The Only Sacrifice.
There is, and there can be, only one atonement for the sin of the world the sacrifice of the death of Christ. This alone is in itself meritorious, propitiatory, and of infinite price and power. And this is, in fact, the whole argument of the Epistle to the Hebrews. St. Paul is showing that the law of Moses was in itself without power; that it could make no propitiation, no true atonement in the eternal world; that the vileness of the sacrifices was enough to show their impotence, and much more their continual repetition.
I. The sacrifice of Jesus Christ, then, is one. There is no other like it, or second after it. It is not the highest of a kind, or the perfecting of any order of oblations; but, like His Person, a mystery sole and apart. In what does this unity consist? In the nature, the quality and the passion of Him who offered Himself. (1) It is one and unapproachable, because He was a Divine Person, both God and man. (2) In like manner the sacrifice is one and above all, in the quality of the person who, as God, was holy, as man was sinless. It was not the obedience only of man for man, but of man without sin; nor only a sinless man for sinners, but the obedience of God. (3) And, further, as the nature and the quality, so the passion of Christ gives to His sacrifice an unity of transcendent perfection. Righteous, holy, pure, perfect in love both to God and man, He offered Himself up as a sacrifice and atonement between God and man. This, then, is its unity.
II. But, further, the sacrifice is not only one, but continuous. As by its unity it abolished the multitude of oblations, so by its continuity it abolished the repetition of sacrifices. To add one more would be to deny its final atonement. The sacrifice of Christ is as everlasting as His Person. He was pierced on Calvary, but His passion is still before the mercy-seat. He was pierced eighteen hundred years ago, but His blood was shed four thousand years before, and His wounds are fresh and atoning until now. His sacrifice is eternal. Though every light in the firmament of heaven were a world, and every world dead in sin; and though time should multiply the generations of sinners for ever, yet that one sacrifice for sin would infinitely redeem all worlds.
H. E. Manning, Sermons,vol. iv., p. 210.