The Land Where It Was Carried

He is a man who wants to know where things go.

That is not a fault and it is not fussiness. He is the person in his family who reads the whole contract, who asks the question at the meeting that everybody else was too polite to ask, who wants to know, when somebody says a matter is closed, what closed means and who closed it and what happens to the file.

So when he became a believer at thirty-four and people told him his sins were forgiven, he did the thing he always does. He accepted it, gladly, and then he asked the follow up question, quietly, to himself, and got no answer for eleven years.

Where did they go?

He is not asking whether God forgave him. He believes that. He is asking a question about disposal, and he means it seriously, the way a serious person means things: a real thing existed, a real thing was dealt with, and dealt with is not a location. It is an assurance. And he has noticed that when he presses on the assurance he gets language about feelings, and feelings are not addresses.

Yonatan is forty-five and he walks out to the ridge above the last houses on Friday afternoons before the light goes, and he asks it there, where nobody can hear him being difficult about a thing everybody else seems content with.

And I want to say to him: your question is not difficult. Your question is the exact question the ritual in Leviticus 16 was designed to answer, and God answered it with a physical picture in front of a whole nation because He knew that people like you exist and that assurances alone would never settle them.

You may be that person too. Not doubting, exactly, but unsatisfied, because you were handed a verdict and never given a destination.

The day the whole nation watched a thing leave

On one day of the year, the priest took two goats. One was offered. The other, the live one, had a job that had nothing to do with the altar.

And the goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities unto a land not inhabited: and he shall let go the goat in the wilderness.Leviticus 16:22

Before that verse, the priest laid both hands on the head of the living goat and confessed over it all the iniquities of the people, all their transgressions, all their sins, and Scripture says he put them upon the head of the goat.

Then a man appointed for the task led that animal away, and everybody watched it go, and it went out until it could not be seen, and the phrase the text uses for its destination is a land not inhabited.

Look at what God is doing in that ritual. He is not explaining forgiveness. He is showing a nation, physically, with an animal and a horizon, that their sin has a destination and that the destination is away from them.

You are looking at a transaction that has a location in it, and it is already carried, and God built the picture precisely because a verdict without a destination does not settle a serious person. I am not offering an image to a man who wants a fact. It is written in Leviticus 16:22, and the Holy Spirit is the one who preserved a picture for two and a half thousand years so that a man on a ridge would have an answer.

Two goats, and why it takes both

Now here is the part that will satisfy the contract reader in him, and it is why the ritual uses two animals rather than one.

The first goat deals with the legal side: the offering, the blood, the covering. That is the verdict.

The second deals with the location: the carrying away, out, gone, into land where nobody lives. That is the disposal.

Both halves are needed, and Yonatan has only ever been given the first. That is why the answer he keeps receiving feels incomplete to him, because it is incomplete. He has been handed the verdict and never the removal, and he has been treating his own dissatisfaction as a defect of faith when it was actually an accurate perception that half the picture was missing.

And Scripture puts both halves on Christ. He is the offering; John the Baptist calls Him the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29), and takes away is the language of the second goat, not the first.

You have both halves in one Person, and it is already both paid and carried, and the taking away is named in the same breath as the offering. Scripture calls Him the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, and the Holy Spirit is the one who puts two ancient goats together into one Man for a person who needs the whole mechanism.

What a land not inhabited means

And here is the phrase to take home, because it is doing careful work.

Not a land far off. Not a land where it will be watched. A land not inhabited. Nobody lives there. Nobody keeps records there. There is no one in that place to bring it up, no one to see it, no one to fetch it back, and no address anybody can write to.

For a man who wants to know where a thing went, that is a real answer, and it is the strongest possible one: it went to the only place in the world where a thing has no witnesses.

You are dealing with something that was taken where there is nobody to bring it up, and it is already out there. It is written that the goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities unto a land not inhabited, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an old phrase about empty country function as rest in a man who reads contracts.