We are continuing today in our series, The Beauty of Forgiveness. So far along the way we have talked about the fact that we have forgiveness available to us in Jesus and that forgiveness comes naturally to God. Today we are reflecting for a bit on just what it means that forgiveness comes so naturally to God. And we are doing this through the lens of a passage that isn’t one we might normally turn to for help with…well…anything. Yet every word of the Scriptures is useful for making us over in God’s image, including this one. So, let’s dive in and see just what God plans for when given the chance.
The Picture of Forgiveness
Do you remember the Disney movie, Meet the Robinsons? It was one of the few Disney animated films that came out after they started working with Pixar. It’s about a boy named Lewis who gets caught up in a time-traveling adventure to stop a dastardly villain from rewriting history. The villain in the film—at least the human villain; the main villain turns out to be an evil AI program that wants to turn humanity into its slaves— turns out to be Lewis’ roommate from their orphanage, Goob. At the pivotal moment of the story, Lewis stays up all night working on a big science fair project. His late hours keep Goob from getting any sleep the night before a big baseball game. Because of his exhaustion, he falls asleep in the outfield and misses a critical fly ball that would have sealed the win for his team. Missing it made sure they lost, consigning him forever to a life of shame. Rather than moving on, though, Goob just stews in his anger and resentment toward Lewis until they form a deep-seated hatred and bitterness. This basically stunts his emotional and relational development. Years later, he happens upon an opportunity to go back and get revenge, which is basically how the whole story gets set into motion in the first place. To put all that in other words: Goob planned for vengeance.
As we talked about last time, we are often tempted or even outright led to believe that God plans for vengeance too. When we sin, He starts looking for the chance to pay us back for it. Yet while we do indeed encounter passages where God brings judgment and exercises vengeance against sinners, what we don’t find is God planning for that. He announces it so that the folks who will potentially be on the receiving end of it have time to repent and avoid the judgment, but that’s not the same as planning for it. God doesn’t stew. He doesn’t look forward to judgment. Instead, what God really plans for and looks forward to with eagerness is forgiveness. And in this next part of our teaching series, The Beauty of Forgiveness, we are going to look at a primary example of God’s doing just that.
This is the third part of our teaching series that is piggybacking off of our current Sunday school series. That means that if you aren’t already connected to a Sunday school group, now is a great time to do that. The big idea for this whole series is that while forgiveness really is a beautiful thing, if we are going to fully appreciate and live in light of the incredible freedom it offers us, we’ve got to understand it as thoroughly as we can.
For the last couple of weeks, we have been marinating in the Psalms, specifically, a couple of psalms King David wrote. The first was his cry of repentance in Psalm 51 after having his sin with Bathsheba revealed to him. As we reflected on our own ability to cry out with some of the same words and sentiments he expressed, we were encouraged with the baseline truth about forgiveness that in Christ, we can always find it. When we sin, we can go to Jesus for forgiveness. Last week, with Psalm 103 as our guide, we joined in David’s exuberant praise for God’s willingness to forgive and discovered that the reason we can go to Jesus no matter what it is we have done is that forgiveness comes naturally to God. It is an absolutely fundamental part of who He is. It is a part of who He is that we can rely on with complete certainty. Today, we are going to keep inching forward in our understanding of forgiveness by looking at something pretty cool that its being such a fundamental part of God’s character means.
When something comes naturally for you, you find yourself thinking in terms of whatever it is. Let me give you a little peak behind the pastor curtain for a second. Writing a sermon like this is easy for me. That’s not to say I don’t put a lot of work into it—I do—but writing just flows for me. That’s how God wired my brain to work. That’s just me. Rest assured: There are things that come easily to you that I couldn’t even conceive of doing. Because writing comes naturally to me, though, I often find myself planning out teaching series months ahead of when I might preach them. Whether I’m at a conference or watching something on TV, an idea will pop into my head, and I’ll have to immediately start taking notes so I don’t forget it. I’ve preached series that first started to develop as an idea more than a year before they actually took shape. Having done this for 18 years, that’s just how my mind works.
Well, forgiveness comes naturally to God. Just like you and I give forethought to the things that come naturally to us, God gives forethought to forgiveness and making sure He is able to forgive us for our sins. And a great place for us to get a sense of just how thorough is His planning around all of this is in an Old Testament document that you probably haven’t done more than try to read on occasion. If you have read all the way through it, my guess is that you skimmed through a number of parts because you just didn’t understand it, and you were bored. For all of the challenges it presents to our attempts to engage with it, though, this particular document is more important than it seems at first glance…or second or third glance for that matter. It is entirely about helping the people of Israel make sure they were worshiping God properly. If you have your copy of the Scriptures handy, join me in Leviticus 16, and let’s see why Paul was right that every word of the Scriptures really is helpful for making us more into the people God created us to be.
Now, again, Leviticus is all about worship. It is about how the people of Israel were to worship from both a mechanical standpoint and a personal standpoint. It goes to great lengths to lay out the kind of behaviors and practices the people were both to engage in and not to engage in. It tells them how they should eat, how they should handle various diseases, how they should handle their interpersonal relationships with friends and family alike. There are a whole bunch of commands that seem to us like they shouldn’t have needed to be mentioned at all, except that they are mentioned which means God felt like the people needed to hear them. There is also a great deal of material directing them on their primary worship practice: the sacrificial offering.
For modern readers the whole thing is…a lot. Again, it’s not terribly exciting reading. It’s often confusing. It doesn’t seem to have much relevance to our lives today. And maybe it sounds funny for the preacher to be saying all of this, but I think we need to be able to be honest with each other about the fact that there are parts of the Scriptures that are hard to read. Maybe you are sufficiently sanctified that you don’t think that, but I guarantee you that you know some folks who do. They might be sitting close to you right now. If we create an environment in which we can’t say things like that out loud, that doesn’t mean the thoughts go away. It usually just means we bury them out of embarrassment. Buried like that, though, they still don’t go away. They instead gradually eat away at our commitment to the Scriptures generally and set us on a subtle process of spiritual drift. At the very least they keep us from getting the kind of broad, robust, balanced diet of God’s word that we need to grow in healthy ways.
So then, if we are going to make any positive sense out of Leviticus at all, we have to keep that one thing in mind: It is all about worship. It’s all about helping the people make sure they were in the kind of spiritual and relational shape they needed to be to worship God truly and consistently. And if they happened to get out of that shape for some reason, God gave them ways to address that.
And think for just a second about what an incredible thing that is. God knew the people weren’t going to be able to consistently keep the Law. He knew that out of the gate. Okay, so then why didn’t He give them a law they were going to be able to keep? Because no such law exists. The brokenness of sin in us makes sure that whatever standard we happen to have adopted for ourselves—whether God’s standard or some other standard —we aren’t going to keep it with any kind of consistency. God’s choice wasn’t between a law we were going to keep and one we weren’t. His choice was between no law at all at which point we would have drifted in all kinds of directions away from Him without any sense of how to return, and a firm, clear law with a mechanism for helping us deal with the times that we fail—that is, a law with forgiveness written into its source code.
For the people of Israel, this took the form of the various sacrificial regulations we encounter in the first several chapters of Leviticus. When they sinned, they could offer a sacrifice of some sort depending on the sin, and God would no longer count those sins against them. He planned on forgiveness out of the gate. As gracious as that system was, though, it was also really impractical. It would have been enormously burdensome to have to try to keep up with what laws you might have broken and then to make time to go to the tabernacle and later the temple to offer the proper sacrifice to make things right. Yes, the priests would have helped guide you through the process, but it would have been a lot. And you would have almost assuredly missed something along the way. Fortunately, God planned for that too.
Look at Leviticus 16 with me. Now, there’s a whole story context here connected to Leviticus 10 that I’ve preached on before (you can actually scan this QR code if you would like to save that sermon to read later). We’re not going to talk about that right now, but Moses makes reference to it here so I didn’t want to completely ignore it. Let’s start at the beginning of the chapter. “The Lord spoke to Moses after the death of two of Aaron’s sons when they approached the presence of the Lord and died. The Lord said to Moses: ‘Tell your brother Aaron that he may not come whenever he wants into the holy place behind the curtain in front of the mercy seat on the ark or else he will die, because I appear in the cloud above the mercy seat.’”
Now, what does all of this mean? Simply this: God cares about how we approach Him in worship. The only way we can truly, in-His-presence worship Him is when we meet with the standards of His righteousness and holiness. Aaron’s two sons Moses references failed to do that at a crucial moment and paid for it in dramatic and sobering fashion. And while we might like to reassure ourselves today that this was just God being His usual, grouchy, Old Testament self, allow me to suggest otherwise. God’s standards didn’t change from the Old Testament to the New Testament. The only people who can be in His presence to worship Him are those who enter His presence in sinless perfection. That’s it. All others need not apply.
Through Moses here, God goes on to give Aaron a process by which he could get his own sins dealt with properly in order for him to be able to lead the whole nation in worshiping Him. And I understand that what follows here sounds really weird and complicated and convoluted and needlessly burdensome, but just listen for a second to what it took for the people to be led in worshiping the Lord together.
“Aaron is to enter the most holy place in this way: with a young bull for a sin offering and a ram for a burnt offering. He is to wear a holy linen tunic, and linen undergarments are to be on his body. He is to tie a linen sash around him and wrap his head with a linen turban. These are holy garments; he must bathe his body with water before he wears them. He is to take from the Israelite community two male goats for a sin offering and one ram for a burnt offering.”
That’s just the getting ready process. Now for step two. “Aaron will present the bull for his sin offering and make atonement for himself and his household.” If your own household is not in order before God, leading others to Him is going to be a great deal more challenging for you. Depending on the extent of the mess, it may not be possible. Get your stuff straight before you worry about anyone else. “Next he will take the two goats and place them before the Lord at the entrance to the tent of meeting. After Aaron casts lots for the two goats, one lot for the Lord and the other for an uninhabitable place, he is to present the goat chosen by lot for the Lord and sacrifice it as a sin offering. But the goat chosen by lot for an uninhabitable place is to be presented alive before the Lord to make atonement with it by sending it into the wilderness for an uninhabitable place.”
God goes on to describe the process Aaron is to go through with the sacrifices, slaughtering the bull and the goat that drew the short straw. It would have been messy. It would have been smelly. It would have been hot, hard work. There would have been blood…everywhere…not just because of the butchering process, but because Aaron was to collect the blood of each animal and sprinkle it on everything in and around the tabernacle. Blood on the altar, blood on the Ark, blood on the various curtains.
All of this begs a natural question: Why? Why make this whole process so…gross? Because sin is gross. God would soon specify that this particularly complex process would only happen once a year as a way of resetting the whole nation before God, but even the daily sacrifices were this bloody. The sheer amount of animal waste produced by the Israelites would have been staggering. And before you start reacting to that, this would have all been normal in the culture of the day. Animal sacrifices were practiced by every religion, and nobody then batted an eye about it. This was God’s operating within the cultural assumptions and expectations of a particular people in order to point them in a better direction. He has always been in the business of humbly meeting people where they are in order to point them back in His direction. All of that is to say: Don’t get all hung up on sacrificial details like this and miss the larger point.
And the larger point here is that sin is messy stuff. It makes a mess in our lives and in the lives of the people around us. The sacrificial system was a way of visibly, viscerally reminding the people of that. Being right with God so that we can enter into His presence to worship Him requires holiness. The people needed to understand that generally so they got God’s character right, but also personally so they would think twice about sinning in the first place. The same goes for us. Sin is still messy stuff that makes a mess of our lives, and when we have sin in our lives, we can’t get into God’s presence to worship Him. That’s all still just as true today as it was for the people of Israel.
Okay, so then what does that mean for our worship today? Hold that question, and let’s talk for just a second about the other goat. Remember there were two? One was sacrificed as part of the whole purification process. What about the other? It became a literal scapegoat. Look down to v. 20: “When he has finished making atonement for the most holy place, the tent of meeting, and the altar, he is to present the live male goat. Aaron will lay both his hands on the head of the live goat and confess over it all the Israelites’ iniquities and rebellious acts—all their sins. He is to put them on the goat’s head and send it away into the wilderness by the man appointed for the task. The goat will carry all their iniquities into a desolate land, and the man will release it there.” After all of this, everybody cleans up, and they all celebrate being right with God together. This was to be an annual practice, and Jews still keep it today. You perhaps know it as Yom Kippur—the Day of Atonement.
Sure, but what about our worship today? If all of this is the case still now just as it was in the days of ancient Israel, how is it that we can worship God? I mean, we still sin. We sin a lot, in fact. Even folks who have signed up to follow Jesus sin. If sinless perfection is the only way to access God’s presence in order to truly worship Him, what hope do we have? Two things. Well, one really. We have only one hope. The other thing is an encouragement in that direction that I want to be sure you don’t miss today.
The hope we have is Jesus. Jesus is how we can worship God today. Jesus is the means by which we can enter into God’s presence in order to worship Him in spirit and in truth. As the writer of the New Testament letter, Hebrews, goes on at length about, Jesus performed and fulfilled all of the sacrificial rituals God gave the people in the law, except that instead of using animals for the task, He made His own life the sacrifice. He could do this because He was without sin in His life. He didn’t have to bother with atoning for His own sins like Aaron did with the bull before he could lead the people in worship. Jesus could simply offer Himself up to God on our behalf, His body broken for ours and His blood spilled for ours. When everything was made clean by His blood, He took our sins with Him to a desolate place and left them there. And when He was dead, the transaction of His life for ours made fully complete, God responded to His faithfulness and obedience by raising Him from the dead on the third day to a new and permanent life that was intended to be a prototype for what those willing to trust in Him have to look forward to when the time for this world has come to an end.
Because Jesus did all of this, because He is perfect in righteousness and holiness before God, when we go to Him, we gain access to the Father through Him so that we can worship as we were created to do. In Him, we can stand before God with humble boldness and proclaim His greatness as we give Him glory. But there’s a catch here. We can only do this in Christ. Apart from Jesus, we can’t really worship God at all. We can be impressed with Him. We can say good things about Him. We can do the kinds of things He would prefer us to be doing. But worship in His presence as we were created to be able to do and enjoy will remain stubbornly off the table. The reason is what we have already talked about. We can only do that when we are perfect in righteousness and holiness before Him. We can’t achieve that status on our own. Only in Jesus can we get there. And then, it’s not our righteousness and holiness that are somehow being augmented by Him. We don’t need Jesus to simply make us better, shinier versions of ourselves. It is Jesus’ righteousness and holiness covering over us like a blanket. What we need is for Him to make us into new people; the kind of people who have been transformed from the inside out by His holiness through His Spirit’s dwelling in us such that we shine before God with the light of His righteousness. The good news here is that in Jesus we can have all of that and more.
If that is all our hope, then what is the encouragement? It is here: This incredible hope we have in Jesus is something that God has been planning on for a very long time. He assured the serpent that one day the seed of the woman was going to crush its head. He told Abraham that a descendant of his was going to one day bless the whole world. Isaiah told of a suffering servant who would bear the iniquity of the world. Jeremiah prophesied of a new covenant God was going to make one day with all people. Here in Leviticus He pointed the people toward a set of rituals that would purify them to stand before Him which themselves pointed forward toward the fulfillment of the law by one who would lay down His life as the ultimate sacrifice to replace the endless parade of dead animals that could never really get the job done, but because God is so committed to forgiveness and grace and mercy and compassion He accepted them for the time being until the time came for the perfect solution to the problem of sin to be set in motion in Jesus. The encouragement here, friends, is that forgiveness was always God’s plan.
From the first time sin marred His perfect creation, the God for whom forgiveness comes so naturally started planning on the ultimate act of forgiveness so that He could have the relationship with us that He created us to enjoy. Forgiveness was always God’s plan. Yes, He occasionally spoke of judgment, and, yes, those were often hard and angry warnings. He was utterly brokenhearted that we rejected His authority as God and the life He offered in favor of death and lies. And He wanted us to know in no uncertain terms what would be both the immediate and the eventual consequences of our rejection. But forgiveness was always God’s plan. These warnings were just intended to wake us up to the truth so we could embrace it freely and fully. What He gave wasn’t guilt—we made clear last time that God doesn’t guilt people into His kingdom. Rather, He gave truth and justice that was always aimed at letting us see the difference between the life He offered and the death that was otherwise awaiting us. Forgiveness was always God’s plan.
It was always God’s plan for the world. It was always God’s plan for you. No matter what it is you have done, no matter what garbage lies in your wake or that litters your path, forgiveness of those sins was always God’s plan. He has been working to get you to that point your entire life. In fact, the very reason you are here today is so that you could have this reminder. Forgiveness was always God’s plan. In Christ, that forgiveness has been made fully and freely available to anyone who desires to enter into His grace and receive it. It only takes a willingness to accept Him for who He is in faith. If you are willing to acknowledge that God raised Him from the dead and to confess His lordship, this forgiveness God has been planning on your receiving since before you were even a thought in anyone’s mind can be yours. Forgiveness was always God’s plan. Don’t miss next week as we take a look at the reason God does all of this.
