Revelation 13:8 tells us that Christ's death was foreordained from the foundation of the world. By extension, that means that His life in a human body was foreordained as well. He had to be given a form that could die. Hebrews 10:5 says, Therefore, when He came into the world, He said: ‘Sacrifice and offering You did not desire, but a body You have prepared for Me.' Because mankind is made of flesh and blood, Jesus likewise partook of the same things (Hebrews 2:14, ESV). God's plan necessitated that the Creator partake of the same physical life and substance that He had created.
Because flesh is mortal, death is always an aspect of human life, and Christ's life in the flesh was no different. Some scriptures focus on the death aspect of Christ's human body, and those are the ones we tend to think of first. For example, I Peter 2:24 says that Christ bore our sins in His own body on the tree. The body God prepared for Him was marred and disfigured so much at His crucifixion that He no longer looked human.
A primary effect of the sacrifice of His fleshly body is reconciliation, both between God and man as well as between men - Jews, Gentiles, and everyone else. And because of that reconciliation, there can be fellowship - communion - with God and with all others who likewise fellowship with God, which fits with the passage we saw in I Corinthians 10. When we partake of that one bread, we are reminded of the brutal end of Christ's life as a Man, which brought about reconciliation and allowed for spiritual fellowship.
But we cannot stop there, because Scripture speaks of Christ's body in other ways as well. It really is a complex symbol.
This is basically the New Testament commentary on Leviticus 16, and it points us to Jesus Christ, not to Satan or a lesser demon called Azazel.
Notice that the exact terms and functions used to describe the live goat are later applied to Jesus as the Messiah. Now, Christ fulfilled the first goat as well, but the first goat did not bear any sins. The bearing of sins was specific to the second goat.
Peter tells us how and when Christ bore our sins: He bore them in His own body while He was on the tree. His bearing of sin was not simply a legal pronouncement. It had a real-life application and a recorded fulfillment. The bearing took place during His extreme suffering, which He endured for hours while He took on the shame, reproach, anguish, piercing, crushing, bruising, smiting, grief, separation, and other disfiguring effects of sin.
We may not like to think about what happened to Jesus when our sins were laid on Him, but without admitting this facet of His sacrifice, we miss the foundational reason for His taking on human flesh (Romans 8:3). We understand that Jesus bore our sins and their penalty, but what can be harder to accept is that Paul says Christ became sin. We will see this in II Corinthians 5:21:
Like the second goat, Christ's sacrifice was not an immediate death. He was alive while He bore our sins in His own body on the tree (I Peter 2:24). Christ's bearing of our sins took hours, and He felt every second. He became sin and a curse as He hung there, bearing our transgressions, outside the gate.
We also saw that, rather than beginning with the uncertain meaning of the word, if we instead begin with what happens to the live goat, there is an abundance of clear scriptures that point to the Messiah. He was the one upon whom sins were laid, and who bore them. He was the one who became sin, who was sent away from the Temple, and who became a curse to satisfy the curse of being sent from God's presence, so we can come back into it.
Now, even though we have seen how the two goats together were used for this annual cleansing of sin, it may still seem like the azazel was not a sin offering since it was not slain. But before excluding the live goat from being a sin offering, we should note that it certainly was sacrificed in the sense of its life being completely given over to a sacrificial purpose. Its purpose was to bear sins as a substitute rather than to give its blood. Jesus Christ was alive while He bore our sins, but He was still a Sacrifice while that took place.
This is how sins are removed - through Jesus Christ becoming sin and being separated from the Father for what must have seemed like eternity. Like the first goat, His sacrifice opened the way into the Holy of Holies. His sinless blood has given us access to and satisfied the Most High God. Like the second goat, Jesus also bore our sins. Through piercing, bruising, and wounding while hanging on a tree for hours outside the gate, our transgressions are removed as far as east is from the west (Psalm 103:12).
