Guest Author: Brian Verrett
Peter and John raced to the tomb to look for their Lord (John 20:3–4). Though John won the race, Peter stooped and looked into the tomb seeing only linen cloths, a face cloth, and empty space (vv. 4–7). John then looked, saw the same, and went home with Peter (vv. 8–10).
Mary remained outside the tomb weeping (v. 11). When she looked into the tomb, she saw more than empty space. Surprisingly, “she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had lain, one at the head and one at the feet” (v. 12).
John included these details about the angels so we’d better understand the meaning of Jesus’s death. The angels there at the head and foot of where Jesus had lain should make us think of the mercy seat atop the ark of the covenant. Per the Lord’s instruction, this mercy seat had “two cherubim of gold … on the two ends of the mercy seat [with] one cherub on the one end, and one cherub on the other end. Of one piece with the mercy seat shall you make the cherubim on its two ends” (Exod 25:18–19).
Since the mercy seat sat atop the ark of the covenant, it resided in the holy of holies. The high priest would only enter the holy of holies once a year on Yom Kippur, the day of atonement (Lev 16). On that day, God would cover the sin of his people that had accrued throughout the year and purge the tabernacle of its uncleanness from Israel’s sins (vv. 16, 30). God covered their sin by having the high priest sprinkle the blood of a slaughtered goat on the mercy seat (v. 15). There, on the mercy seat and beneath the gaze of the two angels, the blood of the sacrifice proved that God had covered their sins.
Jesus is our day of atonement sacrifice. Just as the cherubim were at both ends of the mercy seat, so the two angels sat at the head and foot of Jesus’s burial site. And just as the two cherubim had “their faces one to another” stooping down looking “toward the mercy seat,” so our salvation is something the two angels in Jesus’s tomb and angels still today “long to look into” (1 Peter 1:12). And just as the blood of the goat on the mercy seat covered his people’s sins from the prior year, so the bloodied but now empty slab upon which Jesus was lain proves that God “will remember [our] sins and [our] lawless deeds no more” by “securing an eternal redemption” (Heb 9:12; 10:17).