The Mercy Seat – continued.
“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. The literal rendering of the Greek text is: “Whom set forth God a mercy seat through the reliability, or trustworthiness, of his blood.” The blood of the animals was not trustworthy because it could not cleanse the human conscience. Hebrews 9:9. Paul’s reference to Jesus as the atoning sacrifice, the mercy seat, and the scapegoat in one sentence creates difficulty in translation because, in the Greek language, the order of words is different than in English.
In 2 Corinthians 5:19, NET, Paul states, “In other words, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting people’s trespasses against them, and has given us the message of reconciliation.” Because God was working in the body of Christ on the cross makes it clear how Jesus could be, the place of atonement, the atonement itself, and the scapegoat. Nothing is impossible For God. Jesus on the cross represented the first humankind, not the new one. Because of what transpired on the cross, it was clear to Paul, as it should be to us, that the body of Jesus Christ on the cross was the “mercy seat” and the “one who takes away” – the scapegoat. The fact that Jesus put aside his perfect and eternal life constitutes the sacrifice for sin. Jesus accomplished the sacrifice for human sin by setting aside his perfect life. By his death, Jesus was the Mercy Seat and the Scapegoat.
The difficulty in understanding the intent of putting sin into the body of Jesus prompted the translators to choose “propitiation” as the probable meaning. However, the above verse shows that “expiation” is a more appropriate word here. Jesus Christ, on the cross at Golgotha, did not appease an angry God. He met the righteous demands of God’s justice, mainly, “the soul who sins is the one who will die…”. Ezekiel 18:20. God accomplished the reconciliation of sinners to him by removing sin from the sinners through the body of Jesus Christ. On the cross at Golgotha, God poured His wrath on the sin, not on the sinners. Because God was in Christ on the cross makes it clear that Jesus Christ is our “sacrifice for sin, “the mercy seat,” and “the scapegoat” that took our sin into eternal Abys. The perfect life of Jesus did not die in place of sinful humankind. Jesus’s perfect life was outside of Jesus’s body. The sinful human life, or spirit, died in the body of Jesus. Therefore, Jesus died as us, the sinful humankind.
How could it be? Read the next blog.
