Finding God’s Heart: Atonement
Expository Sermon on Leviticus 16 and Hebrews 7 – 10
by Maylan Schurch
Bellevue Seventh-day Adventist Church 2/12/2022
©2022 by Maylan Schurch

To see the entire worship service where this sermon was preached click just below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abISKb6XbY8

Please open your Bibles to Leviticus chapter 16.

This past Thursday afternoon as I was walking through our neighborhood, I saw a heartwarming and nostalgic sight. Up ahead of me, on the same side of the street I was walking on, I saw someone sitting on a bicycle, with a taller person standing behind.

As I got closer, I saw that the person on the bike was a boy who seemed to be about eight or nine, wearing a bright red helmet. The person behind him was his father.

As I came closer, the boy just stood there, one foot on the sidewalk and the other tentatively feeling for the bicycle pedal. And suddenly I got it. The boy was learning to ride the bike, and the dad was there for support and encouragement.

The scene still hadn’t changed by the time I got close to them. The boy was still standing hesitantly, trying to get his courage up. The dad was close behind with a humorously patient look on his face.

So I decided to do what I could to help. First, I complimented the boy on his bike – it looked like a nice one. And then I told him, “All you have to do is keep pumping. As long as you keep pumping the pedals, you won’t fall.”

The dad grinned shyly. He said, “That’s just what I’ve been telling him. But he’s scared!”

I said confidently, “Well, give him two days. He’ll have it all figured out in two days.” (I just picked that number out of the air. Actually, the boy may have had it figured out in half an hour. I didn’t stick around to watch.)

I couldn’t stop smiling reminiscently for the next block or two. I remembered my own childish fear as I straddled a big bike beneath me. I remember understanding very well that if that bike decided to tip over, I was going down with it. But I remembered my own father walking along beside me, his hand gripping the back edge of the bicycle seat, keeping the bike upright as I tried to get up the courage to pump off. My heart warmed to that Thursday afternoon father, doing what he could, but realizing that it was the boy who had to pump out in faith.

As I’ve often mentioned from this pulpit, Jesus either never or almost never referred to God as anyone besides Father. Jesus would use phrases like “your Father in heaven, or “the Father in heaven.” The Lord’s Prayer begins with “Our Father.” Jesus calls God “Father” right around 200 times within the four Gospels. So since we can take the Savior at His word, we need to fix it firmly in our mind that God is a loving, heavenly Parent.

But He is also more than a parent, and that’s one of the things we’ll learn as we spend some time in Leviticus 16 and then a bit of the New Testament book of Hebrews. We’re going to be looking at what might be the Bible’s most amazing story.

Leviticus 16 talks about the once-a-year “Day of Atonement,” which Jewish people call Yom Kippur. As we look at this chapter, let’s be looking for the heart of God. What is His great heart trying to say to us? After all, on Thursday afternoon, that father, who seemed like a tenderhearted, gentle man, had told his son all he knew about bike-riding. And here in this chapter we will be watching God provide all the details His people needed back then to have their sins forgiven.

This week as I read through this chapter, and later in the book of Hebrews, I could find three immensely important truths God’s heart would like us to know, right now, before we leave this sanctuary. Let’s look for the first one.

Leviticus 16:1 [NKJV]: Now the LORD spoke to Moses after the death of the two sons of Aaron, when they offered profane fire before the LORD, and died;

That sobering story is told in Leviticus 10. If you read all the way through that story and beyond, you get the strong impression that Aaron’s two sons, Nadab and Abihu, both priests, got drunk before they went into the temple, and they carelessly took unconsecrated fire with them. They were slain by the presence of the Lord.

And Moses related to Aaron what God said about that incident, in Leviticus 10:3: “by those who come near Me I must be regarded as holy; And before all the people I must be glorified.”

I don’t know the family whose dad and son I saw Thursday afternoon on the sidewalk, but I got the strong sense that here was a loving father and a respectful son. I’m very sure that this dad had had moments when he needed to communicate to his son some important things in life, like, “I am the dad, you’re the child. You need to obey your mother and me.”

And God, of course, is not simply a dad with a few children. God is responsible for the safety and happiness of the entire universe. Satan has scornfully been spreading a lot of disinformation about God, and God needed to make very clear that everybody is safest when He is respected and believed. The Israelites there in the wilderness needed to know that God was real, and far more powerful than any of the stone images they had seen in Egypt.

God Himself gives more instruction starting in Leviticus 16:

Leviticus 16:1 – 4: Now the LORD spoke to Moses after the death of the two sons of Aaron, when they offered profane fire before the LORD, and died; and the LORD said to Moses: “Tell Aaron your brother not to come at just any time into the Holy Place inside the veil, before the mercy seat which is on the ark, lest he die; for I will appear in the cloud above the mercy seat. “Thus Aaron shall come into the Holy Place: with the blood of a young bull as a sin offering, and of a ram as a burnt offering. He shall put the holy linen tunic and the linen trousers on his body; he shall be girded with a linen sash, and with the linen turban he shall be attired. These are holy garments. Therefore he shall wash his body in water, and put them on.

If you’re taking sermon notes, here comes Sermon Point One. What is God’s heart saying to us so far in this chapter?

Here’s what I think He’s saying:

“I am holy, and I want you holy too.”

When you stop and think of it, those are two powerful statements. When God says “I am holy,” that’s not just Him going into “threatening mode” so we’ll pay attention. God truly is holy. And that means that His presence radiates power, and our human sinfulness makes His presence really traumatic and even dangerous.

We see this happening again and again. Moses approaches the burning bush, and God warns him to take off his sandals because the ground is holy.

God descends on the top of Mount Sinai, but first He warns Moses to keep the people away, in case God’s power will break out and cause them harm.

When Jesus took three disciples up on a mountain and was suddenly filled with the glory of God, the disciples went into sensory shock for a while. And when Jesus returns in glory in the skies, those who are ready to meet him will welcome him gladly, but the wicked will be slain by the brightness of his coming.

So God’s holiness is real. But so is God’s statement that he wants us to be holy too. So, what do I do, now that I know this?
I think one thing we need to do is to pray for a “holiness hunger.” A few years ago Christian songwriter Micah Stampley put it this way:

Holiness, holiness is what I long for
Holiness is what I need
Holiness, holiness is what You want from me, from me…

And the chorus says,

So, Take my heart and mold it
Take my mind, transform it
Take my will, conform it
To Yours, to Yours, Oh Lord

Another thing to keep in mind, besides praying for “holiness hunger”, is to keep firmly in mind that even though God loves us, God is not us. There is a holiness divide between Him and us. After all, Jesus, the son of God, had to become a human baby in order to fulfill God’s desire to come close to us. And Peter, in 1 Peter 2:22, firmly tells us that Jesus committed no sin.

So God says, “I am holy, and want you to be holy too.” But He doesn’t stop there. Let’s lay down Sermon Point Two.

God says, “I am holy, and I want you holy too.” Then He says, “So I have a short-term plan.”

You see, my Thursday afternoon father didn’t just shoo his son out the door and command him to learn bike-riding on his own. Instead, Dad went along with advice and support. It’s the same with God. God had a plan. God knows that the first step to holiness means getting your sins forgiven.

Let’s get some detail about God’s short-term plan.

Verses 5 – 10: And he shall take from the congregation of the children of Israel two kids of the goats as a sin offering, and one ram as a burnt offering. “Aaron shall offer the bull as a sin offering, which is for himself, and make atonement for himself and for his house. He shall take the two goats and present them before the LORD at the door of the tabernacle of meeting. Then Aaron shall cast lots for the two goats: one lot for the LORD and the other lot for the scapegoat. And Aaron shall bring the goat on which the LORD’s lot fell, and offer it as a sin offering. But the goat on which the lot fell to be the scapegoat shall be presented alive before the LORD, to make atonement upon it, and to let it go as the scapegoat into the wilderness.

Now of course these are rituals no Christian needs to perform today, because of what we’ll be reading in Hebrews later on. But one of the reasons it’s so important to read potentially boring chapters like Leviticus 16 is that to the people they were written for – to the people who had heard from God that He wanted them to be holy – these were crucially important instructions.

You see, God wants to make sure everyone (including you and me) knows that sins must not be ignored, or cherished, but sins need to be forgiven. Because if you don’t deal with it, sin leads to death. Paul says in Romans 6:23, “The wages of sin is death.” 1 John 3:4 says, “Whoever commits sin also commits lawlessness, and sin is lawlessness.”

You might say that God wants to make everything spiritually sanitary. When I was in my mid teens, I worked at a creamery, a milk bottling plant, in Redfield, South Dakota. My dad had worked there too, for several years. The whole plant was designed and built around the need to keep things clean – not just apparently clean, but really clean.

I remember my dad wearing these paper hats which you could adjust and then put them over your head. The plant floor was a type of concrete that was a rose-red in color, and it was constantly scrubbed. Often we would use a steam hose.
In any room in the dairy, you could look up toward the ceiling and see gleaming stainless steel pipes that disappeared into the wall. And if you followed those pipes, they led from the milk tank room where bulk milk would be delivered by trucks from the farms, all the way to the bottling room.

Once the milk got to the bottling room, it would go to the cream separator, and then the pasteurizer, and finally to the tank which would hold the milk until it was piped over to the PurePak machines which would put it into milk cartons. No human hand, or even human breath, touched that milk from the time it was delivered to the dairy.

And at the end of the bottling day, water was flushed through all those stainless steel pipes, and then a powerful liquid sterilizer was run through the lines. Then you would send water through the lines to wash away the sterilizer, and you were ready for the next day.

That’s what I thought of as I read these Leviticus 16 procedures. Aaron the high priest needed to be washed and cleaned, his clothing needed to be a special holy clothing, and a whole series of sacrifices were needed to cleanse not only the people but the sanctuary itself.

So as we pause and think about God’s short-term sanctification plan, what should we do, even though it’s not a plan that we still need use today?

First, I think we need to think of sin as something like a virus. We all know – and we’re probably sick to death of talking about it – about all of the carefulness (the hand-washing, the mask-wearing) we’ve had to go through to try to keep ourselves from COVID. And that’s because for a frightening number of people, especially before the vaccines came along, the wages of COVID turned out to be death.

Sin, of course, has its roots in the deeper virus of selfishness, and selfishness is deadly. So I do think it’s a good idea to linger over the details in this chapter.

Another thing to keep in mind is this. Think of the huge satisfaction the people felt when they saw that second goat, the scapegoat, symbolically carry all their sins away out into the wilderness, never to return. The evening of Yom Kippur must have been a vast relief, and even a time of joy, for the faithful people who followed these steps.

Let’s lay down Sermon Point Three, and then we’ll read about it in the book of Hebrews:

God says, “I am holy, and I want you holy too. So I have a short-term plan—until it’s time for My better plan.”

Before we go to Hebrews, I like to show you something Shelley gave me permission to use in my sermon this morning. I’m going to hold this up, and I want you to raise your hand if you think you know what this is.

It’s a slide rule!

Now this is actually an amazing piece of equipment. I still have a miniature one of these, made by a reputable company, but I think this big one would be more accurate than the smaller one.

The two basic skills I learned on the slide rule were to multiply and divide. Multiplication is the only thing I still remember how to do, but people who were good at the slide rule were able to do some amazing calculations.

How many of you still have a slide rule somewhere in your house? Not a lot of you, right? That’s because the slide rule was what you might call the old plan. Back when I was a college student, I saw my first calculator, and I remember the hairs prickling on the back of my neck as I realized what that little device could do.

The slide rule was the old plan – the calculator is the better plan. And of course computers nowadays can calculate complex formulas more rapidly than a calculator ever could.

Leviticus 16, with its Day of Atonement, was God’s short-term plan. Now let’s read about His better plan.

Turn to Hebrews chapter 7. Since we’ve spent a bit of time in Leviticus 16, we’ll see a lot of similarities—but also a huge difference.

If you’ve spent some time in the book of Hebrews, you know that a good part of it talks about how Jesus is now our Heavenly High Priest, and how much better a priest He is than any earthly ones. Let’s pick up the story at Hebrews 7:23:

Hebrews 7:23 – 27: Also there were many priests, because they were prevented by death from continuing. But He [Jesus], because He continues forever, has an unchangeable priesthood. Therefore He is also able to save to the uttermost those who come to God through Him, since He always lives to make intercession for them. For such a High Priest was fitting for us, who is holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners, and has become higher than the heavens; who does not need daily, as those high priests, to offer up sacrifices, first for His own sins and then for the people’s, for this He did once for all when He offered up Himself.

And chapter 8 puts it all together. Keep an eye out for some verses I think are some of the Bible’s most incredibly encouraging ones:

Hebrews 8:1 – 12: Now this is the main point of the things we are saying: We have such a High Priest, who is seated at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in the heavens, a Minister of the sanctuary and of the true tabernacle which the Lord erected, and not man. For every high priest is appointed to offer both gifts and sacrifices. Therefore it is necessary that this One also have something to offer. For if He were on earth, He would not be a priest, since there are priests who offer the gifts according to the law; who serve the copy and shadow of the heavenly things, as Moses was divinely instructed when he was about to make the tabernacle. For He said, “See that you make all things according to the pattern shown you on the mountain.” But now He has obtained a more excellent ministry, inasmuch as He is also Mediator of a better covenant, which was established on better promises. For if that first covenant had been faultless, then no place would have been sought for a second. Because finding fault with them, He says: “Behold, the days are coming, says the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah—not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day when I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt; because they did not continue in My covenant, and I disregarded them, says the LORD. For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD: I will put My laws in their mind and write them on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. None of them shall teach his neighbor, and none his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for all shall know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them. For I will be merciful to their unrighteousness, and their sins and their lawless deeds I will remember no more.”

So – what do we do, now that we know this? We find out exactly what to do over in Hebrews chapter 10.

Remember how careful the Old Testament high priest had to be that he didn’t shoulder his way into the presence of God without taking precautions? This book was written to the Hebrew people, who probably knew those Leviticus 16 procedures by heart. Imagine their amazement and delight when they the verses in Hebrews 10, starting with verse 19.

Hebrews 10: 19 – 25: Therefore, brethren, having boldness to enter the Holiest by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way which He consecrated for us, through the veil, that is, His flesh, and having a High Priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful. And let us consider one another in order to stir up love and good works, not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as is the manner of some, but exhorting one another, and so much the more as you see the Day approaching.

Luke 23:45 says that at the very moment Jesus died on the cross, down in the Jerusalem temple the great veil between the Holy and the Most Holy Places was torn in two. This was a sign that Jesus—through His death as the Lamb of God—had opened the way to God.

And since the way is open, you and I are free to walk along it any time we want. First John 1:9 says, “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”

This is because Jesus first became our sacrifice, and now is our High Priest. And because of what He has done, He has given us the right to enter the presence of God. We just need to confess our sins and accept His sacrifice for us.
Would you like to do that? And this is something we must do often, because we still struggle with sinful tendencies. But each time we can experience the joy that the Israelites felt as the Day of Atonement came to a close.

Our closing song describes how Jesus has opened the way between us and the Heavenly Father. Let’s stand and sing number 178, “The Unveiled Christ.”