We have entered the season of the autumn festivals, which for the Jews, includes Tabernacles and other holy days, such as Yom Kippur (Atonement Day). While Jewish “groupies,” like the Messianics, try to follow these feasts and all things Jewish – a hold over from the Evangelical dogma that the Jews are God’s chosen people – for the historic Church, there are only three feasts of significance to the Christian: Passover, Pentecost, and Tabernacles.
These three Feasts were identified as part of the statutes iterated in the “Law of the Covenant” of Exodus 20-23. It is called the “Book of the Covenant” in Exodus 24:7 and is to be distinguished from the other laws in the Pentateuch, such as the sacerdotal and sacrificial systems described in the Book of Leviticus. These other laws, we believe, were types, and as penance, are meant to be remedial, pedagogical, and temporary.
“Yom Kippur” is a part of this sacrificial system and not the Law of the Covenant. The sacrificial system was created as a remedy for the “Golden Calf” apostasy (Exodus 32), which made it obvious that the Israelites needed something to replace Egypt’s superstitions. While the three main feasts are a part of the Covenant and require a Christian counterpart or fulfillment as a testament to their abiding validity in the Covenant life of God’s people, Yom Kippur does not.
Christ was crucified at Passover and not at Yom Kippur because the Christian “atonement” is a deliverance and not a pecuniary transaction. While Yom Kippur represents a part of the Israelite penitential system, it could not take away sins, as explained by the author of the New Testament Book of Hebrews. Christ’s Passover sacrifice was a redemption that was more like an act of war, than a ransom. Like Abraham’s slaughter of the kings in Genesis 14 to rescue his nephew Lot, Abraham chose to kill these human traffickers than to do business with them. He could have paid ransom money to secure Lot’s freedom. Instead, he decided to kill the perpetrators.
It is significant that the Bible uses the word “slaughter.” It is a term which can invoke the image of a sacrifice, rather than a mere execution. Abraham “redeemed” Lot by violence instead of payment, just as Yahweh, in slaying the firstborn of Egypt, redeemed Israel through a deliverance, rather than through ransom.
One of the great books on the atonement is that of Gustaf Aulen’s Christus Victor (1930) in which he chronicles the teachings of the early Church Fathers to show that they did not believe in the satisfaction theory or the related payment and ransom theories. God did not add up all the sins of the world – past, present, and future – and then put them on Jesus on the Cross for payment with an equivalence of suffering to compensate for the wrongs done.
The Atonement as a deliverance is better explained by the “Governmental Theory.” First espoused by Hugo Grotius in his refutation of Socinianism during the era of the Reformation, it was left to 19th Century American theologian, Albert Barnes, to write perhaps the best exposition of the doctrine. While Grotius is considered the father of international law and his interest in the Atonement extended to the question of public justice in the law of nations, as for Barnes, who attained his renown for his biblical commentaries relied upon by theologians to this day, his work became the foundation for Moral Government theology frequently mentioned on this website. We can thank Dr. Harry Conn for convincing Bethany Publishing to re-publish it in the closing decades of the 20th Century.
If you find 19th Century theological writing to be too daunting, you can get a good introduction to the subject in Conn’s video lectures which have been uploaded to YouTube and can be found here:
Some of this subject matter is further discussed in my latest Pesher for the Day of the Holy Cross, Melchizedek & the Priesthood of the Uncircumcision.
God bless you.
James Wesley Stivers, 10/1/23
