Turn Your Eyes: Celebrating Yom Kippur
Yom Kippur, or the Day of Atonement, is today! Discover its significance and meaning for your spiritual healing.
Remembrance, repentance, and healing
Today is Yom Kippur, or the Day of Atonement, on the Jewish calendar.
It ends the 10 days of Rosh Hashana, which celebrates the new year. It is a solemn day of prayer, fasting, and amending what was broken. A professor of Jewish studies reflected on this day’s importance and shared a powerful point about Yom Kippur: “It represents the moment that is established for reorienting ourselves in the right direction. No other festival has quite the same spiritual power as the idea of Yom Kippur.”
I love how the professor explained it: This day is about “reorienting ourselves in the right direction.” As Christians, we know we are to “turn our eyes upon Jesus” and look upon the Lamb God…
The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him and said, “Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world! This is the one I meant when I said, ‘A man who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.’
John 1:29-30
It is finished!
For Christians, this is a day for remembering, repenting, and healing also, but with with a renewed emphasis: Jesus has died once-and-for-all for the sins of the world.
Yom Kippur reorients us towards the holiness of God. Yet Jesus—as the holiness of God—has reoriented you into right-standing with God through His blood.
So, “It is finished.”
Later, knowing that everything had now been finished, and so that Scripture would be fulfilled, Jesus said, “I am thirsty.” A jar of wine vinegar was there, so they soaked a sponge in it, put the sponge on a stalk of the hyssop plant, and lifted it to Jesus’ lips. When he had received the drink, Jesus said, “It is finished.” With that, he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.
John 19:28-30
And when Jesus returns, He will also renew all things under heaven and on earth. The dead will be raised, and that deposit of the Holy Spirit will come into full bloom.
Until that Day, let us remember and turn our eyes to the Lamb of God.
"Yom Kippur reorients us towards the holiness of God. Yet Jesus—as the holiness of God—has reoriented you into right-standing with God through His blood."
Read on…
For more on Yom Kippur and its significance for you, check out out this prior post:
Jordan Hopkins