Lesson 1: How God Gives Us A New Beginning

The Bible makes an astounding promise: “Anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun! And all of this is a gift from God, who brought us back to himself through Christ” (2 Corinthians 5:17-18). Contrary to the American dream, we don’t work hard to get this new life through our own effort. It is a gift from God. Why would he give us a new life as a new person? Because he loves us so much that he’s willing to do for us what we could never do for ourselves, which is to make ourselves righteous in his sight. No matter how hard I try, no matter how much I discipline myself, I cannot approach God on the basis of my own merits.

God taught this mystery to his chosen people, the Jews, when he rescued them from slavery in Egypt. He set up a system through which their sins could be forgiven by him through the blood of an animal sacrificed on their behalf. “The life of the body is in its blood. I have given you the blood on the altar to purify you, making you right with the Lord. It is the blood, given in exchange for a life, that makes purification possible” (Leviticus 17:11). We instinctively know that someone has to pay for our wrongdoing, causing us to punish ourselves when we mess up, withdrawing from God and people in shame. But God graciously allows for the payment of sin to be made through an animal, rather than the person paying the penalty for their sin. That’s called grace, undeserved favor.

Why did he do this? Our introductory scripture told us God wanted to bring us back to himself. He wants to be with us, to enjoy a relationship with the people he created. Sin – following our own selfish desires instead of pursuing selfless love for God and others – brings separation. When we do selfish things, we hurt others, causing separation in our relationships. It also causes us to separate from God, like the first man and woman who disobeyed God and hid from him in shame. Disobedience to God brought death to our bodies as we rejected the source of life, our Creator. As a result of mankind’s continuous rejection of God and selfish behavior, we live in a fallen world centered on principles of scarcity and separation. Yet this didn’t stop God from pursuing a relationship with us!

“For this is how God loved the world: He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.God sent his Son into the world not to judge the world, but to save the world through him” (John 3:16-17). How did he save us? By fulfilling the very laws God set up for the Jews (called Hebrews or Israelites in the Old Testament). Unless we understand the laws Jesus fulfilled, we can’t grasp the gift of our salvation and the benefits we receive as a new creation. Everything God commanded the Israelites to do for the sacrificial system was so he could atone for their sins, making them right with himself, so his presence could remain with them in the tabernacle (a moveable tent dwelling). God makes us clean in his sight because he wants to draw near to us.

The sacrificial system that foreshadowed Jesus’ sacrifice for us on the cross was God’s way of acknowledging the cost of our sin, which is death, and allowing something or someone else to pay the price so we could draw near to God without fear of punishment. God hints at this when he first establishes his covenant (binding agreement) with Abraham, the father of the Jewish nation, through whom God promised a future descendant who would bless the whole world (Jesus, a Jew descended from Abraham). To test Abraham’s faith, God asked him to sacrifice his only son whom God had miraculously given him in his old age. Abraham obeyed, believing that God could raise his son from the dead. At the last minute, God stopped Abraham and provided a substitute ram as a sacrifice instead.

God never intended human sacrifice but was showing Abraham that while we deserve death for our sins, God will send a substitute. That substitute would be God’s only Son, Jesus, who was miraculously born of a virgin with God as his Father. Jesus was born fully man and fully God so that he could fulfill the requirements of God’s covenant on behalf of both man and God. Everything in the Old Testament is God pointing us to his Son whom God would send as a sacrifice for our sins and raise from the dead to establish a kingdom of God on the earth in which sin has been removed so God can dwell with us.

God showed us how he would accomplish this through the Jewish festivals, the most important of which is Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. The sacrifices offered that day would atone for the sins of the whole nation of Israel, but they had to be made annually. Jesus said that he didn’t come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it (Matthew 5:17). He fulfilled the requirements of God’s law for the Day of Atonement as the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the whole world (John 1:29). In one day, Jesus’ death brought salvation to all who believe in him for all time. But what exactly do we need to believe? Let’s examine the Day of Atonement to discover what Jesus did for us on the cross to fulfill God’s law.

Jesus is our High Priest Who Advocates for Us
There are four elements of this holiest of days. First is the cleansing of the priest and the tabernacle. God instructed Moses to build a tabernacle where God’s presence dwelled above the ark of the covenant in the innermost room called the Most Holy Place. According to Hebrews 9, this tabernacle was built as a pattern of God’s tabernacle in heaven. On the Day of Atonement, there were strict instructions for how the high priest was to dress, bathe, offer incense before the Lord, sacrifice a bull for his own sins and sprinkle its blood on the ark. The role of the high priest points to Jesus’ role in heaven as one who intercedes for us as our Advocate in heaven (1 John 2:1).

“Because Jesus lives forever, his priesthood lasts forever. ²⁵ Therefore he is able, once and forever, to save those who come to God through him. He lives forever to intercede with God on their behalf. ²⁶ He is the kind of high priest we need because he is holy and blameless, unstained by sin. He has been set apart from sinners and has been given the highest place of honor in heaven. ²⁷ Unlike those other high priests, he does not need to offer sacrifices every day. They did this for their own sins first and then for the sins of the people. But Jesus did this once for all when he offered himself as the sacrifice for the people’s sins” (Hebrews 7:24-27). Jesus is on your side! He is forever interceding for your restoration to God’s perfect will. God is for you, not against you!

Jesus Pays the Penalty for our Sin to Cleanse our Conscience
The second element of the Day of Atonement is the sin offering. After his own sins were atoned for, two identical goats were brought before the high priest who had two gold plates that were blindly assigned to the goats. One plate said, “to God,” and the other said, “to Azazel.” This choice foreshadowed what would happen to Jesus when he was arrested. Pilate brought two men before the people, Jesus and Barabbas, asking which one would they would like him to set free, hoping they would say Jesus. Instead, they chose Barabbas and sent Jesus to be crucified. The goat that was assigned to God was offered as a sin offering for the people. Jesus fulfilled this requirement as our sin offering. 2 Corinthians 5:21 tells us that “God made Christ, who never sinned, to be the offering for our sin, so that we could be made right with God through Christ.” The high priest then sprinkled the blood of the goat on the atonement cover of the ark, which is also called the mercy seat. Hebrews 4:16 tells us that by the blood of Jesus, we can now boldly enter God’s throne room and find mercy in our time of need.

“Christ has now become the High Priest over all the good things that have come. He has entered that greater, more perfect Tabernacle in heaven, which was not made by human hands and is not part of this created world. ¹² With his own blood—not the blood of goats and calves—he entered the Most Holy Place once for all time and secured our redemption forever. ¹³ Under the old system, the blood of goats and bulls and the ashes of a heifer could cleanse people’s bodies from ceremonial impurity. ¹⁴ Just think how much more the blood of Christ will purify our consciences from sinful deeds so that we can worship the living God. For by the power of the eternal Spirit, Christ offered himself to God as a perfect sacrifice for our sins” (Hebrews 9:11-14). Why did Jesus offer his blood? To pay the penalty for our sin and, thus, purify our conscience so we can draw near to God and worship. When we feel shame and fear punishment, we draw back from God, but our very conscience can be cleansed by the blood of Jesus so we can enjoy God’s daily presence, knowing that he also enjoys us! How can we be sure God enjoys us?

Jesus Removes Our Scarlet Sins and Makes Us Pure White
The third and most surprising element of the Day of Atonement is what happens to the other goat assigned to Azazel, the scapegoat. The high priest lays his hands on this goat, confessing all the sins of the people over it, thus transferring the sins of the people to the goat. It is then driven out the eastern gate to the wilderness of Azazel where it is pushed off a cliff to its death. Psalm 103:12 says, “He has removed our sins as far from us as the east is from the west.” The prophet Isaiah spoke of the coming scapegoat on whom God would transfer our sins, thus removing them from us.

“It was our weaknesses he carried; it was our sorrows that weighed him down. And we thought his troubles were a punishment from God, a punishment for his own sins! ⁵ But he was pierced for our rebellion, crushed for our sins. He was beaten so we could be whole. He was whipped so we could be healed. ⁶ All of us, like sheep, have strayed away. We have left God’s paths to follow our own. Yet the Lord laid on him the sins of us all” (Isaiah 53:4-6). Just as the high priest confessed the sins of the people while laying his hands on the goat to transfer them, God laid on Jesus every sin that would ever be confessed in a spirit of repentance. Confession of sin matters. 1 John 1:9 tells us, “If we confess our sins to him, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all wickedness.”

Our role is to confess our sins, which means we come into agreement with God and own the fact that we have done wrong to him and others that needs to be forgiven. As Isaiah said, we’ve all left God’s path to follow our own. When we confess our wrongdoing, God immediately transfers our sin to Jesus who then removes it from us, cleansing us from all wickedness. How do we know we are made clean? One of the supernatural signs of this ritual that was recorded by the Jews of Jesus’ day was the wrapping of scarlet thread around the horns of the scapegoat and the handles of the temple in Jerusalem. When the goat reached the cliff, the thread was tied to a stake and the goat pushed off a cliff to its death. If the thread turned white, God had forgiven the sins of the people. God speaks to this in Isaiah 1:18, “Though your sins are like scarlet, I will make them as white as snow. Though they are red like crimson, I will make them as white as wool.”

How do we know Jesus’ sacrifice is enough to purify us and make us white as snow in God’s eyes? The scapegoat was driven off a cliff and descended to the desert below, just as Jesus descended to hell carrying all our sins. He took our sins to the grave so that our sins could be buried in the grave with him. Through water baptism, we symbolically join him in death to sin as we go down under the water, washing away our impurity. Just as Jesus was raised from the dead, having conquered death on our behalf, so we also come up out of the water as a new creation full of life by the same Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead. “For you were buried with Christ when you were baptized. And with him you were raised to new life because you trusted the mighty power of God, who raised Christ from the dead. ¹³ You were dead because of your sins and because your sinful nature was not yet cut away. Then God made you alive with Christ, for he forgave all our sins. ¹⁴ He canceled the record of the charges against us and took it away by nailing it to the cross” (Colossians 2:12-14). How do we know we’re clean? We trust in the power of God – the Holy Spirit – who raised Christ from the dead. We believe that what Jesus did is enough to cancel the charges against us. That leads us to the fourth element of the Day of Atonement.

We Do Not Make Ourselves Clean by Human Effort
On the Day of Atonement, the people were required to deny themselves (through fasting) and abstain from regular work. Anyone found working would be cut off from Israel. This command to abstain from work points us to the truth that we will never atone for our sins by doing good works. We must trust in the process God gave, which is atonement by the blood. He did this so we could be restored to right relationship with him. He wants to be intimately involved in our lives, so he sent his Son to remove all barriers. When Jesus died on the cross, the veil that separated the Most Holy Place was torn by God, demonstrating that all who are under the blood of Jesus may now enter into intimacy with God.

Jewish historians recorded that the scarlet thread always turned white until the last 40 years before the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed. This is because Jesus, the final sacrifice offered for sin, fulfilled the old covenant requirements at that time. With no presence of God in the temple and no way of atonement, the Jews who did not receive Jesus as the fulfillment of their covenant with God invented modern-day rabbinical Judaism which centers around the synagogue, the writings of the rabbis and sages, and the performance of good works. This should be a warning to us that if we’re not teaching that it’s only the blood of Jesus that makes us right with God, and if our life isn’t centered around the leadership and presence of the Holy Spirit in us, his temple, we are essentially acting like modern Jews with a church-centered focus that emphasizes the teachings of men and doing good works to earn God’s favor. This is not biblical Christianity. If that has been your experience, my hope is that this lesson and the ones to come will introduce you to the biblical new covenant through which we are a new creation in Christ.

God pursued us all the way to the cross because he wants to be with us forever. If you don’t know Jesus as your personal Savior, I invite you to confess your sins to God and ask him to transfer them to Jesus, forgiving you and making you clean. Ask him to fill you with his Holy Spirit so you can enjoy relationship with God forever and be made new. What Jesus began at the cross, the Holy Spirit will carry on to completion in you. When we receive God’s Holy Spirit, he comes to guide us to a new life that will extend into eternity with God in heaven. In the lessons to come, we will learn how to recognize the voice of the Holy Spirit and respond as children who trust the Father, sheep who follow the Good Shepherd, and the beloved bride who loves her Bridegroom, Jesus.

Questions for Reflection:
1. If you are already a believer, is there an aspect of the Day of Atonement that you have not fully believed? Do you believe that Jesus is your Advocate, interceding for you, or do you struggle to believe God could ever accept you? Have you received God’s forgiveness based on the finished work of Jesus on the cross or are you trying to fix yourself before you approach him? Do you have a clean conscience, or have you believed that your mistakes are always before God’s eyes? Ask Jesus to cleanse your conscience with his blood, assuring you that your sins are removed from you, so you can worship him with joy and experience a personal daily relationship with him. 

2. If you truly felt like your past sins were removed from you, how would you live differently? Why do you think the devil works so hard to remind us of our failures? Ask the Holy Spirit to help you live this week in the truth that you are a new creation; the old life has gone and the new has come!