Yom Kippur, or ‘The Day of Atonement’ in Judaism said to be a time set aside to ‘afflict the soul’, to atone for the sins of the past year. Ten days prior is Rosh Hosannah, or ‘Days of Awe’ or ‘Days of Rememberance’ or even "Days of Judgement’, following the holiday in Lev. 23:24-25, God writes in the books the fate of the wicked, the righteous, and of an intermediate class. The names of the righteous are written in the book of life. The names of the intermediate class have ten days between Rosh Hosannah and Yom Kippur to respite, to repent and become righteous. But the wicked are blotted out of the BoL. The shofar (ram’s horn) is blown and meant to awaken listeners out of their slumbers and to alert them to the coming judgment.
For us ‘to afflict our soul’ we are saying that there is something is off, apart from ourselves that we should be seeking that is not pleasant. It is certainly not pleasant to come before an all-consuming God in the state that we are in, at least not without the intention to want to change.
If one is going to say that Christ bore all that so that we don’t have to, I think it misses the point. Rather that when the time comes, though we will suffer that affliction, Christ is right there to help us through it. It is and will be painful, because we know that as we seek righteousness, we do not have that righteousness, and so the process of getting there seems to be far away. But the journey there is tempered by Christ, who is our Righteousness, in that He was able to go through this life without sin, therefore able through the instrument of the Holy Spirit, to succor us. Despite some claims that all our sins are washed away at the moment of salvation, as if our sins were able to be collected in some kind of bucket, we need to deal with the source of sin, which is the wicked heart from which sin proceeds. And that just cannot be ‘poof’ in there.
I would have it that once we are ‘born again’ all our wickedness would go away. But it is evident that while we may have a change of heart, our heart isn’t automatically changed. Christians still sin. So do Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus, and Pastafarians. If we look to Christ and learn from Him, how He was able to obey the Father, love with a love that covers a multitude of sin, we will make our repentence from sin realized. My guess is that it will take time, perhaps more than a lifetime. But as long as we respond to His call to that repentence, we will see it’s fruit spring up.
