The Day of At-One-Ment: Not Incarceration Day!

Imagine you are standing in the desert, the sand is blowing, and eleven other tribes are encamped around you in tents that stretch farther than you can see. Somewhere ahead, past the outer court of the Tabernacle, past the linen curtains, a holy room exists that no human being has entered all year except one man, and he is about to walk into it on your behalf.

That is Yom Kippur. 

Leviticus 16 opens with the tragic account of the death of Aaron's own sons, Nadab and Abihu. They had offered strange fire before the LORD in that same Tabernacle and been struck down. We are not told everything about what they did, only that it was unauthorized, and that God does not treat His presence casually. So when the LORD tells Moses to warn Aaron not to come into the Holy Place whenever he pleases, lest he die, we should not hear a threat. We should hear a Father protecting His people.

When God led Adam and Eve out of Eden, He stationed cherubim and a flaming sword at the eastern entrance to guard the way back to the Tree of Life.

What do you find at the very center of the Tabernacle, carved in gold, wings outstretched over the mercy seat? Cherubim. The same image that guarded paradise from man is now hammered into gold and set as the resting place of God's own presence. The Tabernacle was never only a tent for sacrifices. It was an invitation back to Eden.

On Yom Kippur, Aaron comes with a bull, two goats, and a ram. He casts lots over the goats, one for the LORD and one for Azazel–a name people have wondered over for centuries. Some have guessed a demon. Some a rival god. But the most widely accepted explanation in Jewish tradition is that Azazel was a place, a jagged cliff far out in the wilderness. The goat was led out there and released over the edge.

Then Aaron fills both hands with sweet incense, lays it on burning coals, and carries the smoking pan behind the veil until the whole room fills with smoke, rising until it meets the cloud of glory already resting over the mercy seat. Incense, all through Scripture, is prayer. On this one day, the entire nation is praying through the smoke Aaron makes with his own hands, drawing near to God on their behalf.

The blood was sprinkled tenderly and deliberately on the mercy seat. The second goat, the living one, with Aaron's two hands resting on its head, received every sin, every failure, every quiet shame of the whole nation spoken out loud before it was led away for good. Tradition tells us a scarlet cord was tied to the goat, and the moment it went over the cliff, the cord turned white. Isaiah must have carried that image with him when he wrote, though your sins be like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.

Consider what we do, as a society, with criminals. We build cells. We lock the door. We tell ourselves we are keeping everyone safe, and there is some truth in that, but underneath it is fear. We justifiably fear what that person might do if left free. If we are honest, we do the very same thing to ourselves. When we fail at something, instead of walking toward God, we tend to build a wall around that failure and sentence ourselves to live behind it. We are certain that we will fail again, and our shame convinces us that we are unworthy of freedom.

However, a thorough search through the Torah reveals no divine precedent for a prison system. God never prescribes jail time as punishment for His people. When someone sinned, the Torah prescribed restitution, paying back what was taken and more. It prescribed fines, corporal correction, servitude to make things right, and in the most severe cases, capital punishment. But nowhere does it say to lock anyone away for a time.

Even in the rare moments someone was held, like the blasphemer in Leviticus or the man gathering sticks on the Sabbath in Numbers, they were only held until the mind of God concerning them could be made clear, and never as the sentence itself. God's design for dealing with sin was never containment. It was resolution. Make things right, be cleansed, come home, re-enter society.

That is exactly why this day was not named the “Day of Judgment” or the “Day of Verdict” or the “Encarceration Day.” It is the Day of Atonement. God never intended to build cells for His children. From the very beginning, His intention was heart transformation.

Isaiah states it plainly. “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to bring good tidings to the poor, he has sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound.” That is a literal promise that God will bring the Jewish people home from exile, and it is also a promise about the cells we build with our own two hands, out of guilt, out of fear, out of the quiet conviction that we will only fail again. 

Yeshua stood up in the synagogue in Nazareth, opened the scroll to those very words, and said, today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing. He was opening the door of every cell in the synagogue that Shabbat, and the reverberations from that day are still breaking chains, including yours and mine, 2000 years later.

What truly changes a person is standing in the presence of a God who sees everything about you and still invites you to come close. The Psalmist wrote that in His presence is fullness of joy. The joy of being fully known and still wanted is strong enough to turn a heart of stone into a heart of flesh. That is the holistic picture of repentance and forgiveness. It is not a sentence being served; it is a heart made completely new.

If there is something in you that has been sitting in a cell of your own making, something you keep telling yourself you'll fail at again next week, or over this next year, I want you to know this can be the day it gets carried out to the wilderness. God does not want your sin to remain or be managed. He has designed for it to be carried away. He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds, and He does not grow weary of doing it. 

Today we acknowledge what we have done, and, through the sacrifice of the Lamb, understand what we deserve. But then, “on that day the priest shall make atonement for you, to cleanse you, that you may be clean from all your sins before the Lord.” Today, on Yom Kippur, the prison door swings open, chains are broken, and we are set free to serve our King.