Yom Hakippurim
Peter describes God’s sumptuous mercy when he says that we ‘have been chosen to be sprinkled with the blood of Jesus Christ.’ ‘Being sprinkled with the blood’ points to the seven times that Jesus’ blood was sprinkled on the earth.
In order to comprehend the last eighteen hours before Jesus died, we must first understand what happened on Yom HaKippurim, or the Great Day of Atonement. It was only on this day that the high priest was allowed to enter the Holy of Holies in the Temple. Dressed in fine linen, the high priest would enter the Holy of Holies with the blood of the sacrificial animal to receive forgiveness for all of the sins which the people had unknowingly committed4. The High Priest would dip his fingers in the blood and sprinkle it on the golden lid of the Ark of the Covenant, the Mercy Seat, and then he would sprinkle it on the earth seven times. The golden lid of the Ark of the Covenant, the Mercy Seat, was sprinkled as a sign for heaven that the yearly sacrifice for redemption had taken place5. But why did the earth need to be sprinkled with blood seven times as well?
Just as the high priest received the command to sprinkle the ground seven times with the blood of the sacrificial animal on the Great Day of Atonement, in the same way the blood of Jesus saturated the earth seven times on Good Friday. The sevenfold sprinkling in the temple was a prophetic act pointing to the seven times that Jesus would bleed for us in the last eighteen hours before His death.