There's a movie that came out 2008, 2009, something like that. I think I remember what theater I saw it in, so I'd put it right in there. It was called Atonement. Did you see this one? It was one of those fancy, artsy kind of movies that all went mainstream in the late 2000s. There was this little window where really smart movies made it big, and then superheroes and explosions took over, and those movies kind of got relegated over the last 10 years. But this one you might have seen. It was significant. It had Kara Knightley, it had Professor X, James McAvoy. You know what? I think the weasley guy in that was a young Benedict Cumberbatch. Hang on a second. How about that? It sure was. Doctor Strange, Sherlock. Huh? Oh, and 2007. I was wrong on the date. It's a really good show. And if you haven't seen it, I really would recommend it. It's not particularly uplifting because the theme of the show is the impossibility of atonement by human means. That is, we just can't really truly go back and fix the things we got wrong. It's not a sci-fi movie, but time travel isn't an option. And since time travel isn't an option, there's nothing we can do to truly repair at the root the stream of human wreckage that all of us leaves behind. Now, I don't want to paint a bleak picture. We also all leave behind all kinds of beautiful stuff and redemptive stuff. We're a weird mixed bag that way. But the stuff that we really drag with us tends to be the guilt, the ick, the things where maybe it seemed like a good idea at the moment, or maybe we knew dang well it wasn't a good idea at the moment. We were mad or we felt wronged or we were just socially awkward or we had a weird burrito and I don't know, we just didn't behave well and we hurt other people and we did damage. But yeah, what can you do? I mean, even if there weren't all of the social repercussions and social memory and personal pride, like I said earlier, we still can't go back in time and unmake the damage so that that hurt never happened, so that people never suffered because of what we did, so that we never suffered because of what we did. And so the point of this movie is atonement is kind of a myth. We can try to square accounts a little bit, we could try to make things better, but ultimately you don't really get to do that in this world. And that, in a nutshell, is the human problem, right? I mean, that's it's why there's religion, that's why the Bible exists, that's why if you believe what I believe, God reached into the mess of human depravity and was like, I'm gonna put a redemption story right over the top of that sucker, see what I can do by making this thing better. And honestly, I'm fully bought into the concept that the only way true atonement, true repairing of damage and making things right could happen is supernatural, is an intervention of a being who operates outside of space and time and could actually unmake things that for us would only be a fantasy to unmake. And I think if there were a natural solution to this, we would have found it a billion years ago because come on, you've jacked stuff up, right? I mean, if you're not admitting to this in your own brain right now, you're freaking lying to yourself. We've done stupid crap. And I don't just mean like, you know, morally ticky tack stuff. I don't mean the kind of thing that your prudish great aunt would be offended by. I mean stuff that you know was wrong and that you know did damage, and maybe you didn't even know it at the time, but you saw the results and you know that was the wrong thing to do. That was the wrong thing to say, that was the wrong thing to think, that was the wrong way to conceive of other people. You get this. And because of that enormous weight of guilt that people feel when they got both hands on the front wall of the shower and the shower's pouring down on their face and it's running off their nose into the drain and they're staring at the drain and the water swirling around it, being like, what the heck have I done? Who have I become? Where is my life headed? Yeah, I've done that, you've done that, and I've kind of seen it in movies and stuff too. We know the deep and abiding sense of guilt that comes with this thing. And if we can just relieve ourselves of that feeling by doing some mental jujitsu on our own, we would definitely do it, right? Well, again, as the movie Atonement, I think, rightly points out, and as our experience rightly points out, we might be able to make things a little bit better, but we really can't fully atone for the things that have gone wrong in the past, which is part of the beauty of what the Bible is about and what God holds himself out as doing in it. The whole narrative thrust, the whole plot of the Bible is you got this big giant human problem. We do things that are dumb and destructive, and we cannot fix that on our own because we are limited in space-time and always moving forward in a linear way, and therefore we can't fix it. God is not limited in these things. He looks at the situation, he's like, Yep, I'm fixing that. And so he comes along and sets up this elaborate long-term plan that apparently is the one that brings the most glory to himself, and then he executes it painstakingly over time. Probably seems like a long weekend or a normal Tuesday night for him. To us, it seems like thousands of years. But the way the thing unfolds is it all starts to point toward some culminating moment that's going to come down the pike in the future, and then Jesus shows up. And you look at the first five chapters of Matthew that we looked at together, especially the first four, that really are meant to pique the interest of the reader about who this Jesus is. And for the Jewish audience, they're like, he could be the Messiah. For the not Jewish audience who's like a Messiah, what the heck is that? The rest of us, we're like, he could be the one that does the thing that we desperately need to do, but that we can't do, and we all feel at the level of our soul, which is to atone for the stuff that is wrong with us and take the things that are broken and just move forward with the things that are awesome and beautiful and redemptive about us. He could be that guy. So, with that notion of guilt and atonement in our brains, we go back and look at the Old Testament, which normally strikes us as very, very weird, and the thing starts to come into focus a little bit more. There's all this strange language about violence being done to animals and the shedding of blood being required for atonement or the forgiveness of sins. That sounds nuts most of the time, but heck, most of the stuff in Leviticus about clean and unclean sounded nuts to us until like three weeks ago. And all of a sudden, now we're all honoring every single bit of the Old Testament law about clean and unclean to the nth degree, trying not to spread around a virus that is bothering everybody. But Leviticus 17, which might seem nuts otherwise, kind of culminates all of this crazy talk about atonement and guilt and sacrifice, and I should have written it down. It's in the middle of the chapter. Yeah, here we go. Leviticus 17, verse 11 says, For the life of a creature is in the blood, and I have given it to you to make atonement for yourselves on the altar. It is the blood that makes atonement for one's life. For the wages of sin is death. You remember that one from the book of Romans? It's the same exact principle. This same concept appears in the book of Hebrews all over the Bible. And I think etched into the human soul is this concept that guilt requires a payment, but the payments that we can come up with are ultimately insufficient. It's almost like all of the religious, human, physical payments that we could imagine or dream up are just begging for a fulfillment. See where we're going with this? And so what we see conceptually in the Old Testament, and I would straight up say, read the book of Leviticus, read all 17 chapters of the stuff uh regarding sacrifices. It's gonna weird you out and it's a difficult slog. But in light of this conversation, I think it's gonna come into focus a little more, and I think you're gonna see the matrix. What we're seeing all over the Old Testament is something that is not foreign to you and me, but in fact is very familiar to you and me, so familiar to you and me that somebody went and made a gigantic Hollywood blockbuster movie with stinking Doctor Strange in it in 2007. This is a concept that everybody gets across all cultures. And here in the Old Testament, we see it really put into practice, given flesh and form, for what the wages of sin, what the wages of human failure actually are. Now, the idea here is that there is a dispensation, an allotment in the Old Testament law that says the guilt for this thing, it's on you. The intentional stuff, the unintentional stuff, the awkward stuff, all of it, it's on you. But because God is in the process of this redemptive thing, here is a way to shift that guilt. Kind of like you can shift the time by using a DVR to move a program to another place that it doesn't belong, where it works better. Well, likewise here, it just works better to have that guilt be on some bull. And it's very, very sad that that bull got killed. I guess I like bulls and everything, but better that bull than some dude or some lady who got something wrong. And shifting that guilt is not just a spiritual transaction, there is also a psychological metaphor to this thing. And that metaphor is expanded even further. Just a chapter earlier in Leviticus 16, where we get the stuff about the scapegoat. Did you know that the scapegoat was an actual thing? You know, it's just a term that we use for like, hey, you know, there's this guilt and this embarrassment or this humiliation that people are feeling over here, but we're gonna pin it on that guy over there. That will be the scapegoat. That's a Bible term. Leviticus 16 talks about this goat that they pick as a part of the Day of Atonement, the holiest day of the year, where there's this spiritual transaction to atone, or at least to semi-atone, for everything that went wrong that year, sin-wise, as a people. And they like literally would pick a goat and they'd be like, that's that's the one, that goat is awful. We're gonna staple all our sin to it and just send it out in the desert. Again, it sounds crazy. Again, it sounds crazy, but I believe it is hardwired into the minds of humans to understand guilt, to understand the concept of having guilt on us, that we would much rather be on somebody else. In this case, Leviticus 16, a goat. In the rest of the stuff about the sacrifices in Leviticus 1 through 17, animals that get sacrificed and butchered. And ultimately, when we get into the New Testament, we see that the scapegoat, we see that the recipient of sin, we see that the being on which all of the guilt of not just me and you, but all of humanity can be heaped upon, is Jesus. And that's what the cross, which Jesus is on a crash course with already in Matthew chapter five, is about. Hebrews 9.12 says he entered once for all into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves, but by means of his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption. And first Peter 2.24 makes this a little more clear for a not super Jewish audience, saying, He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, the cross, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds, you have been healed. As somebody who's enormously tanked things at points in my life, I really get how much not fun it is to think about guilt and our own failure and the ugly parts of our own track record. Understand me here. I really, really, really get it. But if you got some book holding itself out as holy and being from God and a whole system of thought and faith based around it, and it doesn't go into the deep water on the questions of guilt and atonement, one of the most fundamental human experiences mixed with the most fundamental human longing, then you got a problem. You got something that just smacks of fraud. And look, you might still think the Bible's a fraud and there's nothing behind it, and we can agree to disagree and like each other and high-five over that, whatever. But you got to admit it tackles the stuff it ought to be tackling. And it tackles it with solutions that are actually viable. That being the perfect entity, the deity in the religion, through no compulsion other than his own character, goes and solves the problem of guilt instead of how it is with most religions, where the human characters feel this overwhelming sense of sorrow over what they did wrong, and they gradually work their way out of it. Thus, the imperfect makes itself perfect, the unclean makes itself clean. It doesn't square for me. This does, and I find it very compelling. And whether you agree with me on how I read all of this stuff or not, I'm just really thankful that you're willing to think it through with me because I do think this strikes at the deepest level of the heart of you, me, and all of our brothers and sisters on planet Earth throughout all of time. Tomorrow is going to be a rigorous Bible avalanche of really trying to see what the text says about these concepts that we have thought about in a very general abstract sense in this particular episode. And then we're back into the details of Matthew chapter five. You're understanding what we're doing here, right? But with Jesus saying all this stuff about fulfilling the law and everything, we had to step back and think about what the law actually is and what it is that he's actually fulfilling, or else nothing was going to make sense moving forward. So that is the reason for this big guilt and atonement detour. Probably one more day on this and then back to Matthew chapter five. And hey, everybody who supports this program, even during weird times, thank you. That's a big deal for me and my family, and it means I get to keep doing stuff like this, which I love. All right, looking forward to hanging out tomorrow. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.