Sabhath Reflections

Taranaki Daily News, 9 November 1935, Page 21 (Supplement)

Sabhath Reflections

THE SCAPEGOAT WORLD’S SINS BORNE AWAY. ANCIENT AND MODERN RITE (By the Rev. J. D. McL. Wilson) “Arid Aaron shall lay both his hancls upon the head of the live goat and confess over him all the iniquities of the children of Israel, and all their transgressions in all their sins, putting them upon the head of the goat, and shall send him away by the hand of a fit man into the wilderness; the goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities into a land not inhabited; and he shall let the goat go in the wilderness.”—Lev. 16-21 and 22.

This old world tale has always been a fascinating story to me. Sometimes when passing over the wilderness where the scape-goat, the beast of awful significance, was led to death, I used to think how strange, how wonderful, how prophetic it all was. It is the fashion these days to confess’ an ignorance of sin; to discount its reality and presence in our midst; to look on it as an archaic term from a discarded andThappily forgotten theology. It is curious, that the great men of the past should have so firmly believed in it. We think of the tremendous tragedies exhibited to us in the epic dramas of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripedes, who lived about 500 years before Christ. We pass down the centuries .to Shakespeare and • Goethe, to Ibsen and our present day Francis Thomson and John Masefield. These all seem familiar with a something which rives th: soul, disrupts the temper of the mind and heart, and induces such agonies of spirit as no human skill can calm or heal. They speak of terrors in the soul, aroused by outraged moral laws, and “more menacing in their substance than 10,000 soldiers armed in proof.” They speak of “murdered sleep” and foul stains and giiilt that “not all the perfumes of Arabia can sweeten, or all the wide seas can wash clean.” They speak of offended conscience that condemns villany, and an “even handed justice that commends the ingredients of the poisoned chalice to their lips.” Were these 'all mistaken in their judgments of life?. Were they unwittingly jaundiced in their views of the human heart? Or is it possible that we, in our smug complacencies, have ignored a vital factor in human experience—terrible in its potency for moral destruction? That “new thought” so sedulously, peddled around by comfortable philosophers to comfortable people is a pitiful glossing over of life’s stem realities and merely insults the poor devil who knows his heart is not right with God, and no ineffable peace can ever come to him until he is reconciled with the Holy, Wise and Loving Heavenly Father. What do we make of this true New Zealand story? Here is a man, a woman and an unwanted child. They lived in the back-country. The baby was half-starved and given the scantiest of care and attention. As soon as it could move about it was left outside in the open yard for most of the day to crawl around and eat of the filth and the dirt. Winter came on, and’ in the south the frosts are bitter and lies heavy on the ground. Still the little one was thrust out until its pitiful limbs were frost bitten. Then it was taken in and screamed day and night until the neighbours were aroused and took action. The district nurse came; the police were called in; the child was taken to hospital, where its two legs were amputated. The little mutilated thing still lives. It was adopted by Christian people, taken into their home, and is being given such chance as it now has with its frightful disability. . But what a hellish thing! What damnable depths there are to which men and women will descend in their evil courses. And yet we have these peripatetic and unctious, people who assure us there is no sin; it is only thinking makes it so. The gaols, the reformatories, the orphanages, the hospitals, the doctors, nurses, ministers, social workers, know that sin is real and abounds. A world in which suspicion, distrust, greed and ambition arm one nation against the other; a world in which while food abounds yet leaves one in every 10' to be in want; a world where the hearts of millions are restless and full of dispeace and unhappiness; all these assure us that sin is factual.

No man who is honest enough to look into God’s stainless eternities, no man who will weigh his life with the spotless life of Christ, no man who will compare what he is with what he knows he might be, can doubt that sin is a cognisable entity, everywhere present. Without the neutralisation of that consciousness of guilt before God and conscience which sin causes, without a sense of sin pardoned and covered, without the renewal of man’s inner personality by a power nothing less than Divine man cannot know deep peace. He cannot be the creation God meant him to be. He cannot win the “Well done, good and faithful servant.” It has been the earnest pursuit of serious men of all ages to discover how to live the highest life, how to gain peace in their hearts, how to secure a heavenly absolution from Him who rules the universe and before Whom earth’s creatures are but as the small dust of the ground. History and literature are full of the efforts of man to put away evil and the consequences of it, and to gain- the Almighty’s recognition and favour.

When our missionaries first went to the New Hebrides they found that when a wrong had been committed, or say a person had been slain, the priest would take a branch of kava, and after walking round the guilty person and waving the brand six times, he would exorcise the spirit of evil out of the person into

the stick. Then hurtling it into the bush as far as he could, he would say, “Thus I throw away the guilt of the killing, which this man did.” The man was then pronounced clean and all was well.

Among the North American Indians white dogs were used for the same purpose. In South-Eastern Asia it was the custom to prepare a little ship upon which were placed, with rice and eggs—their sicknesses, agues, diseases, and their sins, the occasion or them. When the off-shore breeze blew the vessel into the deep the priest pronounced all their troubles to have departed from them. In the Chinese highlands at one time a man was made to be the scape-victim. His face y was smeared with paint, and with curses and noise of tom-toms he was driven from the village. In the Old Testament and in the text above there is indicated the ancient Hebrew mode of making atonement for sin. We might say there was an essential difference between their practice and that of the pagan people round about. With the heathen the purpose of it all was to appease the anger or to buy the goodwill of a blind and despotic deity. With the Jewish people God was known to be merciful and gracious, and He Himself indicated, and later in His own son provided, the acceptable sacrifice. Let me tell a little about that original scape-goat of the Hebrews. It is vividly described in the Book of Leviticus. Holman Hunt gave a masterly picture of it, though to most Christians to-day it is a forgotten story, in the Jewish sacred calender the great day of the year was and still is, the day of atonement. After the r: ~>st solemn sacrifices, in which atonement was made, first for the high priest himself and the priesthood and second for the Holy of Holies, the Holy Place and the outer court, the culminating rite in the extraordinary service was reached when atonement was made for the people. Two male goats were chosen, and for these lots were cast at the gate of the sanctuary, one for Azazel to be the scape-goat and one for Jehovah. The one on which the lot fell for Jevovah was slain as sin offering to God. Then took place the most affecting and most mysterious rite of all, when the sin .and guilt of the nation were placed upon the other goat. The proceeding was something like this. The chosen animal stood facing the East, confronting the people, its head down, and a scarlet thread between the horns. The high priest laid both hands upon its head, committing the sins of the people .to it, at the same time confessing and pleading in these words: “Oh, Yahweh, they have committed iniquity, they have transgressed, they havesinned before Thee—Thy people, the people, the people of Israel. Oh, then, Yahweh, cover over, I beseech Thee, their iniquity, their transgression, their sins, which they have committed, and transgressed and sinned before Thee, as it is written in the law of Moses Thy servant, saying, “For on that day it shall be atoned for you, to make you clean. From all your sins before Yahweh ye shall be cleansed.”

And while the people worshipped at the ineffable name of Yahweh, which until the time of Christ was only pronounced upon that day, and by the high priest alone, the high priest turned, and faced the people and uttered the words which promised absolution and remission of sins—“Ye shall be cleansed.”

Then the closing act was witnessed. The priests led forth the sin-burdened goat, through Solomon’s porch, out of the eastern gate, across the arched bridge to the Mount of Olives, where it was handed over to a non-Israelite. For 90 stadia (12 miles) it was led into the wilderness to wander with its terrible load until it died; or as at the time of Christ, it was taken to the edge of a i declivity, over which it was drawn 1 backward to its destruction, the scapegoat bearing to its death the sins of the people. But this vivid and picturesque ritual was, after all, only a symbol of an epic reality of later years. As the author of the Book of the Hebrews has it: “It was a shadow of things to come.' 1 For if the blood of bulls and goats, x and the ashes of an heifer sprinkling the unclean santifieth to the purifying of the flesh, how much more shall the blood of Christ, Who maketh through the Eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God—purge your .onscience from dead works to serve the Living God?” Christ is the scape-goat of the New Testament’s later revelation, though there he is more familiar to us under the symbolism of a lamb—the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world. He is able to cleanse the bosom of that perilous weight which weighs upon the heart; able to raze out the written troubles of the brain; to pluck frpm the memory the rooted sorrow; to minister to the mind diseased; to quench the fires of hell within the breast; lit by the hand of pitiless remorse; and bring pardon and sweet peace to the stricken and the contrite spirit. This is the great news of the Gospelreconciliation with God, redemption from sin, and its every stair, and consequence; life abundantly through Him who was dead for our sins, but is alive again for evermore, and is the Author and Perfecter of our faith. t “We also joy in God, through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we receive the atonement.” I lay my sins on Jesus The spotless Lamb of God. He bears them all and frees us From the accursed load. The scape-goat bearing away the sins of the people, prototype of the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world. * Rest, weary heart! The penalty is borne, the ransom paid, For all thy sins, full satisfaction made! Strive not to do thyself, what Christ has done, Claim the free gift, and make the joy thine own: No more by pangs of guilt and fear distrest, Rest, calmly Rest.