All of these things in the Old Testament are to help us understand what Christ has done, because if I just tell you well, Jesus died for your sins and He's forgiven you, it's very shallow. But if we begin to look into some of the pictures and patterns shown in the Old Testament, oh, it becomes so vivid all that He did, because it's hard to explain to someone all that Jesus did on the cross. That's why the Old Testament has got these pictures so as you study them, and keep thinking about Jesus and what He did for us, you begin to see the full breadth of it. It's extraordinary! But even in how it happens, someone has to shed their blood, and someone else must confess the sins, see? But the work is complete - the work of Jesus Christ, so we want to focus on that. Now notice what they confessed over them: inequities, transgressions and sins.
Now in the New Testament you hear one word and it's called sin, kind of the coverall word, but actually it's composed of three things: Sin - sins are where we break the law of God, but we do it ignorantly. We didn't realise, we didn't know. That's what the Bible calls sins. Transgressions are where we actually knew what we should do, we knew what was right and what was wrong, and we deliberately did what was wrong. That is a transgression. One, we didn't know and did it anyway, we're still guilty. There was an offering for those sins of ignorance. Two, we did it and we knew exactly what we were doing and the third thing is inequity. Inequity is the crookedness or the twistedness in our life that motivates and moves us to continually sin in certain kinds of ways, so often it's connected to our generational background. We'll get back to that another time.
Okay, so notice what he did. All of it went on - sins, transgressions, inequities. It didn't matter if you didn't know. It still needed a remedy - so God has provided a remedy, all of them, the whole lot - ignorance, deliberate, or just the crookedness in our life, this is all there. Now notice - so we've got it there. Notice what happens here in Verse 14: He'll take some of the blood of the bull, sprinkle it with his finger on the mercy seat, and before the mercy seat, seven times. Now I want to look at this thing, seven times. Whenever you see something done seven times, seven times the blood of this was put on, seven times the blood of that was put on - every time you see the number seven, it tries to highlight to us, that whatever we're looking at or whatever's there, is a complete picture of what God is wanting to do. There's always a perfect number; seven days in a week, a full week. Now how many times should I forgive? Seventy times seven - in other words Jesus was saying, you just forgive completely, and you don't keep going back there. It's completion of whatever we do. Many cycles of things are in times or days of seven, so even is a number of God, but it's a number where something is complete. So he sprinkles seven times - so each time he sprinkled, it was a part of the complete picture of sin and the things we struggle with being dealt with.
So he sprinkled the blood seven times, and I want to open up for you a little bit of understanding about the shedding of that blood. He shed the blood so that we could be forgiven, made clean, come out of all cursing, and walk in blessing. That's the provision. We'll look at it in another scripture, but just have a look in Isaiah 53. There are seven things that Jesus came to redeem us from, seven things that the blood of Jesus Christ addresses. Go into Isaiah 53, you notice - very familiar - then I'm going to pick up, and see if you can identify what the seven areas or seven ways, Jesus shed His blood. It's interesting, shed His blood in seven ways. The High Priest sprinkled the blood seven times, seven. Now why did he do it seven times? Just because this is a good thing? It's a happy thing? It's a good number? I like that seven - we'll do it seven - no, it was not. It's because God's trying to tell us that the work Jesus did can be applied to every aspect of our life, and there is a way to apply it. Now, if we don't apply the blood, in the way God designates, we don't get the benefits of what He's done for us, see?