Atonement
Preparation for Yom Kippur
MMin Kevin “Oriyan” Phipps
www.kingdomstar.com
August 2009

    Every Biblical and Jewish holiday has two parts; the preparation and the celebration. Both are equally important. For example, God commands us to work six days and on the seventh day we rest. This ought to be understood that we work six days in such a way that we are able to rest on the seventh. Starting sundown tonight, I should be thinking ahead to next Sabbath and use the next six days in preparation for that day. This is why it is said that any observant Jew is either celebrating a holiday or preparing for the next one.
If this is true, then why do we never hear any messages about a holiday until the day we are celebrating it? Even pagan culture begins sending us messages about Christmas in like October to give Christmasians plenty of time to stress, I mean prepare for that holiday. So, if half of the importance of a holiday like, say Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day of the Biblical year is the preparation, shouldn’t we be hearing messages that help us along that path? Well here it is, a full month ahead. See what cool stuff you can do when you break from tradition? Oh did I say that out loud?

    I am excited to give this message. For one, it’s new. Second, after ten years of being Messianic, the role of Torah in conjunction with the sacrifice of Yeshua and His grace finally really makes sense. Third, I get to use the word naked a lot which I know will keep your attention. 

    I am going to attempt to explain to you today the concept of atonement according to the entirety of Scripture. In order to do that, I need to establish a foundation. To do that we need to go back to the beginning, like Adam and Eve beginning. Here’s the story in the Oriyan condensed version.

    God makes Adam. God makes Eve. God tells both not to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. They were naked and without shame. That was chapter 2. A lawyer, I mean serpent shows up and says, “God didn’t really say you couldn’t eat from the tree did he?” Eve ate. Adam ate. Their eyes we opened and they say they were naked and were ashamed. They make clothes out of leaves, the first camouflage by the way, and hid. God asks Adam where he is. Adam says he is hiding. God asks why. Adam says he is naked. God asks the most important question of the story, “Who told you, you were naked? The story goes on with punishments and consequences and God makes for them clothes out of animal skins and they are banished from the garden. 

    If you want more details read it yourself. The clif notes are all you need for this lesson. The first point, and I really don’t know how many there are, is that this story is not about Adam and Eve and their relationship with each other. Rather it is a story about Adam and Eve and their relationship with God. They did not sin against each other, they sinned against God. Their shame because of their nakedness after they sinned was not from each other because they hid together. Rather their shame was because of their fear of God seeing them, which is why they tried to hide from God. The reason they were naked was because they had a perfect relationship with God and therefore had nothing to hide from Him. They did not wear clothing because they had no reason to. Their nakedness was pure, innocent, and the beauty of their bodies was a tribute to the beauty of their Creator. Here is where a lesson in Hebrew becomes important. The Hebrew word for naked at this point of the story is ערום   or arum. The root word is ערם or aram, which means to make or be bare. Arum is just simply the state of being without clothes with no sense of shame or sinful desire attached to it, and this is how these words are used throughout Scripture. 

    In chapter 3 they sin and everything changes. Scripture gives us a strange phrase. “Their eyes were opened, and they realized they were naked.” (Gen.3:7) This is strange only because we are not Hebrew. In Hebrew culture, and even in our own to an extent, the eyes are connected with knowledge and understanding. The phrase above has nothing to do with their vision, but with their understanding. What tree did they eat from? It was the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. When they ate of it what they gained was knowledge of evil which they were never intended to have. Their innocence was lost because of this new knowledge which came from the Adversary rather than God. Now they understood certain things about their nakedness which added shame to it. We see this in the Hebrew.

    When Adam told God that he hid because he was naked, the word here and in God’s response, “Who told you you were naked?” is עירם or erom. Arom and Erom are from the same root, but spelled and pronounced differently. Also, erom means shameful nakedness. Any time it is used in Scripture it is in a negative way, and often as a consequence for sin. 

    There is something else to notice in these two words. I realize I might be getting a little creative with the Hebrew, but I think this fits too well to be an accident. The difference in the two words from the root is a vav in the one and a yod in the other. The surrounding letters of the vav, a resh and a mem make the word rum (room), which means to lift up or exalt. The surrounding letters of the yod in the second word, an ayin and a resh make the word ayir which means burden. 

    Believe it or not, this all relates to atonement. I’m getting to that. First I want to analyze this question God asks Adam. “Who told you you were naked?” This also seems odd to us, unless you look at it from the standpoint of a parent. Your teenage daughter comes home from school and at dinner barely eats her food and says she is finished. Parent asks why she won’t eat. She say it is because she is fat. What question is most parents going to ask? “Who told you you were fat?” It is the same question for the same purpose. Her weight was never an issue before, so why is it now? Who or what gave her knowledge that made her conscious of her weight and gave her the impression it was something to be ashamed of? This is what God is asking. Does he not know? No He does, but He is playing psychologist and trying to get them to think about the situation they are in. The main point God is trying to make is this. Since God is asking the question, the answer obviously is not Him. If it is not Him why were they listening?

    In listening and obeying something created rather than the Creator, they gained knowledge about things they were never intended to know. This is how they fell. This is why they had shame. This is why they had something to hide. This is why they lost their relationship with God and needed a solution to their problem. 

    This is where we come to the coolest word in the Bible, kaphar. It means to cover. From this word we find the word kapparah, which means atonement. At this point I need to tell you a story from my teenage years. 

    When I was 15, I was still living in New Jersey and on a trip to see family in Michigan for Thanksgiving I was introduced to a girl about a year younger than me who went to the same church as my relatives. Despite some embarrassment from a stomach flu I had, somehow we became friends. After I left their church was later going on a winter retreat in Buffalo, New York. There was a church near me going to the same trip, so I went. Admittedly, I went more for hormonal reasons than spiritual. The last day of the retreat was a formal banquet where the guys were encouraged to ask a girl to the occasion. Of course I asked Barb, my friend, and of course she said yes. On the day of the banquet, everyone went sledding. At one point I was the second to last person on a bobsled with a girl kneeling, not sitting, behind me. About halfway down, we wiped out, and she ended up on top of me with my face between her and ice. I ended up with a nickel size scab on the side of my head. Obviously, for a 15 years old young man trying to impress his new girlfriend at a formal banquet that night, this was not a welcome addition to the facial visage. In my vast array of creativity, my solution was make-up. A little foundation and powder, and the scab was all but gone. Even Barb had to get like six inches from my face to see the source of my miraculous healing. It was not the Holy Spirit. It was Maybelline. 

     What is the point to this story? There was nothing I could do to get rid of the scab. Actually there was nothing wrong with the scab itself. The problem was the perceived embarrassment that came from being seen at the banquet with a big ugly scab on the side of my head. The makeup provided a covering for the scab which did not make the scab go away, but enabled me to go to the banquet without the embarrassment from the scab. The knowledge of evil that we have is there and cannot go away. It is that knowledge which brings condemnation and separation from God. Perhaps some time in the next life with resurrected bodies the knowledge will be gone, but for now nothing can take it away. However, a covering can remove the condemnation and allow us to have a relationship with God despite that knowledge. This is where atonement becomes important. 

    Adam and Eve tried to cover themselves to hide from God. First God does not desire us to hide. He wants us to commune with Him. Second, He wanted to communicate to them that their works could not adequately provide the atonement they needed to have communion with Him. This is why He clothed them. His clothing was with animal skins. What did God have to do to an animal to get the skins? Kill it. This was the first sacrifice for sin. God set three precedents in doing this. One, atonement could only be done by God. Second, It was by His grace. Third, only the blood of a substitutionary sacrifice could produce the sacrifice. The life is in the blood, and the penalty for sin is death. So, when there is sin, there is a debt which requires death. If that debt is paid, atonement is made.

    Now we go to the sacrifices of the priests which provided atonement for themselves, individuals, and at times the entire nation of Israel. They repeated the same thing that God did in the garden, and added another precedent. Atonement could only be made by a priest. There was one problem with this system, however. It broke one of the original precedents set up in the garden in that it is people performing the atonement and not God. God set up the system and as long as they did it according to the way He prescribed it was accepted, but it was just a shadow of things to come, not the real deal. The penalty for sin was simple put on hold until a later Messiah, also predicted in the garden, would come to provide the final redemption. Am I making this up?

For the Torah has in it a shadow of the good things to come, but not the actual manifestation of the originals. Therefore, it can never, by means of the same sacrifices repeated endlessly year after year, bring to the goal those who approach the Holy Place to offer them. Otherwise, wouldn't the offering of those sacrifices have ceased? For if the people performing the service had been cleansed once and for all, they would no longer have sins on their conscience. No, it is quite the contrary — in these sacrifices is a reminder of sins, year after year. For it is impossible that the blood of bulls and goats should take away sins.  [Hebrews 10:1-4]

    So all the sacrifices and the priesthood all was a picture of what the Messiah would later do to provide the final atonement and forgiveness of sin. He fulfills all the requirements. He is God, the atonement was provided by His grace, it was provided by the shedding of His own blood as the Passover Lamb, and He is our Great High Priest. Awesome huh!

    There is still something to be said here. How does Yeshua’s redemption fit in with Adam and Eve? The knowledge of evil is still there. Yeshua’s atonement, like my makeup, only removes the condemnation that comes from that knowledge. I can’t get rid of the knowledge, but I can fight against it. The atonement God provided for Adam and Eve did not enable them to live however they want as the story of Cain and Abel shows. Cain killed Abel which was a sin that Cain was punished for. Cain was given a choice. He could act upon the knowledge of good or the knowledge of evil. One path leads to life, the other to death. He chose the wrong path. God gives us Torah so we can fight against the knowledge of evil in our lives. Torah has nothing to do with our atonement, as that can only be accomplished by God, however Torah teaches us to resist the knowledge of evil and choose to live like Adam and Eve in the garden without shame or condemnation, trusting in the work of our Messiah’s atonement.

Hallellujah!