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Arkadelphia Seventh-day Adventist Church Plant

Eugene Prewitt

Introduction to Atonement

I mean that when the angel asked him a question, he said to the angel, you know.

It's wise when we want to know to ask God.

And if God asks us a question, it might be wise for us to understand that he's really inviting us to ask him for an answer.

Our study today is going to be on the idea of atonement.

It's interesting to me that on the radio a couple weeks ago, I heard men speaking for about a half hour about atonement, but they were talking about a movie instead of a Bible doctrine.

And then in preparing for this sermon, I wanted to see what other people had written about Atonement, and I did a Google search on Atonement, And an entire page came up about the movie.

So I'll have you know, the fact that I'm speaking about atonement has nothing to do with the movie.

I have neither seen it, nor will I ever see it, nor do I know much about it.

But we ought to know something about atonement.

If you were to read books about atonement, because there are books about the topic of atonement, you would find that those books would fall into about 3 categories.

1 of them would be what's called the ransom theory of atonement.

In short, it's the idea that Satan owns us as sinners and that Jesus had to buy us from Satan and that the only thing Satan would accept was the suffering and death of Jesus.

I think maybe you've heard this idea put into a story form.

Maybe You've heard the illustration of the boy with the cage of the birds, and I don't wanna go into it again.

But the idea of the story is that Satan says, the only thing I'll accept for these sinners if you want them is all your blood." That's 1 idea of the atonement, that the atonement is a payment to Satan.

Another idea of the atonement is what's called the Anselm theory of atonement.

In short, It's the idea that when we sin, we sin against the government of God.

And only God dying could pay for our sin.

In this theory, atonement is basically forgiveness through the substitutionary death of Jesus.

That is, I owe a debt to heaven, Jesus died and paid my debt.

I'll tell you frankly, before we get into the study to prove it, that It's a basically true idea, but there's much more to atonement than that.

The second idea is that atonement is basically forgiveness.

The third idea of atonement you'd find represented in books, I forget the name of the guy, oh, it's Peter or Pierre Abelard, Abelard theory, sometimes it's called the moral influence theory.

It's the idea that Jesus died on the cross to show God's love.

And that when we look at that love, it leads us to surrender to Jesus.

The idea is that God didn't need Jesus to die to forgive us.

That just like I can forgive people that hurt me without them dying.

God could forgive people that sin against him without anyone dying.

But that the atonement is a means of influencing us.

Let me repeat these 3 ideas again, and then we'll look at the Bible idea, which is so wider than any of them.

1 idea is that we owe a debt to Satan, and Jesus paid it.

1 is that we owe a debt to God's kingdom and Jesus paid it.

The other is that we are influenced by the love of the cross to do what's right.

And there was no need to pay for our sins with death.

Turn with me in your Bibles to Leviticus chapter 14.

Most of the incidences of the word atone or atonement in the Bible are found in Leviticus.

Or in other words, if you want to understand the idea of atonement, what would be a good book to study?

Leviticus chapter 14 and we're looking at verses 18 to 20.

The passage here is speaking about the cleansing of lepers.

The idea was that if a man receives leprosy, he has to leave the camp.

But if somehow he can get cured from the leprosy, he could come back to the camp.

But you know, not many people in the history of the Bible were ever cured of leprosy.

So that what we're reading about here are laws that went almost without an opportunity to be used until the time of Jesus.

Do you remember when Jesus would heal lepers, what he said?

Go to the priest, and he was referring to what was here in Leviticus 14, it was like the first time in a millennium that these laws had a chance to be put into operation.

Leviticus 14 and verse 18, and the remnant of the oil that is in the priest's hands, he shall pour upon the head of him that is to be, what's the verb?

To be cleansed, and the priest shall make an atonement for him before the Lord.

And the priest shall offer the sin offering, and make an atonement for him that is to be cleansed from his uncleanness.

And afterward he shall kill the burnt offering.

And the priest shall offer the burnt offering and the meat offering upon the altar, and the priest shall make an atonement for him, and he shall be what?

And the rest of the oil that is in the priest's hand he shall put upon the head of him that is to be...

...Cleansed to make an atonement for him before the Lord.

Even such as he is able to get the 1 for a sin offering, the other for a burnt offering with the meat offering.

And the priest shall make an atonement for him that is to be cleansed before the Lord.

I just wanted you to read these 5 verses to get an idea that in the Bible, the idea of atonement is connected to the idea of cleansing.

Was it clear enough to you in these passages that atonement is connected to cleansing?

Now what's interesting is that leprosy isn't sin.

To have leprosy isn't a sin, but leprosy does corrupt you and make you stinky and gross looking.

You know, the leper needed an atonement as part of being healed, of and cleansed from his leprosy.

Look down at verse 53, Leviticus 14, and we're looking at verse 53, But he shall let go the living bird out of the city into the open fields and make an atonement for the, what does it say?

You might wonder why would a house need an atonement?

If you have a structure in southwest Arkansas, it's possible that you could find evidence in a wall that termites are eating up the structure.

In Palestine, it's possible that you could find evidence in a wall that a type of fungus was eating at the wood.

You've seen fungus eating wood every time you go into the woods on a hike.

This is why the woods aren't 30 feet deep in hard logs.

When the fungus would be eating the wood in a Jewish house, what they called that fungus was leprosy.

It makes sense to me because you know what leprosy does to a person?

And what does the fungus do to the house?

And just as a dirty person needed cleansed, needed an atonement, a dirty leprous house needed to be cleansed.

Can I just ask you, was the house guilty of sin?

You know, mostly it was guilty of being wet.

There was no sin involved, but there was defilement involved and defilement required atonement.

I'm gonna say it plainly and go to another.

Atonement in the Bible is not just something that deals with guilt.

It deals in a more broad sense with defilement.

Defilement that may or may not be associated with guilt.

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Introduction to Atonement

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