For then must he often have suffered. — The repeated presentation of Himself to God must imply, as a necessary condition, a repeated “suffering of death; as the high priest’s offering of the blood of expiation in the Holiest Place implied the previous sacrifice of the victim. The writer’s point of view is the time when “Christ entered into heaven itself.” In speaking of the repeated “suffering” (Luke 24:26; Luke 24:46, et al.), he marks the limits within which it must lie, reaching back to the “foundation of the world.” The expression in the second part of the verse is the converse of this: looking forward from the “foundation of the world,” through all the successive periods of human history until the Incarnation, he writes, “Now once at the end of the world” — “at the consummation of the ages” — hath Christ “been manifested.” The words “consummation of the age” occur five times in St. Matthew’s Gospel — Matthew 13:39-40; Matthew 13:49; Matthew 24:3; Matthew 28:20. (See the Notes.) The phrase here is more expressive still. The history of all preceding ages was a preparation for the manifestation of the Christ (“who verily was fore-ordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifest in these last times” (literally, at the end of the times), 1 Peter 1:20; all subsequent history develops the results of that manifestation. A similar thought is contained in St. Paul’s words “the fulness of the seasons” (Ephesians 1:10), “the fulness of the time” (Galatians 4:4). (See further the Note on Hebrews 1:2.)
To put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself. — Literally, for the annulling of sin through His sacrifice. The word which in Hebrews 7:18 was used for the abrogation of the command relating to the line of earthly priests, is here applied to the destruction of the power and abolition of the results of sin. As in the manifestation before the face of God we see the proof that the goal which the human high priest failed to reach had been attained, so these words proclaim full deliverance from guilt and penalty, and from the hold of sin itself — a deliverance which the sin-offering could but express in figure.