Leviticus 16:3-34 Thus shall Aaron come into the holy place: with a young bullock for a sin offering, and a ram for a burnt offering.… I. NOTE THE CHIEF SERVICES OF THE DAY OF ATONEMENT. II. SHOW THAT THE SACRIFICES THEN OFFERED WERE STRICTLY PROPITIATORY. When you consider the two goats as together constituting the sin-offering, you must receive as the only satisfactory account of the transaction that which sets forth the scapegoat as exhibiting the effects of the expiation which was represented by the death of the other. The sins of the people were laid upon the head of the scapegoat, and borne away to the wilderness; but this scapegoat was a part of the sin-offering, and therefore, by combining the parts of the sin. offering, you have before you both the means and the effect: you have the means, the shedding of blood without which there is no remission; you have the effect, the removal of guilt, so that iniquity, though searched for, can nowhere be found. It seems certain that such was the view entertained by the Jews, who were wont to treat the scapegoat as actually an accursed thing. Though not commanded by the law, they used to maltreat the gnat Azazel — for by this name was the scapegoat known — to spit upon him, and pluck off his hair. Thus they acted towards the goat as they acted towards Christ, who, in a truer sense than the Azazel, was "made sin for us." And if further proof were needed of the idea which the Jews themselves attached to the ceremony of the imposition of hands on the head of the victim, it is to be found in the forms of confession which their writers have transmitted as used ordinarily in expiatory sacrifices. It appears, for example, that when an individual presented his own sacrifice, he laid his hands on the head of the offering, saying amongst other things, "Let this victim be my expiation" — words which were universally considered equivalent to an entreaty that evils which ought in justice to have alighted upon the offender might fall upon the sacrifice. And it is every way worthy of note, as marking the traditional idea of the great day of expiation, that the modern Jews, as well as the ancient, hold fast the notion of a strict propitiatory atonement. Where, then, can be the ground for doubting, that by "atonement," in our text, is to be understood what we understand by it in Christian phraseology; that there was effected a real removal of guilt and its consequences from the Jewish transgressor, when on the great and solemn day of expiation, in compliance with a Divine statute an atonement was made for the children of Israel for all their sins once every year? III. And here we bring you back to the main argument we have all along had in hand — THE INFERRING FROM THE CHARACTER OF THE LEGAL SACRIFICE THAT OF THE CHRISTIAN. If you can once show that the sacrifices of the law typify the sacrifice of Christ, and that the sacrifices of the law were strictly propitiatory, it follows as an irresistible deduction — notwithstanding the cavils of philosophising sects — that the Lamb of God died truly as a Sin-offering, making, by His death, atonement for the world. Indeed, if no reference were made to the Old Testament, the language of the New is so explicit that nothing but the most determined prepossession could fail to find in it the doctrine that Christ's death was a propitiatory sacrifice. But the connection between the two dispensations, and therefore the two Testaments, is so strict in every point, that it were no just examination of the gospel which would keep the law out of sight; therefore we come to examine more definitely the correspondence between the sacrifice of the Saviour and those which have just been reviewed. (H. Melvill, B. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: Thus shall Aaron come into the holy place: with a young bullock for a sin offering, and a ram for a burnt offering. |
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