I would suggest that in our observance of Yom Kippur we should consider the following:
First, the Torah instructs us that on this day, the day of Yom Kippur, we are to afflict or humble our souls.
This shall be a permanent statute for you: in the seventh month, on the tenth day of the month, you shall humble your souls and not do any work, whether the native, or the alien who sojourns among you; for it is on this day that atonement shall be made for you to cleanse you; you will be clean from all your sins before the LORD. It is to be a sabbath of solemn rest for you, that you may humble your souls; it is a permanent statute. (Lev 16:29–31)
If there is any person who will not humble himself on this same day, he shall be cut off from his people..… It is to be a sabbath of complete rest to you, and you shall humble your souls; on the ninth of the month at evening, from evening until evening you shall keep your sabbath. (Lev. 23:28, 32)
This commandment was given to Israel as a whole, which included those who had genuine faith in the coming Messiah, and who understood that God had removed their transgressions from them. Thus David writes in Psalm 32:1–2,
How blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered! How blessed is the man to whom the LORD does not impute iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit!
So even before the coming of the Messiah, those who like Abraham were reckoned as righteous by God on the basis of their faith, observed Yom Kippur as a solemn day in which they humbled their souls.
What does it mean to “humble” or “afflict” one’s soul? The Hebrew word used in the Yom Kippur texts is עָנַה, ‘anah. This cluster of consonants apparently has a number of different Semitic roots. One root has the idea of “to answer” or “give a reply.” Another means “to be wretched” or “to be bowed down,” “to suffer” or “to be troubled.” Yet another root means “to sing” (perhaps in the sense of antiphonal responses in song). Quite obviously, in the Yom Kippur texts of Leviticus, the meaning of the verb עָנַה, is “to be bowed down” (thus the English translations that use “humbled”) or to “be afflicted.”
In the poetic lines of Is 58:3, 5, the verb עָנֵה is parallel to fasting:
Why have we fasted and You do not see? Why have we humbled ourselves and You do not notice? (v. 3)
Is it a fast like this which I choose, a day for a man to humble himself? (v. 5)
The same parallelism is seen in Ps 35:13,
But as for me, when they were sick, my clothing was sackcloth; I humbled my soul with fasting, and my prayer kept returning to my bosom.
Here we have a good indication that one way a person may humble or afflict one’s soul is through fasting, and this became the traditional understanding of what the Torah commandment requires: that a person fast on Yom Kippur in order to humble or afflict one’s soul (oneself).
So humbling or afflicting our souls on the appointed day of Yom Kippur is first something we do in obedience to God’s commandment. We do it because our King told us to.
Second, Yom Kippur affords us a set time to stop and make an honest assessment of our own faith and progress in sanctification. Paul admonishes us to test ourselves to see if we are in the faith:
Test yourselves to see if you are in the faith; examine yourselves! Or do you not recognize this about yourselves, that Yeshua Messiah is in you—unless indeed you fail the test? (2Cor 13:5)
Among popular Christianity, testing oneself in regard to one’s faith is not often emphasized. Some would even say that such an exercise brings doubting, and that this is contrary to faith. But the Apostle tells us to do so. Yom Kippur, a day that incorporates a solemn reflection upon one’s own soul, affords the opportunity to take a more complete inventory of one’s own walk with the Lord, and to affirm a genuine faith in Yeshua as the only way to the Father (Jn 14:6).
Paul likewise exhorts us that “each one must examine his own work” (Gal 6:4), by which he means that each one should take stock of how he or she is bearing the burdens of others and thus fulfilling the Torah of Messiah. In other words, each of us is to examine how we are loving our neighbor—how we are progressing in the “law of love.” Once again, a traditional theme for Yom Kippur is that it is a time to make sure we have repaired relationships with others, paid our debts, and sought forgiveness from those against whom we may have sinned. This yearly appointed time helps us keep short accounts with others, and to not allow breaches in our relationships to fester into an incurable wound. But this also requires a humbling of our souls. Perhaps nothing is more humbling than to admit that we have been wrong and to seek forgiveness from the one against whom we have sinned. But doing so moves us forward in becoming holy, to becoming conformed to the image of the One we confess to be Messiah and Lord.
Third, whether we like to admit it or not, it is a characteristic of our fallen human nature that we tend to take for granted things of immense importance. We sometimes take for granted the love extended to us by those who confess to love. But specifically in terms of our relationship to God through Yeshua, we even may take for granted the infinite price that was paid for our atonement. Our confession of faith in Yeshua may sometime become perfunctory, so that we can, almost nonchalantly, say “all my sins are forgiven” without being moved in our souls at the wonder of such a great salvation that we have been given. In many ways, the appointed times of the Lord safeguard us from such a detached, purely intellectual perspective of our faith, and Yom Kippur perhaps most of all. On this day we stop and contemplate, even as we fast and do a thorough soul inventory, the atonement made for us by the death of Yeshua, and are once again given the time to consider what riches He forfeited to make us rich.
So in these ways, we are right to adopt the traditional perspective of Yom Kippur as a solemn day in which we rightly afflict our souls and consider most deeply our relationship to God through Yeshua, the cost of our redemption, and even to sorrow over our lack of love for God and our puny efforts to express our love in obedience to Him. In so doing, we seek a renewal—a rededication through repentance—to be true sons and daughters of the King whose lives express the glory of His greatness.
