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high priest would place his hands on the goat for Azazel and pronounce all the
sins of Israel upon it. Since the goat now, ritually speaking, contained within it
the rest of the residual sins of Israel, it was driven off.
The name Azazel is confusing, but is from the Hebrew word “azal,”
meaning “go away” or even vastation. It seems to depict a place separated
from the Lord, a place of evil spirits. By sending away the goat for Azazel, the
Children of Israel acknowledged that sin and evil were not intrinsically theirs.
We must do the same thing. The Lord in His Second Coming has made
clear to us that neither good nor evil “belong” to us, and the closer we come
to believing and living as if this is true, the happier and more at peace we
will become. We are not the source of good or evil, none of our thoughts or
affections come from ourselves, and nothing makes these things “us” unless
we let them. We read:
To believe and think, as is the truth, that all goodness and truth originate from the
Lord, and all evil and falsity from hell, seems to be an impossibility, when in fact it
is something truly human and thus angelic. This is impossible for people who do
not acknowledge the Lord’s Divinity, and that evils are sins, but it is possible for
people who do. Insofar as they refrain from evils as sins, they simply reflect on the
evils in themselves and cast them away from themselves back to hell from where
they came. (Divine Providence 320)
This truth can clean our lives. Just as the high priest lays his hands on the
goat for Azazel, we direct our own borrowed power to driving evil out of our
life. Please notice that they do not kill the goat; they remove it from camp. It
is not our job to kill evil, nor can we. Instead, we flee from evil, we shun it, we
remove ourselves from it.
This might mean changing behaviors that are not evil in themselves but
that we now perceive to feed evil: we watch what we say at the Tuesday meeting
or spend less time away from home on Saturday. Prepared with humility,
freshly aware of the celestial state the Lord wishes for us, and armed with a
perception of what we should change in our bodily lives in the light of the
Word, we change.
And that is how we undergo yearly examination and repentance,
something the Heavenly Doctrines encourage us to do. (Apocalypse Revealed
224, True Christian Religion 567) The Day of Atonement does not describe
the daily repentance with which we are familiar but a yearly repentance, a
more thorough cleaning. It is a process, as we have said, wholly managed and
performed by the Lord, but He asks that we participate.
The process described is universal; the Atonement ritual describes
individual repentance, spiritual vastation, how a church undergoes
investigation and correction, it even describes how we can clean our worship
of our own proprium and worldly concerns. The process of approaching the
Divine is eternal.
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