DUSTY GOATS
Written By: Tim Mannin

If you are doing this devotional in order of the Ten Days of Awe today is Good Friday, if you happen to be doing this on a different day it’s all good, but I wanted you to know that this devotional is written with Good Friday as the premise. So let’s get into it!

For years as a follower of Jesus I didn’t recognize Good Friday with much emphasis. I simply viewed it as a part of the Easter weekend and sadly it wasn’t that big of a deal to me. I thought that it was all about Easter Sunday — that was the big show, that was the Christian Super Bowl Sunday! Good Friday was the appetizer to the main course at best. Maybe I thought about it this way because the church I was in during my early years didn’t emphasize Good Friday, so I’m sure that was part of it, but the longer I walk with Jesus the more powerful Good Friday has become to me.

In our family we have set Good Friday apart as a holy day on our calendar. Sometimes school is in session on that day and sometimes schools are out (they can’t seem to decide what they think about Good Friday around here, ha!).  For the last few years we’ve decided to keep our kids out of school no matter what and we spend time that day dedicating ourselves to Lord treating it as a holy sabbath where we remember what Jesus has done, worship, celebrate, and honor Christ.

As the Church this is the day we pause and stand in awe and wonder of the cross. Prophetically it is the fulfillment of Day of Atonement that the Israelites set aside as the holiest day of the year as their sins were atoned (covered over) for another year. The historical Ten Days of Awe we read about in Leviticus ended with the Day of Atonement. We shared all about this in the sermon, The Lamb Is The Goat, but let’s take it a step deeper. So as a reminder, before Jesus came into the world God had to create all sorts of systems, ways, rituals, and laws (outlined in Leviticus and much of the Old Testament). People had to abide by these laws and systems in order to obtain salvation and The Day of Atonement was a critical in how the people would be made right and fully restored.

And goats were a big part of it.

Let’s skip to the key part of that day.

Leviticus 16:20-22 "When Aaron has finished making atonement for the Most Holy Place, the Tent of Meeting and the altar, he shall bring forward the live goat. 21 He is to lay both hands on the head of the live goat and confess over it all the wickedness and rebellion of the Israelites-all their sins-and put them on the goat's head. He shall send the goat away into the desert in the care of a man appointed for the task. 22 The goat will carry on itself all their sins to a solitary place; and the man shall release it in the desert.

The live goat is released into the desert.
Carrying the sins of the people.
A new goat…
every year…
Into the desert.

Those must have been some dusty goats.

Dusty, loaded, goats…
carrying the sins of the people away into the wilderness.
We didn’t even mention the other goat…
the one who didn’t get to live (verses 8-9).
That goat was slaughtered as a sacrifice unto God.

So we have a bloody goat and a dusty goat.

Think about it…the system before Jesus was bloody, dusty, dirty, messy, and ultimately undone. It had to be done every year in order for God’s people to barely find justification with God, just enough to buy them some time. But now through Jesus… we celebrate every year on Good Friday that it is done and we are made clean… in other words no more dust!

Hebrews 9:11-15 (Message)
But when the Messiah arrived, high priest of the superior things of this new covenant, he bypassed the old tent and its trappings in this created world and went straight into heaven’s “tent”—the true Holy Place—once and for all. He also bypassed the sacrifices consisting of goat and calf blood, instead using his own blood as the price to set us free once and for all. If that animal blood and the other rituals of purification were effective in cleaning up certain matters of our religion and behavior, think how much more the blood of Christ cleans up our whole lives, inside and out. Through the Spirit, Christ offered himself as an unblemished sacrifice, freeing us from all those dead-end efforts to make ourselves respectable, so that we can live all out for God.

Jesus came to clean up the bloody, dusty, dirty, messy, and ultimately undone things about our life. He cleanses us through his sacrifice on the cross.

One final sacrifice, one final act of atonement…
and your whole life is cleaned up, inside and out.

This Good Friday may you stand in the awe and wonder of Jesus on the cross.

Because without Jesus and the cross
you are hoping in nothing better than…
a dusty goat.

REFLECTION + NEXT STEPS

  1. Spend time today praying the prayer…“here I am…disrupt me God and fill me awe and wonder.”

  2. Take some time to have a conversation with someone today about Good Friday, ask them, “How do you honor/ celebrate/ remember Good Friday?”

  3. Join us for a Good Friday gathering and communion — 7am or 12pm.