Jesus is the Atonement

Jesus is the Atonement

Title: Jesus the Atonement

Subject: Atonement

Text Scripture:1 John 2:1-2 My dear children, I write this to you so that you will not sin. But if anybody does sin, we have an advocate with the Father—Jesus Christ, the Righteous One. 2 He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins,and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world.

Introduction

-Do you ever think about words?  Where words come from… What words really mean… how words can express deep feelings and ideas by putting them together in new ways… words are a made up vehicle for expressing reality.  They are not the real thing. Words are a shadow of the real thing, an analogy of the real thing. Sometimes the real thing is so deep and so important that it takes a huge amount of words just to scratch the surface of what we know the reality to be.  Then we might come up with a single word that puts that huge amount of words together and we just reference all of it with one word. Today that word is atonement.

The words atone, atoning or atonement are deep and meaningful words that cover the breadth and depth of the entire Bible and the entire plan of God throughout eternity for your life individually and for the whole World and my goal today is to be a conduit for God’s insight on these words in such a way that every time we hear them or read them some things fire in our minds about what they really mean and that our eyes can be open to a world were Jesus is the Atonement.

Outline Statements:

Atonement should actually be pronounced At-Onement.

Our God is a Planning God… We usually see His plan after the fact.

Jesus is the Atonement!

What should we do? We should be at one.

Transitional Sentence: Let’s pray!

-Wisdom Focus and Grace

-Holy Spirit open our Ears to hear

-His words not my words

Main Division Title 1: Atonement should be pronounced At-Onement

Scriptural Support 
Romans 5:10

For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life.

Explanation

The first thing that I found in my research on the atonement was that the word atonement was invented in 13th century England.  To be “at one” in the sense of to be “in harmony” or “unified” is an English idiom going back at least to the late 13th century, and “to at-one” was a transitive verb meaning “to achieve a state of at-oneness, or reconciliation, between two parties” first crops up in English in the late 16th century.  

Then, these relatively new words of atone and atonement were used in the original translation for the King James Bible in 1611 translating yom ha-kippurim in the Old Testament Hebrew and kattalagei in the New Testament Greek as this new word at-one-ment.  And, the word atonement stuck. I personally think that pronouncing it at-one-ment actually displays it’s meaning quite well and maybe we should begin to do that.  

The at-one-ing sacrifice of Christ!  The Day of At-One-Ment! You can continue to pronounce atonement in the usual way if you want.  But, knowing where it came from can help us understand the depth of what God has done through Jesus Christ.

At Onement is being reconciled to God and becoming at one with Him.  It is turning back the clock on the Fall of Adam and Eve and re-entering Eden and having fellowship with Him.  It is a complete reversal of our state of living in denial of His Majesty and Glory to a State of Agreeing With Him That His Will Be Done on Heaven and On Earth and In Him Be All the Glory and Honor and Power Forever and Ever and Ever. Being AT ONE with God!

THIS WAS GOD’S PLAN ALL ALONG.  FOR US TO BE AT ONE WITH HIM.

Main Division Title 2: Our God is a Planning God

Scriptural Support
Mark 10:45

"For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many."

Explanation

Our God is a planning God.  He had a plan from the beginning and He has a plan for you.

Why do we say that God has a plan for your life?  

Our God is a planning God.  He knew you even before you were in your mother’s womb… think about that.  He sets up things throughout your entire life so that He can bring you through them.  The Bible says that He will never give you more than you can stand up under. But, that means He’ll always be challenging you because He is bringing you someplace else.  He has a plan for you means that He is not going to just sit back and watch you flounder and stagnate and stay where you are. In order for you to fight the good fight and run the race to win, He is putting those obstacles in your path and you fight by His side and you Run by His side and you become More than conquerors through Him!

You know this Christian thing people call “Quiet Time?”  

What is that really for?  

Why do we need to take time each day to pray and read scripture, to worship and reflect on the Lord?  

So why do we have this quiet time?  Because God has a plan… now these two things might not initially seem to be related.  Here is the key. We don’t know the plan. We know that we need to agree with the plan because He is God and we are not.  We know that the plan is good. But, we don’t know the plan. We have this quiet time each day to reflect on how far God has brought us through His plan so far, Thank Him for it, and to look forward to how his plan will continue to unfold.  Without quiet time with God each day, we get so distracted by the day to day struggle of this world that we forget all about the perspective that we are meant to have. We are to be at one with God in His plan by meeting with Him in quiet every day… hearing that still small voice.

You can know God’s plan for your life right now today.  You can know God’s plan for the whole World right now today.  

Atonement…. Jesus is the atonement.  That is God’s plan for your life and His plan for the whole World.

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When I was in college I was a member of a group called Campus Crusade for Christ.  I think they have since changed the name to CRU due to the accusations that a crusade sounds like medieval warfare against muslims.  Anyway, Campus Crusade was all about evangelism… the act of sharing your faith with other people and back in those days the popular method developed by Billy Graham and Bill Bright to do so was the use of a tract.  Most of these tracts would say something to the effect of there being a huge chasm between you and God and that Jesus was the only way to cross over that chasm. I remember this being an effective tool at the time. People would see a diagram with themselves on one side of the valley and God on the other side and the cross in the middle like a bridge and would be like, “How can I have what you have?  How can I accept Christ as my personal savior?” Meanwhile, I was thinking this is such a silly diagram and such a strange analogy for the atonement!  

This led me to study the scriptures to try and find out if this was really the way it all works… When I do something wrong how is that in any way related to blood?  How does a perfect God-Person dying a painful death forgive me of sins and unite me somehow with God in a way that I was separated from Him before and now I am somehow at one with Him?  What if I don’t feel at one with Him?  

I didn’t want an analogy or a diagram for what was happening I wanted what was actually happening.  We have all these analogy phrases: accept Jesus into your heart… but He’s not actually inside of your heart, that would be weird, he would have to be really small and covered with blood, gross… these analogies are not the real thing of what is happening.  They have their place in helping us to understand but they are just not really what it is.

So let’s discuss this important word of atonement and what it really is.

Main Division Title 3: Jesus is the Atonement

I have read or listened to about 20 sermons on the atonement in the last month and I think that every single one used a different analogy for the atonement.  

Some much better than others but ALL analogies fall apart at some point… unless God is the one planning the analogy.  

I had a Philosophy professor that once said that Jesus couldn’t be both God and Man because a shape could not be both a rectangle and a circle.  Being a math major and taking this class as an elective I patiently waited until after class and handed him a note on the way out with a drawing of a cylinder and a mathematical explanation of viewing the cylinder from different perspectives in 2 dimensions at a time how the cylinder indeed appears to be a rectangle from one viewpoint and a circle from another.  It is actually both.   

In the following class he changed his analogy to a car that could not be both red and green at the same time and I gave him another note about color of the inside of the car and the color of the outside of the car and the possibility of color-blindness.  

In the long run he never did find an indefensible analogy for his argument and we had many good conversations over the next year.  Don’t be led astray by analogies.  

Every analogy is at least partially wrong.  And we don’t want to be wrong about something as important as the At Onement with God.

The only thing that you can trust to understand the depths of God is what He has planned for us.  Remember, our God is a planning God and a very long time ago He knew that He would send Jesus as the atonement for our sins and He wanted to explain to us how that would work by setting things up in the book of Leviticus that we could see and understand what God was doing with the death and resurrection of His Son… God crafted His analogy for what the At Onement is like… We should use God’s analogy instead of those 20 different ones that I found online.

Scriptural Support 

Leviticus 16:34

This shall be an everlasting statute unto you, to make an atonement for the children of Israel for all their sins once a year.

Explanation

In the book of Leviticus which I highly recommend that you read after reading the Gospels the Atonement sacrifices and the Day of Atonement are outlined in detail.  God had a long term plan [Our God is a planning God] set up to show us that Jesus is the atonement.[the At Onement]  

The normal priests would do sacrifices for sin morning and evening throughout the year but once a year at the appointed time, “in the seventh month, on the tenth day of the month,” the day of atonement would occur.  This was to show us that there was an appointed time, not set by Moses or Aaron for convenience but set by God Himself. Jesus’ atonement also had a perfect timing set by God the Father Himself and occurred only once.

Now, we will consider three things about what God set up in the Day of Atonement and how this shows that Jesus is the atonement once and for all.

1)We will consider the person who made the atonement

2)The sacrifice whereby the atonement was made

3)The effects of the atonement

1. Consider that the High Priest was the one to make the atonement on the Day of atonement.
1. The other priests did the sacrifices throughout the rest of the year.  Note that only the High Priest could do this for the people. Just as Jesus Christ is the only one who could atone for us once and for all on the cross.
2. He humbled himself, not wearing his normal High Priest adornment, he put on plain linen and washed himself over and over and over.  Note that Jesus humbled Himself and became a man in order to atone for us once and for all.
3. It was really hard.  Everything that day was done by the High priest when usually there was a large group of priests doing the work of the temple. He lit all the fires, lit all the candles, burned the incense, and I count that he slaughtered 15 beasts by himself.  Note that Jesus was beaten, whipped, mocked, betrayed, and hung on a cross to die utterly alone. He did all the work Himself that day.
4. No one else was allowed to even enter through the veil into the Holy of Holies.  Note that this veil is the same one that Ripped and fell when Jesus was crucified.  When Jesus died on the cross the tradition of the Day of Atonement did not need to be done ever again because “it was finished” he had done the atoning sacrifice once and for all.

2)  The means by which this atonement was made:
    a) Blood.  Hebrews 9:22

And according to the Law, one may almost say, all things are cleansed with blood, and without shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.

    b) Read Leviticus 16.  Forgiveness of sins is a dirty business.  It is not a quick easy painless please forgive me.  It is a gruesome hard deep business that involves unexplainable pain and suffering on the part of Jesus Christ Himself.  He died in your place. That is the at onement. You can be one with God as He is one with God because He took your place.  He took the punishment that we were owed. The perfect Justice of God and the perfect Love of God are both on display in the At onement of Jesus Christ.  

3) The Effects of the atonement

1. Cleansing.  Our sins are gone.
1. The scapegoat.
2. As far as the east is from the west.
2. We are now at one with God.
1. The chasm picture is actually pretty good.
2. Reflect on this one-ness and God’s plan in your quiet time.
3. We should be at one with one another.
1. Have you noticed how divided the World is?
2. Have you become divided yourself?
1. Black/White
2. Man/Woman
3. Republican/Democrat
4. Yankees/Red Sox

The Christian response ought to always be unity, at-oneness, reconciliation, speaking the truth in Love and having grace not judgement.

Conclusion 

Restate Main Division Titles

Atonement should be pronounced At-Onement.

Our God is a Planning God.

Jesus is the Atonement.

What we should do?

Realize this: The atonement of Christ is not merely an experience that you have had personally.  It is the planning of God the Father set down from the foundation of the World throughout eternity for His Creation to be At One with Him.  Strive to be At One. Reflect on how At One you have been with His plan, with His purposes, with His Holy Spirit. As you do your quiet time this week… contemplate the perspective of God throughout human history and try not to use an analogy.  Try to use the real thing of what He has done to bring this fallen World back to being At One with Him through the at-onement of Jesus Christ. Thank you.