Rabbi Schneider — Day of Atonement
God bless you, and Shalom, beloved ones. My name's Rabbi Schneider. Welcome today to this very important edition of Discovering the Jewish Jesus.
We are in the midst of God's fall holy days. And today we're going to be looking into God's Word to better understand the holiday called Yom Kippur; Yom meaning day, Kippur meaning atonement. You'll see the date appearing on your screen right now as this holiday falls for us this year.
Beloved, this is considered in Judaism the most sacred holiday of the Jewish year other than what Jewish people do every week, which is celebrate the Shabbat. These holy days that God has given us are shadows of Messiah Jesus. We've been talking about this.
I encourage you to get this entire series. Yom Kippur, beloved, is all about the time that once a year the high priest would go into the Holy of Holies, which was first in the tabernacle, and later in the temple.
The Holy of Holies is a special room. Again, earlier on it was the room in the tabernacle. And then later when the tabernacle became a permanent structure in Jerusalem, it was built to be the temple.
In the back of the tabernacle, later the back of the temple, in this room called the Holy of Holies, once a year the high priest would enter in with the blood of a bull and the blood of a goat and pour it over an altar that was on top of the Ark of the Covenant.
When the high priest poured the blood on the altar over the Ark of the Covenant, which is often referred to as the mercy seat, the Lord said he was forgiving or overlooking the sins of his people for that year.
He said, in Leviticus, for the life of the flesh is in the blood. And so the Lord then provided an atonement through the innocent blood of an animal that had died in the worshipper's place. And when that blood was poured upon the altar, Father God, knowing that, that blood was a shadow of the blood that his Son, Jesus, would shed, overlooked the sins of Israel for the year.