The Day of Atonement and the Cross

The Day of Atonement, known as Yom Kippur, was the most sacred ritual of the year prescribed under the Mosaic law. Every fall in the seventh month of the Jewish calender the high priest would enter the Holy of Holies, the inner sanctum in the temple in Jerusalem. He would take the blood of a bull to cover his own sins and the sins of his family. Then he would take the blood of a goat to cover the sins of the people and apply it around the ark of the covenant as he had applied the bull's blood. But then he would lay his hands on a second goat and confess all the sins of the nation. A designated man would subsequently lead the goat off to a remote place in the wilderness and let it go. All this was a type (pattern or example) or a foreshadowing of the coming work of Christ on the cross whose suffering not only bore the wrath of God against his people's sins (known as "propitiation") but truly and completely removed them "as far as the east is from the west" and "cast them into the depth of the sea." What was foreshadowed or pictured under the Old Covenant became true, complete, and final in the New Covenant secured by Jesus' shed blood on Calvary's cross.