them, right? Whereas we can look at the Gospels in the New Testament and read about the Passover and the parallels there. But these are mysterious, which we can rest, assured that He is trustworthy, He is good, and His promises will stand. They will stand.

Erin: Dree, I know a lot of our friends will be listening to this while they're facing really tough situations. I just want to remind each of us something that I say to my boys pretty frequently. I'll look them in the eye and I'll say, “is this going to be the time that God lets us down?” We've said that to each other enough they know how to respond. They look at me, little grins come across their toothless faces. And they say “no, Mama.”

Dree: That's such a great reminder. I've heard you say that to your boys and heard them respond to you. You've said that to me multiple times and I've responded to you as well. In the next episode, we're going to go deep into that. We're going to talk about why God will never let us down, so listen to the next episode of The Deep Well.

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