Don’t Go Back After the Goat

On Yom Kippur, the second goat presents us with a powerful picture.

After the high priest confessed the sins of Israel over the goat, it was led away into the wilderness. Leviticus 16:22 says, “And the goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities unto a land not inhabited.”

The sins were carried away.

So why would anyone chase after the goat to get them back?

Yet sometimes that is exactly what we do. We turn to Yehovah in teshuvah. We confess the sin. We determine to walk in a different direction. But we leave the road back to the old life wide open.

We keep the relationship. We keep the number. We keep the website bookmarked. We keep the bottle in the cabinet. We keep going to the same places. We keep whatever made the sin easy and convenient—and then wonder why we find ourselves struggling with the same thing again.

Scripture tells us to “lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us” (Hebrews 12:1).

Sometimes laying it aside requires more than saying, “I won’t do that again.”

You need to make it difficult to return to the sin that has so easily beset you. Burn the bridges. Remove the things that make returning convenient.

Yeshua used deliberately forceful language when He taught about dealing with the things that cause us to stumble. His point was not casual resistance to sin. It was decisive action. If something repeatedly becomes the pathway that takes you back, deal with the pathway.

That is part of teshuvah.

Over the past few weeks we have talked about hearing God’s Word, allowing sorrow to become teshuvah, and then walking in God’s ways. But if we are going to walk in a new direction, sometimes we must close the road that keeps taking us back to the old one.

The goat has been sent away.

Don’t chase after it.

And don’t leave a convenient path for it to come back.

Something to think about this week:

What bridge do you need to burn—not someday, but now—to make it harder to return to the thing Yehovah has called you to leave behind?

David Mattocks
Light of Yeshua Fellowship