He bears our iniquity
Yom Kippur, 1999

Theme: She who has been forgiven much loves much.
Yom Kippur shows us how much, how much, we have been forgiven, because God loves us.
Then we will, I hope, respond to his mercy, by loving Him, very much.

Let me start by giving credit for much of this message to Rabbi Jim Appel and David Van Slyke
of Congregation Shema Yisrael of Rochester, NY.

Let me start by reminding you of the v'ahavta (Deut 6:5):

You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.
Have you ever puzzled over this verse?
How can God command us to love him? Isn't love something that we have to give voluntarily?
Maybe loving God is something God rightfully expects we would do, freely,
once we really understand just how much he loves us?
But do we understand?
Here's another question I've heard: how do we bring ourselves to love Him?
You can't even see Him! But you know he's there, when you see the beauty of creation.
But to acknowledge Him is one thing, to love Him, with all your heart, well, that's another!
Scripture gives us the answer to these questions.
1 John 4:19 puts it most succinctly: "We love because he first loved us."
We love, in response to His great love.
Once you understand how much He loves you, this commandment will be easy to keep.
Once you understand how much He forgives you, you will understand how much He loves you.
Turn to Luke 7:36-48, where Yeshua himself elucidates this principle:
Now one of the Pharisees invited Yeshua to have dinner with him, so he went to the Pharisee's house and reclined at the table. When a woman who had lived a sinful life in that town learned that Yeshua was eating at the Pharisee's house, she brought an alabaster jar of perfume, and as she stood behind him at his feet weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears. Then she wiped them with her hair, kissed them and poured perfume on them. When the Pharisee who had invited him saw this, he said to himself, 'If this man were a prophet, he would know who is touching him and what kind of woman she is--that she is a sinner.'
Why was the Pharisee or Parush so concerned about the woman touching Yeshua?
The very word 'parush' from which we get 'pharisee' means "to be separate"
from the unclean things of the world.
You were not supposed to touch an unclean person.
If you touched an unclean person or object, you became unclean.
This principle is laid out in Leviticus 5:2-3:
If a person touches anything ceremonially unclean ... even though he is unaware of it, he has become unclean and is guilty. Or if he touches human uncleanness--anything that would make him unclean-- even though he is unaware of it, when he learns of it he will be guilty.
This woman of the street was touching Yeshua just as he was about to eat!
Shimon the Parush had a concern about ritual cleanness--and this concern remains to this day.

Now, I don't think Yeshua discounts the spiritual significance of ritual cleanness--
for he fulfilled all the Torah and the prophets.
Even at his trial, no one accused him of violating the requirements of Torah.
Rather, what is at stake here is a matter of priority. Priorities comes up again and again in his teaching.
Which is more important: ritual cleanness or forgiveness of sins?
Which is more important, ceremonial observance or wholehearted love?
Shimon the Parush thinks, "if this man were a prophet..."
Yeshua shows that he is indeed a prophet, by hearing Shimon's thoughts:

Luke 7:40: Yeshua answered him, "Simon, I have something to tell you." "Tell me, teacher," he said. "Two men owed money to a certain moneylender. One owed him five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. Neither of them had the money to pay him back, so he canceled the debts of both. Now which of them will love him more?" Simon replied, "I suppose the one who had the bigger debt canceled." "You have judged correctly," Yeshua said. Then he turned toward the woman and said to Simon, "Do you see this woman? I came into your house. You did not give me any water for my feet, but she wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You did not give me a kiss, but this woman, from the time I entered, has not stopped kissing my feet. You did not put oil on my head, but she has poured perfume on my feet. Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven--for she loved much. But he who has been forgiven little loves little." Then Yeshua said to her, "Your sins are forgiven."
Shimon had not given water for Yeshua's feet or given him a kiss or put oil on his head--
these were all customary ways, in that culture, of showing honor to a special guest.
By not doing these things, Shimon had shown that he regarded Yeshua as a common man.
But this woman had shown Yeshua very special honor,
by bathing his feet in her tears and anointing him with a jar of very expensive perfume.
That jar of nard, which came all the way from India, was worth a whole year's wages!
Those tears, which came all the way from the depth of her soul, was worth Yeshua's death.
Thus this woman showed that she regarded Yeshua as an exceptional man: the Mashiach.
She showed that she understood why Yeshua had come into the world--to forgive sin.

Now it's important that we understand this principle and not be confused about it.
After telling the story, Yeshua asks Shimon, "Now which of them will love him more?"
In verse 47: Yeshua says (according to the New International Version):

Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven--for she loved much.
But he who has been forgiven little loves little.
Now, was the woman forgiven because she loved much?
No, God does not base his forgiveness on how much we express our love for him.
She loved him much, because she knew, by faith, that she was forgiven much.
She came, already knowing that Yeshua did not come into the world to condemn but to forgive.
She loved him, because he loved her first. She was responding to his mercy.
By faith, she loved him: her faith told her that Yeshua is the fullness of the mercy of God.
His very coming into the world, then healing and forgiving sin, revealed the mercy of God in person.
He has loved us, he has loved you, from the beginning, unconditionally.
He offers his forgiveness from his love, graciously, through faith, not by our works or effort.
The Parush didn't love Yeshua much because he didn't understand that he was forgiven much
--if he knew that he was forgiven at all.

Yeshua has revealed a very important principle about our relationship with God:
We love God in proportion to how much we understand we have been forgiven.
Great love for God is a sign that I know that I have been forgiven much.
This is a problem for some of us: we don't understand how much we have been forgiven.
Some of us do know, because we made messes of our lives.
But some of us may think, well, I haven't been so bad.
So, if you don't know how much you have been forgiven, how can you love God much?
Or some of us may think, I don't need to be forgiven much.
So, if you do not know your need for great forgiveness, how can you love God much?

Here's where Yom Kippur comes in.
Yom Kippur was designed to be a visible demonstration of how much we have been forgiven.

To fully understand the meaning of Yom Kippur,
we need to understand the Hebrew word which is usually translated "iniquity."
It's often found in the same phrase as "sin."
For example in Psalm 51:2, "Wash away all my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin."

These are two different words in Hebrew:
the word for "sin" is khatta'ah, meaning an offense against God, against the Torah,
from a root meaning "missing the mark," by violating one of God's commandments
the word for "iniquity" is avon, meaning perversity or wickedness,
from a root meaning "to be crooked," bent or inclined the wrong way.
In other words, khatta'ah, a sin is a particular act, which is against the law,
but avon, iniquity, is a state of being, a description of the human character,
which has an inclination toward evil.
Num 18:1 may help you see the nature of avon:

The LORD says to Aaron, You and your sons in your father's son shall bear the iniquity relating to the sanctuary.
Hmm.... you know, the sanctuary didn't violate any commandments, so how did it get iniquity?
It was made ritually unclean--a state of iniquity--by contact with human iniquity.
And also notice that the cohanim are to "bear the iniquity"
God would not dwell in this place unless its iniquity, avon, was born, lifted, carried away

So how does this iniquity show up in human beings?
In Gen 6:5, just before the flood, it says

The LORD saw how great man's wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time.
So things had gotten pretty bad back then, but you know,
human nature still suffers from the same basic inclination.
You can envision man's moral nature, according to the verse, as standing on a ramp,
good is up there and evil is down there,
putting self, the natural number one, first is down there, putting others first is up there,
and, let's face it, our thoughts are always inclined that way.
Every inclination of our thoughts naturally towards evil.
We're inclined to be selfish; we're inclined to be prideful; we're inclined to be fearful;
we're inclined to lack faith; we're inclined to put others down; we're inclined to lust;
we're inclined towards covetousness. Are you aware of this inclination?
Jeremiah 17:9 says. "The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?"
Our natural self, our carnal nature, such as it is, is, according to God's word, deceitful and wicked.
So we're not fit to come into God's presence, nor can, God's presence dwell within us.

Traditional Judaism has a couple of ways of understanding iniquity.
Reform and secular Judaism focuses on sin and ignores iniquity.
The basic philosophy is that people are inherently good.
A sin is when you break a commandment.
With this understanding, you would have difficulty considering yourself a sinner.
"We're good people! So, every once in a while we mess up... Nobody can be perfect."
With this background, you probably wouldn't think of yourself as a sinner. (I didn't.)
To be a 'sinner', you'd have to be constantly breaking the laws, a reprobate.
With this background, you'd have a hard time understanding the need for Messiah,
and this would hinder you from understanding the good news of Messiah.
On the other hand, Orthodox Judaism does deal with iniquity.
Orthodox Judaism recognize that there is a yetzer hora, the evil inclination of Gen 6:5,
which wars against the yetzer tov, the good inclination.of the soul.
Rav Sha'ul describes this struggle in Roman 7:

For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do--this I keep on doing.
Other Rabbis say that a purpose for afflicting ourselves on Yom Kippur by fasting,
is to enable the yetzer tov to gain sway over the yetzer hora.
The idea is that, by fasting, prayer, acts of tz'dakah or righteousness, and Torah study,
the yetzer tov can overcome the yetzer hora.
While all these activities are admirable, can they truly do away with the evil inclination, iniquity?

The 10 commandments give us a hint about this distinction between sin and iniquity.
Of the 10 commandments, which one deals with iniquity?
Number 10: "You shall not covet."
Think about it: has anyone ever been arrested for coveting? No, it just happens in your heart.
But number 10 is a hint about how to understand all the others,
as Yeshua teaches us in his Sermon on the Mount.
In Matt 5:21, he says,

You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, 'Do not murder
and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.'
"Do not murder" is of course one of the 10 commandments that the people heard at Mount Sinai.
Yeshua says, "I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment."
Murder is a crime; it can be tried in court; but anger, that's more like coveting, right?
Where the 10 commandments deal with sin, Yeshua makes it deeper by applying it to iniquity.
For instance, adultery is an overt sin, right? But Yeshua deals with lust in our hearts.
Even President Jimmy Carter had lust in his heart!
This difference is important for people, especially non-Orthodox Jewish people, to understand.
The B'rit Chadashah deals more with iniquity than sin.
Believers say, echoing Rabbi Sha'ul, "I'm just a sinner saved by grace."
This doesn't necessarily mean that I am always sinning.
It means that we recognize that there is something in us that is prone to iniquity. Not a lot of Jewish people are out there robbing banks.
But do you ever covet? Do you ever lust? Do you ever hold grudges?
These things are iniquity. Your iniquity separates you from God.
Isaiah 59:1 says:
Surely the arm of the LORD is not too short to save, nor his ear too dull to hear. But your iniquities have separated you from your God; your sins have hidden his face from you, so that he will not hear.
Here we see both sins and iniquity together again: your iniquities separate you from your God,
so that your sins make him hide his face from you.
Both sins and iniquity need to be dealt with.
We all have this evil inclination, we're all this on this inclined place, and we all make excuses.
Even if you are so morally strong that you resist the evil inclination,
the fact that you have this evil inclination still makes you unfit
to come into the presence of the God in his perfect holiness.
This is what Isaiah realized when he say the Lord in the Temple, saying, in Isaiah 6:5.
"Woe to me! I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty."
Isaiah wasn't necessarily confessing any particular sin, but his state of uncleanness or iniquity.
Similarly, we read in Lev 5:2, "If a person touches anything ceremonially unclean ...
even though he is unaware of it, he has become unclean and is guilty."
Ritual uncleanness isn't necessarily a sin--since one may even be unaware of it--
it is a state that makes you unfit to be in the presence of God,
even though God very much you to come into his presence!
Every child of Adam is unclean, because he or she is born into iniquity, this evil inclination.
So your iniquity separates you from God.

So what is to be done about this?
Just as the sanctuary needed to have its iniquity born, so do we.
Let's see how God deals with iniquity in Torah, in the Yom Kippur sacrifices, in Lev 16.
Lev 16:9-10 tells us about two goats:

Aaron shall bring the goat whose lot falls to the LORD and sacrifice it for a sin offering."
So this first goat is for what? Sin.
10 But the goat chosen by lot as the scapegoat shall be presented alive before the LORD to be used for making atonement by sending it into the desert as a scapegoat.
So this scapegoat was to be taken alive into the wilderness, not killed.
21 Aaron is to lay both hands on the head of the live goat and confess over it all the iniquities (avon) and rebellious sins of the Israelites-- all their sins-- and put them on the goat's head. He shall send the goat away into the desert in the care of a man appointed for the task. The goat will carry on itself all their iniquity (avon) to a solitary place; and the man shall release it in the desert.
Notice that the first goat was offered as a sacrifice for sin.
The second goat, the azazel, was to bear iniquity, alive, into the wilderness.
This bearing or carrying of iniquity is an ongoing process, dealing with the ongoing state of iniquity,
because iniquity doesn't just disappear.
I must continually put my carnal nature to death, with the help of the Holy Spirit.
Now most people, when they think about the scapegoat, think he's the lucky goat, he doesn't die.
But that's because we don't understand the terrain, the wilderness.
If you sent a goat into the wilderness of Pennsylvania--happy goat!
But that's not what the Judean wilderness is like -- it's a trackless, hot, burning waste.
The azazel was left out there, tied to something, was doomed to die a very terrible, suffering death.
Not so lucky!
The other goat, the sacrifice goat, died a very humane death.
The method of slaughtering sacrifices, which comes down to us in kosher laws today,
was very humane, using a very sharp knife, so there was no pain.
That sacrifice goat died a very easy death,
but the scapegoat died a slow death, after suffering alone in the wilderness.
Why was this necessary?
A sacrifice was sufficient to atone for sin.
But for the atonement of iniquity, it seems it can only be done by a slow, agonizing death.
But now that we don't have a tabernacle or a Temple, how can we have atonement for sin & iniquity?

I hope you know the answer--the Creator of the Universe came into the world to do it,
taking human form as the Messiah.
In Isaiah 53:5 we see some amazing parallels between Yeshua and the two goats of Yom Kippur.

But he was wounded for our transgressions, and he was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement that brought us peace was upon him, and by his stripes we are healed.
"He was wounded": The Hebrew word for "wounded" is khalah, meaning literally a "breaking of skin."
On Yom Kippur, once the sacrifice goat's skin was broken, it died instantly from blood loss.
Its blood was sprinkled on the ark of the covenant, the mercy seat.
Because this was done, God manifested himself in the Sh'khinah glory.
In the same way, because the blood of Messiah Yeshua was shed,
flowed out of his wounds on the cross (the cross is like the mercy seat),
the people saw God manifest himself on that mercy seat, saying,
"Surely he was the Son of God!"
Do you see the parallel here? Incredible, awesome parallel. But there's more....

Isaiah 53:5 also says he was "bruised," gaka, meaning beat to pieces, broken, crushed, destroyed.
You may have wondered, why did he have to die like that? Why did he have to suffer so much?
Why did he have to be whipped, crowned with thorns, made to carry a cross,
forced outside the city onto a rocky hill, nailed to two wooden beams, hung up naked,
taunted and humiliated by his own people,
then left to die, of exhaustion and thirst, asphyxiation, and a broken heart.
Here's the other incredible parallel: he didn't die a humane death. It was slow and agonizing.
Like the scapegoat driven out into the wilderness, he suffered and died, to bear our iniquity.
As Isaiah 53:6 says, "We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way;
and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all."
Somehow, he still bears our iniquity... because we all still struggle with it.
We all wander off, from his perfect way for our lives, because we all want to go his own way.
So HaShem has laid on Messiah ha-avon, the iniquity of us all. He bears it away for us.

Now, let's return to where we started.... Do you remember where we started?
We were wondering how to love God, with all our heart, soul, mind and strength?
Yeshua tells u how: one who has been forgiven much, loves much.
Do you see now? You do stray, you do incline towards selfishness and evil thoughts and deeds.
Yet Messiah has made atonement for you, not only for your sin, by his blood,
but also for your iniquity, your carnal nature, by his wounds, all to forgive you.
How much he has done for you, because he really forgives you, because he really loves you.
If you understand this, not only in your mind but in your heart, then you will be able to respond with a great love for God, that will make it all worthwhile for him, and for you. Amen?


I think we should take a few moments to pray about this, don't you?

If you are someone who has come to see your need for atonement for sin and iniquity
and you are ready to accept what Messiah Yeshua has done for you,
I invite you to pray to receive his gift of mercy tonight.
If you want to receive mercy from God through Yeshua the Messiah tonight,
I invite you to kneel, or stand, in his presence. [wait]
If you are someone who never thought of yourself as 'sinner'
maybe now you can see he also forgiven you much, for he has forgiven your iniquity,
so that you can come into his presence.
I invite you to kneel, or stand, in his presence.
If you are someone who once were a reprobate, but it's been a long time,
and maybe the fire of your first love has cooled a bit,
maybe now you can see that you still have iniquity, which keeps us apart from him,
except that he still forgives you much, and bears your iniquity away,
so that you can come into his presence, tonight.
I invite you also to kneel, or stand, in his presence.
If you are someone who has struggled to understand the meaning of suffering,
maybe tonight Messiah has begun to show you.
He has suffered to give you and me victory over our carnal nature and selfishness.
Perhaps this is why God commands us to afflict ourselves on this day..
Though it is not God's desire that anyone suffer,
his suffering does redeems our suffering, gives it eternal meaning.
For if you share in his suffering, you will also share in his glory.
If you can forgive in suffering, rejoice in suffering, love in suffering, you will share in His glory.
I invite you again to also kneel, or stand, in his presence.

So let's pray... maybe you could put your hands on your heart,
because this word needs to get down into our hearts.

Write this into my heart.
Show me, Lord God, how I am inclined toward evil.
Help me not to cover this up or brush it aside, but to see that it is a spiritual reality,
and that I need that part of me to die on the tree with you,
so that you can bear it away for me.
Thank you, Yeshua, for atoning for my sins and bearing my iniquity.
Thank you, Yeshua, for pouring our your life unto death, to make intercession for me.
Thank you, Yeshua, for making your life a guilt offering, so that I could see with you. the light of life.
Thank you, Yeshua, for suffering for me, so that you could forgive me much.

O Yeshua, because you have forgiven me much, I love you, I love you much!
I do love you, and I will love you, with all my heart, and all my soul, and all my strength.

Comments for the Rabbi?