CHRIST’S ONE SACRIFICE IS ALTOGETHER SUFFICIENT
CRITICAL AND EXEGETICAL NOTES
THE first eighteen verses of this chapter are in the nature of a summary of what has already been presented, with some further unfoldings of the argument. One point is made especially prominent; it is that the repetition of the olden sacrifices testified to their inadequacy, while Christ’s one offering is perpetually availing to complete the purification of those who are affected by it. The main thesis of the writer should be kept well before the mind. He argues that the Jewish sacrifices availed for nothing more than external or ceremonial purifications, but the one offering of the obedient will of Christ purifies the soul or mind (συνείδησιν) from the uncleanness of sin, and renders it capable of offering acceptable service to the living God.
Hebrews 10:1. The law.—Used here for the Mosaic system or dispensation. The term is used in the New Testament with other meanings, such as the Ten Commandments, the general law relations of God with man. See St. Paul’s use of the word in Romans and Galatians. Shadow.—Imperfect sketch. Very image.—Full representation. The words σκιάν and εἰκών are related, as the Latin umbra and effigies are. See Hebrews 1:3. Stuart gives the point of the sentence thus: “The law did not go so far as to exhibit a full image of future blessings, but only a slight adumbration.” Farrar quotes the following sentence from St. Ambrose: “The Law had the Shadow; the Gospel the Image; the Reality itself is in Heaven.” Good things to come.—See Hebrews 9:11. The spiritual things of the new dispensation. Christ is the very image of God. Christ’s work is the very image of heavenly realities. Only it is the image, not the reality. Can never.—This vital imperfection lay in those older sacrifices. Perfect.—Much importance attaches to the writer’s use of this word. Compare Hebrews 9:9-10. It is used here in the sense of fully meeting the whole circle of our spiritual need. The ineffectiveness of the sacrifices is shown in the fact that the sense of sin which they are supposed to remove recurs again, so that fresh sacrifices are found necessary.
Hebrews 10:2. Not have ceased.—The Mosaic ritual might have been retained if it had proved efficient. The precise thought here is, however, rather this—“If the offerings could have perfected those who presented them, would not the offerings have ceased?” It might be answered, “They would have ceased so far as concerned the offerers once purged, but they would have had to be constantly renewed for the sake of other worshippers.” Conscience.—συνείδησιν; apprehension of the consequences of sin; consciousness of guilt. Pardon does not remove the fact of our guilt, nor destroy the memory of it, but it does remove the fear of penalty, and bring a sense of freedom.
Hebrews 10:3. Remembrance.—By the repetition of the same sacrifice for the same person. The writer dwells on his point so fully, because this view of the essential imperfection of Judaism would be exceedingly distasteful to his Jewish readers. But the inefficiency would not be apparent to those who lived under the Mosaic dispensation. It came to view only when the higher and spiritual dispensation was introduced. In the light of Christianity the weakness of Judaism appears. Farrar’s note on this verse is specially suggestive: “This view of sacrifices—that they are ‘a calling to mind of sins yearly’—is very remarkable. It seems to be derived from Numbers 5:15, where ‘the offering of jealousy’ is called ‘an offering of memorial, bringing iniquity to remembrance.’ Philo also speaks of sacrifices as providing, ‘not an oblivion of sins, but a reminder of them.’ But if the sacrifices thus called sins to remembrance, they also daily symbolised the means of their removal, so that when offered obediently with repentance and faith they became valid symbols.”
Hebrews 10:4.—“This verse explains those which precede. No inconsistency really belonged to these sacrifices and this ceremonial, though so often repeated; for it was impossible that any such sacrifice should really remove sin. The offering was necessary, and it answered its purpose; but it could not remove the necessity for another and a better offering” (Moulton). Not possible.—Compare 1 Samuel 15:22; Isaiah 1:11-17; Jeremiah 6:20; Jeremiah 7:21-23; Amos 5:21-24; Micah 6:6-8; Hosea 6:6; Psalms 40:6-8, etc. “Sins” and “blood of animals” have no necessary relation to each other; none save that which, for teaching purposes, God pleases to fix to them. Sins can only be taken away by spritual influences exerted on spiritual conditions. All physical, material sacrifices are symbols of spiritual things. So is Christ’s bodily sacrifice. (See Outline Homily on Hebrews 9:22.) Sins.—Properly and precisely speaking, sin is not a particular act which is done, but the wilful condition of the mind, for which the act only finds expression. In this verse not penalties are dealt with, but sins. All sacrifices had their value, not in themselves, but in the spiritual condition of the worshippers, as is clearly seen in the cases of Cain and Abel, the first sacrificers.
Hebrews 10:5. When He cometh.—As antitype; spiritual realisation. See Psalms 40:7. Sacrifice and offering.—The two classes of sacrifice that Judaism demanded. Victims sacrificed; slaughtered beasts; and unbloody offerings expressing gratitude and dependence. Wouldest not.—See Hebrews 10:7. No desire for any more such; desire now is for the reality that was symbolised in them. A body hast Thou prepared Me.—The Hebrew seems to mean, “Mine ears hast Thou opened,” or “ears hast Thou dug, or hollowed out, for Me.” The Hebrews speak of “opening the ears,” and of “uncovering the ears,” in order to designate the idea of prompt obedience, of attentive listening to the commands of any one. The idea, “Mine ears hast Thou bored through in token of My servitude,” does not appear at all suitable here. Better read, “Thou hast given Me the power of hearing, so as to obey. A channel of communication has been opened, through which the knowledge of God’s true will can reach the heart, and excite the desire to obey.” The obedience (sacrifice) of Christ was the full surrender of His will to the will of God: but to be a human obedience, bearing relation to us, it must have a body sphere. This explains the physical phase of the great sacrifice.
Hebrews 10:6. Burnt-offerings.—Should be “whole burnt-offerings.” These represented the full surrender of himself by the offerer, when they were made really spiritual sacrifices. Usually they were regarded but as ceremonials. The idea of corrupt Judaism is, that God is pleased with burnt-offerings as offerings, and for their own sake.
Hebrews 10:7. In the volume of the book.—Besides the reference to Psalms 40, the writer intimates that this is the general burden of the Messianic allusions in the Old Testament Scriptures. Come to do Thy will.—Clearly stating wherein consists the true spiritual sacrifice, even in the full surrender of Christ’s whole self in obedience to God, through life and death. Perfect human obedience in human spheres God required. He who rendered it made the “great sacrifice.”
Hebrews 10:10. By the which will.—Or by the yielding to the will, in obedience unto death. Or by the voluntary self-sacrifice of Christ. We are sanctified.—Set right and made right. Observe how entirely this is conceived by the writer in a spiritual sense. The antitypical sacrifice is the offering of the will of Jesus, in obedience to the Divine will. But our wills can only act, and gain expression, through our bodies and our bodily relations, and therefore our Lord’s sublime self-surrender took a bodily form.
MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.— Hebrews 10:1-10
The Shadow and Image of Sacrifice.—The law of all effective teaching is, “Simplify and repeat.” This writer does not hesitate to repeat, endeavouring to fix on attention the points which he regards as of supreme importance. In the first portion of this chapter there is a summary of previous teachings. He had previously spoken of the “law,” or ceremonial and sacrificial system of Judaism, as a copy, or shadow, of heavenly or spiritual things (Hebrews 8:5). He does not deny the value of the shadow, but it is a value which strictly belongs to it as a shadow, and we must never get to value it for its own sake, only for the sake of the reality, whose existence, and whose presence, it indicates. “Shadow” is an imperfect sketch, a mere outline, a slight representation or resemblance. “Image” is a picture filled out or completed, and made, in all its minuter parts, to resemble the original. Illustration may be found by contrasting the black outline portraits, which were the fashion fifty years ago—mere shadows of our friends—and the modern photographs, which give us their very image. But we need not be so strictly limited to the exact meaning of the terms which this writer uses. And this explanation hardly seems to catch his point of distinction. A shadow is not an independent thing. It is thrown by something. Something real, substantial, exists, which casts the shadow, and which the shadow, in some imperfect way, represents. To this writer the spiritual relations of men with God, as secured by the spiritual sacrifice of the spiritual High Priest, form the reality, the thing itself, the “image”; and the material, outward, ceremonial system of Judaism was the shadow which it flung on earth beforehand, to give men some outline idea of it, and prepare them for realising it fully by-and-by. Taking this view, we inquire—
I. What the “shadow” was.—A system of rules, rites, sacrifices; involving a material tabernacle, articles of furniture, and an order of priesthood. All Divinely arranged, and bearing Divine authority. In no sense to be thought of as an independent system, or an independent revelation. It was the shadow that belonged to something, and told of what it belonged to. No man ever saw it aright without saying, “What can that be which has caused this shadow?”
II. What the “shadow” could do.—Meet the needs of the hour, which were not purely spiritual needs. Religious education was then in no sense complete. It was in its pictorial stage. The nation of Israel was then in its formative period. It was getting all its civil, social, and governmental relations put into order. All its interest was in outward things, and its religion had to be in harmony, and to be concerned also with outward things. So the “shadow” religious system was occupied with arranging religious affairs, and rectifying them when they became disturbed.
III. What the “shadow” could not do.—Satisfy spiritual needs. Deal with the personal, the soul, relations of men with God, who bore on them the conscience of sin. The shadow could take away ceremonial penalties: it could not take away sin. It could not “make the comers thereunto perfect.” It might help the spiritually-minded to enter into that spiritual reality, that eternal meaning of things, which its outline could only suggest.
IV. What the “Image” was.—A spiritual High Priest, abiding ever in the presence of God mediating for man. The spiritual and infinitely acceptable sacrifice of the High Priest Himself. The offering of a spotless life of obedience, tested and proved by the strain of an awful death. That sacrifice ever in God’s view, because the Priest is always before Him. And a spiritual covenant which pledges, not the mere shaping of conduct, but the renewal of men’s hearts and wills; the implanting of a love which will make obedience both easy and acceptable.
V. What the “Image” could not do.—Fit to the age that was past; or to those who persisted in keeping the attitude, and limited capacity, that properly belonged to the past. The times were changed; men’s spiritual instincts were awakened; and the system that was called for could do nothing for those who kept down on the materialistic, symbolical, and ceremonial levels. Farrar illustrates the awakened spiritual feeling of the times in which the epistle to the Hebrews was written when he says: “Philo, in one of his finest passages, shows how deeply he had realised that sacrifices were valueless, apart from holiness, and that no mere external acts can cleanse the soul from moral guilt. He adds that God accepts the innocent even when they offer no sacrifices, and delights in unkindled altars if the virtues dance around them. The heathen had learnt the same high truths.”
VI. What the “Image” could do.—Remove sins—the spiritual penalties that necessarily follow sins: the conscience of sins which always burdens when the spiritual nature of sin is apprehended. It effected the purging, or cleansing away, of sinfulness, which in its essence is child-wilfulness; and this goes when into the child-heart is put again, through the sacrifice, mediation, and grace of Christ, the spirit of child-obedience. The dispensation which is the very image and reality can make men and women once again, and once for ever, “sons and daughters of the Lord God Almighty.”[1]
[1] An image is an exact draft of the thing represented thereby. The law did not go so far, but was only a shadow, as the image of a person in a looking-glass is a much more perfect representation than his shadow upon the wall. The law was a very rough draft of the great design of Divine grace, and therefore not to be so much doted on.—Matthew Henry.
The relativity of a religion of shadows.—The efficiency of a religion of shadows lies in its relativity to a particular age, and a particular people. The Syrian Version gives the first sentence of Hebrews 10:1 thus: “The law—not having the reality of the things.” The Greek word for “image” means, not a resemblance or likeness, but the essential form of a thing. It stands as the representative of σῶμα, the body or substance.
SUGGESTIVE NOTES AND SERMON SKETCHES
Hebrews 10:1. The Imperfect Efficiency of the Jewish Sacrifices.—“They can never with the same sacrifices year by year, which they offer continually, make perfect them that draw nigh” (R.V.). Dr. J. Harris says: “What is the Jewish economy, if we desire to reach its interior truths, but a vast, profound, elaborated enigma—to which the gospel, indeed, brings us the key, but the opening and exploration of which is yet incomplete?” The legal sacrifices, being offered year by year, could never make the comers thereunto perfect, for then there would have been an end of offering them. Could they have satisfied the demands of justice, and made reconciliation for iniquity—could they have purified and pacified conscience—then they had ceased, as being no further necessary, since the offerers would have had no more sin lying upon their consciences. But this was not the case; after one day of atonement was over, the sinner would fall again into one fault or another, and so there would be need of another day of atonement, and of one every year, besides the daily ministrations. Whereas now, under the gospel, the atonement is perfect, and not to be repeated, and the sinner, once pardoned, is ever pardoned as to his state, and only needs to renew his repentance and faith, that he may have a comfortable sense of a continued pardon. As the legal sacrifices did not of themselves take away sin, so it was impossible they should (Hebrews 10:4). There was an essential defect in them.
1. They were not of the same nature with those who sinned.
2. They were not of sufficient value to make satisfaction for the affronts offered to the justice and government of God. They were not of the same nature that offended, and so could not be suitable. Much less were they of the same nature that was offended, and nothing less than the nature that was offended could make the sacrifice a full satisfaction for the offence.
3. The beasts offered up under the law could not consent to put themselves in the sinner’s room and place. The atoning sacrifice must be one capable of consenting, and must voluntarily substitute himself in the sinner’s stead: Christ did so.—Matthew Henry.
Hebrews 10:2. The Bad Consciousness taken away.—The reading is, not “conscience of no more sins,” as if the sins were stopped, but “no more conscience of sins,” as if the conscience of sins already past were somehow extirpated, or else the sins taken quite away from it, and for ever extirpated themselves, as facts, or factors of the life. How is it, or how is it to be imagined, that Christ, by His sacrifice, takes away the condemning conscience, or the felt dishonour of transgression?
I. The supposed answers that are not sufficient.—When it is conceived that Christ has borne our punishment, that, if it were true, might take away our fear of punishment; but fear is one thing, and mortified honour, self-condemning guilt, self-chastising remorse, another and very different thing. Neither will it bring any relief to show that the justice of God is satisfied. Be it so; the transgressor is none the better satisfied with himself. Is it conceived that what has satisfied the justice of God has also atoned the guilty conscience? Will it then make the guilty conscience less guilty, or say sweeter things of itself, that it sees innocence, purity, goodness Divine, put to suffering for it? Is it then brought forward to quell the guilt of the conscience that Christ has evened our account legally by His sacrifice, and that we are even justified of God for Christ’s sake? But if God calls us just, do we any the less certainly disapprove ourselves? Forgiveness, taken as a mere release of claim, or a negative letting go of right against transgression, brings, if possible, even less help to the conscience. Christ had forgiven His crucifiers in His dying prayer, but it was the very crime of the cross, nevertheless, that pricked so many hundred hearts on the Day of Pentecost. But Christ renews the soul itself, it will be said, and makes it just within, when, of course, it will be justified. That does not follow. But the fatherhood of God—the disciple of another school will take refuge under that, and say that here, at least, there is truly no more conscience of sin. Conscience, in man, is God’s throne of judgment in the man. If God, in His fatherhood, were a being dealing in laxities and fond accommodations, having no care for His rectoral honour, as the defender of right and order, we certainly are not such to ourselves.
II. The answer that is given by the Scriptures of God.—Is it possible, and how far possible, to change the consciousness of a soul, without any breach of its identity? In this manner, we shall find, the gospel undertakes to remove, and assumes the fact of the removal of, the dishonour and self-condemnation of sin. See first certain analogies. A thoroughly venal, low-principled man, elected President of the United States, will undergo, not unlikely, an inward lifting of sentiment and impulse, corresponding with the immense lift of his position. He wants to deserve the place, and begins to act in character in it. How many thousand soldiers, who before were living in the low, mean vices, lost to character and self-respect, have been raised, in like manner, in our armies, to quite another grade of being! The same is true, in a different way, of all the gifted ones in art and speech and poetry when they are taken by the inspirations of genius. When such a soul, that was down upon the level of uses, torturing itself into production for applause, begins to behold God’s signature upon His works, then he becomes to himself quite another creature. In such examples we are made familiar with the possibility of remarkable liftings in the consciousness of men, such as make them really other to themselves, and set them in a higher range of being; and we are prepared for that more wonderful ascent above ourselves which is accomplished in Christ, when He takes us away from the conscience of sins. He does it by so communicating God, or Himself as the express Image of God, that He changes, in fact, the plane of our existence. The very thing that Christianity proposes is to bring us up into another level, where the consciousness shall take in other matter, and have a higher range. But you will not conceive how very essential this idea of a raising of the consciousness may be, if you do not bring up distinctly the immense fall of our moral consciousness in the precipitation of our sin. In their true normal condition, as originally created, human souls are inherently related to God, made permeable and inspirable by Him, intended to move in His Divine impulse for ever. A sponge in the sea is not more truly made to be filled and permeated by the water in which it grows, than a soul to be permeated and possessed by the infinite Life. It is so made that, over and above the little tiny consciousness it has of itself, it may have a grand, all-inclusive consciousness of God. In that consciousness it was to be, and be lifted and blessed evermore. But this higher consciousness, the consciousness of God, is exactly what was lost in transgression, and nothing was left of course but the little defiled consciousness of ourselves, in which we are all contriving how to get some particles of good, or pleasure, or pride, or passion, that will comfort us. The true normal footing or plane of our humanity was thus let down, and it is exactly this which Christ undertakes to restore. As soon as the soul is opened to God, by the faith of Jesus Christ, and is truly born of God, it begins to be the higher creature God meant it to be—the same yet another. The disciple, raised thus in his plane, has the same consciousness, and remembers the same sins, and is the very same person that he was before; but the consciousness of God, now restored, makes him so nearly another being to himself, that the old torment of his sin will scarcely so much as ripple the flow of his peace. If Christ is purging thus men’s consciences, by lifting them above themselves, into a higher range of life, the conception will appear and reappear, in many distinct forms, and weave itself in so many varieties, into the whole texture of Christianity. Three of the forms may be noticed:
1. Justification by faith. Gospel justification turns on no such mere objective matter as the squaring of an account, nor on any such subjective matter as our being made inherently righteous; but it turns on the fact of our being so invested with God, and closeted in His righteous impulse, that He becomes a felt righteousness upon us. Inherently speaking, we are not righteous; our store is in God, not in ourselves; but we have the supply traductively from Him, just as we have the supply of light from the sun. But the new Divine consciousness in which we live is continually conforming us, more and more deeply, and will settle us at last, in its own pure habit. It is “the righteousness of God, which is by faith of Jesus Christ, unto all and upon all them that believe.” It is a higher consciousness which God generates and feeds, and as long as He does it there is no more conscience of sins.
2. The same truth of a raising of our plane appears in what is called the witness of the Spirit. Being spirit, we are permeable by the Divine Spirit, and He has a way of working in our working, so as to be consciously known as a better presence in our hearts.
3. It is also presented in what is said of the conscious inhabitation of Christ. “Until Christ be formed in you.” “I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.” It is as if Paul’s being itself were taken well-nigh out of its identity by Christ revealed in it. The old sin he does not think of. The conscience of sins—it may be that he has it in a sense; for, being an eternal fact, he must eternally know it; but the Christ-consciousness in him ranges so high above the self-consciousness, that he lives in a summit of exaltation, which the infinitesimal disturbances of his human wrong and shame cannot reach. When once you have conceived the possibility of raising a soul into a higher grade and order, where the consciousness shall take in more than the mere self, the body of God’s own righteousness and love and peace, the problem is solved, and that in a way so plain, yet so easily ennobling to our state of shame, that it proves itself by its own self-supporting evidence.—Horace Bushnell, D.D.
Conscience of Sins after Ceremonies.—“Should have had no more conscience of sins.” Ritual religions can never deal with any more than the legal penalties attending on sin, and the outward relations into which men are brought by sin. There may be a personal and spiritual religion within the ritual, and finding expression through it, or there may not. The spiritual religion within is by no means essential to the efficiency of the ritual religion, so far as it goes. But it is evident that no ritual religion can alone suffice to meet the necessities of man as a spiritual being, standing in spiritual relations; afflicted in conscience, as well as disturbed in relations, by sin. No ritual ever yet cleansed a conscience of its sense of sin, or lifted from a soul its burden of guilt. This may be effectively illustrated by the religion represented by the book of Psalms. Such psalms as the thirty-second and fifty-first bring before us men who have, or who have had, the conscience of sin. But they do not seek their soul-relief from Levitical sacrifices, from any routine ceremonies. They evidently feel instinctively that these cannot meet their case. They go direct to God Himself, past all ceremonies and symbols, seeking personal relations, and immediate forgiveness.
Hebrews 10:4. Everything to its Sphere.—Everything that exists by nature, and everything that takes shape “by art and man’s device,” has its proper sphere, its adaptation to that sphere, and its efficiency within that sphere. Nothing can be its real, best self, nothing can be really efficient, outside of or transcending its proper sphere. It does not fit. It is too large, or too small, or otherwise. Blood of bulls and goats has a sphere, strictly limited to the removal of ceremonial uncleanness. It is efficient there. It is helpless in the sphere of soul-sin and burdened conscience.
Hebrews 10:5. A Living Sacrifice.—These words, as used of Christ, unfold the mystery of His redeeming work: as used by the psalmist, they show us what is the spirit of the redeemed life. Christ did not come to offer a sacrifice in Jewish mode, or to offer Himself in the mode in which a Jewish sacrifice was offered; but to do that which the sacrifices of Judaism typified, to offer the obedience of a life, and that obedience in a human body.
1. God does not ask of any man first what he has. He asks first for the man himself—what he is.
2. If any man is willing to give God what he is, then that man will find that God is willing to accept what he has.
3. But how far may the distinction between what a man has, and what a man is, be carried? In life we have to do with some persons who want what we have; but we have to do with others—altogether dearer ones—who can be satisfied with nothing less than ourselves—what we are; just our love is their wealth. It is somewhat thus with God. The design of God in giving us what we have, is that by means of it we may carry ourselves to Him. What a man is includes his body. Man is not a spirit only; he is a spirit in a certain particular body, which has certain particular relations. So we never can give ourselves to God until we give Him soul and body together. Show how much larger an idea of the “living sacrifice” this is than is generally conceived. To make any gift acceptable to any one—and certainly to God—a man must put himself into the gift. Our bodies must carry us to God, as the body of Jesus (and indeed of the psalmist) carried Him.
The Atonement.—Why is the doctrine of the Atonement called an immoral doctrine? It is based, it is said, on injustice. The point on which the objector has fixed is the substitution of one man for another to suffer for sin. But he does not take the doctrine of substitution as represented and interpreted by Christian teachers, but barely and nakedly, simply as the principle of vicarious punishment. So stated, the notion is certainly a barbarous one. But God cannot regard punishment apart from the person to whom it is due. He cannot be appeased by pain as such, without reference to the bearer of it. He cannot be contented, so long as the punishment is suffered, that another than the criminal should be the sufferer. Such a bald notion of atonement does not require that the sacrifice should be voluntary. Punishment, vicarious or other, does not require a voluntary sufferer—only a sufferer. A striking illustration of an atonement was found in the state religion of Mexico. The gospel is, that love is of the very essence of sacrifice, and that there cannot be sacrifice without will. In the case of Christ there was no earthly altar, no expiatory form, no visible priest. Nobody could have told, either from His life or from His death, that He was a victim. He died by the natural course of events, as the effect of a holy and courageous life operating upon the intense jealousy of a class; He died by civil punishment; and yet in heaven that death pleaded as the sacrifice that taketh away the sin of the world. But that sacrifice was a willing self-offered sacrifice; and this takes away all question of injustice to the victim. In common life no wrong is done to one who volunteers to take a painful office. The existence of pain and evil being supposed, there arises a special morality upon this fact, and in connection with it. It is the morality of sacrifice. Sacrifice then becomes, in the person who makes it, the most remarkable kind of manifestation of virtue, which ennobles the sufferer, and which it is no wrong-doing in the universe to accept. What is the effect of such an atonement on the sinner? The willingness of the sacrifice changes the mode of the operation of the sacrifice, so that it acts on a totally different principle and law from that upon which a sacrifice, if a mere substitution, acts. When a man substitutes himself for another, he really means to soften the heart of the judge, to stimulate the element of mercy in the judge. The gospel puts the doctrine of Atonement in this light. The mercy of God the Father is called out toward man by our Lord’s generous sacrifice of Himself in behalf of men. Neither in natural mediation nor in supernatural does the act of suffering love, in producing that change of regard to which it tends, dispense with the moral change of the criminal. We cannot, of course, because a good man suffers for a criminal, alter our regards to him, if he obstinately remains a criminal. And if the gospel taught any such thing in the doctrine of the Atonement, it would certainly expose itself to the charge of immorality. Undoubtedly there must be this change, but even with this past crime is not yet pardoned. There is room for a mediator—room for some source of pardon which does not take its rise in a man’s self, although it must act with conditions. But viewed as acting upon this mediatorial principle, the doctrine of the Atonement rises altogether to another level; it parts company with the gross and irrational conception of mere naked material substitution of one person for another in punishment, and it takes its stand upon the power of love, and points to the actual effect of the intervention of suffering love in nature, and to a parallel case of mediation as a pardoning power in nature. The doctrine of Scripture, so far from being the doctrine of mere substitution, is a protest against that doctrine; it makes accurate provision for moral claims; it enforces conditions on the subject of the sacrifice; it attributes a reasonable and rational ground of influence and mode of operation to the sacrifice. There is, however, undoubtedly, contained in the Scriptural doctrine of the Atonement, a kind, and a true kind, of fulfilment of justice. It is a fulfilment in the sense of appeasing and satisfying justice. And so, also, there is a kind of substitution involved in the Scriptural doctrine of the Atonement, and a true kind; it is not a literal, but a moral substitution. The doctrine of the Atonement is the doctrine which most of all comes into collision with, and declares most unextinguishable war with, materialistic ideas of the Deity.… So rooted is the great principle of mediation in nature, that the mediatorship of Christ cannot be revealed to us without reminding us of a whole world of analogous action, and of representation of action. How natural thus does the idea of a mediator turn out to be! Yet this is exactly the point at which many stumble: pardon they approve of; reconciliation they approve of; but reconciliation by means of mediation is what they cannot understand. Why not dispense with a superfluity? they say; and why not let these relieve us from what they consider the incumbrance of a mediator? It has, however, appeared to the great mass of Christians infinitely more natural to be saved with a Mediator than without one.—J. B. Mozley, D.D.
A Sacrifice in the Living of a Human Life.—“A body hast Thou prepared Me.” A human body is the medium through which a soul—a spiritual being—is enabled to live a human life on the earth—a life of various earthly relations. What is here affirmed appears to be this—that God was pleased to find a material, human body, in which His Son, the spiritual being Jesus, could live out a human life, as a human son, perfecting an obedience to the will of God, which should be a representative obedience for humanity. And it seems to be distinctly declared that the real spiritual sacrifice which Jesus offered to God on behalf of humanity was that life of obedience and submission and service which He lived through—under a strain and stress which reached its climax in the cross—in that human body which God had prepared for Him, in which He could, fully and representatively, do and bear God’s will for humanity.
The Sacrifice of the Body.—This sentence is a quotation from one of the Psalms, but it is not quoted with strict accuracy. In the psalm there is a figure; in the quotation the figure is not repeated, it is translated, and its meaning is suggested. In Psalms 40:6 the words are, “Sacrifice and offering Thou didst not desire; Mine ears hast Thou opened.” But the Hebrew would be more precisely rendered, “Ears hast Thou digged or pierced for Me.” Two explanations of this figure have been offered. There was a curious ancient custom, which some think may be referred to here. When a Hebrew voluntarily resolved to be the life-long servant or slave of another person, that person accepted the surrender by boring through the ear of the would-be slave with an awl. The law regulating this matter is given in Exodus 21:5-6: “And if the servant [who could claim his freedom] shall plainly say, I love my master, my wife, and my children; I will not go out free: then his master shall bring him to the judges; he shall also bring him to the door, or unto the door-post; and his master shall bore his ear through with an aul; and he shall serve him for ever.” If this could be received as the basis of the figure in the psalm, the sentence would then mean, “I am, through life, thy voluntary servant.” But if that had been the reference, a certain technical word would have been used; and even the English reader can see that in the psalm both ears are mentioned, and the Hebrew boring was done only to one ear. The better explanation is that opening the ears, digging out the ears, hollowing the ears, uncovering the ears, suggested to the Hebrews the idea of prompt obedience, of attentive listening to the commands of any one. We may understand the figure to mean, “Thou hast made me obedient,” or “I am entirely devoted to thy service.” What God desires is not sacrifice, but hearing ears, and consequently the submission of the person himself in willing obedience. Where the writer of the epistle to the Hebrews gained his translation of the figure into “a body hast Thou prepared Me” does not clearly appear. Some of the manuscripts of the Septuagint Version have this rendering, and the writer may have met with one of these; but some think he purposely made the alteration so as to make the Messianic reference of the psalm more distinct. Ears are given so that we may hear and heed. A body is given so that we may obey and serve in the earthly spheres. And Messiah is represented as saying, “Lo, I come [in the body which Thou hast given me] to do Thy will, O God.” The text is part of an argument. The writer is urging that the animal sacrifices of Judaism availed only for external or ceremonial purification. They vitally and eternally saved nobody. They represented the true sacrifice, which God then accepted, and still accepts—the sacrifice of an obedient will, and of a consecrated life. He has provided for us bodies; He has uncovered for us ears; we too can do His will. Our text then embodies a great principle which I want to state, to illustrate, and to enforce. It was true for the psalmist; it was true for our Lord Jesus Christ; and it is true also for us. The principle is this—God never asks of any man first of all what he has. God asks of every man first of all, himself, what he is. If any man is willing to give himself to God, then God will lovingly accept also what he has.
I. God never asks of any man first of all what he has.—“Sacrifice and offering Thou wouldest not, neither hadst pleasure therein.” Sacrifice and offering both represent man’s gifts to God. They are things which a man has; they are things belonging to man. The distinction between them is a Jewish one. Sacrifice is a gift to God of that which has life—life which can be surrendered. Offering is a gift to God of something which has no life, but which can be used in God’s service. The man who brought a bullock, or a lamb, or a dove made his gift to God; and the man who brought his shekel, or his flower, or his jewel, or his robe also made his gift to God. He brought of his property—of the things that he had. And if that was all he brought, God never asked for it, and never wanted it. “To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto Me, saith the Lord; I am full of the burnt-offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts; and I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he-goats. Bring no more vain oblations.” The prophet Isaiah gives these searching words as the utterance of God’s Spirit through him; but the earlier psalmist had quite as clear a vision of the truth that God never has cared for mere things. “I will take no bullock out of thine house, nor he-goats out of the folds, for every beast of the forest is Mine, and the cattle upon a thousand hills. I know all the fowls of the mountains; and the wild beasts of the field are Mine. If I were hungry, I would not tell thee: for the world is Mine, and the fulness thereof.” “Sacrifice and offering”! They are only things of which man claims possession, and which, as his own, he consents to give. Cattle from his folds, corn and fruit from his fields, gold and jewels from his treasuries. In what sense they are his does not readily appear, since man has nothing to possess, but everything lent him just for use during his brief spell of life. When good men give to God, they reverently say, “Of Thine own have we given Thee.” In the sight of God there is a most valid and practical distinction between what a man has, and what a man is. In our sight that distinction is most strangely confused. We are constantly valuing men according to the measure of what they call their wealth. God reckons a man’s possessions at nothing, save as it deepens the man’s responsibility for the faithful use of his trusts. The man himself is of priceless worth. “What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” We need to learn how to distinguish between the essentials and the accidents of the man; between the man and the clothes which, at a given time, he may happen to wear; between the man and the material circumstances with which he may be surrounded. Job expresses the distinction very vigorously when all his things that he had were gone from his grasp, seized by the invader, or whirled away in the storms. “Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither.” Things were gone; but he was what he was. A man carries his entire self into the next world. Death cannot rob him of that. Death cannot touch or injure that. But man cannot carry into the next world a single one of the things that he only has. Death has its power on them, and plucks them all away—plucks away the monarch’s crown, and the nobleman’s estate, and the lady’s gay apparel and costly jewels. Death stands before the dying man, and compels him to surrender absolutely everything that he has. Death will not let the man take even his grave-clothes with him. The wild Indian will have his bow and arrows put into the grave with him, that they may be ready for use in the happy hunting-grounds he is anticipating. But it is a vain delusion. They only rot in the dampness of the grave. When a late Queen of Madagascar died, they arrayed her in her most gorgeous dresses, ornamented her with her jewels, and so laid her in the tomb. But they only wasted what might have been of use to somebody, and put temptation in the way of thieves. No dresses nor jewels deck her majesty in the other life. She is just herself, and a poor miserable self she must be. Moses and Elijah reappeared from the glory, but they were the very men they were, just the men, even the earth-form and dress was but a seeming. Realise the distinction between the essentials of a man and the accidents of a man, and then you will understand what I mean when I say, that God never has, and never will, ask first of all for the accidents of a man.
1. Because whatsoever a man may seem to have, it is not really his. It is only a loan to him, only a trust to him. It all belongs to God; and to give it to God is only to give God His own. He needs nothing from us. “In His hand are the deep places of the earth; the strength of the hills is His also. The sea is His, and He made it; and His hands formed the dry land.” “What have we that we have not received?”
2. And because nothing that man has could reach up to satisfy the claims of God. Know God as the infinite moral Being, the Source of all moral being, as the eternal Father of mankind, and at once it comes to mind that His claim must be for love, for trust, for obedience, for service. No mere material things can ever satisfy parent hearts. Fathers and mothers stand in soul-relations, and they can never be satisfied with other gifts from their children instead of soul-gifts. So thoroughly is God represented as despising mere things that have no soul in them, that when men failed to give themselves in and with their gifts, God actually dealt severely with their gifts. Cain brought an offering only of things. He was not himself in his gift. And “unto Cain, and to his offering, the Lord had not respect.” Pleading with a people who had become wholly formal in their religious gifts, God says, “Incense is an abomination unto Me; the new moons and sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity, even the solemn meeting.” “To what purpose cometh there to Me incense from Sheba, and the sweet cane from a far country? Your burnt-offerings are not acceptable, nor your sacrifices sweet unto Me.” “I hate, I despise your feast days, and I will not smell in your solemn assemblies. Though ye offer Me burnt-offerings and your meat-offerings, I will not accept them; neither will I regard the peace-offerings of your fat beasts. Take thou away from Me the noise of thy songs; for I will not hear the melody of thy viols” (Amos 5:21-23). This truth is indeed set forth so plainly, and so impressively, that it is passing strange to find men still deluded by the notion that God can be pleased with gifts. Heathen people still say, “Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, and with ten thousands of rivers of oil? shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?” Christian people still give goods, or prayers, or emotions. And still the apostolic words may be used, and we may say, God seeks “not yours, but you.”
II. God asks of every man the gift of himself, of what he is.—If we separate a man from his possessions, from the things that he only has, what is gathered up in the man? There is body, mind, affections, character, soul. For this earth-sphere a man is not a simple spirit, but a spirit with a certain particular environment. And it is this whole self which God asks. “Yield yourselves unto God, as those that are alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God.” “Glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are His.” “I beseech you therefore, brethren, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.” We find our model gift in the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave His whole bodily and spiritual manhood in one life-long devotion to God. There is a sense in which men may properly be regarded as not already God’s. Something which can only be called independence has been given to us. Though it is placed under strict limitations, our free-will does make us separate persons, and give us some sort of right in ourselves. And we well know how self-will exaggerates the independence, and throws off God, saying, “Who is the Lord, that we should serve Him? and what profit should we have, if we pray unto Him?” In whatsoever sense man is himself, he can give that self to God. The truth is, that the only thing which any man has that he can give to God is himself. This every man, poor or rich, wise or ignorant, can give; and this is every man’s grandest and noblest gift.
“Lord, in the strength of grace, with a glad heart and free,
Myself, my residue of days, I consecrate to Thee.
Thy ransomed servant, I restore to Thee Thine own;
And from this moment live or die, to serve my God alone.”
A man can give his will to God, voluntarily choosing Him, and acceptting His service, saying with the noble Joshua, “Whatsover others do, we will serve the Lord.” A man may give his love to God; and of such a man God will surely say, “Because he hath set his love upon Me, therefore will I deliver him.” A man may give his penitence to God, going to Him and saying, “Father, I have sinned, and am no more worthy to be called Thy son.” And such a man ever finds the Father waiting and watching for his return, and hears the sweetest sounds of home-welcome, “Bring forth the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet; and bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it; and let us eat and be merry: for this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.” A man may give to God his obedience. It is this which comes fully into view in our text: “Then said I, Lo, I come (in the volume of the book it is written of Me) to do Thy will, O God.” This is what God asks of you and me, asks of every one: “Be Mine. I am Father. Be thou My son indeed.” All the revelations that God makes to men, read in the light of their deepest meanings, are just persuasions to making full surrender of themselves to Him. The type of them all is to be found in the vision given to Jacob at Bethel. He felt like a homeless wanderer. He was bearing the burden of his own wrong-doing. Yet God was mindful of him, caring for him, watching him, tending him all night through with loving angel ministries. That vision was God calling upon Jacob to give Him himself; and Jacob did it. “And Jacob rose up early in the morning, and took the stone that he had put for his pillow, and set it up for a pillar, and poured oil upon the top of it. And Jacob vowed a vow, saying, If God will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat, and raiment to put on, so that I come again to my father’s house in peace; then shall the Lord be my God: and this stone, which I set up for a pillar, shall be God’s house. And of all which Thou, O God, shalt give me, I will surely give the tenth unto Thee.”
III. When a man gives to God what he is, God graciously accepts, with him, what he has.—How very different is the value we put on the various gifts that we receive! Some are mere gifts. They say nothing; they mean nothing. We take them. But we wish we had not to take them. We put them aside, after a cold thanksgiving. And we do not much care if we never see the thing any more. We are like God in this—that we are very indifferent to mere things as gifts. But the very same gifts, and even inferior gifts, may become priceless. They are if they carry to us a heart’s love—if the gift is the person, expressed only in the thing that is offered. Then the gifts are treasured. Then they find conspicuous place. Then they are looked at again and again, and always seem to freshen the love-gift of which they remind. It is thus with God. At one time sacrifice and offering will seem to Him altogether worthless. It is only sacrifice and offering. At another time they will seem to Him of priceless value, because they express love, and trust, and obedience, full heart-surrender. When we can say, “Lo, I come to do Thy will,” when we can give to God ourselves, then everything we bring with us will be acceptable unto Him. Passing by the receipt of custom, our Lord found Matthew seated, busily engaged with his work. Our Lord called him. But Matthew did not respond by giving his money, Christ cared nothing for that. Matthew responded by giving to Christ himself, and that gift carried with it his money, his abilities, everything that Matthew had. Some time ago I took part in a scene of peculiar interest and suggestiveness. Well-nigh two thousand persons were assembled in the largest chapel in Liverpool, to bid God-speed to a band of missionaries who were about to leave home and friends, and devote themselves to Christ’s service in heathen lands. Twenty-three men and women faced that great audience as they sat together upon the platform. As I watched them I thought what a variety of powers and talents they represented—what various riches they had. But they were not giving to Christ their abilities, their doctoring skill, their teaching efficiencies, their power to draw or to preach. Those men and women were giving to Christ themselves—themselves as spiritual beings. The company on that platform was a company of consecrated men and women; their manhood and their womanhood lay on the altar of Christ. They gave “their own selves to the Lord.” But they gave themselves in their bodies, with their bodies. The gift of themselves carried with it all they had; and the God who so graciously accepted them, as graciously accepted theirs with them. And so they represented a whole devotement—what they were, and what they had. There they sat, the realisation of the whole burnt-offering unto the Lord. That truth fills our thoughts and hearts—God wants us first, then ours. Have we been making the fatal mistake, and bringing, as offerings to God, our things? Have we imagined that God’s claim could be satisfied with gifts of our money, of anything that we only have? See this truth once again. God wants you. Yes, first you. He will receive nothing from you until you give Him yourself. And when you give yourself, you cannot help giving all you have. This is God’s order; you cannot alter it—first you, then yours. This is the Lord’s sacrifice—yourself in the body prepared for you.
Hebrews 10:7. Submission and Obedience.—The “will of God” is a present, living reality. It is not something shut up in a book. It is a living revelation to us, made by the indwelling, presiding Spirit. We may know the “will of God” now as truly as our fathers did when the will came to them in an audible voice, or by an angel-messenger. We may even conceive the time when the written word will cease to be the medium of the will, because spiritual relations will be perfected. This text presents one form in which we have to accept the Divine will, and it suggests the other; for there are two forms in which the will of God has to be met:
(1) By submission—bearing; and
(2) by obedience—doing. Prominence is here given to obedience. In Gethsemane prominence is given to submission. Too often it is urged that submission is the only attitude for us to take in relation to the will. This may, indeed, be fittingly commended to the sick, the suffering, and the dying, but it is not the attitude most wisely commended to the healthy, the active, and the enterprising. It is the glory of our nature that we are not mere things to be acted upon, but persons, agents, by and through whom ends are to be reached, and purposes accomplished. Therefore, while it is a great and blessed thing to submit to the will of God, it is, for active man, an even greater and more blessed thing to do the will.
I. Submission.—God sometimes deals with us as if He would convince us that He is the Creator, and we but the creatures of His power. He sweeps over our life in a majesty of wild storm-wind, and there is nothing for us to do but to submit. But usually God deals with us in such ways of mingled severity and tenderness, that He seems to be asking us to yield, even making it easy for us to yield. And there is nothing essentially Christian about our submission until it becomes both voluntary and cheerful. Our submission is never possible by knowing what God is doing with us; it is only possible by knowing God Himself better, and so gaining an all-conquering faith (trust) in Him.
II. Obedience.—Illustrate this phase by patriarchal times. Abraham obeyed God: also by the human life and devoted service of the Lord Jesus. Our common life can be looked at in two ways:
(1) As the scene in which we are doing and accomplishing something for ourselves; or
(2) as the scene in which, as servants, we are doing and accomplishing the will of God. It is freely granted that the former way of viewing life will seem the most attractive to us as men; but the latter may be commended as the altogether noble, and the more satisfying way. In what spheres can the will of God be discerned? We are to bring our thought, our speech, and our relationships into the obedience of Christ. Then in these spheres we can know the will. And besides the more general disclosures to us of the Divine mind, the open heart will be always able to discern special calls to particular forms of duty. The ideal Christian life is a full, free, constant, loving response to the Divine will, in a holy blending of submission and obedience.
The Sacrifice of an Obedient Will.—This is a quotation from the fortieth Psalm, and it is helpful to understand precisely what thought and feeling the psalmist expressed by it. Dean Perowne says: “The psalmist declares what had been the great lesson of his affliction—how he had learnt that there was a better sacrifice than that of bulls and goats, even the sacrifice of an obedient will. It is as if he had said, ‘Once I should have thought sacrifices and offerings a proper and sufficient acknowledgment. Now I feel how inadequate these are, for Thou hast taught me the truth; my deaf, unwilling ears hast Thou opened, that I might understand that a willing heart was the best offering I could render. Then, being thus taught by Thee, I said, Lo, I come! Presenting myself before Thee, not with a dead and formal service, but with myself as a living sacrifice.’ ”
The Religion of Divine Humility.—To preach Christ is to preach the doctrine of surrender to the will of God. The religion of Christ has been well called “The Religion of Divine Humility.” This is Christianity: love to God, and love to man; that surrender of self-will through life and death which marks the whole existence of the Redeemer.—F. W. Robertson.
Christ’s Own References to the Will He obeyed.—It is some disadvantage to our apprehension of the will of God for humanity, and so the will of God for Jesus, the representative man, that in this chapter it is so closely associated with altar-forms. Our Lord’s own references to the will which He fulfilled are free from this association. As He regards it, it is a moral obedience, a heart obedience, finding expression in doing, bearing, and suffering whatever may be recognised as the will of God in a human life. In Gethsemane it was seen by the Lord Jesus that the will of God immediately before Him was a time of overwhelming shame and suffering, and the agony of a violent and dishonourable death; and He would wholly lift Himself up to an entire, unquestioning, and uncomplaining obedience.
Hebrews 10:7; Hebrews 10:9. The Will of God which Christ came to do.—He was to do the will of God in several ways. “Not only as a prophet to reveal the will of God; not only as a king to give forth Divine laws; but as a priest to satisfy the demands of justice, and to fulfil all righteousness. Christ came to do the will of God in two instances:
1. In taking away the first priesthood, which God had no pleasure in; not only taking away the curse of the covenant of works, and cancelling the sentence denounced against us as sinners, but taking away the insufficient typical priesthood, and blotting out the handwriting of ceremonial ordinances, and nailing it to His cross.
2. In establishing the second, that is, his own priesthood and the everlasting gospel, the most pure and perfect dispensation of the covenant of grace: this is the great design upon which the heart of God was set from all eternity. The will of God centres and terminates in it; and it is not more agreeable to the will of God than it is advantageous to the souls of men; for it is by this will that we are sanctified, through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.”—Matthew Henry.
Hebrews 10:10. Christ’s Antitypical Sacrifice.—This epistle being directly addressed to Jewish Christians, it is of first importance that we should endeavour to understand their views. They were men who had been lifted from the material to the moral. That was the work that had been done for the Jewish nation by the later prophets. They were men that had been lifted from the ritual to the spiritual. That was the work which had been done for them by the Lord Jesus Christ. But these Jewish Christians found it very difficult to keep up to the higher level they had attained. There were certain forms in which temptations to revert to their old standpoint came to them.
1. Persecution by the bigoted and extreme Jewish section—represented by Saul of Tarsus.
2. An exaggeration of the claims of Judaism as an unquestionable revelation from God—specially honourable as having been ministered by angels.
3. The spiritualising of Philo and the Alexandrian School, which worked for a reform of Judaism, and shook confidence in Christ. The writer of this epistle has to counteract these three evil influences. But such temptations are better met by persuasions than by arguments: only the persuasions must be based upon arguments precisely adapted. One great point is made by the writer: “First that which is natural, and afterward that which is spiritual.” The material is pictorial—it is the picture-teaching of truth, which is necessary for all child-stages of the individual, the nation, or the world. The moral is the reality which is pictured in the material, and it is the proper thing for the man-stage. We teach children arithmetic by showing them, and by working, balls on a frame; by-and-by they come to apprehend the principles and relations of numbers. But what has such comparison to do with us, who have no association with material bodily sacrifices as the Jewish Christians had? Is it possible that there may be a material, pictorial setting of the sacrificial work of the Lord Jesus Christ, which may be limiting us somewhat as the ritual of Moses limited the Jews? These Christian Jews evidently had not spiritual views of Christ’s work, and Christians now may keep in the pictorial range for babes when they ought to be in the spiritual range for men. They do when they see Christ’s offering of Himself to be a ritual, not a spiritual sacrifice.
I. The surrendered will is the sanctifying sacrifice.—Trace the argument. Those old Jewish sacrifices had no value in themselves. The prophets—especially Isaiah and Hosea—made that quite plain. Their value lay solely in their being a means by which the will of a man was offered to God. When this is taught so as to be fully apprehended, formal sacrifice may cease. It has done its work. The final lesson is the Divine acceptance of the offering of Himself which came to Jesus. Christ’s whole life was His sacrifice. The sacrifice that God wants is the man, not something a man gives. The offering of a man himself is the offering of a life—that alone is the man. This makes Christ’s death the final act, the seal, the perfecting of His sacrifice; because that death completes, rounds off, the life. No life is complete until death seals it. Christ’s death is the great act of surrendered will under the most severe testing-conditions. Dead—human life ended—there is a whole man offered unto God.
II. That sacrifice—the spiritual sacrifice of the surrendered will—was offered through the body.—Things can have no influence on us that do not come within our range, do not lie in our plane. Moral forces are compelled to use material agencies because we are in material limitations. The surrender of the will of an angel is nothing to us. The surrender of the will of a human being like ourselves is everything to us. Christ became man that He might be able to offer a human sacrifice, because that is precisely what we ought to offer. An angel could not offer our sacrifice: the Son of God, as only Son of God, could not. Christ became representative man that He might offer His sacrifice of Himself in our name, as standing for and pledging us.
III. That offering satisfies once for all.—Picture-teaching needs repetition, “line upon line, precept upon precept.” The teaching of principles is done once for all. Christ’s sacrifice need not be repeated, because it effected its end—
1. With God. Did this representative offering of the surrendered will meet God’s requirement from us His creatures? The answer is the Resurrection.
2. With men. Was that devotion of Christ to our interests, which led Him to suffer so much in order to secure an acceptable sacrifice for us, such a devotion as could be really persuasive on us? The answer is our experience. The sacrifice of Christ must not be repeated, even in symbol. To repeat the sacrifice is to remove Christ from His present work of applying the gains of His sacrifice. What then have we to keep in mind? Is it only the medium, the bodily agency of the great sacrifice? Every incident of the Passion is intensely interesting to us. But there is a mystery within it. There is a real spiritual sacrifice. It is a man’s surrendered will. We cannot offer a material sacrifice with Christ. We can offer a spiritual sacrifice with Him. That we will offer it He pledges in our name. But our sacrifice, like His, must be made through our bodies. Our lives, lived unto God, are our sacrifice (see Romans 12:1).
The First and Second Sacrifices.—That which is temporarily efficient may, and indeed must, in time become inefficient, because the conditions which it once met undergo change. Whatever concerns the accidents of things must be changed. Whatever concerns the essentials of things is of necessity unchangeable. The first sacrifices, those of Judaism, dealt with accidental conditions of men. The second sacrifice deals with the essential states and relations of men. The first sacrifices could not last; and it was significant of their fading away that the Shekinah-glory left the Temple, that even the ark was lost, and the tables of the covenant. In Pompey’s time the Temple was but an empty shell with the kernel gone; for when he forced his way into the Holy of Holies, he found only an empty chamber. The very heart and life of the old sacrifices was already gone, wholly gone.