True Repentance
H. W. Beecher. Leviticus 16:3-34 Thus shall Aaron come into the holy place: with a young bullock for a sin offering, and a ram for a burnt offering.… I think that men look upon repentance and humiliation before God very much as they do upon a voyage from the tropics to the North Pole. Every single league as they advance toward the Arctic region they leave more and more behind them greenness, and fruit, and warmth, and civilisation, and find themselves more and more in the midst of sterility, barrenness, ice, and barbarism. I think that men repent toward the frigid zones. They think that to go to God is dreary and desolate in the extreme. It is not. The sinner is an Esquimaux! He lives in ice and burrows underground, and is but little better than a beast. But if by any means he becomes fired with a conception of a better clime, and leaving his hibernating quarters, he takes the ship Repentance and sails toward the torrid zone, at every league he is surprised by the new forms of vegetation by which he is surrounded. He has seen oak-trees only about as high as his knee. Not long after he sets out on his voyage he is astonished to see them as high as his head. By and by, as he draws near the tropics, he is lost in wonder and ecstasy to see them lifting themselves far above him in the air. And with what satisfaction does he compare the delightful home that he has found with the miserable one that he has left behind. (H. W. Beecher.) Parallel Verses KJV: Thus shall Aaron come into the holy place: with a young bullock for a sin offering, and a ram for a burnt offering. WEB: "Herewith shall Aaron come into the sanctuary: with a young bull for a sin offering, and a ram for a burnt offering.