Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript: Hebrews 10:1-18

A delightful setting for that psalm, a portion of which is in today’s sermon text in the book of Hebrews chapter 10. We are—this is the last section of this massive doctrinal section in the middle of this book. We’re going to read through and talk about verses 1 to 18. We’re continuing; remember we talked about Jeremiah 31. And that’s the way this text will conclude by referencing back to Jeremiah 31. So this is a mini sermon inside the sermon on Jeremiah 31.

And within that mini sermon, there’s a little tiny mini sermon on some of these verses from Psalm 40. And so that’s why we wanted to recite that and begin to learn this song. Well, please stand for reading of God’s word. Hebrews chapter 10. We’ll begin reading at verse 1 and read through verse 18.

For the law having a shadow of the good things to come and not the very image of the things can never with these same sacrifices which they offer continually year by year make those who approach perfect.

For then would they not have ceased to be offered. For worshippers once purified would have had no more consciousness of sins. But in those sacrifices there is a reminder of sins every year. For it is not possible that the blood of bulls and goats could take away sins. Therefore, when he came into the world, he said, “Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but a body you have prepared for me. In burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin you had no pleasure.

Then I said, ‘Behold, I have come.’ In the volume of the book, it is written of me to do your will, oh God. Previously saying, ‘Sacrifice and offering, burnt offerings and offerings for sin, you did not desire, nor had pleasure in them, which are offered according to the law.’ Then he said, ‘Behold, I have come to do your will, oh God.’ He takes away the first that he may establish the second. By that will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.

And every priest stands ministering daily and offering repeatedly the same sacrifices which can never take away sins. But this man after he had offered one sacrifice for sins forever sat down at the right hand of God. From that time waiting till his enemies are made his footstool. For by one offering he has perfected forever those who are being sanctified. But the Holy Spirit also witnesses to us. For after he had said before, “This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, says the Lord, I will put my laws into their hearts, and in their minds I will write them.” Then he adds, “Their sins and their lawless deeds I will remember no more.” Now where there is remission of these, there is no longer an offering for sin.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for your word. May the spirit speak to us today as he speaks here in this text, as he spoke to those Christians gathered together in a metropolis trying to keep the faith. May the spirit speak to us today of the realities of covenant and law. Help us, Lord God, to understand this text, to be transformed by this text. Help us to hear it. Keep our ears open. Help us to understand this text and its implications for us. And help us to be transformed by it that we may say with our savior that we have come to do thy will. In Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated.

The spirit of God speaks to us from this text in Jeremiah. First describing that there is this placing of the law in the heart and then saying, secondly, in terms of the new covenant that their sins they will remember no more. The spirit of God—may he speak to us today. May our consciences be clean. May we remember to heed the exhortations, the movements of the Holy Spirit in our lives day by day and week by week. May we not grieve that Holy Spirit. May we be sensitive to him. May the Lord God give us sensitivity today to what the spirit speaks through this word.

Law, covenant. These are the things of this text. What do you think when I say law? What do you think when I say covenant?

For the author of this sermon, as we’ll see in just a little bit here, when he says law, he thinks worship. And when he thinks covenant and when he exposits covenant to us here in this book, in this sermon, he exposits old covenant worship and then exhorts us to draw near. This is significant. We have come to the conclusion—as I said—of this massive, well not massive, this large section at the middle of this book. And you know, through my insufficiencies and a little bit of yours too, maybe, and just through the difficulty of the matter, this has not been easy going, has it? It hasn’t been for me. I’ve tried to help make it clear to you as we’ve gone along, and this section, you know, can be made clear by kind of looking at what it’s doing. But understand that this is the end of this massive section and next week Bumi Yang will be here and the week after that Ralph Smith, and when I return to the pulpit we’ll be in chapter 10 verse 19 that follows this section. We’ll be in the exhortation which is, I guess, the formal ending of the middle, but the doctrinal material will have been covered—all this material about Jesus Christ and his being the focal point of all history and his offering—that will be done and we’ll move on to exhortation in the last half of chapter 10, chapter 11. We’ll have that hall of faith, you know, and we’ll see the application of all this stuff in the lives of men of the past and what it says to us. And then we’ll move to the very specific application about business and marriage and other things, community life, heavenly living in a heavenly community here on earth in chapter 12.

So, you know, we—this is the end of this—and as typical for a man who was as skilled as this author was, the man that God used to write this sermon, he skillfully brings together and sort of synthesizes these aspects that he’s been talking about. And so the themes of the book come back here in this central part.

You’ll remember that way in the beginning of this book, in chapter one, the first four verses, the introduction, we have that description of Jesus Christ having purged our sins, sat down at the right hand of God the Father. And Psalm 2 and Psalm 110 were indicated there. He’s the heir of all things, the bright shining refulgence of God’s glory. He purges our sins being the act of creation, recreation, and he sits down at the right hand of the father. Psalm 2 and Psalm 110.

And then as we got into the next little section, a whole string of verses from Psalm 2 to Psalm 110. And then he opened up the name of Jesus Christ as Son of God, God and Son of Man. And we sang, you know, Psalm 8 as we reviewed this material. And Psalm 8 is kind of the object of his—this portion of his sermon earlier in this book. And then it moved to Psalm 95 rather warning us in chapters 3 and 4. And then in chapters 5 to 8 there was a great discussion of Psalm 110 in specific, now already opened up in the beginning of the book. It’s going to be important, important.

And then in chapters 5 to 8 he exposited Psalm 110 and Jesus Christ as a priest like Melchizedek. And then in chapter 9 he moved on to Jeremiah 31 and chapter 10 will complete that little section. So, you know, Hebrews can be thought of as this succession of talks where he brings in a significant text from the Psalter to begin with and eventually Jeremiah 31 and talks about its implications. So this is kind of finishing that up.

And then next week we’ll see—or no, three weeks—the next section of the sermon he’ll move on to a different Old Testament text: he’ll move to Habakkuk and “the just shall live by faith.” So having established, you know, the sacrificial aspects of Christ’s work and talked about that at this great central section, he then will—and saying that this is what the new covenant is—then he’ll move on to “the just shall live by faith” in verses 19 and following of this chapter.

So one more text as the book moves toward its conclusion. So, you know, it’s—we can we can grab ahold of this book. We can think of it as these series of sermons and this is the conclusion of this major section in the middle, you know, that sort of started with Psalm 110 and he returns to that obviously in today’s text, but it’s working Jeremiah 31 still, and in the middle of that he throws in Psalm 40.

So, you know what’s going on here? There’s a discussion of Jesus Christ, the priest, the offering, and where that happens, right? That’s what we’ve been talking about for a number of weeks here in the middle of this book. Jesus is a priest. So, there’s that comparison to the Old Testament priests. But then, as that developed, Jesus became not just the priest, the one who brings the offering, but then a discussion of him as offering.

Okay? And then that was described in the context of the heavenly temple. Okay? Being where reality really is. This is reality. It’s not like it’s reality and we’re non-reality. But the true reality, the meaning of all things—you know, the eschatology, we could say, of what is real in the world is found in heaven with Jesus’s finished work. And so that defines our reality, you see.

And so, you know, the price—it’s real simple. The priest brings an offering in a temple in the old covenant, the first. And in the second, the new world, Jesus, the priest, brings the offering himself into the heavenly temple to create the new world. He does away with the first that he might establish the second.

And so this text today, you know, it begins by talking about the offering again—Jesus as the offering. And then it moves on to talk about the priest. Jesus as the priest. And then it also moves on to talk about, you know, that he’s seated in the heavenly places. So these same basic themes, you see, run through this text before us today.

Now look at the text. Look at your Bibles. Look at verse 10. “By that will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.” Okay. So that’s a—that’s kind of—you know, that is the end of those first 10 verses. That’s where the first paragraph we would say ends.

And then look at look at verse 14. “By one offering he has perfected forever those who are being sanctified.” Very similar language, right? By one offering those who are being sanctified perfected forever. So the same basic message, and that’s the end of those next few verses.

And then at the end of the section verse 18: “Now where there is remission of these there is no longer an offering for sin.” So we have these markers at the end of these sections that all hook up together and yet describe these different sections. So it gives us an order to the book—it breaks this section up basically into three paragraphs in this way.

Now in relationship to this as well, we have a continuing discussion in this section of the purging of the conscience. And we’ve talked about that last week. That was back in chapter nine and that continues to be an element of this discussion as well.

One other way to think of this in connection to this central section: look at chapter 7 verse 11. Turn there in your Bibles if you could. Hebrews chapter 7 verse 11: “If therefore perfection were by the Levitical priesthood, for under it the people received the law, what further need was there that another priest should arise after the order of Melchizedek?”

So if it could have done it, then why have another priest talked about? Okay. And now turn to chapter 8 verse 7. And this is another one of those same kind of statements. Chapter 8 verse 7: “If that first covenant had been fulfilled, less then should no place have been sought for the second.”

If the first covenant could have done it, we wouldn’t need the second. If the first priest could have done it, we wouldn’t need a priest after the order of Melchizedek. And then in today’s text, look at verse 2 of chapter 10. Yeah, enough, you know, in picking up the thought of verse 1: “For then would they not have ceased to be offered, for the worshippers once purified would have had no more consciousness of sins.”

So if these things could have cleansed us, if the sacrifices would have been able to make men’s consciences clean to deal with sin, why did they have to be offered over and over? If they would have worked, they would have ceased rather to be offered.

So we have—there’s a technical expression, but that doesn’t make any difference. There are these three sort of “if this would have been the case then this wouldn’t have had to happen” statements. If the priest could have done it we wouldn’t need a priest like Melchizedek. If the first covenant could have done it or was intended to do it we wouldn’t need the second covenant. And here if the offerings could have cleansed the conscience they wouldn’t have had to be done all over again.

And then the implication is we wouldn’t have needed the final offering of Jesus. Now you see that wraps it up. Priest, covenant, and the thing being offered. So the covenant is described in terms of the priest and the offering. The law here that he talks about is that same thing. The law throughout Hebrews is used to describe the laws of worship first and foremost. And the covenant is talked about in terms of these two things going on. The priest and the offering.

And then, you know, in terms of the exposition, there’s a spatial differentiation as well that’s drawn between heaven and earth. So I guess I’m just trying to help you to see—I hope this kind of clarifies—these major elements of this book of Hebrews. You know, the major elements are this covenant, this new covenant, and the covenant involves the priestly offering of Jesus Christ as the high priest but also his paschal victim, right? Okay. Also as the offering itself, and those things were picked up here. And so it contrasts this, and you know, this first-second, first-second, first-second that goes on here over and over again.

If you look at verse nine, he said, “Behold I have come to do your will oh God. He takes away the first that he may establish the second.” Actually, the word order in the Greek is “abolished first, established second.” And so it, you know, right at the heart is this transition from first to second. Okay. First group of priests, second priest for all; those offerings, this offering; first covenant, establishment of the new covenant; first temple points to the temple in heaven.

And so he’s giving us—he’s telling us over and over and over again—that what he’s describing here, the once-for-all offering of Jesus Christ in his death and resurrection and ascension, this is the pivot point of the world. This is the pivot point of the ages. And this can be understood in terms of place, person, and the thing being offered.

And so, you know, we don’t have to—you know, it’s not really confusing. And it does it right here in this text. Let’s just look at the text then in a summary fashion and then we’ll come back and pick up some major elements.

First, verses 1 to 10. The law is a shadow of the good things to come, not the very image of the things. It’s a pattern. It’s a shadow. You know, it’s not unreal. That’s not the terminology being used. This is not Platonic. You know, the law is real. It’s addressing the offerings, but it’s not the representation of the exact representation of the real which is in heaven. So the reality—the very image of the things—is not the law.

“It can never with these same sacrifices offered continually year by year”—you hear that? Same sacrifices offered continually year by year. He’s piling it up—because of that, it couldn’t make those who approach perfect. “Then would they not have ceased to be offered? For the worshippers once purified would have had no more consciousness of sins.”

Well, you know, we wonder about that. What does that mean? And we began, you know, some thoughts about this last week. Well, let me just finish reading this and then come back to this. So he says first of all that it couldn’t produce the kind of definitive purging of the conscience. That’s what’s being said here. Consciousness is not the best of terms. It couldn’t have produced the good conscience that Christ’s sacrifice did. And he goes on to say that actually it’s even worse than that.

“But in those sacrifices there is a reminder of sins every year.” Now every year. So he’s focusing on the Day of Atonement, right? And the Day of Atonement—he said a purification, right? All that we know that. But he says, you know, actually, if you get right down to it, the Day of Atonement was not a removal of the conscience from the guilt of sin definitively. And in fact, what it really was is a reminder of sin.

Now, that’s true, you know, in terms of the fact that it had to be done every year, because you kept saying, “Well, yeah, isn’t this going to end all this blood, all these animals? Yeah, it will end, but not now. See?” And so it’s a reminder just in the fact that it’s offered repeatedly. But the Day of Atonement actually had reminders of sin built into it. It was a required—the only required fast day of the Old Testament cycle. And not only was it a required fast day, there was a required confession of sins that was to be brought forward as well. And not only that, but you know, if you think about it, why have a Day of Atonement? You’re having purification offerings every day in the temple. Well, so weren’t they really being cleansed? No, they weren’t. They were still building up somehow, right?

So the Day of Atonement—just the fact that it happens every year and then the fact that it actually has designed into the ritual confession of sin and a fasting from joy, a death in other words, and the fact that it was cleaning up what couldn’t be cleansed by the blood of bulls and goats. All these things says that the old covenant, not only did it not bring the kind of definitive purging of the conscience that we have in Christ, this side of the cross, but in point of fact, it actually was a reminder of sins.

Now, there’s some deep Christian psychological stuff going on here. And I don’t understand it all, but I do know that this side of the cross, our consciences have been purged definitively in a way that they weren’t before the cross. Now, David knew forgiveness of sins. It’s not that David didn’t understand his sins were forgiven, but he didn’t understand the depth of it. The whole—the Holy Spirit hadn’t manifested the voluntary self-offering of Jesus Christ, which is at the heart of this book of Hebrews, and that’s tied to the cleansing of our consciences definitively. We have cleaner consciences this side of the cross. That’s what this text makes quite clear.

And yeah, he’s saying that those people that were doing all that without reference to God, they’re certainly not going to have clean consciences. But everybody back then, their consciences were not as definitively purged as ours are. Okay, so that’s what he’s saying. And he’s ratcheting up the argument here from what he had said earlier. Sounds like the same thing, but now he’s saying not only did it not clean it, it actually was a reminder of sins.

“It is not possible that the blood of bulls and goats could take away sins.” They were looking forward. Well, who will take away sins? Well, then he quotes from Psalm 40: “Therefore, when he came into the world, he said, ‘Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but a body you have prepared for me.’”

Now, this is a citation of Psalm 40 that we just read responsively, but we didn’t read “a body you have prepared for me,” did we? We read “you’ve cleaned” or “you’ve opened my ears.” The quotation here is from the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament that was being used in these days. And now it is not an inspired translation, but when the author of a New Testament book quotes it in the context of that translation, in the context of Scripture, it’s the inspired word of God. Okay, why the Septuagint? And why does the author of Hebrews have no problem moving from a description in the Psalms in the Hebrew from the opening of ears to “a body you have prepared for me”?

Because the opening of ears is a synecdoche. It’s a technical term and it means several things, but what it means is a part for a whole. “You know, I want you to listen to me.” That doesn’t mean I want you to take earplugs out and just hear audibly—the sound waves hit your ear. Could mean that, and you know these kids when they grow, that’s what they start doing, right? “Well, you didn’t say I had to obey you, just said I had to listen to you.” And you say, “Well, don’t make me be a Philadelphia lawyer with you now. You know what I’m saying? We don’t mean just hear it. We don’t mean just understand it, do we, folks? Parents—no, we mean obey us. Here and obey what we mean.”

Well, it’s the same thing here in the Psalms. Somebody is coming who will have open ears, and the part for the whole—the entire body will be driven by what he hears, you see? So the ear is, by way of literary device, used to represent the whole man. See, so we are now seeing that the one will come—Jesus clearly—when he came into the world in his incarnation. Okay, when he was incarnate, he said—and I don’t understand how that works with the womb and the baby in the womb. I don’t understand that, but this is what the text says—when he came into the world he said, “Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but a body you have prepared for me.” The Father has prepared a body for the Son. The Son takes that body in the incarnation.

“In burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin you had no pleasure. Then I said, ‘Behold, I have come. In the volume of the book it is written of me to do your will.’”

You see the parallelism? This is not chiastic now; this is parallel. You know, “sacrifices you didn’t want”—”you prepared a body.” “Sacrifices you didn’t want”—”I’ve come to do your will.” Preparing a body, having open ears means obedience, okay? Obedience to do the will of the Father. And so Jesus—these words of the Psalms are put in Jesus’s mouth. He’s the offering.

Yeah, the lambs, the goats, they were not voluntarily offering themselves to God. It was involuntary. And it wasn’t a self-offering. Then Jesus is a voluntary self-offering, and is being contrasted with the blood of bulls and goats. And essentially then what he’s saying is that Jesus said that the will of the Father is what has driven all this stuff we’ve talked about in Hebrews. It’s the will of the Father in heaven that has produced Jesus’s obedience, and his obedience is being talked about.

And you know, the penultimate moment of the obedience of Jesus is his death on the cross. Now he’ll take that blood into heaven, but you see, it’s that death, the voluntary self-offering of Jesus Christ, that is being described here. And as I said before, this is what cleanses our consciences definitively. This is what makes all the difference in the world to us. This is what has made all the difference in the world. The change in the world that’s happened since the coming of Jesus Christ has been the Spirit making manifest the way of entrance into service to God. It is the self-offering of Jesus.

And now we say, you know, “I didn’t really know what those goats were about. I knew that God was going to do something for me and it wasn’t going to be me. Some of that, and I really deserve death. But now we say, ah, I see. I see the deep, deep love of Jesus, you see? I see the once-for-all act that never has to be repeated. I am definitively cleansed and purified of my sin. I see it. I see it now.”

And that makes us different people. We are different people. The world is a different place this side of this wonderful condescension of the Son to do the will of the Father by dying on the cross.

And then he explains it in verse 8: “Previously saying, ‘Sacrifice and offering, burnt offerings and offerings for sin you did not desire, nor had pleasure in them,’ he does not—that’s not a direct quote. He’s conflating here terminology used in Psalm 40. And he does it in an interesting way because when he says ‘sacrifice,’ that’s the peace offering. You know, ‘sacrifice’—the word in the Old Testament meant meal. It didn’t mean something dying. I mean it sort of did, but it meant a meal. The sacrifice is the peace offering. ‘The offering’ is referring to the grain offering here. The burnt offering—that’s an ascension. We know that in this church that burnt, you know, here it’s a holocaust, a whole burnt offering. But in the Hebrew—the Hebrew term—it’s the Olah. It’s the ascension. It’s the transformation of the person. He goes up into heaven. So the burnt offering is the ascension offering.

And ‘offerings for sin’—purification offerings. Those are the four regular offerings. You purify the worship place, the environment. You do the ascension offering connected to that would be the grain offering, and the culmination is the peace offering. So he’s saying that all four of those—part of the entire system there. These things you did not really desire, but they all pointed to Jesus and his offering on the cross. “You had no pleasure in them, which are offered according to the law.”

So now we have again the explanation that law for this man is worship. I’ll talk about that in a couple minutes.

“Then he said, ‘Behold, I’ve come to do your will, oh God.’” So the obedience of Jesus.

And so one way to look at this text is that what was being described was this voluntary, heart obedience of the true servant of God. And now you know, I said remember the way that the quotation from Jeremiah is summed up at the end of this section. How is it summed up? “Law of the heart, sins I won’t remember anymore,” right? That’s what it said in the last two verses. Law in the heart, sins remembered no more.

And that’s getting at here. Jesus comes, law in the heart. “I’ve come to do your will,” open ears, and he then does that will, and no remembrance of sin. So the new covenant formulated by Jeremiah’s description is a picture. Jesus is the new covenant. Jesus brings mankind into that voluntary service of God. He comes to do the will of God, and then he deals with our sin definitively on the cross. And so these things are being spoken of here.

And then the conclusion is: “By that will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.” Okay? So we’re cleansed. We have been sanctified. He doesn’t say we’ve been justified, by the way. He doesn’t say we’ve been justified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all. No. He says by that will we have been sanctified.

There’s a lot of brouhaha these days. “Well, justification is, you know, a point action, and sanctification is progressive and it’s ongoing, and glorification is future, and this is, you know”—it’s there’s people arguing about some of this stuff, and the Westminster Standards tend to define things that way. That’s great. That is the primary emphasis. Justification is once for all. We have right standing with God—just as if I never sinned, plus the righteousness of Christ is given to me—you know, the confessions talk this way, and that’s great. And sanctification is, you know, this growing in grace. That’s what it’s normally used in the New Testament. That is the doctrine, progressive sanctification. And there is this future glorification.

But here we clearly have a verse that refers to definitive once-for-all sanctification like it would be justification. And that bothers some people, and they start thinking, “Well, how can we get rid of that?” We don’t want to get rid of that, folks. We want to say that our justification, our right standing with God, is linked to a definitive once-for-all sanctification of who you are, a consecration to the service of Jesus Christ. We don’t want to be saved by justification and think that somehow the rest of it just sort of happens.

No, God, when he saves us, when he justifies us, sanctifies us definitively. He sets us apart to do his will. You see, this idea of, you know, lordship is completely involved in this. It says that once you’ve been saved, Jesus is your Lord. You’ve been consecrated. You’ve been sanctified definitively for the very purpose of moving ahead with that and continuing to grow in grace. So the end result of this is definitive sanctification. Okay.

So the first one: Jesus as offering. And then the second section, verse 11 and following.

“Every priest there’s lots of them. Every priest stands ministering daily and offering repeatedly the same sacrifices which can never take away sins. Now he’s going to—this is chiastic. Now he’s going to back out from where he left off. “But this man after he had offered one sacrifice for sins forever sat down at the right hand of God. From that time waiting till his enemies be made his footstool.”

So they’re standing; he’s sitting. They do things daily; he’s done it once forever. Their sacrifices could never take away sins; he has offered one sacrifice for sins. The very center of that is this Man, the incarnated Jesus Christ came to fulfill this very purpose—to offer himself once a sacrifice for sins and then to be seated at the right hand of God.

We’ve gone from Jesus as the offering, but he’s also now the priest. And that priest is now seated at the right hand of God. What a deal that is. Meditate on it. You see, we’re standing all the time in the Old Testament. Always standing. In the New Testament—there you are. You get to sit. I ought to be sitting. I have a chair up here. We’re seated, aren’t we?

The world is moving that way. Did you think about that? Yeah. You think about these texts, you know, I read these commentaries. Well, you know, the old people, up to—you know, for the most part, they were always standing, working away. Standing is always what work is about. And being seated is what rest is about and rule.

Of course, Jesus is still working. He’s making intercession for us, seated at the right hand of God the Father. I mean, that’s what the text has already told us. But, you know, it’s interesting to think about that. For most of history, men have stood to do their jobs. Agricultural workplace, right? That’s what it was. And now, for the last, you know, however many years, centuries or whatever it is—but I mean, relatively in modern times—we most of us sit to do our jobs, right? I think—I haven’t done a poll, but probably most of you men are seated when you’re doing your job. You’re not standing. I ought to make you guys that stand feel bad. You know, standing’s not bad. That kind of labor isn’t bad. But the world is moving forward.

You see, mankind and Jesus Christ is going from standing to being seated. The curse of difficult labor is being rolled back, and men are managing and exercising dominion from seated positions. The heavenly reality is working out changes in the world round about us. That’s what it is. That has implications, by the way.

If we have young men growing up and because they want to get married quick, and you know they see other guys getting married quick, and they want to get married quick and then they end up, you know, standing all the time in manual labor jobs and not being seated. Well, it’s we need craftsmen. We need guys that do that. But we need managers. We need people that are seated and ruling in their positions. We need kids—a significant number of them—with college degrees. I’m not trying to make anybody feel bad. I’m just saying that as a culture, you know, we want to move this way. We want to be like Jesus, right?

So we’re—he’s seated. The finality of the work of Jesus Christ—Christ has given to us here, and it’s a wonderful wonder. Can you imagine? You know, this is—this is supposed to be great news to the Hebrews. Yeah. You know, he’s seated. We can be seated. We can sit down and rest in the finished work of Jesus Christ. We tell you that sometimes in the liturgy, right? That’s what we do. It’s a wonderful thing. A wonderful thing.

Then it says that verse 13: “From that time waiting until his enemies are made his footstool. Wow. More great stuff. Now he comes back to Psalm 110 verse 1. Now he brings back the idea that we saw in the introduction—that having purged our sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Father. Having purified us, he equipped us for service. Having accomplished the once-for-all offering for humanity, having come and having his heart be to do the Father’s will, he takes away our sins and prepares us for rule and dominion in the world.

And that rule and dominion is—it’s going to happen progressively in time. The future orientation of this verse should just grab us, you know, by our socks and say, “Yes, that’s what we want to do. We want to see the world become Christ’s footstool.” We said last week that, you know, the blessings are for those who eagerly await the Savior. Paul said it several times in the epistles: who love the appearing of Jesus.

You know, there’s this story in Edinburgh. There’s the Greyfriars Seminary, the original Friars back in Scotland, right? There’s this cemetery, and where, you know, godly men are buried, and there was a dog that belonged to one of the—I don’t know if he was an instructor at Greyfriars or what he was, but not the dog, the man. And the dog was his pet. The dog was very loyal. Man died. Man was buried at Greyfriars Cemetery. And this dog came there every day for 14 years waiting for his master. Sat there just waiting. 14 days, 14 years. He does this. He’s still standing there. Because we got to put a statue up, which is what they did. So you can go to Greyfriars Seminary in Edinburgh and you can see Bobby—is his name. And you can see Bobby waiting for his master to show back up.

See, we’re supposed to have that kind of anticipation, eager desire to see Jesus. That’s the illustration, right? We are to be those who eagerly await the appearing of Jesus Christ. That’s what we saw last week in the text. That means we’re a future-oriented people. We’re building on what Jesus accomplished definitively. Our orientation is future, right? We’re waiting for the future. But here we see that he’s not coming back until his enemies are made his footstool.

So unlike, you know, Bobby the dog, we don’t just wait. We say we want Jesus to come. We want to see him. And so we create dominion work in the world. We try to see the world become subject to Jesus, become his footstool, through bringing him the same message that was brought to us. And so the dominion work of the church is, you know, fueled by this statement that the purification of sins has happened, and then after purging our sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Father. Psalm 110 comes back. His intention was never to just leave it that Melchizedek was a priest, but to remind us that Melchizedek was a king. That Jesus Christ is not just a priest. Jesus Christ is the King of Kings, Lord of Lords, and that the world is moving inevitably to become his footstool. That was the point all along. But we don’t get there if we don’t go through the offering of Jesus Christ.

You know, people get upset, you know, that some people—it’s—these are funny days we live in. You know, people get upset because you quote this or that commentator and they think that you must really like him a lot. People get upset because some people these days are quoting N.T. Wright, and oh, you’re going to become Anglicans, you’re going to become Roman Catholic. 20 years ago in Tyler, Texas, they had a book that they liked by Alexander Schmemann called For the Life of the World. We still use that book in this church, still give it out. Doug gave a copy to the Harmons to take back to Albania because the man who’s in charge of their mission there is Eastern Orthodox, and this is an Eastern Orthodox guy by Schmemann who had a lot of great things to say. We don’t agree with it all. But because we read a book like Schmemann and like it doesn’t mean we’re going to become Eastern Orthodox. Because we read stuff by N.T. Wright and like it doesn’t mean we’re going to become Anglican.

There’s a commentator named William Barclay, and some of you know that I quote from him occasionally. He has some really neat stuff to say about the Greek words, particularly in their meaning. But the man—I don’t necessarily think I’m going to see him in heaven. When he comes to this text, what he says is well, Jesus came as the pattern for who we’re supposed to be like, and he shows all these things and he’s produced victory. But he doesn’t talk about the centrality of the atonement of Jesus, the purging of sins through his atonement once for all that produces us then being able to image Jesus and look at him and follow in his path. Too bad. Too bad. Very bad.

There’s another commentator I could mention. Years ago, I heard Rushdoony talk about a guy named George Bush. And you know, it’s kind of funny, because Rushdoony would say, well, it’s not the president, you know, and it was a really good commentary on one of the Pentateuch books, maybe all of them, by this old commentator, I think in the 19th century, named George Bush. And so, you know, I bought a couple of his commentaries that I found in used bookstores. And then I found out a long time later, just a couple years ago, that actually he is kind of like a great-great-grandfather to our president—number one, there is a connection to the president—and number two, I found out that he was Swedenorgian. Now that’s a cult. Swedenborgians aren’t going to heaven, okay? I mean, some of them may. They’re just, you know, but he was a cultist. But when he wrote his commentaries, he needed to make money, apparently the story goes. So when he wrote his commentaries, he wrote from an orthodox perspective. And so, you know, are we going to use the commentaries of a Swedenborgian? Well, I used them for 20 years before no one was a Swedenborgian. And you know, as Rushdoony said, and he’s right, real good commentaries, good stuff to say. And if that bothers us, we just always got to remember Balaam’s ass, you know? God can use a donkey to speak truth. God’s arm is not shortened. And because we quote this or that guy doesn’t mean that we’re saying we like everything they do or a lot of what they do, or, you know, it doesn’t mean anything. And people just have to relax about some of this stuff and be kind of grown up and not worry that, you know, somehow—

I remember talking to a friend of mine years ago. He and I had reconsecrated our lives to Jesus Christ about the same time, and then he’s a missionary in Spain. And I’d see him occasionally, and we’d get together and talk, you know, and his wife was always worried when he came and talked to me. You know, there’s an expression in Spanish in Spain: “Don’t let him eat your melon,” you know, which I guess means “don’t let him,” you know, change your mind, I guess, is the idea. “Don’t let it—don’t let Tuuri, you know, that reconstruction stuff steal your mind away,” you know, and some people are afraid of that. And I guess, you know, with young people you do have to be careful, and all of us have to be cautious, using a Swedenborgian even though he’s writing orthodox or using some of these commentaries. But hey, we’re grown men, right? We’re solid. We’re established. We know the great truths of the Reformation. Building on that scaffolding, we don’t have to keep saying that, do we? If we do, that’s okay. I’ll say it over and over and over that’s what we’re doing. But as we build, the Lord God uses a lot of different kinds of men to help us understand how these texts relate to our lives.

If you’re not reading, you know, you should be reading as a Christian. But you know, so the idea here is that definitive sanctification is not something to worry us. We see it here in this text. And because this isn’t exactly the way the Westminster Standards defined it—those guys wouldn’t have, if they were here, they wouldn’t have said the only thing that sanctification is is this aggressive movement of becoming more holy. They wouldn’t have done that. They were giving you summary definitions, which are great, but they weren’t intended to be comprehensive. And here we have definitive sanctification, okay?

Then the last part: you know, as I said, every priest stands, and Jesus Christ having sat, now all of his enemies being his footstool. “By one offering he has perfected forever those who are being sanctified.” So maybe this is the ongoing sanctification. Some people think that this actually could be defined as definitive as well. I don’t know.

“The Holy Spirit also witnesses to us. For after he had said before, ‘This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, says the Lord, I will put my laws into their hearts, and in their minds I will write them.’ This is Jesus. Then he adds, ‘Their sins, their lawless deeds I remember no more.’ Now where there is remission of these, there was no longer an offering for sin.”

End of exhortation. End of sermon. End of this long sermon inside of a longer sermon. No more offering for sins. And then he’s going to warn them in the next paragraph: you reject Jesus, there’s no more offering for sins, okay? There’s no more purification going on through that system. Forget it. You’re dead meat. If you go back to that house, it’s being destroyed.

So that’s the text. That’s the overview of what it is. The focal point here is he comes to this great climactic conclusion: this one man who has definitively brought, as the priest of all priests and the offering of all offerings, he has brought, you know, purging of our consciences and equipped us for the dominion work that is now ongoing.

And if you read Psalm 40 later in your homes, you’ll see the same thing, won’t you? If you noticed or not. But what happens in that section that’s quoted here is followed then by the implications of Jesus being worked out through the destruction of enemies. You see, that’s what Psalm 40 says as well.

Now, I want to conclude with making a few points of application here. Number one: as I’ve said earlier and I’ve alluded to it a couple of times—when this writer thinks law and when this writer thinks covenant, he thinks worship. You know, the Reformers believed in lectio continua, for the most part, which meant you didn’t have topical sermons. You preached through books of the Bible. The advantage of that is that it places a yoke upon the pastor. He can’t decide to, “Oh, people would like this or people would like that.” He’s got to deal with every word, heard as he preaches through a book. And this book has had an awful lot to say about worship, right? So that’s just the way it is. And it’s instructive to us that for this man, law means worship.

And I would say that what he’s going to do now, he’s finally going to move on to the faithful lives of people who were to emulate. And then he’s going to talk about the home and business and that sort of stuff in summary fashion. But all of that: so he’s going to talk about the implications of the law for those lives, but it begins in worship. And we’ve thought this for 22 years.

If we’ve had a covenantal vision based on the liturgy of the church driving the subduing of our enemies the other six days of the week. We’ve had this for since our beginning. Howard came back in ’83, ’84, whenever it was from Tyler, Texas with what now is referred to as covenant renewal worship, and we said, “Man, that seems to fit the scriptures real well, and we’re trying to do things by the book and that seems to do it.” So that’s what we’ve been doing. You see, and we’ve never said—and we will never say—that the worship of the church automatically creates—we’ve critiqued that over and over again. In the old days, the older guys here, Rushdoony critiques it. The Eastern—I’ve talked about it several times in my sermons. The Eastern Orthodox think that you worship—some branches—you worship correctly and the world works automatically, magically, incantationally. Well, it’s not that way.

There is something mysterious and profound that happens as God cleanses, reminds us of that definitive purgation at this table, right? There’s something very significant that empowers us here. And there’s a movement in the liturgy that empowers us for mission and drives us back out so we take dominion. So we have a future orientation. That was the battle that Jesus faced in the Gospels. The whole Sabbath thing was about: are we going to cling to the past or are we going to move on to the future and build on what Jesus has done? See, so this whole future orientation is driven by the liturgy as well. It moves forward, you know, in a climactic fashion.

So we’ve always thought this way. We probably never would have—I don’t think I would have actually thought of it the way I’ve discussed it here—that law means for this man first the laws of worship, and the laws of the state and the family and the business flow out of that. But I think that’s what he’s getting at here. That’s the way he’s set about the sermon. This is what I’m bound to preach to you: these long sections about the worship and preparing people to come and worship before him. Because that’s what he’s going to do: in chapter 19, we draw boldly into the holy place, right? So he’s going to go back to the worship thing so that we might live then lives changed.

So that’s what he’s going to do. The Ten Commandments moves the same way, right? It begins, you know, no other gods, no idols. “Don’t worship the way you want to worship.” And then it moves toward having a full witness in the world, and that leads to Sabbath rest. Or we could say the first four lead to that Sabbath rest, and then the next ones are applications in the world. But even if we take the first three—you know, it moves in terms of worship in the second commandment to then the witness in the world that’s to flow out of worship.

This is what we believe for over 20 years in this church, and it’s driven, you know, a lot of ministry and service. And it’s going on here as well. So, you know, I don’t know, you know, all this stuff swirling about liturgy and stuff, but we’re doing the same thing with some minor, you know, the maturation around the edges, like we always try to do. We put in a salutation and response in our liturgy a couple of years ago because, you know, it seems like when we come into God’s presence, we just want to say, you know, “Praise God,” you know, so we have that going on first before the confession of sins.

But for the most part, this is what we’ve believed: that the liturgy changes us. The officers of the church take on themselves the yoke of this liturgy. We can’t decide to do communion first next week and jazz it up that way. We take on the yoke of the liturgy. The liturgy moves us in a particular way and prepares the army of God.

There’s a great movie—uh, I can’t recommend it because there is some bad speech in it. No nudity—it’s called Around the Bend. And this old man dies. And the way he produces reconciliation in the three generations of men under him is he makes them, in order to get their will, he makes them go to a KFC, Kentucky Fried Chicken, eat a meal together, and then go through a ritual where they blow his ashes and the ashes of his dog. They got to stir them together. Then they blow them here, and it’s like three or four places they got to do this. And he set it up so that by the end of this sequence there’ll be healing. That’s what he hopes, and I’m not going to tell you if it happens or not.

The idea is to bring reconciliation among people and prepare them then to be a solid family that produces something in the world. And he does it through a ritual action. They have to eat at the KFC each of these three or four places before they blow the dust. And one of the sons says, “Oh, we don’t need to eat at the KFC. It’s closed.” They get their lunch. Forget it. And the older—the older—the guys—first son, the oldest man in this group of three generations—he says, “Now look, Jack never asked me to do anything for him, but he asked me to do this. And he told us this is the way he wants it done, and we’re going to do it.”

And through following the liturgy that the man had established, you know, this is how the old man wants to achieve equipped conscientiousness men. That’s the purpose of it: to cleanse consciences. And I tell you, you know, that’s what it is here. You can do what you want the rest of your lives. You can choose what vocation—what, you know, if you’re going to get involved in politics, your recreation, your wife, all your husband, all that stuff. All kinds of choices God gives you. And he brings you here and says, “For two hours, this is the way it’s going to happen. There’s a ritual, and we submit to that ritual, and we become the army of the Lord Jesus Christ, formed up. We drill for two hours every week. Is that too much for you? I hope not. Think of the great freedom with the rest of our lives.

But God has us do drill for two hours in this process of seeing that all these offerings of the old covenant are all fulfilled in the wondrous work of Jesus Christ, who has purified us, transformed us, receives all the work that we’ve done—through our offerings. We’ve changed the world. We brought the world in, and, you know, in our representation of gifts to God. He said, “That’s great work doing dominion work out there. I accept your tribute. Have a meal with me and each other. Let’s sit at peace and reconciliation at the end of the ritual.” It forms us up.

So: law, worship, which produces then the world.

The other thing I want to talk about is the ear. Jesus has an open ear, which means obedience. Young people, you know, Shema—have open ears to hear your parents. Jesus has the—definitively purged our sins—that we may be like him, that we may have open ears, circumcised ears, to hear, to do the will of the Father. A body he has prepared—a church and individual members of that church, you and I. He’s prepared our bodies, and he wants us to follow the Savior, having a cleansed conscience in service.

He drew near so that we can draw near and worship so that we can do what he does. He says, “I’ve come to do your will in all things. So that when we leave here, we have reconsecrated ourselves afresh to have open ears to do the will of the Father.”

Now, what that means practically is: how does Jesus speak to us? And you know, we’ve talked about this a lot, but an awful lot of the way he speaks to us is through other people. Children—have open ears. A body God has prepared you to do those chores that mom and dad want you to do. And when you do them, you’re following in the footsteps of Jesus Christ. Parents—have open ears to your authorities. There’s authority structures that go on. But, you know, we’re supposed to listen to our children sometimes, too. And if we’re trying to live out a lifestyle of consistency for our children, we entreat us about things that we’re doing wrong. We want to have open ears to obey, to hear the voice of Jesus coming to us through our children.

And we want to have open ears to one another—each other, right? To one another, to hear from one another the will of God. I had a delightful meeting last night. Got together over at Prentice’s house. I don’t know, six or seven men. Talked about the future of the church. Talked about where we’re at, where we’re going. Man, it was great. Loved it, because everybody was having open ears to hear what Christ was telling them from each other, and understanding that they had things to contribute to the conversation. Wonderful. We’ve got plans to make for the future.

This text points us to the future. We got plans to make. We’re going to have an extra $50,000 next year if we get this building paid off, right? What are we going to do with it? The elders are not going to make that decision in isolation. We want to hear Jesus by hearing you. Well, lots of conversations, you know, sitting around living rooms with or without adult beverages, whatever it might be—tea, whatever it is—we want to get together. We’ve always had this vision, right? And how are we going to implement it in this next stage? You see, we want to have open ears with bodies ready to obey God in the calling that he’s given us to do. We want to be confident to move toward the future.

I mean, the entire purpose of the cleansing of our conscience is that we might serve God, yeah, for drill time for two hours, but then we’re drilling for a purpose—to take that obedience that we might in everything that we are and do and say, be servants of God the way Jesus was, right, and is. And if we do that, you see, then we’re moving toward that day when we are—when we’re we can eagerly anticipate Jesus’s return. We want that. We want that.

But it’s not going to happen. He has said that he is seated until all his enemies be made his footstool. There’s a definitive culmination of the thing when he returns. But between here and then, there is an appearing of Jesus in the work of Jesus Christ in his church. My wife goes someplace and does something. There’s a there’s an appearance of me, so to speak, right? Your children represent you. Very interesting to see how our children represent us. They do. We’re representing Jesus Christ here. We’re bringing Jesus Christ to this world. We are doing that dominion thing throughout the week in everything that we do and say.

It begins in worship and then drives itself out into the world in mission and accomplishment. That’s what this central section of Hebrews says. That’s what it’s all about. The new covenant is Jesus Christ. The law begins in the Lord’s service and moves out then to have implications for all of our lives. And it creates a future-oriented people who are willing to make plans, make, you know, have discussions, make decisions about the future in terms of what will be effectual for us being that body prepared by Christ as the church here at Reformation Covenant Church to do the will of our Father in Heaven.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for this day. We thank you, Father, for your love for us. We thank you for the tremendous blessing to see the work of Jesus Christ this side of the cross, his voluntary self-offering. Thank you, Lord God, for the assurance we have that our sins are forgiven once for all. We’re not just justified, Lord God, definitively. We’re sanctified definitively as well. We thank you for that. Thank you for the peace, the confidence, the courage, the boldness that should give us.

Help us to be those men who are peaceful and yet courageous and bold, willing to talk with one another frankly and hear things frankly from one another to the end that we might be mutual encouragements to each other in the faith of our Savior as we seek to continue to grow in our effectiveness for service where you’ve planted us.

Lord God, we draw together on this mountaintop. We come up out of the wilderness of Oregon City, out of the wilderness of Vancouver, out of the wilderness of the west side in Beaverton where horrible things are going on, where marriages are falling apart, divorce is happening, people are planning abortions, sex shops allowed by our Supreme Court in this state, Lord God. We’re ashamed of the places we live. It’s wilderness, Lord God. But we know that you’ve drawn us up out of that today to show us what the reality of the future is.

Now help us, Lord God, as we go back changed into that wilderness to do what’s effectual, proper, and fitting to change that wilderness itself into the garden, to bring those people who hear the word of the Lord Jesus Christ who died, Lord God, for his people. Help us to transform that wilderness into a garden. We thank you for this place.

But as the disciples wanted to just rest there on the Mount of Transfiguration, Jesus said, “No, there’s demon-possessed children at the bottom of this mountain. You need to go help them.” Father, help us every Lord’s Day to recognize the mission you send us forth to—to go back into our lives, transforming them through repentance of sin, through empowerment to serve Jesus Christ, to have open ears to one another, to our authority figures, to those that are under us—to have open ears to hear from Jesus how we would obey him today.

We thank you for these things and commit ourselves afresh to you now. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.