The atonement that God made for us by the sacrifice of Christ on Calvary is so comprehensive that it is difficult to describe in a few words. One definition of "make atonement" would be: restore to Divine favor. We think the word that comes the closest to summing up the various shades of meaning is reconcile.

The Day of Atonement (Reconciliation) is the sixth of the seven feasts. The seven feasts do not proceed in order in our lives like the grades of an elementary school. The spiritual fulfillments of the seven feasts are experienced by us at the moment of receiving Christ into our life and then should be working in us each day of our discipleship.

The several facets of the Divine Atonement, which include the Passover protection, the canceling of guilt, the washing away of unrighteous tendencies, the restoration of what was destroyed by sin, the partaking of the body and blood of Christ, are ours at the moment of receiving Christ as our Savior and Lord.

As we move along in the plan of God for our lives the feasts are fulfilled in our personalities to an ever greater degree. The full weight of authority and power contained in the body and blood of Jesus becomes increasingly manifest in our lives.

Our day-to-day Christian walk brings to us an enlarging consciousness of what the blood of Christ really can do concerning the grip that sin and self-will have on us. We become better able to appropriate the body and blood of the Lamb and thereby overcome the accuser (Revelation 12:11).

Let us think for a moment about the need for us who have been Christians for awhile to learn to draw on the authority and power of the atonement made by Christ so we can fight our way through to greater freedom from the "sin which doth so easily beset us" (Hebrews 12:1).

The "living bird" of Leviticus 14:7 and the "scapegoat" of Leviticus 16:10 show us that God intends that our sins not only should be forgiven but also removed from us. We Christians need to learn more about how to have our sins removed from us so we can be made perfect in the sight of God (Hebrews 10:1).

Perhaps it is the reader's understanding that sin is purged from our personality at the time of our initial experience in the Lord Jesus Christ. Is that belief actually borne out in our own experience and in the lives of the Christian people whom we know?

We may have started out on our Christian pilgrimage many years ago. Is it true that we now are free from the bondages of lust, of the love of money, of murderous hatred, of deceit, of occult practices, of the love of pleasure more than the love of God, of backbiting and gossiping, of pride, of haughtiness, of jealousy, of foolishness, of lying, of boasting, of stealing, of divisiveness, of fear, of self-pity, of complacency?

If we still are behaving in these ways, the redeeming authority and power contained in the atoning blood of Christ have not as yet completed their work of cleansing and reconciliation in us. But there is no doubt about the fact that we believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and have been baptized in His name.

To be continued.