Seeing Green

There's nothing quite like the day after it rains. From our backyard, we see the San Bernardino mountains in all their snow-capped glory. The leaves of our plants glisten with water, the ground smells earthy and fresh. Everything seems cleaner, the air crisper, the sun more beckoning.

As I read the newspaper this morning and checked out the forecast, I saw nothing but green dots marked over the map of the Southland, meaning the air quality was good everywhere. This only happens after it rains.

This is what forgiveness feels like. Or at least it's supposed to. Over my lifetime I have often wondered why it didn't, first for me, and later as a pastor conversing and counseling many people struggling in their own shame, drowning in their own self-hatred, imprisoned by a ruthless condemnation with their own finger pointing back at them.

Christians know cognitively that Jesus has died for their sins. They get that. But forgiveness is not just a matter of the mind, but of the heart. It is not merely something to know, but to know, as in experience.

Several years ago my professor at Fuller Seminary, Dr.Ray Anderson led us to a passage in the OT that shed so much light on Jesus' death and resurrection and changed my own experience of forgiveness. I have since tried to pass along that insight, encouragement, and healing to others.

In Leviticus 16, the Lord through Moses gives instructions for how the priest is to make atonement for the sins of the Israelites each year, known as the Day of Atonement. From the community of the Israelites, the priest is to take two male goats. One will be a sin offering to the Lord. This goat is slaughtered, and its blood sprinkled on the altar in the Most Holy Place because of "the uncleanness and rebellion of the Israelites, whatever their sins had been."

But the other goat the priest is to keep alive. He is to lay both hands atop the head of the goat and confess over it "all the wickedness and rebellion of the Israelites - all their sins - and put them on the goat's head." Then the goat is released into the wilderness, where "the goat will carry on itself all their sins to a remote place." This is where we get the term "scapegoat."

We are often taught that Jesus died for our sins, that his blood covers us, making us clean. And this is true. This is the first goat. Jesus as the perfect Lamb of God became the sin offering to the Lord for all sin for all persons for all time. But this teaching, I discovered, often fell short in experience. Many, including myself, knew we were clean because of Christ's sacrifice, yet never quite felt clean. We knew we were forgiven, but didn't exactly experience forgiveness. This, I now realize, is because though Christ's blood covers our sin, we still from the inside, see the sin his blood covers. We are forgiven, but not released from the sin we see.

This is where the second goat is necessary. The live goat carried the sins of the people away from them and beyond the horizon. I imagine the entire Israelite community watching as the goat was released, carrying with him their sins to a faraway place never to be seen again. This is also what Jesus did - he took our sins onto himself. In other words, the cross is the "remote place" our sins are taken from us to go, never to be seen again.

In David's Psalm 103, we see both of these aspects of forgiveness: "Praise the Lord...who forgives all your sins and heals all your diseases...as far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us." We not only need to be covered in the blood of Jesus, but we need to be released from our sins. This is how we experience true forgiveness and the healing of shame - through the love of Jesus and the power of the cross.

Forgiveness is what happens when the rain of His mercy falls upon us in our contrition and confession with humility. There is nothing quite like it. You know it, you see green dots everywhere.