Leviticus 11 through 15 portray that man’s contact with people, man’s source, man’s manifestation, and man’s discharge are altogether unclean. These different aspects of human uncleanness all issue from sins. The sinful unclean man before God needs God to take away his sins. However, in the Old Testament the taking away of sins through the redemption of Christ, which God foreordained, was not yet accomplished. Hence, God set up the expiation, the covering of sins, as a symbol of the redemption which was to come. Therefore, after revealing the different aspects of human uncleanness in chapters 11 through 15, chapter 16 presents the expiation prepared by God.
In the Scriptures there is a difference between redemption and expiation. Redemption in the New Testament is the taking away of sins to fully solve the problem of sin for the sinners. This was accomplished by Christ on the cross as the Lamb of God (John 1:29); it was a redemption accomplished once for all (Heb. 9:12). Expiation in the Old Testament was not the taking away of sins but the covering of sins so that they were not seen. According to Hebrews 10:4, expiation in the Old Testament could not take away sins. If expiation had been able to take away sins, there would have been no need for the people to continually offer the sin offering year after year. The repetition of the offering was an indication that the taking away of sins for the accomplishment of redemption had not yet taken place. Therefore, it was necessary for the Lord Jesus to come to die on the cross for our redemption.
The lid of the Ark, which was within the Holy of Holies in the tabernacle in the Old Testament, was the place where God met with His people. Inside the Ark were the two tablets of the Testimony, the two tablets of the law, on which the Ten Commandments were written. Without the lid of the Ark, the commandments on the tablets of the law would have exposed and condemned the sins of the people who came to meet with God, making it impossible for God to meet with sinners. However, the tablets of the law that exposed and condemned the people’s sins were covered by the lid of the Ark with the expiating blood sprinkled on it. Hence, based on the expiating blood on the lid, which pointed to the redemption which was to be accomplished by Christ, God could pass over the sins covered by the lid to meet with man (Rom. 3:25). These covered sins were not taken away; they remained until Christ came. Then they were taken away by the eternal redemption which He accomplished. Therefore, the expiating blood of the bulls and goats on this lid accomplished the covering of sins, not the actual taking away of sins; it is a type of the redemption accomplished by Christ in the New Testament (see Rom. 3:25, footnote 3, Recovery Version).
In the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament, the word for cover, as in the covering of sins, is translated “place of propitiation.” Actually, this is not a translation but an interpretation. It interprets the covering of sins before God as an appeasing of sins, that is, the appeasing of the problem between man and God so that God could give grace and show favor to man unhesitatingly and unquestionably (see v. 25, footnote 2, Recovery Version).