The Day of Atonement (Transcript)

CLICK TO LISTEN TO BOB BARNEY’S MIDDAY BROADCAST: The Day of Atonement

Hello, Bob Barney again with The Plain Truth today, brought to you by theplaintruth.com, and we’re going to talk about the Day of Atonement in the Bible, why we are supposed to follow this day, what we’re supposed to do on this day, and why does this day take place over two days, and answer a quick question, does that prove that the morning does not begin God’s day, but the evening does? And we will go over that.

But first of all, we want to discuss the holy days of God. We’ve done that in other programs, and I want to get over that the first holy day, really, of God in the year would be the new year, which starts on March 20th, which is the first day of the first month of the year, and on the 14th day of that year is Passover, on the 21st day is the end of unleavened bread, the 22nd day is to feast of first fruits.

All these have to do with pointing towards Jesus Christ and his ministry, his life, his death, and resurrection, and return. That’s what these holy days are meant to be. Fifty days after the feast of first fruits comes Pentecost, meaning 50th, and that day is May 29th each year, and that day is the day that Moses received the Ten Commandments, the law, but it’s also the day that the people of the New Testament, after Jesus went back to heaven, got the Holy Spirit.

You see, God says in his word, called the Bible, that he is going to take his law and write it on our hearts and in our minds and not on stone in the New Testament time, at the time of the millennium. That means he’s taking the law, which was written on stone, and he’s going to make it a spiritual law. People don’t understand.

This is what Jesus did when he was saying about, you have heard, for example, you cannot divorce your wife and anyone who marries her commits adultery. I say if you look at a woman with lust and you’ve committed adultery with her. His disciples were horrified to hear that because every man in the world basically lusts after women that he sees pretty in front of them, even if he’s married or not.

So they said, well, who can be saved? And that’s his famous thing. Well, really, nobody can be saved, but with God anything’s possible. It was kind of like a backhanded slap, but what he was saying was God is going to take physical law and now he’s going to make it spiritual on top of just being physical before you could look at a woman and lust after that woman.

As long as you didn’t touch that woman, you’re still following the law as written by Moses and given to him by God. But Jesus saying, I’m going to take that mosaic law and I’m going to turn it into spirit. So when you even lust after a woman, you look at a woman, you say, I wish I was with her or vice versa, if you’re a woman to a man, then Jesus says that’s committing adultery.

So he took the law from something that was easier to follow physically to where it was almost impossible to follow spiritually, and he did so on purpose to show the need that everyone has for his forgiveness, because it’s not only a physical law we have to worry about, it is the law of the spirit in our minds, the spirit that we are sinning as well as physically. Like I said, you don’t have to physically commit adultery or murder. Jesus said when you hate someone and you wish they were dead, it’s the same as you murdered that person, no difference.

The actual physical act of murdering them and thinking about murdering them to God is the same thing. That is making the law into spiritual ideas. So after the Day of Atonement, when the church now, the same exact day that Moses received the law, now they receive the Holy Spirit, which is the spirit that imbibes the law within us.Once we are baptized and we are born of God, not born again, born of God, we have the spirit in us and we are like a little zygote in the mother’s womb. We’re waiting to be born again at the resurrection of the dead. We are now imbibed with a spirit of God in us that makes us understand what is sin more clearly and try to take our physical self, because we’re going to someday be a spiritual self, but take the spiritual sinful body and mind and try to mold it into what God wants us to be.

And that is the idea of why the Holy Spirit came on Pentecost, because it is the spiritual form of the Ten Commandments. I don’t think too many people have thought of it that way. Well, then you go through all summer long, through the growing season, you should say, after Pentecost, you have this long growing season of June, July, and August, and part of September, before you get into the harvest season, and the second part of God’s holy days come into contents here with the idea that this first day of the seventh month becomes the Feast of Trumpets, when trumpets were blown and people did not work.And that symbolizes the end times when trumpets are the same thing as a newscaster. Back in the old days, when somebody blew the trumpet, that meant everybody stop what you’re doing and listen to what’s going to come next. If there was an important announcement, they would blow the trumpet.

Think of a bugle. Everybody would stop doing what they were doing. It’s like a judge hitting a hammer, you know, the hammer or the wooden mallet on the desk to get your attention.Well, that is exactly what the trumpet did, and people would listen. So the Feast of Trumpets right before the Day of Atonement and the Feast of Tabernacles symbolizes the time when the tribulation begins, and the news, because trumpets symbolize the news of God, the news is going to be very bad, and everybody is to pay attention because it’s to their eternal well-being to pay attention to what God’s message is once this tribulation begins, and that is symbolized by the Feast of Trumpets, which happens on, I believe, September 16th every year. Then, nine days later, we observe the Day of Atonement by fasting and prayer and do not, of course, go to work, and it happens at the sundown on the ninth day of the month, and it goes through the night and through the next day, the tenth day of the month, and it ends at evening on the tenth day of the month, and many people who want to follow the evening day that is absolutely Babylonian, pagan in content, use this one holiday, basically, to try to prove their point that the day begins at the evening and ends at the next evening, and that’s not what it says.

This particular holiday, like Passover, begins in the evening and ends the next day. It’s two different days spoken of here. We’re going to show that to you in a minute before we get into the idea of a Day of Atonement, but there’s two days being spoke here.I always use the idea of, when does Christmas really start? I know we’re not supposed to follow Christmas, but everybody knows this example the best. Well, I think most people, you would say December 25th, but when you ask them, when do you start Christmas, really, they’ll say, oh, Christmas Eve. Well, when’s Christmas Eve? Oh, it’s the nighttime of the 24th day, you know, at the end of the day at the 24th, you have Christmas parties on the 24th, you don’t do much work.

That night is Christmas Eve, and most people, that’s when they carol, and that’s when they sit around the tree and look at the presents. Then they go to sleep, and the next day, the 25th, in the morning, and in my family, it was like 3 30 in the morning, us kids wanted to get up and see what we got. We would, everyone gets up and opens their presents, and that becomes Christmas Day.By Christmas, two, three o’clock in the afternoon, Christmas is basically over for everybody. They’re getting ready to go somewhere else, and so when you think about it, Christmas is really from the evening of the 24th until the evening of the 25th, and by Christmas night, everybody’s in another world, and that’s the same with the Day of Atonement. So, let’s look at the verse, which we will find in the Old Testament in Numbers 29, chapter 29 in Numbers, and this is how it reads, and I’m reading out of the New King James Version, because I’m trying to get more of a word-for-word translation than we have, like, for the example, the Plain Truths Bible.

And in the seventh month, on the first day of the month, you shall have a holy assembly, and you shall do no work. For to you, and on this day, you should blow trumpets, and this is the Feast of Trumpets, and we go down to the seventh verse, on the tenth day of this month, you shall have a holy convocation, meaning a holy assembly. You shall afflict your souls, and many people believe, and I can, any concordance will prove this, any Bible dictionary, afflict your souls means to fast, and that’s fast without any food or any water for these 24 hours.You shall do no work. You shall present a burnt offering, and it goes to the offerings you have to do in grain offerings, right? And then it goes on to the Feast of Tabernacles, which is five days after Atonement, which we’ll do when we get closer to that. But if you go to Leviticus, when it really talks about the Day of Atonement, Leviticus chapter 16, we’re going to see a little different rendition than the tenth day of the month.

We’re going to see, now the Lord spoke to Moses after the death of his two sons, I’m sorry, the two sons of Aaron, tell Aaron, your brother, not just to come any time to the holy place. Even the high priest cannot go in where the holy place was, the most holy place. He could not pull back the veil and go in and see the Ark of the Covenant any day he wanted to, or he’d die.He only could go one day a year, and that one day was going to be the Day of Atonement. And it goes through what he has to offer. He’s got to offer offerings for his own sin, and goat offerings, and this is where you have the scapegoat story, and everything else.But this shall be a statue forever for you. In the seventh month, on the tenth day of the month, you shall afflict your souls and do no work at all, whether a native of your country or a stranger who dwells amongst you. Then we go to the same thing on Leviticus 23, go to Leviticus 23, and we have on verse 26, the Day of Atonement.Now listen to how God explains it here in this chapter. And the Lord spoke to Moses saying, also on the tenth day of the seventh month shall be a holy Day of Atonement. It shall be a holy assembly for you, and you shall afflict your souls and offer an offering made by fire for the Lord.

And you shall do no work on that same day, for it is the Day of Atonement to make atonement for you before the Lord your God. For any person who is not afflicted in the soul, meaning not fasting, on the same day shall be cut off from his people. And any person who does any work on that same day, that person will be destroyed amongst his people.You shall do no manner of work on that day. It shall be a Sabbath to you of solemn rest, and you shall afflict your souls. On the ninth day of the month at evening, from evening to evening, you shall celebrate your Sabbath.So there’s people saying, oh, it’s ninth day at evening, it begins the tenth day. That’s not what it says. The tenth day is the tenth day, and that begins on the sunrise of the following morning, and that’s the Day of Atonement that you have your holy convocation, you have your holy assembly of the people worshiping God on that day, asking for forgiveness, getting forgiven, the blood of the lambs at the time in the Old Testament.

And Jesus Christ now is the Lamb of God. He is our atonement for our sins, and by his death, he was the same as the Passover lamb. By his death, we are freed from our sin if we want to be.We have to ask for it. First of all, we’ve got to know we’re a sinner. We have to know we are sinning, and that’s a very important concept because so many people who do unrighteous things today try to justify it by saying, oh, God made me the way I am.I’m not a sinner. This is natural. This is what, you know, all these excuses that you hear.It’s what modern Americans and Western culture in general that has become absolutely against God and God’s laws and God’s ways now try to explain away that they are not sinners. God will accept them no matter what, and so therefore they don’t care about anything to do with days of atonement or Passover’s or anything like of the such, and that is a big error because they’re going to have a very, very rude awakening when they are awoken from the dead on their general day of resurrection, which does not occur, you read this in Revelation, does not occur until after the millennium. Everybody in this world that’s ever lived from Adam and Eve, and I’m not saying it’s them, but from Adam and Eve until the very last person who’s alive on this earth who has not accepted Jesus Christ, followed him and obeyed him and bade his voice and did not only worship him in, you know, faith alone and all this stuff and not follow what he said to do and obey his voice, those people are not going to be raised at the beginning of the millennium along with the Christians who are dead in their graves to this day.

When that day comes, the day of Christ’s return, only Christians, true Christians, not people who say they’re Christians, only true Christians who obey Christ will find themselves resurrected into immortality. They will be gods. A thousand years later comes the general resurrection when all the graves are open and all the people who never believed in Jesus or didn’t even know he existed are then judged by their works, how good of a life they lived by the rules they were supposed to follow, and some people will be found justified by their works and they will be given a second chance at human existence under the direction of us, Christians, who are now gods.I know, but a lot of people think that’s blasphemy, but when God created us in their own image, after their own kind, we’re not created after the mankind as animals were created after their own kind. We are created after Jesus Christ and God the Father. We are created in their image, their likeness.They have the same arms and fingers that we do, but spiritually, and that’s what we will be. We will be like them spiritually and we will help lead the nations that come out of the great resurrection at the end of the millennium, and we will help guide them because there’s no more Satan to worry about, and guide them so they too, at the end of their very long life, will become God’s children as well, just like us, and they will become our brethren, male and female. That is the good plan of God, and that is why God wants us to follow the holidays that God puts in the Bible.

In the Bible, you’re not going to find an Easter celebration, other than maybe you could say Ezekiel chapter 8, and that doesn’t have a very good ending for the people of God, because God knows that the Easter celebration comes from the goddess Ishtar and the god Tammuz, who is a fake antichrist figure, and comes out of Babylon and Babylonian religion, and God tells the people not to do the things that the pagans around them do. Do not celebrate their holidays and do things that they do. Don’t even take their customs and put it on God’s holidays.I know there was a time during the Feast of Tabernacles when my kids were young, we had some people, our relatives, that wanted to give them gifts like Christmas time because they didn’t have Christmas, but we did have birthdays instead of Christmases, and they got a lot of presents on their birthdays, and we did not see a need to give them all kinds of presents during the Feast of Tabernacles, though it is a very joyous time. It’s a holiday time. It’s a time that God does not want you to work.He wants you to take that week off, rest and relax, go to a nice place, live in temporary dwellings, and we’ll get into the Feast of Tabernacles a little next week when it begins, but when we are following God’s holy days from Passover to Pentecost to Day of Atonement to the Feast of Tabernacles and the Last Great Day, it absolutely symbolizes, those holidays symbolize the plan of God, and when you follow these fake holidays that are not found in the Bible and you Christianize those, it doesn’t help you with your faith with God at all. You don’t even understand God’s plan for you. You don’t understand how important you are in this world and what God wants you to be.

You don’t realize that God’s purpose for you, if you want it, is to be like him, or I should say like them, like Jesus and the Father. They want you to be God’s. I know it sounds blasphemous, but that’s what the Bible is telling you, and it’s the best news you could ever hear.It’s better than anything anybody even can conceive about what the reward for a real Christian is. It’s immortality as God and God’s children going through the universe and repopulating the universe and making the universe beautiful again, because the universe was destroyed in some kind of a star wars between the devils, the demons, and the angels long before mankind walked this earth, most likely. That seems to be the case.You can think about that. You can do a search on that. You can see that most people will agree with that, but going back to the Day of Atonement, it is a time that we are to remember our sins.This is a very important concept, to remember your sins. God says, by the way, when you ask for forgiveness and he wipes you clean, he will not remember your sin anymore. That’s fine, and I’m glad God doesn’t remember my sin, and I hope he doesn’t remember my sins, but we should not forget our sins.

We should always have those in the back of our mind and always be a little guilty because that guilt, I remember Garner Ted Armstrong one time had a booklet out, How Not to Be Guilty. Well, I had a problem with that booklet because God uses guilt. Guilt is a great thing if it’s used properly, and God uses it properly.Because of guilt and because of you think God saw what you did, that keeps you on the straight line. That keeps you doing the right thing because that guilt of what you did in the past keeps you from doing it again. Guilt can be, when used rightfully as God does with us, is a way to keep you going down the right road, and that’s so important.So we are to remember our guilt and then we are to go to God on the Day of Atonement, every day, but the Day of Atonement, every year, it is a holiday, we have a day off from work and not eat any food or drink any water if we can, and I’ll talk about that in a second, and we are to ask God and thank God for forgiving our sins and thank Jesus Christ for dying for us. Jesus Christ suffered and was butchered almost beyond recognition, so we have a chance to become like He, God. It’s so important.It’s such a beautiful concept and we do that once a year. It’s a memorial now. It will have another real live version when Christ returns because He’s going to be our Atonement returning and forgiving the sins of the world throughout the next plan of God of salvation, which is still being worked out below and above.

But let’s get into the actual Day of Atonement. So you’re supposed to have your last meal, if anything, if you’re going to have anything, no later than five o’clock on the night before or the hour before the night of when you start the fast of the Day of Atonement. That night, before you go to bed, you really should read out of the Bible about the Day of Atonement, maybe read about Christ on the cross and what He did and what He said and what happened, and maybe also find some New Testament apostles writing about the Day of Atonement, and Paul does do that.You can look that up in any good Bible search on the internet, and then you go to sleep, and if you can, you don’t drink any water after you ate, and you have no snacks that night, you fast. Everybody knows what a fast is. The next morning, you get up, you clean yourself up, and it’s a time that you don’t go to work, so you open the Bible, maybe start reading, or maybe start praying.Go outside and pray to God the Father and Jesus Christ, and thank Jesus Christ for what He did for you for the Day of Atonement. The Day of Atonement is celebrated in heaven, I believe, because they remember, both God the Father and Jesus Christ, the whole plan on that day as well. So be in communication, in prayer, and reading the Bible, and try not to eat or drink any water for that day until the evening time, about six o’clock.We always had a nice, pretty nice meal after the Day of Atonement at six o’clock when you break that fast, and you have, you start with a little bit of water, and a little bit of wine maybe, and some unleavened bread. I would not have, you could have leavened bread. It doesn’t say you can’t, but it would be a good time like Passover.

Leavening equals sin. We’re trying to be sinless that day, and that night is the day it’s over with now, and then you can have a regular meal, and you can enjoy drinking a coffee, or drinking some more wine, or some water. Now what I wanted to get to, and this is the last part, this is a very serious part, there are a lot of people, I’m one of them, I have some medical conditions.I may be 70 years old, and I’m trying my best to try to make it to at least 80 hopefully, or maybe a little longer, and exercise every day, but I have some medical conditions, and although most years I do make it without any food, and no water, there are times if you’re not feeling well, and you are starting to feel dizzy, or nauseous, and I have drank water. I do take my pills, so I do drink water in the morning, and at night a little bit to take my pills no matter what, because I don’t think I should stop taking the medication I’m on, and I think God can see that, but if you have conditions where you can’t even, you’re a diabetic, and going 24 hours without eating could put you in an insulin problem, then you got to do what you got to do, and God understands that. God, it’s like the Sabbath day when Jesus was told you can’t heal a person on the Sabbath day, and Jesus said I’m lord of the Sabbath, basically is what he was saying, and I have the right, and the person has the right to be healed on the Sabbath day.Remember, he said the Sabbath day was made for man. Man was not made for the Sabbath day, and that means that the Sabbath day was met as a day of rest and joy for man’s enjoyment, not an enslavement of mankind to follow the Sabbath day. We are to follow the Sabbaths, and even the day of atonement, and every other day with joy, and understand the joy is what we are going to get as a reward for being Christians, which is immortality as God.

That’s the plain truth of the matter of the day of atonement. So tonight starts the day of atonement. Tomorrow ends at evening time, and I hope some of the people listening may want to try it, may want to partially try it, at least take the time to read the Bible about the day of atonement tonight and tomorrow.Every little step you make towards doing the right thing, there’s rejoicing in heaven. I can guarantee you that. You can find scriptures that even say that.God is trying to get his message out to us. He’s gotten his message out to us. It’s just mainly us opening our eyes.If we open our eyes, and we read the words on the page, and we follow what the words on the page say to do, you know what? They’re going to make God happy. When we read the words on the page, and we don’t want to follow those words on the page, because we just don’t want to do it, and we somehow excuse ourselves for not doing it, and say it’s okay, then God’s not happy. That’s simple.So tomorrow’s the day of atonement, and tonight is the evening of the day of atonement, and then in five days after tomorrow starts the Feast of Tabernacles, and we’ll get into the Feast of Tabernacles next week, and the Great Last Day, and what it means in this holy season. The seventh month of the year is the holy month of the year, and I hope people get to learn it, that don’t understand it, and I hope that people more and more want to follow God’s holy days, and not man’s holy days. Well, that’s it for the Plain Truth Show for today.

I just want to thank everyone who does listen to the show, and tell others about the show. I’m humbled when I hear people say they listen to a show, and talk to me about it, when I talk to them, or they write me an email, or something like that. I am humbled, because I don’t have the talent to do this, like Gunner Ted Armstrong, the guy was a natural, but I think I’m doing a decent job for somebody who has a full-time job, and full-time everything else, and trying to do my Savior, and my Father, the best I can do, and not feel guilty about where I lack.Until tomorrow, and it’ll be a short show tomorrow, until tomorrow, this is Bob Barney with The Plain Truth today, saying thank you for listening. Goodbye.