Leviticus is given to Israel at Sinai, a freshly-redeemed people now learning how a holy God can dwell in the middle of an unholy camp. Chapter 16 is the pivot of the book: the Day of Atonement, the one day each year the high priest enters the Most Holy Place. Two goats are chosen. One is killed and its blood brought inside the veil; the other is sent away alive, carrying the people's sin out of the camp. The original audience would have watched this — seen the goat disappear over a ridge — and gone home cleansed.

From the writers we read together

E. Stanley Jones

Methodist missionary to India, author of The Christ of the Indian Road (1884-1973)

Jones spent fifty years explaining the gospel to Hindu audiences who already understood karma — the iron law that every wrong must be borne by someone. What Jones kept saying, in lecture halls and ashrams, was that Christianity does not deny the law; it answers it. The sin has to go somewhere. Leviticus 16 stages this with brutal honesty: hands on the head, the iniquities named out loud, the animal walking off into the waste. Israel did not get to pretend the sin had simply evaporated. They watched it leave on the back of something living.

Jones' instinct was that the scapegoat is not a primitive shadow we have outgrown but the exact shape of the cross. Jesus is led outside the camp (Hebrews 13:12); the sin is named, laid on him, carried away. What Jones wants you to feel is the weight of the transaction — that your particular failures of this past week are not floating in some abstract ledger. They were confessed over a head, and the head walked into the wilderness and did not come back. You can stop carrying what has already been carried.