February 1

THE SCAPEGOAT

Read Leviticus 14-16.

“For 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” (Lev. 16:30).

Once a year on the Day of Atonement the high priest, after having made sin offerings for his own sin, took the blood of one of the two perfect goats into the Holy of Holies.  He sprinkled the blood on the mercy seat that lies on top of the Ark of the Covenant and beneath the wing tips of the Cherubim.  The Lord said He would dwell there between the wing tips on top of the Ark.  When He looks down at the ark containing the broken tablets of the law and sees the blood of the sacrifice God said He would forgive.  The high priest then took the second goat and confesses his own sins and the sins of people upon its head, directing a trusted man to take the scapegoat into the wilderness where it is released and gone forever.

Now if the blood of goats sanctified the flesh for the priest and the people, how much more shall the blood of our sinless Savior clear the believer before God (He. 9:13-14)?  Sins are remised by the atonement of Christ, put away and never brought up again.  When God saw the blood He forgave and sins are never remembered again.

Jesus “bore our sins in his own body on the tree” (1Pet. 2:24).  He so identified with us in love that our burden of sin became his own; and we, through faith and identification with His love for us, receive His righteousness.  “He hath made Him to be sin for us who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him” (2Cor. 5:21).  Jesus Christ is our vicarious sin-bearer.  As men rejected Him and drove Him away to the cross their sins were being put to death never to be remembered again.

Prayer: “Praise and glory be unto You, O Lord, for being our scapegoat bearing our sins away into death. Hallelujah and Amen.”

Evening Reading: Acts 8, Ex. 30-32