‘We have an altar, of which they have no right to eat who serve the tabernacle.'
His reply is that we actually have an altar which provides us with spiritual food of which they know nothing and of which they cannot partake. For Jesus Christ was offered up as a sacrifice (Hebrews 9:12-14; Hebrews 10:10) which must mean that He was offered up on an spiritual altar provided by God. We must not see this as just an answer it is a proud boast. It is a declaration of triumph. It is now time for them to recognise that they (and we) have a better altar, of which they who serve the earthly tabernacle and what it represents have no right to eat while they are in their unbelief.
Those who serve in the tabernacle with all its ritual are provided with meat from the sacrifices which have been offered on the altar in Jerusalem, (speaking loosely, they can ‘eat meat from the altar'), but we should recognise that we have a better altar, a spiritual altar, on which has been offered a better Sacrifice once for all, one which, supplies us with better spiritual food than their altar ever could.
For what is an altar? It is a place where a sacrifice is offered to God. And as they should well know, when Jesus died He was being offered up as a sacrifice, which indicates that God had arranged for such ‘an altar' outside Jerusalem at Golgotha, where this could occur. And that being so, through His being offered up there on that altar, a superior altar to that in Jerusalem, we can participate in Christ's sacrifice for us. We can participate of God's Passover Lamb (1 Corinthians 5:7; John 1:29). We can feed on the Bread of Life (John 6:35). We can partake of Jesus Christ (John 6:48-58; John 6:63).
And how do we thus feed and drink of Christ? Jesus puts the answer in clear terms in John 6:35, ‘He who comes to Me will never hunger, and he who believes in Me will never thirst'. In other words we feed and drink by coming and believing. We come in personal faith responding in our spirits to Jesus as revealed to us through His word, looking to Him in our hearts, and we exercise constant trust, faith and response day by day as we continue looking to Him (compare Hebrews 12:2). So do we eat and drink of Him, and participate in Him. And this is especially so as we meet together to look to Him and honour Him and worship Him.
(This is not referring directly to the Lord's Table, even though the Lord's Table does symbolise it. He is not comparing religious rituals and saying our religious ceremony is better than theirs. As he has done all through his letter, he is contrasting the earthly with the heavenly. He is saying, ‘they participate in an earthly altar and what it offers, we participate in a heavenly altar and what it offers').
For, as he will now point out, this altar on which His sacrifice was made is ‘outside the camp' (Hebrews 13:11). It is not tied to religious Jerusalem. It is a spiritual altar. It is not even visible. It is God's invisible altar (like the invisible temple of Ezekiel, descending to earth and present in Israel but invisible to all but him - see Ezekiel 40 onwards) on which Jesus Christ offered Himself up even as He was being crucified, seen as an altar of sacrifice. It is the altar on which our Great High Priest offered Himself up as a sacrifice for the sins of the world.
The important thing that will be stressed here is not specifically where the altar was as seen on a map. That was not what mattered. What mattered was where it was not. What mattered was that it was situated ‘outside the camp', and therefore outside the scope of the levitical priesthood and the polluted city. And those who serve the Jerusalem altar have therefore no right there for they have not come to Him to receive life and forgiveness. They have rejected Him.
Note on the Altar.
Many and varied have been the interpretations of this altar, mainly ignoring the context in which it is found. Some would refer it to the altars in their own churches, but that is to totally ignore the context in the letter. We cannot just erect our own altar and say, ‘this is what the writer was talking about'. Nor can we say that our altars represent that altar, as though we could represent our Great High Priest. For earlier he has stressed that there cannot be a sacrificing priest on earth (Hebrews 8:4). That is why the early church did not erect altars.
Others see it as referring to the Lord's Table at which we partake of bread and wine, but there is nothing in the context to suggest this. What is contrasted to the meats is not the bread and the wine but the grace of God in a far wider sense, which is then expanded on in terms of Christ's offering of Himself. There is nothing in Scripture which justifies seeing the Lord's Table as in any way being a sacrifice, whether non-bloody or otherwise, or as being connected with an earthly altar. It is always seen as pointing back to one sacrifice for all time, and as taken along with a meal. Nor does participation in it require a priest (except in the sense that all Christians are priests and that they come to the Lord's Table to offer the sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving and the sacrifice of their own lives to His service). It is a celebration and participation in Christ through faith not a sacrifice.
Still others, with more justification, see it as Christ Himself. (They then usually also see Christ as the heavenly tabernacle as well). But it overloads the picture when we see Christ as altar, High Priest and sacrifice all together, and more importantly it is not justified in the context. The altar is the place where the sacrifice is offered and where the High Priest officiates. But while the sacrifice and the officiating of the High Priest are both shown earlier to be ‘types' of Christ, there has been no suggestion in Hebrews that the altar is such a type.
Yet it is true in that in that altar He is visualising precisely what was accomplished there. By ‘we have an altar' he is really meaning, we have a sufficient sacrifice that has been offered, and we have a great High Priest Who offered it on our behalf and has gone into the Heavens with its benefits in order to mediate on our behalf. In that sense the altar is Christ.
Some therefore refer to the cross as the altar. But that is to be too literal in our thinking. It was not Jesus Who hung Himself on the cross, it was the Roman soldiers. They placed Him on the cross. In contrast Jesus was offering Himself on an altar, on a spiritual altar of God's making, an altar not made with hands. Thus to suggest the cross as the altar is being too literalistic. But we may certainly see the place where the cross was erected as the temporary site of God's spiritual altar. It is just that the cross was what Rome used, whereas His offering of Himself was a spiritual and invisible action accomplished on a spiritual and invisible altar provided by God using symbolic language.
But certainly, whether we see the altar as Christ, or as the cross, or as a spiritual altar seen as provided by God, he depicts it as physically ‘outside the gate' (Hebrews 13:12) where Jesus suffered, which specific reference, in contrast to ‘outside the camp', can only mean that he has in mind one of the gates of Jerusalem (which would simply not apply in the case of the first two suggestions above). Thus we are clearly to see it as a spiritual altar parallel with the spiritual tabernacle mentioned earlier, ‘the true tabernacle' (Hebrews 8:2; Hebrews 9:11; Hebrews 9:24) not made with hands. It has no physical form. It is an altar fashioned by God and connected with the heavenly temple, and is purely spiritual like the temple of Ezekiel, which descended on a mountain outside Jerusalem, seen only by the prophet himself. And it was by officiating at that spiritual altar by offering Himself as a sacrifice, that the Great High Priest, having offered Himself on it, passed through the heavens to enter the Holy Place in Heaven (Hebrews 4:14).
Furthermore this altar was only required for use once, and once used would be required no more. That is why, in context, it has come rather to symbolise the benefits to be received from His offering of Himself once for all upon it. Men did not literally eat from the altar but from the meat which was sacrificed on it, which was then carried away to be cooked and eaten. In the same way this new altar has provided the sacrifice which is satisfactory to all for all time, and therefore is no longer needed as an altar of sacrifice, nor is it ever to be so used again. We eat of that altar because we eat of the eternal sacrifice offered on it once for all. So the use of the altar and the offering were both once for all. Its importance lies in what it was once used for, and in the benefit we receive from the Sacrifice offered once for all upon it.
So unlike the Great High Priest, and Christ's sacrificial blood once for ever obtained through His sacrifice of Himself on that altar, the efficacy of which go on day by day, the altar itself is no longer required. What we ‘partake of' is what it has provided through the one sacrifice offered on it.
Thus when the writer says, ‘we have an altar' he means simply that they are to recognise that the charge laid against them, that they have no altar, is untrue. They do have an altar. But not one that is in use now, nor one that can be seen. It is the spiritual altar on which Jesus was offered once for all, and from that offering come continually its benefits whereby we ‘partake of the altar'. That is we partake of the benefits of what was once offered upon it. In that sense Christ can be said to be the altar.
End of note.