huckelberry wrote:"to be able to associate with you without tarnishing"
How could a statement be more wrong? Jesus was associating with all kinds of sinners. His father loved Isreal a people well versed in sin. God was not pleased with this sin but it never never never never stopped him from associaling in love with humans. How do Protestants get so bizarre?
The entire system of sacrifice and priestly mediation was designed to give impure people a modicum of access to a God so pure that he cannot allow them to be directly in his presence. In the words of Habakkuk, God's "eyes are too pure to look on evil; you cannot tolerate wrong." Mind you, Habakkuk goes on to lament that God tolerates the wicked anyway. So it's not that God doesn't love sinners; he loves them at least enough to allow them to exist. But on the the other hand, he seems only to associate with them through mediators (such as priests and Jesus) or after putting them through a rigorous purification process involving ritual washing and propitatory sacrifice.
Christ's atonement merely continues and completes this logic. As pseudo-Paul says in Ephesians 2, "remember that at that time you [Gentiles] were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ. ... For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit." And again in Hebrews 10:19-31: "...since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way opened for us through the curtain, that is, his body, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near to God with a sincere heart and with the full assurance that faith brings, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water."
I think it's great that the Christ-myth attenuated the Old Testament purity logic as much as it did, but let's not fool ourselves; it's still the same logic. And it makes no more sense, really, when Christ fulfills it than when Moses laid it all out in the first place.