CRITICAL AND EXEGETICAL NOTES
Hebrews 9:6. Thus ordained.—Prepared, or adapted to their several purposes. Went always.—Regularly, systematically. Service.—Public religious services; λατρείας. These included morning and evening oblations, sacrifices for special occasions, and private offerings of individuals.
Hebrews 9:7. Second.—Inner chamber. “There was a graduated sanctity in the tabernacle and in the Temple. In the Temple any one may go into the outer court, or court of the Gentiles; Jews into the second court; men only into the third; priests only in their robes into the Holy Place; and only the high priest into the inmost shrine.” Once every year.—On the tenth day of the seventh month, Tisri, the Day of Atonement. The several times of entrance on that day are treated as one. He went in
(1) with the incense;
(2) with the blood of the bullock offered for his own sins;
(3) with the blood of the goat offered for the sins of the people; and it is probable that he also went in again to fetch out the censer (Leviticus 16:12-16). Not without blood.—The type of self-surrender, full consecration. The blood was sprinkled seven times on and before the mercy-seat. Errors.—Ceremonial mistakes, involving ceremonial uncleanness; sins of ignorance and frailty.
Hebrews 9:8. Made manifest.—Not yet laid open. “It was obstructed by numerous ceremonial rites, and limited as to times and persons.” “Hence the deep significance of the rending of the veil from the top to the bottom at the Crucifixion” (Matthew 27:51).
Hebrews 9:9. Figure.—παραβολή, symbolical presentation: compare τύπος. To the conscience.—This was not their sphere. The old economy did not deal with the inward sense of sin; only with disturbed outward relations caused by sin, in the sense of infringement of formal rules. Stuart thus paraphrases: “The Jewish ritual, from the commencement of it down to the present moment, has never been, and still is not, anything more than a type of the Christian dispensation, which has already commenced. All its oblations and sacrifices were ineffectual, as to removing the penalty due to sin in the sight of Heaven, or procuring real peace of conscience.”
Hebrews 9:10. Carnal ordinances.—Omit “and.” R.V. “being only carnal ordinances,” i.e. “ordinances of flesh”; which “relate to the outward state of things only; closely connected with the maintenance of external privileges and relations, but (in themselves) nothing more.” Outward, transitory, superficial. Imposed.—Compare Acts 15:10; Acts 15:28; Galatians 5:1.
MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.— Hebrews 9:6-10
The Limitations of the Symbolical.—Since the Jewish Christians were tempted to exaggerate the value and importance of the Mosaic ceremonial system, because it had been unquestionably given directly by God, the writer does them good service by pointing out that it was essentially a symbolical system, illustrative of spiritual things by its suggestive and symbolical rites and ceremonies. But the symbolical is always limited. It is never a thing itself; it is always the representation of a thing, or the suggestion of a thing. When once this is gripped, the Old Testament economy is readily recognised as limited in sphere, and limited in time. This may be opened up somewhat fully and with present applications, because a symbolic system has been allowed to grow up in association with Christianity, which threatens to absorb men’s attention, and take them back from the elevations of spiritual religion to the old formal Jewish ideas and standpoints. Our attention will be confined to a general consideration of the limited nature of a symbolical religion.
I. The symbolical is temporary.—The symbols must be in precise adaptation to the thoughts, ideas, mental and circumstantial associations of a nation at a particular time. Another nation, with other associations, can do nothing with the symbols. The nation itself will soon grow out of them, look on them as ancient relics, and replace them with new ones. The temporary character of the Old Testament symbols is seen in the fact—
1. That much of the ceremonial system we are now unable effectively to explain, because we cannot recover the early associations;
2. That much of prophetical and apocalyptic Scripture, being based on the early symbols, is closed to us, so that we can only with uncertainty guess its meaning, and oftentimes have to manufacture a meaning of our own. The truths taught by the symbols remain as the heritage of the nation and the race for ever, but the forms which at a given time illustrated the truths pass away, as do our nursery books when we have gained the power to deal with moral principles in plain statements.
II. The symbolical is materialistic.—It is essentially in the range of the senses. It is the sight of sacrifice and ceremony; it is the smell of incense; it is the work of hands; it is the movement of body; it is change of garments; it is solemn service. It is altogether outward. But the material is not the real; it is only the seeming, the showing, of the real which is spiritual. “The things which are not seen are eternal.” True, man is a dual being,—a spirit clothed upon with a body, in order that he might come into relations with a material world; but the spirit is the man, not the body. And we must take care not to press the interests of the body—which wants symbolical religion—so as to stifle the cry of the man himself, which is for a spiritual religion. So long as man finds he needs the help of religious symbols, he is in a low spiritual range. Or to speak in the manner of the passage before us he is having no direct access to God in the Most Holy Place of His spiritual presence; he is only in outer courts, getting some sort of access through priests, and sacrifices, and representative rites.
III. The symbolical is preparatory.—It has no value in itself. Its value lies in what it leads to. It has a stage, and a necessary stage, in an educative process. It is the “kinder-garten” stage of the world’s training in religion. It may be likened to the parabolic form in which so much of our Lord’s teaching was given. The educative value of the parabolical, and of the symbolical, are not sufficiently recognised. Both start and culture the power of religious, spiritual thinking. The parabolical wraps something up, and half hides it, in a word-picture; the symbolical wraps something up, and half hides it, in some acted rite. In both cases the little show of something hidden arouses attention, wakens thought, inquiry, research, and so both parabolical and symbolical become distinctly educative of spiritual discernment. It is no fatal objection to this fact, that so often the symbolical is allowed to satisfy us, and then our moral education ends with it. The wrong use of a thing affords no proof that it was never intended to be used aright. The symbolical is only used aright when it is treated as a preparatory stage. To come back on it when spiritual levels have been reached is altogether to mistake its mission.
IV. The symbolical is suggestive.—But it is manifestly limited if it points to something beyond, and better than itself. In this passage certain things are recalled to mind.
1. The people might not go into the Holy Place. That was suggestive. Because they were sinful, even their worship could only be presented to God through mediators, and by appointed ceremonies.
2. The priests might not go into the Holy of Holies. That was suggestive. So far from the people having direct access to God, their representatives, the priests, had none. They dared not go into the immediate presence; they dared not take aside the veil.
3. Only the high priest might go into the Holy of Holies; and he only once a year, and only on the most solemn conditions. That was suggestive; those conditions represented the spiritual conditions which were to be met, not for a nation, but for humanity, in the infinitely acceptable sacrifice, and the living mediation, of the Son of God.
But the limitation of the symbolical is seen in the fact that its suggestiveness is dependent on—
1. Capacity to deal with it. We have seen that one nation cannot do with the symbolism of another, and one age cannot do with the symbolism of another; but it is also true, that within a nation it may be but a select few who can get at the meanings of the symbols—the many simply take them as they are. Heathen customs are kept by the thousands without their attaching any meaning to them: the few keep them with understanding of their inner significance. We have to awaken in men’s minds the interest in truth-symbols, for the sake of the truth they symbolise.
2. Sensitive moods. The poet sees meanings in prosaic things, because of his poetic moods. The artist sees beauty in prosaic forms, because of his artistic moods. And similarly the spiritual mind finds and feels the truth in symbols, according to his sensitive spiritual moods. Then the highest ministerial work is cultivating the spiritual faculties of men.
SUGGESTIVE NOTES AND SERMON SKETCHES
Hebrews 9:6. Faithfulness required in the “Usual.”—“The priests go in continually into the first tabernacle, accomplishing the services.” There is the constant danger of supreme interest in the unusual taking off men’s interest from the usual and the commonplace. Attention is fixed on the sublime ceremonies in which, occasionally, the high priest officiated; and so attention is taken from the importance, and the significance, of those daily ministries which bore so close a relation to the daily religious life and thought and feeling of the people. And so it always is with frail man. He delights in the astonishing, but wearies with the ordinary. But the ordinary, and not the astonishing, is man’s real life, for which he needs upholding grace. Illustrate from—
1. Our effort to meet times of great affliction, our failure to meet daily worries.
2. Our response to the sacredness of Sunday, our failure to respond to the sacredness of the Christian weekday.
3. Our close attention in times of “missions” and “revival services,” our easy neglect of the usual means of grace.
4. Our concern to culture graces that make a show, and indifference to the every-day sweetness of common relations.
Hebrews 9:7. The Condition of the Sprinkled Blood.—The significance of the sprinkling of the blood is not generally apprehended. Attention is so exclusively given to the sacrifice, as the burning of the victim, or parts of the victim, that attention is diverted from what was the very essence of the sacrifice, which was taking the victim’s blood, which was its life, and offering that life to God, by the sprinkling of the blood upon the altar. To burn a sacrifice was to give a body to God, and it typified man’s devotion of his body and powers and relations to God. But to sprinkle the blood was to give a life to God, and it typified man’s soul-surrender, the gift of himself to God. When this is rightly apprehended, the sprinkling of the blood is seen to be the very essence of the old sacrifice, and to carry its deepest meaning. Ewald suggests fresh lines of thought in relation to this intensely interesting, but unfamiliar, subject. In the spiritual antitype of the sprinkled blood may be found the most satisfactory settings of our spiritual Redeemer’s atonement work. Ewald says: “Under any circumstances the sacerdotal function commenced with the slaughter, in so far that the priest caught the fresh blood with the sacrificial bowls, in order to employ it, while it was yet warm, in that usage which formed the essential kernel of the whole sacred rite. In later times, as we know for certain, the inferior priests caught the blood, and handed it over to a sacrificial priest to sprinkle it. The sprinkling of the blood was itself the most solemn moment: in ordinary cases the priest sprinkled it only on the corners, and the sides, and the foot of the altar, but all round the latter; just as in general the ancient custom required on the most solemn occasions the party to go round the altar, in a circle, praying, singing, and otherwise fervently soliciting the divinity. What the priest said while going round the altar to sprinkle it with the most sacred element of the sacrifice, how he supplicated thereby the Divine grace for the sacrificer, and how he announced it, we no longer can tell in detail, but that it did take place in this way there can be no doubt. A stalk of the shrub hyssôp (tsop) was, in accordance with ancient custom, used for the sprinkling, one end of it being dipped in the blood. This wood must once in early times have passed for pure and cleansing, just as among the Hindoos and Persians the sôma (hôma) alone is used as a sacrificial drink; and only by means of this instrument did it seem possible to complete properly the cleansing atonement. It was in the sprinkling of the blood, the proper sacrament of sacrifice, that the distinction between the guilt-offering, and the expiatory offering in the narrow sense, came most clearly to the front; and it is easy to understand why it would reveal itself most plainly there. As it was right that the blood of an expiatory offering for public transgression (as we may term it for the sake of brevity) should be made far more conspicuous to eyes and sense, so it was sprinkled on an elevated place, or even on one which was extraordinarily sacred. The way, too, in which this was done was marked by three stages. If the atonement was made for an ordinary man or for a prince, the priest sprinkled the blood against the high-towering horns of the outer altar, and poured the remainder as usual out at its base; if it was made for the community or for the high priest, some of the blood was seven times sprinkled against the veil of the Holy of Holies, then some more against the horns of the inner altar, and only what was then left was poured out as usual at the base of the outer altar. The third and highest stage of the expiation was adopted on the yearly Day of Atonement. On the other hand, in the case of guilt-offering, no reason existed for adopting any unusual mode of sprinkling the blood. It was sprinkled just as in other cases round the sides and foot of the outer altar. But as soon as this most sacred ceremony of the sprinkling of the blood was completed, then, according to the ancient belief, the impurity and guilt were already shaken off from the object to which they had clung. It seemed as though the drops of blood, sprinkled by the mighty hand of One who was pure, had called them up, and irresistibly drawn them forth; for thus we must plainly interpret this procedure in accordance with the feeling of antiquity. Yet shaken off as they were, they only passed in the first instance, according to the same view, into that body whose blood had so irresistibly driven them forth (as well as into the officiating priest). The rest of this body, therefore, was now deemed to have become in its turn unclean, and was regarded with all the dread with which anything that was unclean before God was looked upon, nay, even with yet stronger dread; it was just here that the dark side of this whole order of sacrifices was felt most keenly. Consequently all the remainder of the body, just as it was, together with the dung, was burned far away from the sanctuary at some common, but in other respects clean, spot (outside of the camp or city), as though it was an object of horror, which could only be disposed of and annihilated in this way.”
Hebrews 9:8. For a While no Open Way to God.—“The way into the Holy Place hath not yet been made manifest.” The old tabernacle and its limitations were picture-teachings of spiritual conditions and relations. They taught the people God’s nearness to them, but made them feel that there was something which prevented the nearness from being closeness; which necessitated the raising of a thin and slight, but effective, barrier; which made impossible that sort of free access to God which Adam enjoyed in Paradise, and which should have been man’s birthright. That hindrance was not something placed by God, in the exercise of His Divine sovereignty. It was a gracious and necessary response of God to the condition in which man had placed himself. It could be no kindness in an earthly father to keep smiling on a child while that child was wayward and wilful. The cherubim were put at the gates of Eden in considerate love. The veils hid from the people the Holy Place, and from the priests the Holy of Holies, in considerate love. God must make His relation to man’s wilfulness apparent; and man must be made symbolically and representatively right, as a beginning of his becoming really right, before an open way to God could be made.
Hebrews 9:9. Conscience under the Old Covenant.—“Cannot, as touching the conscience, make the worshipper perfect.” If we speak precisely concerning conscience, we keep its sphere to that which belongs to God—God’s will, God’s standard, God’s revelation. It is not perhaps strictly correct to state it in this way, but it helps by suggesting an important distinction—Conscience is concerned only with our idea of what is absolutely right, or with laws, not with rules. Men make a slavery of the moral life when they bring conscience into the spheres of rule, and custom, and rite, and etiquette. It follows from this, that any amount of attention to rules and rites will fail to satisfy the conscience as the witness in us to what is absolutely right—right in the sight of God. But in moral education it seems that conscience of the eternally right is trained through cultivating conscience in relation to formal rules. It is so in the case of the Jews; it is so in the case of our children The Jew’s conscience of the clean and unclean was educating him to a conscience of absolute right before God.
Hebrews 9:10. Divers Washings.—The religious rites of the Mosaic ceremonial must have involved the use of enormous quantities of water; and it has always been found difficult to explain how the water necessary for ablutions could have been obtained during the forty years’ wandering in the wilderness. It is just possible that, as the following facts suggest, their ablutions were performed during the journey by other means than that of water. An old traveller relates that the Arabs, if they cannot come by any water, then they must wipe [themselves] as clean as they can, till water may conveniently be had; or else it suffices to take Abdees [purification] upon a stone, which I call an imaginary Abdees, i.e. to smooth their hands over a stone two or three times, and rub them one with the other, as if they were washing with water—the like Abdees sufficeth when any are sickly, so that water might endanger their life—and after they have so wiped, it is guise, i.e. lawful, for them to do as they would had their purification been really done by water. In a Mohammedan treatise on prayer it is said, “In case water is not to be had, that defect may be supplied by earth, a stone, or any product of the earth.” It has been asserted that sand was frequently used for the same purpose, and even poured over the hands like water. It is possible that thus, or in some similar way, the Israelites in the desert purified themselves when water was scarce. It has also been suggested that it might have been for a similar purpose that Naaman the Syrian took two mules’ loads of earth back with him from Palestine. He might have taken Jordan water, but that would not last. The earth, however, would serve the same purpose for many years (2 Kings 5:17). In the old tabernacle the lowest grade of purification demanded a washing of the body and changing of the clothes, as well as the removal of any objects of heathen superstition which might be about. For the priests on duty purifications wholly special to themselves were necessary; they must, e.g., bathe with hands and feet, i.e. with the whole body, in the fore-court of the sanctuary, when they desired to enter the sanctuary, or approach the altar.
Religion an Imposition, and Religion a Willing Service.—“Imposed until a time of reformation.” Two kinds of religion are possible to the moral beings which God has made. And the two kinds are represented in every age and every land—just as truly represented in our day as in any other. Man’s religion may be the obedience of rules imposed by a competent and recognised authority. Man’s religion may be the natural and free expression of his own good will, swayed by the persuasions of the Divine love. It is manifest that the second form of religion is altogether a higher form than the first. It is the religion of a cultured being, who has gained control of himself, and is, in a sense, become an independent being—a man indeed. But the second form of religion can never come first in the case of man. “First that which is natural, afterward that which is spiritual,” is the ever-working and all-round law for humanity. A moral education begins with rules imposed. A man’s religion begins with things to be done in response to authority. Only in an advanced time, a “time of reformation,” can a man manage his own religion. The mistake is made when men are content to stop with a religion of impositions.
1. This the Jewish Christians were tempted to do, in the first Christian age. They could not quite give up, indeed they were sorely tempted to fall back upon, the impositional religion of Judaism, and even upon that religion as exaggerated by Rabbinism.
2. This ritual religions, in all the Christian ages, have tempted men to do. For the satisfaction of undeveloped spiritual men and women, claims of authority to impose opinions, duties, and rites have been made on behalf of a Church, or of particular orders of men; and many have been, and are to-day, kept in the first and child stages of religion. They belong to Judaism; they are not lifted into the free life of Christianity.
3. But it is necessary to add that, since our modern “Time of the Reformation,” Protestant Christians have been subject to the same peril. Careful thinking will reveal the fact, that the verbal inspiration theory of the Bible has made it, practically, to thousands of Christians the text-book of a merely impositional religion.