Torah Times Messianic Ministry

Sacrifice Doesn't Mean What They Teach! (Romans 3:25-26)

First, I will read you the text:

The usual noun used to describe the purpose of sacrifice in these texts is "propitiation" or atonement."  The general idea in English is to appease God with an offering that will compensate for or make amends for wrong so that God's wrath is satisfied. These terms universally invoke the payment model of sacrifice.

In the previous video, I gave a part of the evidentiary foundation for a more ancient meaning of kipper that actually makes sense in the contexts. That was from the Greek point of view. Here I will get into the Hebrew sense.

As such, the terms atonement and propitiation are paganizations of the original Greek and Hebrew terms, which are to be understood by the Hebrew term. The verb Kaphar means "to wipe away," to "purge", or "cleanse." So the Good News of Messiah translates "purging," in this text and in 1 John 2:2, "cleansing." Most of the dictionaries in Hebrew supply the wrong definition. Some of them provide the correct definition alongside the wrong one. In the Torah, the translations "to atone" or "to make atonement" are universally wrong, corrupt, misleading, and tend to communicate a pagan idea. That "purging" or "cleansing" is correct may be proved by the parallel usages of the Hebrew and Greek terms in the LXX and the MT with synonyms meaning to cleanse. It is not my purpose in this presentation to explain all this research. There are top scholars who have already done so and who agree with what I am saying here. I would only observe that no one listens to them in the institutional Church because correcting the matter is fatal to their most cherished traditions surrounding the meaning of Messiah's death.

Note well that when I speak of "purging" or "wiping away," I am speaking of all those texts in the Torah that use the incorrect words "to make atonement."

There are two inflections of "purging" that it is necessary to understand. One is actual, and the other is declarative. Usually, the Hebrew verb Kaphar is in the PIEL conjugation, Kipper. In this sense, it means "to make to be wipped away," in a declarative sense. A synonymous sense occurs in Leviticus 14:7: "And he shall declare him clean." A parallel construction occurs in Leviticus 16:30, "For in this day, he shall declare wiping away upon you all, to pronounce you clean from all your sins.  At the face of Yahweh, ye will be clean."

The last phrase, "At the face of Yahweh ye will be clean" is in the Qal and refers to actually being clean, but it may also be read as PIEL.

A person declared clean is clean before the fact is declared. The priest observing the person who pronounces him clean is only finding out what is already the case, and then making an official proclamation of the result of the examination. This is the case with disease.

Sin is analogous to disease. When a person confesses their sin, and is sorry for it, and turns from it, then the Spirit of the Most High forgives the sin, meaning wipes out a final judgment of the person for the sin, and cleanses the heart from the guilt. This all takes place in the spiritual realm before any offering is brought. This is analogous to the cleansing procedure a person with a physical disease goes through before the priest officially declares him clean.

Strictly speaking, an offering is not required for forgiveness or spiritual cleansing. Strictly speaking, a person can be forgiven and cleansed of a sin without an offering that makes an official pronouncement of the fact. However, the Most High, in his wisdom, thought it best that there be a severe object lesson along with an official pronouncement of purging (wiping away). So the sin is confessed onto the offering, and the offering makes the proclamation of the purging of the sin. That is, the offering symbolically bears the sin away and buries it in the grave. The loss of life, the blood, proclaims the purging by demonstrating the cost taken by the sin that is being carried by the offering. The picture obtained is that of a ransom, with the sin symbolically taking the life of the ransom as the sinner is separated from his sin. This whole ritual is a picture of what has already happened in the spiritual realm. The purpose of the offering is to bring this hidden lesson into full view, much like the Most High spoke the commandments to Israel at first to impress upon them the fear of YHWH.

No doubt someone will think to quote "without the shedding of blood there is no remission" from the book of Hebrews. But this book was not accepted by the majority of Christians right after it was written. In fact, it was considered a fraud, and was accepted only in Egypt by the Alexandrian Church on the supposition that Paul wrote it. It was later proved that Paul was not the author. But by that time the book had been promoted and accepted in the west, and it had become tradition. When it was accepted by Jerome and Augustine, they also make the mistake of adding several other books to the canon that are not recognized as part of the canon by the institutional Protestant Church. This is to say that new authorities removed books that older authorities had sanctified.

Sacrifice is like baptism. It is not required for forgiveness, but it is required by Torah for bringing the lesson home to the heart. It is usually said by Messianic apologists for Torah observance, holding to Messiah Yeshua, that when the Temple is restored, the sin offerings will have a new memorial purpose or only a ritual cleansing purpose. What I am saying is that this was their purpose all along, and that an attack on the Torah has been built out of false expectations of a propitiatory effect of the offerings. We can call this a strawman argument. It was never the case in the first place. The memorial purpose is to make the object lesson about the ransom-taking cost of sin and the ransom-giving love of God. This would be called redemptive, but clearly I don't like the word "redeem." It's too commercial. Only the divine end is legal. What sin takes is not, which is all the more reason why sacrifice is to teach the lesson, not that God actually takes a ransom.

The offering represents the sacrifice of the Most High in the Spirit to cleanse us. This is why the offering must be perfect, indicating innocence. The offering is a proxy for the Most High in the sacrificial instruction.

With respect to animal sacrifice, however, the purging also applies to actual ritual impurity, which would literally be cleansed by the physical blood of the animal.

Now let us go back to our Romans text. It is evident that Messiah is set forth to actually purge us from sin AND ALSO via his sacrifice he is set forth as the same sort of object lesson I have described with the animal offerings for sin. So through his faithfulness, by the Spirit, he purges us from our sins. He cleanses us from sin. In death, of course, the cleansing is only symbolized, because Messiah can only cleanse through his restored divine life, through the Spirit. So in this respect, Messiah does more than the offering because he is risen from the dead.

Now in retrospect, Messiah did cleanse the sins of the repentant before he came. He forgave them and then cleansed them. But when the transgression of Israel killed Messiah, the Almighty turned the tables on sin and made this murder into an official declaration of purging for us, for all the sins which in the time of Moses could not be officially declared to be wiped. Indeed, it was only allowed to declare a purging at that time for sins of ignorance or circumstance, and not for rebellion (cf. Numbers 15). Yet, even then those who confessed their sins to the Most High and repented received forgiveness. There was just no offical proclamation of it.

The official proclamation, "to declare to be purged" the sin, is an object lesson on the ransom cost taken from the Most High in his long suffering and patience with us, hoping we will repent. This ransom cost affects all of the Almighty, but more specifically, our sin attacked the Messiah in the flesh, as the Most High wanted it to become visible to all in the physical realm. And he knew ahead of time that this would happen when he entered the domain of darkness to do battle with it.

For this reason, Paul calls the offering of Messiah, "a demonstration of his justice." Now, as I pointed out in an earlier lesson, his justice here is his favorable justice, apart from NOMOS, which is not according to what is customary, which is punishment, but according to his benevolence and justice according to a ransom rescue.

Paul repeats himself twice in vs. 25–26. The word I translated "demonstration," which refers to the symbolism, can also be translated as "indication." In fact, our word "indication" is directly related to the Greek word. Paul takes this from knowing what kipper means and also from Isaiah 53: "The instruction of our peace is upon him."

The iniquities that occurred before Messiah Yeshua's demonstration of God's favorable justice to us were indeed already forgiven. The Most High took advantage of his murder and made it a guilt offering to instruct us in the cost of, and cleansing of, our transgressions, which Messiah took to the grave with him. The lesson is equally applicable to the holy ones who lived before Messiah suffered and was taken by sin and death.

We should not imagine that "he should be just" in v. 26 refers to punishment. It does not. It still refers to the favorable justice by which we are forgiven and ransomed from captivity under sin. And this is when we repent, because the Most High has judged it JUST to forgive us when we repent of sin. This is made clear in Ezekiel 18. He is administering justice to us—forgiveness, cleansing, and instruction on the cost of it all. There is nothing in this lesson about punishing Messiah for our sin. There is no penal substitution. That idea comes from the false idea of atonement and propitiation. It is a pagan idea.

Explore with me for a bit the philosophical foundation of propitiation. It is based on the idea that sacrifice, in the view of God, compensates for sin, i.e., pays for it. But sacrifice viewed this way never truly paid for sin. To expose this to view so we can clearly see the folly. Which would all the victims of sin rather have? Or rather, which would God rather have? The lives of all those destroyed by sin back, or a sacrificial payment from the ones who took the lives as a just compensation? Well, the answer is obvious. There is no compensation that can be of equal value to the loss. Sacrifice cannot be equal to the state of reality that would result from obeying God in the first place and not taking life. To obey is better than sacrifice. So the commercial view of sacrifice in view of real justice is a complete failure!

But Messiah, through his covenant faithfulness, forgives our sins, which cannot be paid back, and this we must realize because it is part of the lesson. Sin takes a deadly cost. And the Most High suffers a loss. The king who forgives the debt suffers the loss of his loan, but the unforgiving servant was unwilling to suffer the loss of his loan when his debtor pleaded for mercy.

There is a fundamental difference between those destroyed by sin and YHWH suffering from our sin. The latter is the ransom cost of suffering because YHWH is love and he wants to rescue his creation. The former is an unrecoverable loss. And since YHWH is love, Messiah can be no other than YHWH himself, he who makes be.

The Almighty himself takes the lead in putting out the ransom cost to rescue us from sin. This is because God is love. God would not be love if he had asked another, non-god, who was not his only kindred Son, to show the cost in the his flesh to us, a cost which all of the Almighty bears in the Spirit, Father, Son and Spirit. And God would not be love if he asked his only kindred Son to bear a cost that he himself was not already bearing or unwilling to bear.

For this reason, the propitiation explanation, the payment explanation, that takes from the Son and gives to the Father, is false. But the truth is that all of the Almighty is giving a king's ransom in terms of suffering to rescue us. For all that belongs to the Son is the Father's, and all that belongs to the Father is the Son's. The Son's loss is equal to the Father's loss. The Most High also asks us to suffer with him to ransom others. He does not ask what he himself does not do.

I have explained the elements of the meaning of these two verses. Here it is again:

A few remarks again. The ritual of sacrifice demonstrates or makes proclamation of purging, a purging that before the offering removed the debt, which is forgiveness, and then removes the sin in the spirit, cleansing the heart. What is taught by the offering actually occured with the previous transgressions, which is why I translated "thoughout letting go the inquities that had been occuring previously." That is, the favorable justice was applied back then also. But in the present time, Messiah's murder has been made a demonstration, the instruction of our peace about the suffering of the Almighty, about what it took to bring us to repentance, to forgive us, and to cleanse us from sin.