I remember my friend Graham Marsh illustrating this using two balloons. Imagine these helium balloons represent your sins, he said. One of them—here he took a knife and stabbed the balloon—is burst, demonstrating that everything you have done wrong has been defeated with a bang. The other—and at this point he opened the fire doors at the back of the auditorium and let go of the balloon—is released, rising higher and higher into the sky, until it is so far away you can no longer see it. That’s how the substitutionary goats work on the Day of Atonement, he explained, and that’s how the substitutionary sacrifice of Christ works for you. Your sins have been destroyed, and you have been cleansed from them. But they have also been taken away from you, so far that you cannot even see them, as far as the east is from the west.
Atonement
