Statement of Faith: Article 5 (The Work of Christ)
Article 5: The Work of Christ
We believe that Jesus Christ, as our representative and substitute, shed His blood on the cross as the perfect, all-sufficient sacrifice for our sins. His atoning death and victorious resurrection constitute the only ground for salvation.
In recent years, I’ve become more and more intrigued by goats. I think they are one of the goofiest creatures you’ll find on planet earth. The other day, a friend stopped by my office and noticed a book that my wife got for me entitled The Goat: a Natural and Cultural History. My friend thought the book was some kind of joke. But no, it’s a very serious look at the different kinds of goats that exist throughout the world. It’s a good read.
In the Old Testament book of Leviticus, which is the book of the Bible most often passed over by Christians because of its tedious and challenging content, there is an obscure section dealing with goats. In Leviticus 16, we see a description of the Day of Atonement. On that day, the priest would take two goats. One would be sacrificed as a substitute for the sins for the people. Then the priest would put his hand on the head of the other goat as a symbol of transference. The sins of the people would be passed on to the live goat who would then carry those sins into the wilderness. The goat would eventually die there. When the King James Version of the Bible was created over 400 years ago, a new English word was created to identify this creature: the scapegoat.
Turning another person into a scapegoat is one of the cruelest things that humans do to one another. If you’ve been on the receiving end of this, it can be a truly heart-wrenching and disorienting experience. But there is something in us as sinful people that longs to scapegoat others; something in our psyche that is gratified by the act. There is a part of me that struggles with the idea that God would create a law that allowed his people to satiate the desire and fulfill the need they had to cast their faults upon another. But this law was an act of grace from God and it recognized our need to be absolved from all the wrong that we have done.
As noted by theologian Fleming Rutledge, Jesus is never called the “goat of God.” Instead, He is called the Lamb of God by John the Baptist (John 1:29), alluding to the passover lamb that provided salvation from death for God’s people before they left Egypt at the beginning of the book of Exodus. Jesus is the Lamb who was slain, atoning for sin and delivering from death.
But again, I return to the concept of the scapegoat as a necessary part of the Old Testament’s Day of Atonement in Leviticus 16. God codified this concept. He set it up as necessary in the redemption process. Why? Because we needed Him to. As Miroslav Volf writes, “Jesus was a scapegoat.” It is in our nature to cast our own worst motivations and actions onto the back of another to be carried off to the wilderness to die. And this is what Jesus did. In Jesus, we can see our shame removed, carried into the remote wilds from where it would not return. We needed a God who would not look away from the evils of this world and ignore them, but who would carry them away and deal with them Himself.
We needed a God who would deal with sin in justice and truth. And this is what Jesus did. Volf continues, “There can be no redemption unless the truth about the world is told and justice is done. To treat sin as if it were not there, when in fact it is there, amounts to living as if the world were redeemed when in fact it is not.” When Jesus went to the cross, our sin was placed upon Him and He removed it from us. Praise God for His grace! I deserve to bear the weight of my sin; to die with it in the wilderness. But God has not given me what I deserve. There is no need to cast my faults upon the people around me when Jesus has already taken those faults upon Himself, carrying them to the wilderness of the cross, dying with them there and then rising again.