Leviticus; The Law of Holiness and Grace

The Day of Atonement

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Genre: Lessons with Q & A

Lesson: 61

Track: 61

Dictation Name: RR172AG61

Date: Early 70s

Let us worship God. This is the confidence that we have in Him that if we ask anything according to His will, He heareth us. Having these promises, let us draw near to the Throne of Grace with true hearts, in full assurance of faith. My voice shalt Thou hear in the morning, oh Lord, in the morning will I direct my prayer unto Thee and will look up.

Let us pray.

Our Lord and our God, we thank Thee that our time is in Thy hands, who doest all things well. We thank Thee that all our yesterdays, today and tomorrows are known to Thee, that in Thy grace and mercy, Thou hast ordained our triumph in Christ and the victory of Thy kingdom over the powers of darkness. Guide us and bless us by Thy Word and by Thy Spirit, so that we may be better prepared for Thy service and in all things glorify and magnify Thy name and Thy kingdom. In Christ’s name, amen.

Our scripture is Leviticus 23:26-32, our subject, “The Day of Atonement.” Leviticus 23:26-32:

“26 And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying,

27 Also on the tenth day of this seventh month there shall be a day of atonement: it shall be an holy convocation unto you; and ye shall afflict your souls, and offer an offering made by fire unto the Lord.

28 And ye shall do no work in that same day: for it is a day of atonement, to make an atonement for you before the Lord your God.

29 For whatsoever soul it be that shall not be afflicted in that same day, he shall be cut off from among his people.

30 And whatsoever soul it be that doeth any work in that same day, the same soul will I destroy from among his people.

31 Ye shall do no manner of work: it shall be a statute forever throughout your generations in all your dwellings.

32 It shall be unto you a Sabbath of rest, and ye shall afflict your souls: in the ninth day of the month at even, from even unto even, shall ye celebrate your Sabbath.”

This is the law concerning the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur. Three times in these verses there is the command, “ye shall afflict your souls.” Now, with the mindset we have from centuries of malpractice, we approach this with altogether the wrong presupposition. We think of afflicting ourselves, our souls as somehow being miserable and sorrowful but sorrow does not take away sin, nor alter it. The Hebrew word, ‘anah’ means “to depress,” that is, our pride and our self-trust. It is to reverse Genesis 3:5, “ye shall be as gods, knowing (determining for yourselves) what constitutes good and evil.” Every man is his own lawmaker, his own god, is his own arbiter of good and evil. So that when we are told we are ‘to depress’ ourselves, it does not refer to our emotions, but it is a religious statement. It means that our pride and our self-trust is to be reversed, that we are to recognize that God is God, and we are man, that our strength is not in ourselves, but in the Lord.

As one student of Leviticus generations ago declared, atonement meant bringing the glory back to the human scene; restoring God’s purpose in the World and in our lives. And so to afflict our souls means to take away our self-glorification—our belief that we are god. It means that we reverse Genesis 3:5 and that we restore the glory to its proper place: the Glory of God.

According to scripture, and as Hebrews makes much of this in the New Testament, only the High Priest could enter the Holy of Holies, because sin was s separating power. But after Christ—and this is the great difference, according to the Book of Hebrews—the believer has direct access to the Father through Christ. So that afflicting our souls is to see God in His proper place, man in his proper place, and to rejoice in that fact.

Unhappily, in Judaism as it developed, and especially in the Medieval Era, the emphasis of Yom Kippur has been on the collective confession of sins, rather than on the objective fact of God’s provided atonement. This could be expected in Judaism; after all they had rejected God’s atonement in Christ. But both in Catholicism and in Protestantism, forms of Pietism have led to the same emphasis, to an emphasis not on the victory that is ours, because we place ourselves where we belong in relationship to God but on grief, on feeling sorrowful for our sins, though they have, if we are believers, been taken way. It has led to what some scholars have called, in particular, the other Spanish Christ, in which the whole of the Passion Week story centers on Good Friday on disaster, on tragedy, on grief. And this is the big day, not the Day of Resurrection. And the empty crucifix is not stressed, but the crucifix with Christ in His agony.

I recall when I was a student hearing a professor discuss this matter and the fact that the number of Catholic thinkers who bewailed this misappropriation of stress, this misappropriation of piety, saying that some of the older priests in Europe and thinkers were very, very embittered by this new stress. And he described a scene in a Catholic bookstore in France, and this monsignor came in and the woman who was the main sales lady came up to him, bustling up to the monsignor to tell him ‘we have a lot of new crucifixes here’ and how marvelous they were, and they were all with the agonized Christ, the dying Christ. And the monsignor turned on her, took his cane and brushed all those crucifixes off the table and he said, “These reek of death, not the victory of the cross!” That emphasis has largely disappeared. Even among Protestants today the sense of victory is gone. But this is what the Day of Atonement is about.

According to verse 29, non-observance meant excommunication.

Verse 30, God says in His own way, He will bring about destruction to those who violate this day, who despise the victory He has provided. The Hebrew day, by the way, was from sundown to sundown. The liturgical calendar of some churches still maintains that, so that holy days begin on the eve preceding the calendar date.

In the Day of Atonement, we again have time stressed in its meaning. And the consequences of our misunderstanding of time are important. They stem from our misunderstanding the Day of Atonement. After the fall of Jerusalem, with the end of the sacrificial system, Judaism turned to self-atonement. This should not surprise us, because the sacrificial system had become mere traditionalism by the first century. A modern writer from Israel has said of Yom Kippur, that it “…adds a new dimension. However low man has fallen, he can pull himself up again.” Of course, that is Humanism. It is self-atonement. And a great deal of what passes for evangelicalism as well as modernism echoes the same kind of thing: man pulling himself up again; man as his own savior.

One aspect of the continuing synagogue service of Yom Kippur is Kol Nidra. It has been a part of the service since about the 18th century and it is the eradication of all vows in the previous year. And it has led very often to anti-Semitic charges. But the Kol Nidra applied only to personal religious vows which effected or involved no one else. They were in relationship to God.

In modernism, atonement has given way to self-salvation or with the social gospel, to salvation by the State.

Now in all such interpretations, the meaning of time is seen as derived from within time and from man himself. As in the Fall, therefore, all these false theologies see man as his own savior. But when we separate the meaning of time from God, time loses its meaning and becomes merely the empty s… a succession of moments. And the result is logically, existentialism. Existentialism says that the meaning of man’s life is to be derived only the moment--not even from time past, or time to come; certainly not from beyond time. Man’s meaning is to be derived from his existential impulses of the moment.

Now, existentialism as a philosophy has been succeeded by further developments, but the existentialist temper is basic to all of them and basic to our culture. It is basic of course to modern music, whether it’s rock and roll or the new classicism; it stresses the moment, and no meaning from beyond the moment. It exalts therefore the meaningless moment and sees salvation in existence, uninfluenced by anything outside or beyond it. And this exaltation of time leads to the death of meaning.

But because God is the Creator, according to scripture, there can be no atonement and no redemption apart from Him. God created all things, and the conditions of all life, of every atom in the universe come from His ordination. Atonement therefore alone gives life to fallen man, and to reject it is to choose death.

The Doctrine of the Atonement also tells us that progress is possible in history. I do believe that if someone were to go back and study those eras when the classical Doctrine of the Atonement, as set forth in Anselm and Calvin, have been dominant in theology and in the Church. One will also find that victory has also been a dominant note at the same time. Because the classical Doctrine of the Atonement tells us that it is not our doing, but God’s doing—His grace and mercy—that it is this which saves us. And because our victory over sin and death comes from God, it gives us an assurance about the future, that the same God will accomplish His purposes in time. The atonement therefore tells us that progress is possible in history because God is at work in history, having overthrown the power of sin and death, the overthrow of other things is as nothing to Him.

The old Puritan poet who wrote about the glory of his salvation told himself, as he faced the problems of the world, that as he looked back at the atonement, he said, ‘he that did so much for you will do yet more and care for you.’

The Humanistic doctrines of progress are all now dead. Many aphorisms call attention to this. History repeats itself. History is bunk. History is the endless repetition of misery and much more. But the Bible tells us the universe is one of total meaning. It is God-created and its meaning is God-ordained. The hairs of our head are all numbered. It is a universe of total meaning. But without atonement the world is meaningless. It is caught in the cycle of sin and death, whereas for us, there is atonement. There is resurrection. There is victory.

Atonement brings back the glory, the glory of God’s creation of all things as very good. Therefore, to afflict our souls does not mean be mournful, it means to place ourselves in our proper relationship to God. That we are His handiwork, to serve Him, that we have been called to His service and to victory. We reverse the curse. We reverse Genesis 3:5 and instead of declaring that we are as god, we declare God is God. This to the Humanist is self-affliction, but it is the afflicting of our souls that is their healing and their strength.

Let us pray.

Oh Lord our God, we thank Thee that Jesus Christ has destroyed the power of sin and death, that the Fall has been reversed and the doorway to victory opened. We thank Thee that the powers of darkness in our day have a judgment against them, that in due time they shall be destroyed, that it is Thy kingdom that alone shall prevail, for the gates of Hell cannot hold out against it. We thank Thee that we are citizens of Thy kingdom. Make us zealous in Thy service, and joyful in Thy victory. In Christ’s name, amen.

Are there any questions now?

Yes

[Audience] New International Version translates this phrase, ‘affliction of the souls’ as, ah, to deny yourself. Can you comment on that rendering?

[Rushdoony] It really means ‘depress,’ the word. So you depress yourself in your relationship to God. There are a number of translations, uh, one modern translation, uh, or paraphrase, because that’s what it is, says, “abstain and fast.” There’s no hint of fasting in the original, so that they are approaching the meaning of the term humanistically. And they have to render a word that will carry a Humanistic connotation because they think of somehow, how you are to feel, rather than how you are to relate yourself to God. And the whole point of it is, this is the Day of Atonement. This is God’s work, God’s salvation, and we have sinned because we trusted that we would be as god. So we afflict our souls because His atonement and His grace and mercy restore us to our proper place as His creatures. So, that’s the whole meaning of it. And it’s only when we psychologize it we see it in terms of our mental outlook rather than the theological perspective that we get something, that says it’s something we do to ourselves and the way we feel.

Yes

[Audience] Well the whole thing flies against the modern trend because it means the recognition of authority.

[Rushdoony] Exactly. Very good point. We are so intent on viewing everything in terms of our inner feelings. What is it going to do to us? And this is in terms of authority. We afflict our souls; that is we place ourselves under God which means we recognize that we have sought to be as god—that’s been our problem! Now as we see ourselves as His creatures, the sheep of His pasture, the work of His hands, then we have afflicted our souls, which as fallen were proud and arrogant.

There’s an old English homily which is very beautiful in this context. The homilies were written at the time of the Reformation because the Church of England clergy were not used to preaching. So they were given a book of sermons to preach in rotation, because they would give a series of emphases which would be a well-rounded theological presentation. And in one of them, it speaks about this afflicting of the souls, and there is then the statement to the congregation which is magnificent. I wish I knew more than the two or three words. It’s “Down, proud peacock feathers.” Magnificent! Because that was the point of it all--down, proud peacock feathers was the word to the congregation. And when you remember that the congregations then included all kinds, including proud cavaliers with their swords and their, uh, extravagant clothing, you appreciate the full import of that, both as it applied to the psychology and to the dress of the congregation. Down, proud peacock feathers. That’s what afflicting one’s soul meant.

Yes.

[Audience] As John the Baptist’s comment with regard to Christ would be appropriate, “He must increase, and I must decrease.”

[Rushdoony] Yes, exactly. Very good. Very, very good. And our increase is then only in His service and in faithfulness to Him.

Just as we have taken the word ‘love’ and reduced it to an emotion and the word ‘forgiveness’ and reduced it to an emotion when it means “charges dropped because satisfaction has been rendered,” so too with this, we have reduced it to an emotional thing.

Any other questions or comments? Well if not, let us conclude with prayer.

Thy Word is truth, oh Lord, and Thy Word still cries out, “down, proud peacock feathers.” That our self-exaltation leads only to death, that all that we do to exalt Thy kingdom and Thy Son our king, leads to life and to victory. We thank Thee that our Lord has overthrown the power of sin and death, has overthrown the powers of darkness and has made us the people of life and victory. Give us joy in our calling, and joy in Thine atonement. And now, go in peace. God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost bless you and keep you, guide and protect you this day, and always. Amen.