Dennis Tuuri

# Hebrews 9:1-15 Sermon Transcript

Praise God for these wonderful songs that the Lord God has taught us and that we get to come together and sing. I’m just so excited about the truth of these songs we just sang and how they relate to today’s text so directly. We do our best—Isaac and myself, sometimes with John’s help if he’s got the time—to pick these songs out, and Lana, while Isaac was on vacation. And we do our best, and the Lord God’s Spirit oversees that process and does a lot better job a lot of times than I would do, of course. But always does that better. But somehow he works through our efforts. And these songs we’ve just sung are just delightful and are so keyed to today’s message.

Today’s sermon text is found in Hebrews chapter 9, and the specific text we’ll be reading is 1-14. Although I will also read verse 15, it’s not part of this structure that we see here, but it’s important for the context. So, please stand, and if you’ve got a handout from today, the text is on the back side.

Hebrews 9:1-14 is the text, but we’ll read through 15. And again, I’ve tried to on the outline bold some words that are important for understanding how this text is laid out. I am just astonished week by week as I study this particular book with tremendous attention to the detailed structure of so many of these texts, and it helps us. You know, Hebrews is a difficult book, and we’re getting to stuff now as we saw last week that is more of what he’d said earlier in this book.

You know, he’s got things to say that are going to be difficult to understand, and Melchizedek was tough enough, but now we get to the very center of this book. Some of these things are difficult to understand, and the structure can help us. And yeah, I’m just astonished and amazed at the beauty of how God wrote this text. And you know, looking forward in heaven to meeting the man that wrote it, whoever that might be, and just rejoicing in it.

All right. So, Hebrews chapter 9:1-15:

“Then indeed, even the first covenant had ordinances of divine service and the earthly sanctuary. For the tabernacle was prepared, the first part in which was the lampstand, the table, and the showbread, which is called the sanctuary. And behind the second veil, the part of the tabernacle which is called the holiest of all, which had the golden altar of incense and the ark of the covenant covered on all sides with gold, in which were the golden pot that had the manna, Aaron’s rod that budded, and the tablets of the covenant. And above it were the cherubim of glory overshadowing the mercy seat.

“Of these things we cannot now speak in detail. Now when these things had been thus prepared, the priests always went into the first part of the tabernacle performing the services. But into the second part, the high priest went alone once a year, not without blood, which he offered for himself and for the people’s sins committed in ignorance. The Holy Spirit indicating this, that the way into the holiest of all was not yet made manifest.

“While the first tabernacle was still standing, it was symbolic for the present time in which both gifts and sacrifices are offered which cannot make him who performed the service perfect in regard to the conscience, concerned only with foods and drinks, various washings and fleshly ordinances imposed until the time of reformation. But Christ came as high priest of the good things to come with the greater and more perfect tabernacle not made with hands, that is not of this creation. Not with the blood of goats and calves, but with his own blood, he entered the most holy place once for all, having obtained eternal redemption.

“For if the blood of bulls and goats and the ashes of a heifer, sprinkling the unclean, sanctifies for the purging of the flesh, how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal spirit offered himself without spot to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God.

“And for this reason, he is the mediator of the new covenant by means of death for the redemption of the transgressions under the first covenant, that those who are called may receive the promise of the eternal inheritance.”

Let’s pray. Lord God, we thank you for your most holy word, and we thank you for the beauty of this text. And if nothing else, Lord God, may we leave today with another gasp of awe as we look at this text and the beauty of it, and beyond that, the beauty of what is mentioned here. We thank you for this central pivot point of this book that we’ve now reached, Lord God, and we pray that you would give us—give me, Lord God—clarity of thought in speech. Help me, Lord God, not to swerve to the right or the left from your word, but to go right down the center with it where it leads us. In Jesus name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated.

Yeah, that last verse 15 is not actually part of the text, but I want to read it for a couple of reasons, which we’ll talk about as we move ahead here.

We’ve reached the center of this book, and I have this outline on here most every time. But today I do want to mention it just a little bit. So turn back to the first side of the handout, and we’ll look again at this outline. And what we see here is in the overall structure of the book, there’s this large central fourth section—chapter 5:11 through 10:39. And those of you who have been here for a while know that these sections are pretty clearly marked and have an indicator before them what he’s going to talk about.

So each section is linked to the next section there. It’s like a big golden chain here of things. And at the center—at the very center of the book—the way the outline we’re using indicates is the text we’ve come to today: that Jesus Christ has come. So he describes all these things up to the time of reformation. That word is like straightening—the time of straightening out what was crooked. And then immediately in verse 11, now he’s come. Jesus has come.

The time of reformation has appeared, and he’s come as high priest of good things to come. And you know, you don’t know—but I’ll tell you—that the commentators argue about this. Is it the good things that are here? Is it good things yet to come? And the text seems to indicate it’s good things that are coming, but not as if they haven’t come already. So the definitive change or transition in this book—contrasting the old covenant and the new—is at the center point. And the center point is this declaration that Jesus Christ has come, and that now everything’s changed.

So we move from the relative powerlessness—and we’ll talk about that; it’s hard language; there’s a couple of ditches as we think about this continuity and discontinuity thing—but it talks about the relative powerlessness of that old covenant, and now the relative power in relationship to that—the great power and the tremendous blessing of the new covenant. Jesus having come and accomplished on the cross and in his entrance into the heavenly realities where reality is—having accomplished eternal redemption for us.

So, right at the pivot point of the book, this is really what the book hinges on: the coming of Christ and its relationship to this transition from the old covenant and the things that they were being tempted to go back and do—without Christ, very importantly—and the new covenant.

Now, as we get to the center of this, then the expanded outline of the section four here—the bottom half of the first page. You know, just remembering where we’ve come from. You know, this is a pastoral matter. It’s a sermon that is to address the pastoral needs of his congregation. Those pastoral needs, in some ways, are similar to ours, and we’ve talked about that. But in some ways, it’s quite different, isn’t it? We’re not being tempted to go back to old covenant rituals of the tabernacle or the temple without Jesus. And that’s what these people were being tempted to do.

They were on the verge of losing their faith. Now, we may be on the verge—for various sins on our part—but it’s a little bit different. There’s a lot of commonality, but we have to remember the immediate context here.

And so, the central section is bounded—it’s bracketed—by pastoral admonitions at the beginning and end. You see, 5:1 through 6:20—long section, two chapters of an introductory exhortation. “And you better listen up. It’s going to be hard. And if you don’t listen, you’re going to hell. That’s you know, learn or burn.” And so that exhortation at the beginning, and then at the end of this section—when we get there, we’ll see it in more detail—but 10:19-39 is a concluding exhortation: Live by faith. Continue to come together to assemble and worship. And this sermon, you know, worship is front and center.

I didn’t pick it for that reason. Some of you may be thinking I had a hidden agenda or something. No, I didn’t really see it that way until I did my studies of the book, and we’ll see again today how worship is front and center. And the concluding exhortation of this central section of the book has to do with them going to church on Sunday. It really does. Now it goes beyond that—they’re to encourage one another and live a life on earth, you know, that’s ordered from the heavenly pattern they see.

But that’s the exhortation. So at the center of this epistle—of this sermon, rather—the exhortations. And then we saw in chapter 7 the comparison of Jesus to the priestly order of Melchizedek. And that matches what the offering of Jesus accomplished—what the old offerings could not—down at the at its matching section. And then, and then we saw this description of heavenly places for earthly work.

And as we move in a couple of weeks, we’ll see that we have access to heaven and a better relationship with God. And so that kind of matches up. And then last week, so we’re getting to the very center now of the center. And what I’m trying to get at here is the centrality—at the center of the center—of covenant. And so what we saw last week was the introduction of the next major scripture, Jeremiah 31:31-34, that then becomes a matter of exposition during this entire central portion of the text.

Now today’s text mentions the first covenant at the beginning, and then in verse 15, the next section starts with Jesus coming as the mediator of the new covenant. So that places the very center in the immediate bracketed context of covenant. So there’s this relationship between this divine service in the tabernacle and now the divine service that Jesus accomplishes. You know, that is bracketed by references to covenant.

So it’s covenant that’s at the center, and at the heart of covenant is this way we approach God in worship and the implications of it. So we have the centrality of covenant as we move toward the center of this book. And so we had contrasted then the weakness of the old covenant—and you know why, because of the sin of the people, but also because it was provisional—and then that’s contrasted with the power of the new covenant in today’s in today’s text.

So the old covenant’s provisional and imperfect. The new covenant will be established in next week’s text—definitively, in the text we read last week—that matches the old covenant text from chapter 8. Remember we looked at the communion table at 9:15 to 2:3, which is about the blood of Jesus, the death of the testator, etc. So, the old covenant is provisional and imperfect. Jesus establishes the new covenant.

And then in the middle of that is today’s text. And this text has to do with the weakness of the old covenant and then the power of the new covenant. We’ve reached the critical hinge point of the book where Jesus is described as having come as the high priest of good things to come—both beginning those good things now and continuing them on into the future. So, you know, I want to stress here, you know, that this text shows us that at the heart of this sermon is this consideration of covenant.

Now, covenant was—remember back in chapter 7—he dropped the word covenant once, but there’s 19 occurrences of covenant in the book of Hebrews, and 12 of them occur here in this central section. So, now we’re going to see over and over again, just through the repetition of the word covenant, the emphasis that we talked about last week—over and over again here at the central section. We see that repetition, and that tells us—alone—that’s central to the text, as well as the way the structure is worked. And he’s opening up now Jeremiah 31, and this whole middle section deals with that text.

So you know, the overall structure as we move from these different big chunks of text that are exposited—that overall structure says what we’re dealing with now is this new covenant that Jeremiah described. And then the little details. So the overarching theme of the book tells us the covenant is central. And then the very detail, the individual words that are used—12 out of the 19 times here in this central couple of chapters here—remind us again that the heart of this book is indeed this idea of covenant.

So covenant is central to this book. It’s central to the middle of the book. The middle of the book kind of helps us to understand the overall teaching of the book. And therefore, covenant is central to the overall teaching of the book. And this relationship of covenant is now going to be described in terms of how that covenant worked—in terms of its worship, in terms of its worship.

Now the second thing I want to say by way of introduction before we actually look at the text itself is I want to talk again about you know this—what we talked about last week. I know that some of you have been scratching your heads for last week, and some of you, you know, are not happy with the things I said, and some are very happy. And you know, it is difficult material here, and I would just—I wanted to point out that again—you know, it’s wrong to read a text of scripture without its context. The context that we must take into our analysis of the central section of the sermon to properly make its application to our lives—the analysis has to include who it’s being written to.

You know, the prophets in the Old Testament would frequently dismiss the covenant. “Well, what do you think? God wants the blood of goats and bulls? Forget it. He doesn’t want that. Go give it to somebody else.” He says in Isaiah, Jeremiah, other prophets. They would put down the sacrificial system. Apparently. But we know that these things were required. God did want them from one perspective—to do them.

Why was he putting them down? Because he was talking to people who had made that system idolatrous—who were not looking beyond it to their relationship with the God who set it up, but just looking at ritual performance—”is all that was required for them.” They were relying not upon what was being taught, and we’ll see what one thing was being taught here: Messiah to die for them. They weren’t relying upon that.

They were relying on the rituals themselves. And in the same way, this author of Hebrews is like a prophet. He’s telling some Christians who are on the verge of abandoning Christ to go back to those rituals going on in the temple. He was telling them that if we’re going to talk about the temple in isolation from Christ, it is worthless. And it’s more than worthless. It’s actually negative for you. You’re doing a bad thing because you’ve got an idol made of it.

And just as the serpent in the wilderness was a wonderful and great thing for people to cast their eyes upon and be healed—they began to become idolatrous with it, and God ground it up then—get rid of it. And there’s a sense in which that’s what’s going to happen to the temple. It’s going to be ground up, ripped apart, thrown away. Not just for that reason, as we see in today’s text, the consummation has come in Christ.

But you see, you have to take the negative thrust of these statements that we find in the central section about the old covenant worship forms. You have to remember that he’s talking about people who were in violation here. Let me quote from Rob Rayburn in a couple of sermons that he gave on Hebrews. He says that we frequently take these statements to mean that believers in the ancient epic did not have direct access to God or full forgiveness of their sins.

Okay, so here he’s talking about two things. He’s going to talk about access to the Holy of Holies—which was restricted—and he’s going to talk about cleansing of the conscience. So it’s like we talked about last week, you know, access and forgiveness—being his people, and he their God, and forgiveness of sins. And you know, frequently we come to this text and think that somehow the Old Testament believers had no direct access, and nor did they have forgiveness of sins.

But Rayburn says, I think correctly, that this is a notion that the entire scripture rises to protest. Paul makes his great argument for justification by faith and the full forgiveness that Abraham and David received. And the Psalms are nothing if they are not the experience of men who drew near to God. Why do we recite these psalms responsibly if what our common notion is that these Old Testament saints were not filled with the spirit—that they weren’t—didn’t have access to God, their sins weren’t forgiven. They were, you know, pretty much different than us? Why would we use those inspired scriptures of that Old Testament people?

And you know, some people say, “That’s right. Let’s get rid of them.” And there are people like that. There are people, good Christian people, who think that we are just awful for reciting the Ten Commandments or reciting the Psalms or singing the Psalms. You see, so what Rayburn is saying is, “But look, you can’t just relate the Psalms to the life of Jesus.” They point to that, but as we saw last week, the Psalms are filled with specific references, saying, “These are specific real guys, Asaf and David and other people.

They’re real people who had a vital living relationship with God through faith in someone else dying for their sins other than them. So they were—as Rayburn goes on to say—they received their forgiveness and drew near to God by virtue of Christ’s work in anticipation, just as we do by virtue of Christ’s work in retrospect. So they had this access and forgiveness by looking ahead. We do it in retrospect.

We have it in the context of retrospect. In effect, they had to have faith, and when they didn’t, they were chastised for what they were doing. The Hebrews also here—the saints that this sermon is addressed to in Hebrews—were guilty of the same thing: losing faith, slipping away from faith in the one who stood behind all of these perfectly good, wonderful pictures of the representation of God. I mean, if you read this section on the tabernacle with proper eyes, you think, “Man, that was great. What a wonderful worship service that was to be able to go into these places, and yet now we have something even better.”

So, so you know, they were to approach God through faith, and when they didn’t, God criticized the forms—just as he does with us. And we could say the same thing about the Lord’s supper. We have a danger now. We’re trying to make our theology of the covenant more objective, but the danger is that we then start to rely upon baptism and the Lord’s supper apart from faith in Jesus Christ.

And if we ever get close to that—God forbid—that howls of protest should rise from you if we start to move away from these things as seen in relationship to this living faith in Jesus, who gives us these things. Now, he gives us these things to encourage and buttress that faith. But you see what I’m saying? So the ditch here is that we could think that somehow he’s critical of the whole Old Testament—it was all goofed up. It was always a works religion. They could never get close to God. That is not what the author of this sermon is saying.

You’re on the same line. Well, another quote from Rayburn. “It points to the sinful conditions in which a man must be delivered by the sacrifice of a better covenant and God’s sovereign calling.” That’s what this text in Hebrews calls us to do. He says, “In any event, it was from people who are misusing the covenant.” Another quote, not from Rayburn, but now from John Calvin that sort of makes the same point. Or one last quote from Pastor Rayburn.

Once again, as with the first and better covenant, the contrast is not between the religious situation of the Old Testament and that of the New Testament as two epics in the history of salvation succeeding one another in time. It is not primarily that. Now, there is some of that as we see today, but that is not the point of it. The point is not to show how our worship is built upon that worship. He’s addressing people who have misused those Old Testament worship elements and are moving away from faith instead of toward faith, as the whole context makes clear.

Rayburn says, “It is a contrast between a false faith centered in ceremonies and a true faith centered in Christ. It is a contrast between what does not take away sin and what does—what does not rather take a man or a woman to heaven and what does. That’s the contrast that’s being drawn.” Calvin put it this way:

“Or anyone to ask why the apostle speaks with so little respect, and even with contempt, of sacraments divinely instituted.”

And you see, that’s important because he’s talking about sacraments divinely instituted. If we read it wrong, we’re going to come away with contempt and disrespect for the divine sacraments of the New Testament, which are alluded to in today’s text as we’ll see. Why does he do this?

Calvin says, “and extentuates their efficacy. This he does because he separates them from Christ. We know that when viewed in themselves, they are but beggarly elements, as Paul calls them.” So he separates them from Christ in his presentation because that’s what the Hebrews were doing—separating them from Christ.

So once more, as we come to this text, we have to be careful to read it carefully and not to bring alien presuppositions of this Old Testament, New Testament clear language before us.

Okay. Now, let’s look at the text itself. And you can follow along in the handout in your own Bibles. The handout will be a lot easier. I do this, you know, to make it easier for you. And we’re just going to walk through these elements.

Okay. So, first of all, we have the relative weakness of the old covenant—weak because of their sin—and some extent also weak because something was being taught us. Okay. So, now we see in verse one, we see the bolded ordinances, right?

And then look down at verse 10, and we see the bolded word ordinances once more. The author is using a word that occurs only here in the book—occurs seven or eight other times the rest of new testament. But in Hebrews, these are the only two occurrences of this particular word. He wants us to see these as an inclusio—brackets. He wants to see this as a section. You see? So that’s why we’ve bracketed it. That way, we’re obeying what God has written for us here in this wonderful description.

Now then he says that there—so he’s talking about the covenant—these ordinances are of divine service and the earthly sanctuary. So as we’ve seen him do repeatedly in this text in this sermon, he gives us a little header. “I’m going to talk about two things,” he says here: “divine services and the earthly tabernacle.” And just as he almost always does, he addresses the last one first. Okay, which is not how we would do it, but that’s how he did it.

So again, he starts here by talking about the earthly sanctuary, and he’s going to talk about the place where the divine services happened. And then what he’s going to do after that is he’s going to talk about the divine services themselves.

What were these divine services? Okay, so he begins with the place. “For a tabernacle was prepared. How was it prepared? Well, it was built. How was it built? Help with the tithes of the people? No, with the offerings of the people.”

And I would just pause here for just a minute. We are very pleased that we’re within about $50,000 of paying off the debt on this particular tabernacle. And we are now looking forward to try to get this thing paid off by the end of the year. I know it’s a little jag away from the explicit teaching of this text, but that’s how it was prepared. And it’s worth pointing out that’s how buildings were prepared in the Old Testament with the offerings of the people.

For the last six years, the elders of this church have taken roughly $300,000 of tithe money and given it to pay off the debt in this building. We’ve been happy to do it. But we’re also happy that during that same period of time, and prior to that, it was probably about the same amount of money put in through the offerings of the church. Praise God for that. Now, we’re down to the end. We want the debt retired.

We want a tabernacle like this tabernacle paid off. And the way the tabernacle was constructed by the in the wilderness, and then the temple as well in the land, was not through the use of tithe monies primarily, or at all. It was the free will offerings of the people. The elders have contributed free will offerings from the tithe. That’s one way to think of it—to bail to pay off the debt of this building.

And we want to put before you the goal of getting this thing paid off by the end of this year. So please consider you know what you could do to bring money to pay off the debt of this building as we move to have a wonderful celebration that the Lord God answered our prayers that we could pay off a building within 6 years of attaining it. Okay, a little side step, but a tabernacle was prepared.

And you see this tabernacle is prepared, and then he’s going to talk about the specifics in it. “The first part in which was the lampstand, the table, and the showbread which is called the sanctuary. Behind the second veil, the part of the tabernacle which is called the holy of all which had the golden altar of incense, the ark of the covenant overlaid on all sides with gold in which were the golden pot that had the manna, Aaron’s rod that budded, and the tablets of the covenant and above it were the cherubim of glory overshadowing the mercy seat.”

He describes the physical contents in two compartments. Now this is interesting because we know that what he just talked about in the verses prior to this that we talked about last week were a first and second—first covenant, second covenant. And here he’s got first and second—first compartment, second compartment. In actuality, of course, if you wanted to give a fuller description, there are three parts.

There’s the outer courtyard, then there’s the holy place, then there the holy of holies. But he decides to encompass all the rest except for the holy of holies in his description of the second compartment. And that’ll serve his purposes here as we get through the text. But he’s describing the physical elements of these things. And that’s why I’ve got it bracketed this way: first he describes the holies, and then the second he describes the holies.

The holies, and then the middle—the hinges of these things we can now speak in detail. So he’s not going to talk more, but he’s given us some detail that I think is important for the text, and we’ll come to that at the end of the sermon. He does give us some detail, and because he gives us detail, let me just speak to a couple of things of this detail.

The golden altar of incense is better translated—the golden altar of incense. The sensor was just a shovel that was used for that incense, a pan to bring into the holy of holies on day of atonement. But that’s not what he’s describing. He’s just describing the major elements of the holy of holies and the holy place. So, it’s the altar of incense, and but it says that the holiest of all had the golden sensor. And so, it seems to you as if he’s saying that in the holy of holies was the altar of incense.

Well, it wasn’t. Leviticus 16, other places of scripture make it quite clear. You know, you should know this. Your children should know this. Holy of Holies: three things that he describes here. Golden pot of manna—bread, food, right? The law of God and Aaron’s rod that blossomed. Three things. And in the holy place, the Old Testament’s quite clear on this. Three things: the table of showbread, more food like the golden pot of manna, right? Aaron’s—or not Aaron’s rather—blossom, but a different version of that. The lampstand. The lampstand’s an almond tree.

His rod that budded is an almond tree. It represents authority. You know, if you have authority someplace, you’re a supervisor, right? “Super over visor.” Look, the lampstand is overlooking Israel represented by 12 loaves of the face of the presence bread in the on the table of showbread. So, we’ve got authority again like Aaron Rod that budded—his authority.

Now, we got authority, looking over things, controlling. We got bread. And then in relationship to the law, we had the golden altar of incense. That was the altar that represented the prayers God’s people. Outside of all this arrangement—this is important. Outside of this is the bronze altar where the most of the—where all the animals were burned up. That was outside of all this. That’s really interesting because he’s describing a liturgy, the service, the ministration of the Old Testament tabernacle.

And for now, he leaves out the death of the animal. That’s interesting. Well, what about this sensor, this golden altar of incense being in the holy of holies? Well, that doesn’t necessarily mean that when it says that uh it had the golden sensor, it means in relationship to the golden sensor. It doesn’t necessarily mean it was inside of it. We know it wasn’t. The difference between you had the table of showbread and the and the lampstand—they were at either side of this room as you came in, right in front of the veil that led into the holy of holies. That’s where the golden altar of incense is. It’s connected to it geographically, spatially, by being close to it.

And here the author identifies it with the Holy of Holies, even though it’s not in there. Now, this is significant because it’s the—if you think about it, where are we in all of this stuff? Well, we’re the loaves of showbread. You know, we’re Israel. We’re also supervisors. We’re sort of there. But in terms of access to God, if that’s what he’s talking about here, isn’t it? He’s talking about coming into the presence of God, drawing near to God. Where are we? We come through the prayers at the golden altar of incense related. And the law is related to the prayer. So God speaks to us, we speak to him, we draw near to God.

If we’re looking at those three things, the entrance point from those three into the next room is that altar of incense. Say the golden altar, our prayers, drawing near to God. You see, and later, you know, we’ve talked about this earlier in the book. You know, we come with boldness to the throne of grace in our prayers—incense. So that’s what it means here. It means close to and connected to the holy of holies but not inside it.

Three things inside, three things in the holy place. Then he says that there’s a—he parallels this with the service.

Now right now, “when these things had been thus prepared, the priest always went into the first part of the tabernacle and performed the services. He’s performing liturgy. The Divine services, right? Priests plural, always, first part, performing the services. But into the second part, the Holy of Holies, the high priest went alone once a year, not without blood, which he offered for himself and the people sins committed in ignorance.

Many people doing things, many priests always doing this divine service. No blood mentioned. Contrasting that now into the holy of holies, high priest by himself once a year offering blood. Now offering blood, you know, if you look at the Old Testament, you will—if you knew your Old Testament better than I did, I wouldn’t have to read this in a commentary, but this is where I read it.

We don’t have the offering of blood in the Old Testament in the Septuagint. This word offering is never applied to blood because the animal is not offering anything. His blood is being taken from him, right? But here the high priest is described as offering blood. Now, he was doing that, but my point is the blood is never looked upon in the Old Testament as an offering. It’s connected to the offering of the animal, but it isn’t spec.

So, what he’s pointing out to us is something very significant here. He’s getting us ready because Jesus is the greater high priest, the greater offering. His blood he is offering. You see, it points to Jesus’s volitional, willful being our sacrificial animal. Those animals were passive. Jesus laid down his life for us. And that’s alluded to here by the author of this one tiny little words. That’s the beauty of this text.

One little word draws up these associations. He brings blood for his own sins and for the people’s sins. So what? Well, now he’s going to tell us why. He’s talked about the divine service and the tabernacle, the holy place and the holiest of holies and then the service in that thing.

Here’s what he says: “The Holy Spirit indicating this, that the way into the holiest of all was not yet made manifest.”

Now see careful. He doesn’t say they didn’t have access to the person of God. He’s not saying that. What he’s saying is—says in this text, what his focus is, his purpose—at the center of this book and drawing this to our attention is to say the Holy Spirit’s talking here. God set this up, and here’s what the Holy Spirit was saying. And what he was saying was that the way—the way that access is accomplished—was not made manifest, fully revealed.

We didn’t see Jesus. We saw animals. Now the way is manifest. The way is Jesus. That he’ll talk about here in a couple of minutes. So, he’s saying that the way was not made manifest. He doesn’t say they didn’t have access. I mean, sure, it was restricted. Yes, there’s barriers, and that’s important for the text. And you know, on the one side of it, of course, he’s saying, “you leave Christ out, you’ve got no access whatsoever to God.”

With Christ in there, the high priest was representing the people. And David had access. He prayed to God. God heard his prayers. But the way wasn’t manifest yet.

“While the first tabernacle was still standing. Boy, that’s tough. See, you noodle on that one for a while. What’s he talking about? He’s used the word tabernacle for the holy of holies. He’s used it for the holy place. He’s used it for the whole thing. What’s he talking about?

Well, hard to tell for sure. What does it mean still standing? Because that first tabernacle wasn’t still standing for a thousand years. It’d been done away with a long time ago. The tabernacle, he’s not talking about temple. He’s talking about tabernacle. So, he’s saying that while it was established, while the Mosaic rituals were established—not literally standing, I don’t think. But while they were established, God was indicating by this establishment of these things that the way was not yet manifest.

And then he says something else. “It was symbolic. It was a parable.” Greek word translated parable was symbolic—”for the present time in which both gifts and sacrifices are offered, which cannot make him who performed the service perfect in regard to the conscience.”

Again, this is hard to understand, but I think a couple of things that he’s saying here is this. The present time can be an allusion—not just to the ongoing services in the temple, although that’s kind of it. But these Hebrews, if they go off and start doing this stuff without Jesus, they cannot—their consciences will not be brought into right standing with God because only Jesus can purify the conscience. And he’s saying is that this purification of the conscience is quite important for his purposes in this discussion.

Perfect. He’s also saying that so there was a weakness to this—if you leave Christ out. But secondly, he’s saying that even with Christ in it clearly shows—like Melchizedek and the priests and all that stuff showed that one was coming who would bring us to perfection. A perfection doesn’t mean you know without sin. It means to our goal, to our purpose, the fulfillment, the perfecting of the washing of our consciences.

And then he says that the whole Old Testament liturgy is wrapped up with “food and drink, various washings, fleshly ordinances imposed into the time of reformation.”

Now we read that “fleshly ordinances,” he’s putting them down. No, he’s not. The word sarks here that he’s using—Hebrew just about earthly components. And remember, this is parallel. It’s bracketed to the first verse of the text, and the first verse of the text described this tabernacle as earthly. That’s all it means here. There were these earthly things that God set up, and in and of themselves they were wonderful.

Without Jesus, they’re nothing. But they’re set up to tell us that perfection will come with the coming of Jesus Christ. That will be the time of reformation. And what he’s telling them, of course, is that this time of straightening things out is now.

So, he’s just summing up the liturgy, and he’s drawing it to the inability of that liturgy under the best of circumstances. It couldn’t bring the perfection of the conscience and the purging of the conscience because the way wasn’t manifest. The way to get into the holy place was not manifest. It hadn’t been revealed. And what he’s setting us up to see here is that a consideration of Jesus Christ, voluntarily giving his life, shedding his blood—this is the way of access. And that consideration of the perfection of Jesus Christ given to us in the gospels, given to us in the reflection of the gospels in the epistles, that meditation and the person of God portrayed out in these large letters of life, the life of Jesus.

This makes manifest the way into the place. And this is the thing that will move us to the perfection, the completion of the purging of our consciences that God had always attended to accomplish. Their consciences were cleansed, but not as good. By their consciences were cleansed meditating upon a way of access through a high priest through animals that they knew were vaguely you know something—it was representing something else. But when we come along and see what it was representing—the person and work of Jesus Christ—the beauty of Jesus, his great love, mercy, and grace, giving his life sacrificially, living out the trinitarian life of service to the point of dying for us—when we see this?

You see, now our consciences are even better. Now our consciences are perfected. And that’s what he’s going to go on to say.

So it showed the weakness both in terms of, you know, their own sinfulness of leaving Christ out, but even under the best of circumstances, it was weak.

Now let’s look at the power then of the new covenant—verses 11 to 14. And here, instead of the ordinances as the brackets here, verse 11 and verse 14 have a common word: Christ. This is the brackets here. So see, we’ve moved from the ordinances that were earthly to now a consideration of Messiah, Jesus Christ, the anointed high priest and offering.

So you see, right in the middle, Christ comes—the high priest of good things to come. Christ came. Good things are now coming. “He came with the greater and more perfect tabernacle not made with hands, that is not of this creation.”

Again—boy, it’s it’s tough. Good men disagree on what this means. And I can tell you what I think it means. It seems like this word “with” can mean “with” or “through.” And some people think it means “through the heavens” like he talked about earlier. Jesus goes through the heavens and into the throne room of God. I don’t think so. I think that it means “with.” And I think that the reference to the greater and more perfect tabernacle not made with hands is parallel to other such verses that are used in this same sermon where we have access to God through the flesh of Jesus Christ.

Let me mention this: 10:19 and 20 says this. “Therefore, brethren, having boldness to enter the holiest by the blood of Jesus by a new and living way which he consecrated for us through the veil that is his flesh.”

Jesus is the tabernacle. Jesus with the greater and more perfect tabernacle. “Not,” you know, people say, “well, it’s not Jesus’s body because it’s—it’s not of this creation. His body was of this creation.”

Well, his resurrection body wasn’t. His resurrection body was not—you know, restricted to of this creation. It transcended it. So Jesus—with his resurrection body—not with the blood of goats and calves, with his own blood, entered the most holy place in heaven. That’s what he’s been describing for us.

“Once for all, having obtained eternal redemption.”

What’s the good things to come? Well, it all flows from eternal redemption, the forgiveness of our sins. That’s what redemption means. How is it accomplished? The ritual—it’s accomplished with Jesus bringing his resurrected body from the cross in the ascension into the holy place, bringing his blood and applying it there. The blood opens the door, as it were. You need a blood to get in. Jesus brings not the blood of bulls and calves and goats, his own blood.

And then we have two last fragments of verses here that are parallel. “The blood of bulls and goats and the ashes of the heifer, sprinkling the unclean, sanctifies for the purifying of the flesh. How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal spirit offered himself without spot to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?”

We’re back to conscience. Both sections end with conscience. So the Old Testament couldn’t do something about our consciences fully or perfectly. And when Jesus comes, now the way is manifest, and that moves something in our consciences and allows us to serve God away from dead works.

Works—any works that we do that bring death is what that means. It doesn’t mean formalistic ritual. It doesn’t mean the dead works of the law. It means any work that we do that produces death, and all of them apart from Jesus produce death.

Now, now here we go. I know this is a lot of information, but this is really pretty simple from one perspective. Look at verse 13 again. “The blood of bulls, goats, and the ash—goats and the ashes of a heifer. What’s he talking about? He is not talking about—now there’s a sense in which all the sacrificial system is linked up in this. But he’s not talking about the daily sacrifices. He’s talking about the day of atonement.

On the day of atonement, the high priest had to bring a bull for his own sins and then had to confess his sins, etc. Then he had to bring a goat for the sins of the people. That’s what he’s talking about here. So on the day of atonement—now the day of atonement was a particular kind of sacrifice. It was a purification offering. Okay? It was not an ascension offering. It was a purification or sin offering. It cleansed from sin and defilement.

And then he mentions this ashes of a heifer. Well, here we have the infamous ashes of a red heifer. And dispensationalists have talked about this—yada yada. But what you need to know is this. And in Numbers 19, there’s a ritual, an obscure ritual. But the important—and the ashes of a heifer are used for cleansing. Cleansing what? Cleansing people—not who had sinned, but people who were defiled through contact with a corpse or bones or a graveyard relationship to death. Okay?

So, so you see the specific thing he’s talking about here has to do with that element of the Old Testament—the lampstand had nothing to do with purification. The table of showbread had nothing to do with purification. Aaron’s rod had nothing to do. No, but that’s what he’s talking about—he’s focusing on that part of the liturgy that had to do with purification from sins.

And in fact, when he describes how it’s what’s going to happen there—”sprinkling the unclean.” He uses a specific word that doesn’t talk about sin. I mean, sin produces uncleanness, but all kinds of good things having marital relationships with your wife produce. And so uncleanness doesn’t mean sinfulness. It—that is part of it. But the other part is purification from the effects of the fall that are supposed to be done away with.

“Sanctifies for the purifying of the flesh.” Again, here we get it wrong. “It mean, oh, he’s just talking about the—he washed their bodies.” Well, they didn’t wash their bodies, but it purified their person is what he’s saying. He’s not saying—he’s not drawing a contrast between the first and the second. He’s drawing a comparison. Now, it’s a comparison that there is much better coming, but this was good stuff. God said, “I’m going to make you—cleanse you—not just from your sins, but from the effects of the fall in the world with bulls and goats and heifers. That’s good stuff.” And it really did purify their conscience, their person. It brought them out of uncleanness.

But now, even better, “what Jesus has done—how much more shall the blood of Christ, as opposed to the ashes of a heifer, who through the eternal spirit offered himself without spot to God, the self offering of Jesus, in the power of the Holy Spirit, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God.”

There’s the payoff. That’s the conclusion of this section of how things are better. Let’s look at it a little bit slower. “Through the eternal spirit,” you know, the animal sacrifices were burned up with fire. And the spirit of God is fire, right? So, fire is involved with the with the work of Jesus Christ. The empowerment of the eternal spirit offers himself to the Father. We’ve got a nice trinitarian sense. Enter to that last part. But he offers himself without spot. You see, he’s perfect, and he is creating a cleansed people.

And the end result of this is God has cleansed our conscience from dead works. Now, what he’s saying about this conscience is that what’s happened now is that Jesus Christ has purged and forgiven our sins. But more than that, he’s assured our consciences that we have been brought out of the old fallen world of death and into newness of life. Jesus has brought about the new creation.

He has definitively cleansed the entire world. That’s what he’s saying here. That’s the perfection that comes with Jesus Christ. That’s the beginning of the good things to come. The world has been cleansed definitively, and it will never be the same.

Now, there’s a purpose for all of this, and he’s applying it to you. The payoff of this text is that when we meditate upon Jesus—not just animals, they were great; not just, you know, the blood; not just that stuff in the old covenant—but when we focus on the means of access to God being the perfect work of Jesus Christ, he is the tabernacle. He’s the one that secures our cleansing and our forgiveness of sins with his great love for us. When we see that, our consciences come to this perfection of being relieved of guilt.

That’s the focal point of what these verses are saying. You’re to walk away today recognizing that as we meditate upon the death of Jesus Christ, he has cleansed you from all defilement. He has cleansed you from your sins. He has washed you from all defilement—contact with the old fallen dying world. You are in the new world now. That’s what you’re supposed to learn from the center of Hebrews: that you’ve been purged definitively.

Now, but it doesn’t quite end there, does it? What’s interesting about this—look at that last verse again. Verse 14. He’s cleansed our conscience, but to a purpose. What’s the purpose? “To serve the living God.”

And we’re back to that same Greek word that he’s used throughout the book really, but throughout today’s text when he talked about the service of those priests in the holy place, the service of the high priest, the divine services summed up in washings and food and drink. All those are services. That’s what it means here in the first and immediate application. The reason why—what the result of your being purged of uncleanness and forgiveness of sins—is so that you may come in through those doors, that you may minister today, that you may engage yourself in the divine liturgy, that you may enter into the service of God.

In other words, the service of God is not focused. The end result of forgiveness of sins is not forgiveness of sins. The end result of the forgiveness of sins is living a life of service to God. That’s the purpose. We get all hung up with the forgiveness of sins and make that the end point. It’s not. The forgiveness of sins, the definitive cleansing that Christ accomplished, is to a particular purpose: that your consciences may be clean so that you can with more power and efficaciousness serve the living God.

For first in worship and then in the world—and all those details now that he described: right, bread—food, so that our serving of food, our participation of the life of God can be done with clean, with clean consciences; lights, lampstand, Aaron’s rod that blossomed. Every one of you is an overseer of something. If you’re a little kid, it’s just your own little body there in your room, whatever it might be. If you’re a dad, it’s your family. If it’s a mom, it’s your kids. If you’re going to work, you’ve got some area, it’s just a little cubicle, your car—you’re an overseer.

And when you come into the worship of God, God says he is going to give you and transform you and give you more power to serve him throughout the week by empowering you with glory and a mission from him. And then, you know, in terms of the altar of incense, our prayers and dialogue with God are described. The point is all those things he describes for us are things that we get to go into, but not because we just want to stop and that’s the end of life.

Those things represent all the elements of our lives. All of the lighting, all the filling, all the forming work we’re to do in our week. The very purpose of Jesus Christ coming. And this is why it’s described of better things to come—not just once for all, but he’s changed the course of the world because our consciences now are cleansed in a way and perfected in a way that they could never be until we saw Jesus in those gospel accounts.

You see, and the purpose of that cleansing of our conscience is that Jesus has definitively rolled away the effects of the old world. He has established us in the new world. Our job, the equipping of us that Jesus has accomplished, is definitively said to be that we might serve the living God. You know, it’s interesting. You talk about offering systems and the giving of blood, and people do this and that and other religions have, you know, “you got to bring things to God.”

And you know, so much of pagan religion is trying to appease God. And now you’re pausing for a moment because you know that God has been appeased—his anger against our sin. But see, the focus today—at the center of Hebrews—is about something else, isn’t it? He’s not focusing on God’s being appeased through the blood of Jesus. That’s true. But for the Christian and for the Old Testament saint—because he draws the connection here, right?—offerings, worship is not as much about changing God’s perspective toward us. It’s about changing who we are.

It’s about recognizing and being told one more time through the liturgy of the worship that Jesus has definitively cleansed you of your sins and removed all the impact. Death doesn’t flow now. Now life flows out from us. We don’t have to worry about contact with the fallen world. In fact, we’re supposed to go out and touch it because we bring life, right? We’ve got the mightiest touch, so to speak. Now, everything flowers where the gospel of Jesus goes.

But you won’t do that if your conscience isn’t clean. You’ll hold back. You won’t serve God now, or more importantly, the implications of this into our week with a dirty conscience. The purpose of worship at the center of Hebrews is the cleansing of your conscience—is the assurance to you that your sins are forgiven and a new world has come.

And this text tells us that the perfection of that cleansing of your conscience comes from a meditation on the second person of the trinity voluntarily dying for you, offering his blood in the eternal tabernacle of God. You know, worship is drawing near. And as we’ve seen in these texts, reality isn’t here. Ultimately, reality is in heaven. And as we’re drawn close to heaven in worship, the reality is that your conscience has been cleansed.

Believe it. Trust it to the end, that you might indeed be transformed through the worship of the church and go out as fuller servants, more committed to work and serve Jesus. The problem isn’t, you know, that God needs to be changed. Somehow, worship isn’t about changing how he treats us. It’s about changing how we treat him. It’s to the purpose that we might serve him with all that we are.

And to that end, God says that the focal point for giving you the kind of commitment and strength to serve God this week is the understanding that Jesus has definitively and finally purged this world of sinfulness and uncleanness—the effects of the fall. Jesus has ushered in a new reality. We don’t draw him down to us. We go to him. We draw near to reality. It is, it is for the Christian, unreality to not have a cleansed conscience and not to serve God.

May the Lord God grant that our drawing forth in the reality of the work of Jesus for us today empower us as a mighty host for him in everything we oversee, in everything that we put our thoughts to do—the knowledge of God through his word, in all the rejoicing and community aspects that we engage in this week. May we serve God recognizing that our consciences have been cleansed by Christ.

Let’s pray.

Father, we pray that as we come forward, we would commit ourselves—more than that, that we would leap at the opportunity to serve you, Father. We thank you for serving us today by assuring us that we’ve been forgiven of our sins. And not that’s the end of it, but that’s the beginning, Lord God. And we’ve come into this service assured of your forgiveness. And then we’ve had our minds transformed, and we’re going to rejoice in community before you.

Help us, Lord—Lord God—then commit ourselves afresh to serving you in all that we do and say as we go into this week. Help us, Father, to have the pure consciences that Christ has indeed obtained for us, and because of that to have fullness of service to you.

In Jesus name we ask it. Amen.