The Mercy Seat.
“God publicly displayed him at his death as the mercy seat accessible through faith. This was to demonstrate his righteousness, because God in his forbearance had passed over the sins previously committed.” Romans 3:25, NET. Paul, in Romans 3, refers to Jesus Christ as the atoning sacrifice, how the atonement is accomplished, and the scapegoat that removes the sin without a trace. Paul’s practice challenges translators who struggle to visualize how Jesus could be all simultaneously. Paul employed the Greek word “hilasterion,” which is a translation of the Hebrew word for “mercy seat.” The emphasis here is on removing the sin from the sinners to justify them and make them righteous in God’s eyes. The wonderful exchange of the human spirit could be accomplished in Christ Jesus only because his body was sanctified. Jesus’s body could not experience decay because it was a sanctified body. It did not die, technically speaking. Had Jesus’s body experience decay, humankind would cease to exist.
To understand Paul correctly, we must accept that Jesus on the cross at Golgotha was the sacrifice for our sin, the scapegoat who takes away the sin of humankind, and how our sin was removed from us. The “Day of Atonement,” in the earthly temple, was the shadow pointing to the reality that will take place in the body of Jesus Christ on the cross at Golgotha. The earthly priest, in the order of Aaron, had to sprinkle the blood of sacrifice for sin onto Mercy Seat. By exiting the temple and placing both hands on the head of the scapegoat, the priest transferred the full weight of the people’s sins onto the scapegoat.
God removed our sin by having humankind’s sin and sinful life die in the sanctified body of Jesus Christ forever. God abandoned Jesus on the cross and thus forever destroyed the sinful human spirit or human life. This is how Jesus served as the scapegoat, taking humankind’s sin into the eternal abyss. “God made the one who did not know sin to be sin for us, so that in him we would become the righteousness of God.” 2 Corinthians 5:21, NET. God made Jesus to be a sin for us, not a sinner. Therefore, sin and sinful human life died in the body of Jesus, but his body did not perish. The new human spirit that God gave Jesus at incarnation must have the same body that the first Man, Adam, had.
Continued in the next blog.
