Daily devotion – the Day of Atonement
Exo 30:10 And Aaron shall make an atonement upon the horns of it once in a year with the blood of the sin offering of atonements: once in the year shall he make atonement upon it throughout your generations: it is most holy unto the LORD.
Last Sunday was Yom Kippur or the Day of Atonement in Israel. They celebrate this special day now without a sacrifice and without a Temple.
After the Temple was destroyed in 70 C.E., and after the subsequent Dispersion of the Jewish people, Jewish scholars substituted for the Temple ritual of the sin offering and the Day of Atonement offerings the “three great concepts,” which became Orthodox and Conservative views for the basis of righteousness.
These concepts are repentance – prayer – and good deeds. These became the means by which one is made right with God and with his fellow man.
However, the reality of such meeting the requirements of sin and a Holy God leave the Jews still passionately seeking the rebuilding of the Temple and the true sacrificial system being reinstituted. Only then within their hearts could they truly sense and know that blood is required for the forgiveness of sin.
One can see clearly how and why the Jewish nation will accept with open arms the first horse rider of the Apocalypse, the Antichrist, who will enable the building of the new Temple and the establishment once again, of the priests and the sacrificial system as per the book of Leviticus.
When we visit Israel and attend the Western Wall, the closest the Jews get to the Temple Mount at the moment, one’s heart is broken.
Firstly, the Jewish people are blinded to the knowledge of Jesus Christ their true sacrificial Lamb, the sacrifice to end all sacrifices, being rejected when He first came to Jerusalem.
Secondly, the tragedy that what they are seeking even today, falls short of the wonder and glory of receiving Messiah Jesus as Lord and Saviour as we the Church now experience and have in our relationship with Christ our Saviour.
The Bible tells us to pray for the people of Israel and to ask God’s blessing be upon them.
How thankful should we be, Gentiles, the unnatural branch grafted into the True Vine, all because of the wonder of the grace and love of God for us. Right now, we experience a close loving relationship with our Heavenly Father through His Son Jesus.
The nation Israel will too experience what we already have at the time of Christ’s Second Coming, and the revelation of Christ to His beloved chosen people.
Zec 13:6 And one shall say unto him, What are these wounds in thine hands? Then he shall answer, Those with which I was wounded in the house of my friends.