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I love reading stories about old preachers, old evangelists, old missionaries. You probably know the story of John Wesley, or maybe you haven't heard it, so let me tell you. He was on his way home one Sunday night from a preaching trip.
And it was dark, and he was walking through the woods, and a robber came and stole all his money. The only thing Wesley had was some Christian literature and the money, and the robber took the money. And as the robber was running off, Wesley said, stop, I have something more to give you.
With a surprised look, the robber paused. My friend, you may live to regret this sort of life. If you ever do, there's something to remember. The blood of Jesus Christ cleanses from all sin. The blood of Jesus Christ cleanses from all sin.
If you haven't noticed, Christianity is a bloody religion. Matter of fact, I could take this Bible and basically say it's been baptized in blood. One English translation has 408 times the word blood. If you're a child today and you want to know what the sermon's about, the answer is with one word, blood.
If you read Leviticus, by the way, just out of curiosity, I think the visitors for the first time today would find this interesting, how many people read the book of Leviticus this week? Wow, if I ever walked around a church and found that many people reading Leviticus, I wouldn't know what to think.
Good job, by the way. We asked last week that everyone read Leviticus. It doesn't take many chapters before you begin to say there is blood everywhere, and lots of it. Christianity is a bloody religion, seeping with blood.
The book of Hebrews, 19 times, blood, and in my opinion, Christianity today is going through kind of a spiritual anemia. We have an inadequate and insufficient view of the blood of Christ Jesus. We have too high a view of trying to get to heaven by being good.
I think we also, in evangelical circles, have a little spiritual sickle cell anemia, where you've got this kind of weird shaped particle of blood that manifests itself in Christian churches today with philosophy and psychology and pragmatics, post-modernism.
I also think maybe there's a little bit of spiritual leukemia floating around churches where we have the blood of Christ whitewashed with a consumer mentality. I come to church for what I get. So what do we do about that?
Well, I'll tell you what some liberals do. They just let even more blood. They just get rid of more blood. I studied bloodletting this week. I never thought I'd be a pastor and study bloodletting. Can you imagine when you used to be sick, they would basically have phlebotomists take blood away from you.
That's how George Washington, by the way, even died. You've got a problem, let's take more blood away. And if we can't find any surgeon to get rid of the blood or barber to get rid of the blood, we'll just get a lot of leeches and attach those to your system and we've got to get rid of the blood somehow.
But for Christian circles today, what we don't need is more bloodletting. We need to understand really what blood is in the Bible. And why don't you turn your Bibles to the blood bank of the Bible, Hebrews.
This is one of the most bloodiest books in the Bible. And I'm not talking about wars in the name of Christianity because of blood. I'm talking about blood because there has to be bloodshed for the sacrifice so sins can be remitted, forgiven.
And basically, this is going to be a big IV transfusion of blood. You're going to just get about three pints of blood today through the book of Hebrews. Ten times even in chapter nine, blood, blood, blood, blood, blood, blood.
I've lost count. A bunch of more bloods. Everything about it is about blood. And you have to understand blood or you don't understand Christianity. If you don't understand blood, you may have a portion of Christianity, but you really understand, you need to understand what blood is.
And if I just backed up a little bit and talked about Judaism, you'd know very quickly in Genesis chapter three, when Adam and Eve sinned, there was bloodshed. God shed the blood of the animal and then took the skin and covered Adam and Eve.
You could go to Passover, couldn't you, in Exodus chapter 12. And what would you find there? What would you have to put over the doorpost so the death angel would not come and annihilate the family? Blood.
What would happen in the day of atonement in Leviticus chapter 16? What was necessary to be sprinkled and put everywhere? Blood. It doesn't take long for us, if we think like a Jew or if we think like a Christian, to say to ourselves, there is blood everywhere.
And basically what I want you to do today as we look at the book of Hebrews is to have kind of a blood film over your eyes. So everything you see, you see through blood. Here comes an operating room story.
And you know it had to fit its way in here. I'm standing there, and I usually don't get too close because I'm not allowed to touch the patient. I'm just telling the doctors how to use this particular laser and how to do the surgery.
That's a scary thought in and of itself. I don't do that anymore. But I would stand there, and just so I wouldn't touch anything and touch the sterile field, I just put my hands behind my back. And some procedures were very bloody, total hips.
There's blood just flying everywhere, and you have to have some kind of protection on your eyes. But lots of other procedures, you don't need it. And so I'm just standing there. It was just, I don't know what procedure it was.
I've seen thousands. And all of a sudden, as the doctor's going in with a scalpel, you know, you think if you open up the skin, it bleeds everywhere. But it only bleeds where there are blood vessels. But he went a little deeper and got a bigger blood vessel.
And before I knew it, that bleeder is shooting right up and into my face and on my eye, in my eye. So I immediately went and got my eyes flushed out and did all those things. And that was probably, I don't know, 18 years ago.
I'm hoping that the book of Hebrews is going to give you that blood film in your eye. That's what I'm after today. Like, what does this have to do with anything? I have no idea, but I want you to be interested in the message.
Kind of sounds like this blood theme we're working to. You see, because if we don't understand blood, we don't understand sin. You ask yourself the question, why do we struggle with the definition of sin in America and in evangelical churches?
We can take a step back and we don't understand how insanely hideous sin is against God, treason against God, and something has to be done to take care of it, and that is blood. And if we see the problem, sin, but we don't know the solution, blood, we're in big trouble.
Listen to this man. He understood sin and he understood, therefore, the need of blood. And as I read this, ask yourself the question, do you ever talk like this? Have you ever talked like this? I've had a vastly greater sense of my own wickedness and the badness of my heart than ever I had before my conversion.
It has often appeared to me that if God should mark iniquity against me, I should appear the very worst of all mankind, of all that have been since the beginning of the world to this time, and that I should have by far the lowest place in hell.
This great writer said, my wickedness as I am in myself has long appeared to me perfectly ineffable and swallowing up all thought and imagination like an infinite deluge are mountains over my head. I do not know how to express better what my sins appeared to me to be than by heaping infinite upon infinite and multiplying infinite by infinite.
Very often for these many years, these expressions are in my mind and in my mouth, infinite upon infinite, infinite upon infinite. When I look into my heart and take a view of my wickedness, it looks like an abyss infinitely deeper than hell.
Jonathan Edwards, he knew what sin was like, and therefore he knew of his great need of the Savior who spilled his blood in the place of sinners. And the connection is always there, and as we dive into the book of Hebrews, you'll see this foundational basis for Christianity, whether you're a Jew or a Gentile, that you must understand, and that is the blood of Christ Jesus.
Well, just to give you a little background, we've been going through the book of Hebrews, and this is week three. I thought I could do it in four weeks, but last week I just preached five sermons in 50 minutes, and so we'll just slow down a little bit, just as many weeks as it takes us.
We'll just slowly work through so we can understand it. And we're out of the Sermon on the Mount just for these few weeks, and we're in the book of Hebrews because it's foundational for your way, for all ways to think about God.
And it exclaims one central truth. Who can just say it out loud? The key truth, the key theme to the book of Hebrews is superiority of Christ. Jesus is superior. He's superior to all kinds of covenants, people, things, angelic beings.
He is superior. You say, well, I don't really know why that would matter, if He's superior or not. I believe that if you say to yourself, I believe Jesus is superior, you can't be the same person as you used to be before you made that declaration in your mind.
I think it incarnates itself into service, with heart attitudes, with desires of worship and thanksgiving. It will change you, and if you're not changed, then today maybe you need to hear again about the superiority of Christ.
I just did a little research with the elders. I could pick several families, but let's simply pick one. They don't know I'm picking them, but Scott and Karen Brown. I just asked Steve Cooley, what do they do around the church?
Not that they didn't do much, but I knew they did a lot. Sunday school, IBS instruction, praise team, parking lot, admissions committee, IT department, budget committee, AWANA. Did I miss anything? Why would people do that?
By the way, they don't get paid. They have full-time jobs. Scott goes to work in the morning, and Karen wakes up at work, right? Full-time jobs, and you say, these people are basically full-time employees of the church.
How do you live like that? What do you do? What motivates people? And I would say the Browns, by the grace of God and the illumination of the Spirit of God, they understand Christ is superior. I don't serve people.
I don't serve the church. Ultimately, I serve Christ Jesus, and if He is this superior and has condescended in amazing grace to save me, then I will respond with service. So as we're looking here, I want you to say to yourself, if I'm not serving, if I'm not engaged in the life of the church, and certainly we have new people, you're not plugged in yet, but there's ways to serve other Christians outside the local building here.
You ask yourself the question, I don't really think Jesus is superior if my life doesn't show it as we love our neighbor as ourselves. They're hooked together. You can't say Jesus is superior and live the way you live, because I'll say to you, look at your life and I'll tell you what you believe.
And so what I want, I don't want anybody to leave the church, but what I want is I want everyone here who is here to say, I believe Jesus is superior so much that I'll love other people. We're running out of space.
This is a wonderful problem. And I want all those people sitting in the pews to say, I am going to serve Christ Jesus in this local community because he is superior and he has saved me. If not, the pressure is never going to let up because we're going to keep preaching a high view of God and this high view of God who is all powerful, all holy, immutably powerful will change you.
You won't be the same person you were last year. All right, back to Hebrews. Jesus is superior and it makes every difference in the world that you view him as superior. Now, in the book of Hebrews, five things are entities that Jesus is superior to mixed in with how many warnings?
Five warnings. Easy to remember, five and five. And so we're up through chapter seven. And so we'll just quickly, with a little bit of new things thrown in, catch up one through seven, and then we'll dive into chapter eight and see that Jesus is superior to the new covenant.
This week, somebody told me that since the series began here on Sunday morning about Hebrews, the person said, I've fallen in love with the book of Hebrews. I hope that's you too. I've fallen in love with it.
I need to study it more. I can't wait to learn. It's one of those things, even when you teach your kids or teach yourselves, hard things are by definition difficult, but they give great rewards once you've studied them and you've done the hard work.
Nothing comes easy. Nothing that's good comes easy. Here's the same thing. And it's not that difficult a book. Once you realize there are five things, our people, our entities that Jesus is superior to, and then the five warnings.
And you don't need to know who wrote the book. Maybe it was Luke. Maybe it was Barnabas. Maybe it was Clement. I think it was Paul. Orton said, the only person who knows who wrote this book is God. Fair enough.
But I don't want you to be unfamiliar with this book. I want you to be familiar with the book that says Jesus is superior chapter one to 10, 18, and then it should change your life. Chapter 10 verse 19 and following.
And Jesus is greater and he's better. First of all, he's greater than the Old Testament prophets. Chapter 1 verses 1 through 3. Prophets were great. Prophets were wonderful. You probably have some favorite prophets who would speak for God.
The definition of a prophet would be one foretelling or foretelling the truth of God. And you'd say, that's an amazing thing to study the life of Elijah, Elisha, Moses, the greatest prophet, to study these prophets and think there's a better prophet than all of those and his name is Jesus.
And when you read the text, God did speak in chapter 1 verse 1 through prophets. But in these last days, verse 2, we're in the last days, post-resurrection and ascension of Christ. He has spoken to us in his son.
He's more excellent. He's better. And he has the credentials to prove that from purification of sins to seated at the right hand of, to being seated at the right hand of the father. Not only is he better than prophets, but number two, he's better than, who could tell me?
Angels. Excellent. He's better than angels. By the way, if you write in the margins of your Bible, you'd always remember this outline. This is not my outline. This is the text outline. Very logical. He's better five different ways, five different warnings.
He's better than angels and angels are wonderful, supernatural, very powerful, but they're not sons and Jesus is a son. And these angels actually worship Jesus and Jesus is called by the father God. And because of this first and second demonstration of Jesus's superiority, there's a warning.
You can't just learn that and not do anything about it. Chapter 2 verses 1 to 4. And that warning is you should pay attention. You should not drift away from what you've learned. There has to be a response.
And the response is, I believe that. And I affirm that Christianity offers the truth. Number three, found in chapter 3 verse 1 through chapter 4 verse 13, Jesus is superior to Moses. You can almost see the way the writer's going.
I'm going to have to talk about Jesus is better than Aaron. But how can I talk about Aaron until I talk about Moses? Jesus is better than Moses. And remember, he's talking to the Jews. And so he doesn't say Moses was a sinner and Moses was a bad guy and Moses killed that guy.
All those are true. Moses certainly was redeemed by the grace of the triune God. But he starts off a little bit wiser. And he just basically says Moses did a great job, but he's not the architect of the building.
He's just the builder. Jesus is better. And because he's talking about Moses, he says in chapter 3 verse 7 through 19, with warning number 2, don't defect. There is a consequence to not believing this.
This is not like school where you just audit it and say, oh, that's nice to know. This is world religion class and now I know the Buddhists believe this and the Neo-Astrianism people believe this. And the Baha 'is learn this.
Good, it's just all there in my mind. No, this is information that presses. You can read a cookbook and it doesn't stick its arm out to say you've got to cook cookies. You just read it. You can hear the writer through the spirit of God saying you have to believe this.
Not your wife, not your kids, not other people in the church, but you. You are going to stand before God. Every one of you will stand before God and he will say, do you love my son and who he is? There's consequences to unbelief.
And if you look at chapter 4 verse 2, it's not just head knowledge, but it's complete being knowledge. You have to receive the intellectual knowledge by faith. Verse 2 of chapter 4. For indeed we have had the good news preached to us just as they had also.
So there's intellectual hearing and listening and preaching. But the word they heard did not profit them. How do you have the word of God not profit you? Many reasons, but here in chapter 4 verse 2, because it was not united by what?
Faith. You have to not just intellectually believe it, but you have to believe it with your entire body. After all, demons believe things, don't they? Demons believe intellectually that God is one. They believe our statement of faith.
They believe the book of Hebrews. And they are even emotionally engaged. The demons even believe and what? Shudder, tremble. It's an emotional shake. They intellectually know. They emotionally shake. And are any demons going to ever be in heaven?
No, there's something that says saving faith must contain intellect, must contain emotions. But it's got to be tied in with the will. Everything you have. And so he says we'd better be afraid and we'd better be diligent.
Verse 11 says we'd better be diligent to enter that rest, chapter 4, lest anyone fall through following the same example of disobedience. So how do you know if you're a Christian or not? Who knows? Do the elders know?
Do people know? Does my family know? No, the word of God is the ultimate x-ray machine to know for sure if you're really a Christian. Chapter 4, verse 12. It, with objective standards, with intense microscopic analysis, shows who's really got the faith that is more than just lip service to God.
For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged surgeon's scalpel, sword, and piercing as far as the division of the soul and spirit, joints and marrows. And what does it do? It's able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.
So we say to ourself, all right, we have to believe that. We have to believe that. There's no other option. And he says in chapter 5, Jesus is superior to Aaron. He's superior to Aaron. Jesus had to be appointed.
Aaron was appointed. Jesus had to be compassionate. Aaron is compassionate. And then he says in chapter 5, verse 11, don't fall away. Here's the third warning. 511 to 612, don't fall away. Move forward.
Wherever you are now, continue to move forward. And lots of times he was talking here to the Jews who knew some intellectual things about Jesus, who were kind of on the edge of their seats to believe, and he said, you've got to move forward.
You can't go back. You're going back to nowhere. And if you take all the truth claims about Jesus and say, forget about it. I'm not going to believe it. I've got my own immoral life to live. And basically that's one of the main reasons why people don't believe, is because they love to sin.
And who wants to have this book that messes your conscience up? But if you know it all, verse 6 of chapter 6, and still say no, these kind of people, it's possible to read chapter 6, verse 6, and say this, and then they have fallen away.
It is impossible to renew them again to repentance, since they again crucify to themselves the Son of God and put Him to open shame. He's not talking about losing your salvation. He's saying if you know everything about salvation and you're not a Christian, and you say, I'm turning my back on Jesus, there's no other option for you.
Buddha's not going to save you. He couldn't save himself. Brigham Young's not going to save you. He couldn't save himself. But we have things about salvation, chapter 6, verse 9, but beloved, things that accompany salvation.
And then he says wonderfully in chapter 6, verse 19, we have the anchor of our soul. Who's the anchor? Chapter 6, verse 20, we have this Jesus who's entered as a forerunner, having become a high priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek.
I did a little study on forerunner. Listen to this, you're going to like it. The harbor of Alexandria was very difficult to approach. When the great corn ships came into it, a little pilot boat was sent out to guide them in.
It went before them and they followed it as it led them along the channel to safe waters. The pilot boat was called a forerunner. In the Roman army, the forerunner was the reconnaissance troops. They went ahead of the main body of the armor to blaze the trail and ensure that it was safe for the rest of the troops to follow.
And then the commentator ties everything together by saying, these two things illustrate that Jesus is saying about himself in this passage that he goes first to make it safe for those who follow. He blazed the way to heaven and to God that we might follow in his steps.
That's the argument of Hebrews. Then we come to this chapter, chapter 7, Melchizedek. And if you're not careful, you'll do what most kids do and most adults do too. They just go, Melchizedek. I'll get to that another week.
I don't even know how to pronounce it. I was told how to pronounce it in Hebrew last week, but I've already forgotten, so I'm just going to stay Anglicized with Melchizedek, this righteous king. Now, without even looking at my notes, let me just see if I can explain it and we'll get to the new stuff.
If you're going to be a king, you've got to come from the tribe of Judah. Is Jesus a king? He's from the tribe of Judah. But if you're going to be a priest, you've got to come from the line of Levi. And if you're a Jew listening to this speaker, this sermon, you're going to say Jesus was from Judah, but he wasn't from Levi.
How can Jesus be a high priest if he's not from the tribe of Levi? So that's the argument here. He's a king from Judah, but how can he be a priest when he's not from Levi, from the loins of Levi, the Levitical priesthood?
So here's what happens. Now, stay with me here, and then we're going to move on. And remember, chapter 5 kind of ends by saying, you should know plenty about Melchizedek, but you're too immature to get it now.
We'll talk about it later. So at the risk of pushing your immaturity buttons, listen so that you don't say, I don't care about Melchizedek, because that's what the immature do. So be mature with me. Let's all be together here.
Here's Melchizedek. Melchizedek was before Moses. Yes? Before Mosaic law, before there was a law to say you've got to be from the tribe of Levi to be a priest. Melchizedek was before all that, yet he was a high priest.
Remember? Remember? Genesis chapter 14, Abram goes out, he takes 318 mighty men, he kills the four kings, he rescues Lot, comes back, and on his way back, God sends a priest to give him blessings, to say, that was right, that was good.
Here's this priest who mediates between God and this man Abram, and this man's, this priest's name was Melchizedek. And Abram knew he was a priest because he gave him tithes. Abram knew he was a priest because he was blessed by him, giving the blessings of God as a mediator to Abraham.
And Moses knew he was a priest because Moses is writing by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. So, what's that mean? You can be a priest, not out of Levi, as long as you're a priest according to the order of Melchizedek, which is before Mosaic law, and he's still a high priest.
And he's trying to tell, the writer of Hebrews is trying to say, Jesus can be a priest even though he's not from Melchizedek. That's what he's trying to say, that's all. That whole chapter 7, that Jesus is a priest according to a different order, not Levitical, but pre-Levitical Melchizedekian priesthood.
By the way, if you look at chapter 7, verse 11, we don't even need the Levitical law anymore. Why? Verse 11. Now, perfection was through the Levitical priesthood. If you can get to heaven through the Levites, we know you can't.
What further need was there for another priest to arise according to the order of Melchizedek, and not be designated according to the order of Aaron? What further need was there for another priest to arise in the order of Melchizedek?
In other words, if you can be perfect before God's eyes, and have saving faith because of what the Levites did, then we don't need Melchizedek. But since you can't be perfect based on the killing of animals, you need another better priest, and his name was Melchizedek, and that's who Jesus is.
The law goes when the priesthood goes. By the way, verse 22, it says that Jesus had become the guarantee of a better covenant, a covenant that can make you perfect in God's eyes. In summary, this chapter talks about you can be a priest and not be a Levite.
That's all it's saying. And all the Jews listening would have gone, oh, I get that, I see how that goes. Jesus is superior to everything and everyone, number 5, chapter 8. Number 5, chapter 8 through 10.
Jesus is superior to the old covenant ministry. He's superior to the prophets, he's superior to the angels, he's superior to Moses, he's superior to Aaron, and he's superior to the old covenant ministry.
If I say covenant to you, what do you do? You go, covenant? It's a rock band with Christian lyrics. No. If I said covenant to the Jews, if this writer said covenant to the people, they'd all go, that's our language.
We talk covenants and we talk testaments. And now this writer is going to say because of Jesus, your old covenant, your constitution of the United States of America is gone. We're not keeping part of it.
We're not keeping the preamble. We're not keeping any of the governmental constitution of the United States with the Bill of Rights or anything else. We're not just keeping the good stuff. We're not keeping the stuff that applies to today, kind of transcultural stuff.
It is gone. This is going to be crushing to these readers. But Jesus is offering a more excellent ministry. And you say, again, why do I get bogged down in all this? If I were you, I'd be praying this.
God, A, help me to understand this, and B, make me different because I know it. We have deacons for reasons, and one of the reasons we have deacons is so you see a model of service incarnate, people who have captured their minds with Jesus is superior.
You know, Jesus is superior to this old covenant because the priest used to have to be in the tent or in the tabernacle or in the temple, and where does Jesus do his priestly function? On earth. He does it in heaven.
Look at verse 1 through 5 of chapter 8. Jesus in his new covenant is better because he's in the presence of God. Now, the main point in what has been said is this. Don't you like it when a writer does that?
We have such a high priest. You want to talk about Moses, Aaron, Melchizedek, you go, I don't get it, all right? Here's what we do get, main point. We have a high priest who has taken his seat in the right hand of the throne of the majesties in heaven.
He's done slaying animals, and he's sat down. His work is finished. At Calvary, it is finished. He did everything that needed to be done. Nothing else needs to be done. He doesn't need to come back and do it again.
He doesn't have to be re-sacrificed in the mass. Nothing has to happen. He is done, and where is he now that he's done? Back in the tent? No, he is in heaven. He's a better priest because he's a heavenly priest.
And you know what? He's also a better mediator. Look at verse 6. This ministry has given him a better mediatorial work, but now he has obtained a more excellent ministry, by as much as he is also the mediator of a better covenant, which has been enacted on better promises.
Let's talk about this for a minute. I think this will be helpful and insightful. Mediators. When I see that word, what do you think about? Mediator. Maybe somebody's on strike. Baseball players are on strike, and there's the union, and they're the owners, and you've got to get together and sit at a table and have a what?
Kind of an arbitrator and a mediator. A mediator says, there's a person over here, an entity. There's an entity over here, and I will be in the middle, and I'll try to bring them together. Jesus is that mediator between people.
And think why we need to have such a great mediator. Don't miss this. Can you imagine God on this side saying, now I'd kind of like to get together with these people. I think I know how to do it. I think if I'm just a little less holy, so I'll give on some of my holiness.
We've got to meet in the middle. And so let's see, what do I have to offer? I won't be quite as holy. I won't hate sin as much as I do. I won't be quite as righteous. I won't be quite as good. I won't be quite as knowledgeable.
I'll give up some of my knowledge about some other sin. And you know, there's that one attribute that I have that really drives everybody crazy, and that's immutability, meaning I don't change. Because if I'm holy, that's one thing, but if I never cease to be holy, that's another.
Righteousness on occasion is good, but totally, with finality, based on my essence in person, righteousness, I kind of have to give a little bit on these things, and so I'll give. Then you have the humans.
They want to be right before God. They want to be to heaven, go to heaven. And the humans go, all right, what do we have on the table? Well, you know, God, we just won't lust as much. We'll kind of put that over here.
I'll be better. Last time I blew my temper, I won't do that again. I'll be better at work and have better thoughts, and I'll be a little more holy and a little less sinful, and let's just meet in the middle.
What would happen to that arrangement if these two parties just kind of had no mediator? There's no God. There's no hope. This is a big lie. So Jesus comes, and He is not just fully God, completely holy, completely righteous, completely all-powerful, eternal, but He also, in time, 2 ,000 years ago, added a nature, and that nature was the human nature, and He cloaked Himself with human nature that He'll keep forever.
Before He had no human nature. Now He has human nature, but it was a human nature like our nature. It wasn't exactly our nature, correct? It was like ours because He had fingers and a respiratory system, et cetera, but it wasn't exactly like it because we have been tainted by sin, and Jesus wasn't.
So now you have this mediator. He is fully God without compromising any of His deity. He keeps all His attributes all the time, immutable, eternal, sovereign, righteous, wrathful, kind, and then He's also human, so He can represent humans, and He knows that they're weak, that they get tired, and He knows intellectually certainly about their sin, but He in His body has never sinned, never sinned, never sinned at all.
So Jesus comes, and can He be a true mediator between man as a man, and can He be a mediator between man and God as a God, completely God, and yet He's God and man? And what's the answer? Is Jesus a better mediator than Moses, than Aaron, than any of the other high priests, 84 of them or whatever they counted, from Aaron to the New Testament times, whatever the number is.
Every one of them could only represent what? Themselves and needing the forgiveness based on God's future sacrifice, and God couldn't do anything except look forward to the cross. So who's the better mediator?
Aaron? You Jews are sitting there thinking, who are reading Hebrews, the writer of Hebrews is saying, you can't be saying, go Moses, go Aaron, I'm going to put a stake in the ground with Melchizedek and these other people.
No, you need Jesus because He is fully God, and fully man, and that's why Paul writes in 1 Timothy 2, that we have one mediator between man and God, the man, Christ, Jesus. He's a better mediator. Why do you want to play in the mud when you can be playing in the mansion?
He's a better mediator. Everything about Jesus is better. By the way, verse 7, chapter 8, for if that first covenant had been faultless, there would have been no occasion sought for a second. There's nothing sinful with the first covenant.
It was just, obsolescence was built in. It wasn't perfect. We need a perfect covenant mediated by a perfect mediator, and it's laid out in chapter 8, verse 8. 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12. This is the new covenant prophesied in Jeremiah chapter 31.
And I won't read all the verses, but what I will do is show you the unilateral promises of God with the statement that is run through here like a seam of thread, I will. Do you see it in chapter 8, verse 8?
I will effect a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. Verse 9, not like the covenant which I made with their fathers. It's not like that. It's a new, better one. Verse 10, for this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel.
I will put my law into their minds. I will write them on their hearts. I will be their God. You mean to tell me that you'd rather have the other covenant than this covenant? No. Verse 12, for I will be merciful to their iniquities and I will remember their sins until the next day of atonement.
No, this is remember the sins no more. True, real forgiveness. Verse 13, when he said a new covenant, he has made the first what? A good backup plan in case we might need it. No, it is obsolete and it's ready to disappear.
And then he says, by the way, chapter 9, you don't want the old. Who wants the old? Even we as American consumers know we don't want the old. I'm biting my tongue. I could just launch on that rabbit trail and all the elders are praying that I don't.
Chapter 9, verse 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, all talk about this old tabernacle and the old system and who wants to go back there? You don't want to go back. Verse 6, now when these things had been so prepared, the table, the bread, the high place, the holy of holies, the golden altar, Aaron's rod, when they had been prepared, the priests are what?
Mark it, continually entering the outer tabernacle performing the divine worship. But in the second, only the high priest enters once a year. The priests go into the holy place over and over and over, but only once a year do you go in that second place called the holy of holies.
And he offers for himself and for the sins of the people committed in ignorance. And everything here is to be teaching us a lesson. Verse 8, the Holy Spirit is signifying this. He's teaching us. He's teaching us that people can't just waltz into God's presence.
Remember what Erwin Luther said? People want to be in the presence of God and trapeze into His presence without ever stopping and thinking that it might be a bad idea. Holy God, sinful men, nuclear winter.
And here we have this old system, chapter 9, verse 1 and following. You can't go in the presence of God and tradition was even if that high priest did go to the holy of holies once a year, Leviticus chapter 16, it was said that they tied what around his leg?
Because if he didn't get himself right before God and didn't have his own sins taken care of before God, that God would kill him on the spot. You wouldn't hear those bells dinging on his leg anymore. And then you would pull the guy out.
How would you like to have that as a ministry? What do you do around the temple? I pull out the dead priests. That's what I do. Kind of get stuck there on the menorah over there and I'm just pulling them out.
I've often thought about that. If I had to do that, the elders had to do that for you. Once a year we had to go back into the shed back outside. Get ready. I always thought, well the good news is I wouldn't have to worry about it every year because after the first year I would be obliterated.
How do I take care of all these things? And the writer of the Hebrews was saying, why would you go back to that? Why don't you go to the priest who's the sacrifice? He's the perfect priest, the perfect sacrifice.
And in this covenant, I will, I will, I will, I will, I will not do better, keep going. And for those of you who read Leviticus, how would you like to live under that? You see that? You see that? Take him to the priest.
Is there a hair coming out of it? Is it white? What do we do? We're going to run back to that? The sacrifices of the old covenant were not effectual. Purposely designed to be vanished when the real high priest came.
Back to Hebrews 9, verse 11. But when Christ appeared as a high priest, He's a king, but He's a high priest of good things to come. What a great loving God we have. He entered through the greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made with hands, that is to say, not of this creation.
He's not going through that second tent veil into the Holy of Holies, but He's going into the presence of God. And how did He do it? He did it because He did it through His own sacrifice and not through the blood of goats and calves, verse 12, but through His own what?
Blood. He entered the holy place once for all, having obtained eternal redemption and no rope or bells were needed. The sanctuary is heaven. There's no reason that the priest would die in his mediatorial ministry because the Father and the Son are never separated except by sin.
There's no sin. And do you notice the text, verse 12? Mark it, once for all. And the focus here is not on some kind of weekly or daily Roman Catholic Mass, although it would apply, but it's back to these Levitical sacrifices over and over, morning and night, morning and night, morning and night, 365 days a year, and then added with the Day of Atonement.
Jesus fulfills the Older Covenant. You might say it that way. You could also say it this way, verse 13,. For if the blood of bulls and goats and the ashes of a heifer sprinkling those who have been defiled sanctify for the cleansing of the fresh, if that covered sin under the Old Covenant, how much more?
You can underline those words, how much more? And here we go with the blood again. Will the blood of Christ, through the Eternal Spirit, offer Himself without blemish to God, cleanse your conscience, things that couldn't be cleansed back in the old system, cleanse your conscience from dead work to serve the living God.
How much more? How great is Christ's mediatorial redemption? Now here's this word, blood. By the way, there are all kinds of kooky stories about blood. People say, you know, that there's this thing of blood up there, Jesus' blood in heaven, and every time there's somebody who's saved, somehow the angels or whoever's got the dish up there, the bowl or the jug or whatever it is, pour the blood out again, and there's this eternal thing of blood up there in heaven.
What is this blood? I mean, could Jesus just have bled? Were the Roman soldiers underneath Jesus who were punching Him and spearing Him, if some of that blood came out of the side of Jesus and got on the Roman soldier, was He saved?
Is He in heaven? When they're punching His face and the blood is flying and you can't even recognize He's a man, and there's blood on the fist, can you say, oh yeah, those people are in heaven because there's blood.
Got blood on there. So what is He talking about when He's saying blood? If I say Jesus dies on a cross, do you go, oh yeah, the cross, the wood, the tree. No, you're saying He died on the cross, meaning this substitutionary atonement as a sacrifice in our place.
And when you say blood, it's this theological word. It is actually shorthand for theological vicious sacrifice that includes death and includes blood. It is a word that's packed full of meaning and we just say blood.
When you sing nothing but the blood of Jesus, what are you saying? Got the blood, throw the blood around. Are you washed in the blood? Have you been up to the labor here and had a little kind of blood washing?
Underneath me used to be the baptismal. It's over there now. It's just a big thing of blood in there. And when you want to show your faith in Christ, we're going to baptize you into blood. What is that?
What is blood? It's shorthand for a vicious death. You've got to die. Of course He bled. But we're not talking about plasma, hemoglobin, enzymes, leukocytes and thrombocytes. Impressed? Wikipedia is good.
Sin costs. Those who sin will die. Without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness. Jesus had to be... He had to have blood shed. Of course, it wasn't like Jesus could be strangled for our salvation.
But it is theological shorthand. Blood is for Christ's sacrificial, substitutionary, violent death. By the way, there's a group of evangelicals, so-called evangelicals, that want to get rid of all this bloody stuff and all this wrath and all these things.
And they're a million miles away from A. God, B. Leviticus, and C. Hebrews. Jesus voluntarily laid down His life, His blood. And remember Leviticus 17. For the life of the flesh is in the blood. So here Jesus, the mediator, He gives His own blood, self-sacrificially dies in the place of sinners.
And that's why Peter says that we are redeemed with what kind of blood? Blood from goats? Blood from bulls? No blood's from the Savior. And that's why He calls it the precious blood. Some of these people that can't stand the theology of blood, they're too high-brow for it, they put in death instead of blood.
The Greek word is blood. And it signifies death, but it's a bloody death. It's not some blood floating around up in heaven. The World Congress on Fundamentalism even said, The precious blood is indestructible.
It cannot be anything else because of its permanence. The blood is eternally preserved in heaven. Such a denial of this is dangerous, and it's a devilish deception. For those of you that like details, in the Old Testament, the word blood is used 362 times, according to Leon Morris.
203 of those refer to death and violence, with an additional 103 referring to the blood of sacrifices. 306 times out of 362 times, blood and death and sacrifice. When you think of blood, don't think about some kind of hemoglobin, think about vicious death.
And by the way, if you're one of those who plead the blood, I don't know what you're doing, but stop it. I'm just pleading the blood. Pleading what blood? I hear this all the time, I'm just pleading the blood.
I don't know what to do with that, but it's not from the Bible. And if you're pleading that Jesus' bloody sacrifice of salvation would be applied to one of your loved ones, then just pray that way instead of pleading the blood.
Alright, back on target here. Verse 15. For this reason He is the mediator of a new covenant. It's His sacrifice. He is the sacrifice. Since a death has taken place for the redemption of transgressions that were committed under the first covenant, those who have been called may receive the promise of eternal inheritance.
Verse 22. According to the law, one may almost say all things are cleansed with blood. There were a few things that you didn't have to clean with blood. And without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness.
Verse 24. For Christ did not enter a holy place made with hands, a mere copy of the true one, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God for us as a priest. Nor was it that He would offer Himself often as the high priest enters into the holy place year by year with blood that is not His own.
Otherwise, verse 26, He would have needed to suffer often. Who would want that? Since the foundation of the world, He'd have to suffer over and over and over and over. But now once at the consummation of the ages, He has been manifested to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself.
He's not coming back to even deal with sin. It's been dealt with at the cross. We are saved by the blood of Christ, meaning His self-sacrificial, vicious death in our place. As God judged our sins on Christ.
Don't you let anyone ever tell you that we still have sacrifices today and we need them. All from the catechism. The holy sacrifice of the Eucharist is no holy sacrifice. The sacrifice of the Eucharist is truly propitiatory, meaning wrath assuaging.
That is not true. Sacrifice of the Eucharist is offered in reparation for the sins of the living and the dead, not the living nor the dead. And by the way, we have a mission field here in New England to go tell people about the once and for all death of Christ.
The once and for all death of Christ. We don't need to keep re-sacrificing Him. And by the way, you say, well, you know, we're all in this together. Friends, truth divides and knowledge divides. And let me tell you what they think of you because they think they need to evangelize you and I think you need to evangelize them.
We both can't be right. Trent, if anyone saith that the sacrifice of the Mass is only a sacrifice of praise and of thanksgiving or that it is a bare commemoration of the sacrifice consummated on the cross, that's what we believe, but not a propitiatory sacrifice.
If you don't think that God's assuaging His anger on the bread and the wine turned into the body and blood or that it profits Him only who receives and that not ought to be offered for the living and the dead for sins, pain, satisfactions, and other necessities, let Him or let you be damned.
If you believe it's once for all Jesus 2 ,000 years ago and never again, it's not needed again, it's blasphemous to do again, then you are damned. And if you believe you've got to keep slaying Jesus over and over and over, you don't believe in the right Jesus.
Once for all. You say, well, it's unloving. Friends, it has everything to do with being loving. First of all, if you think you're going to be an evangelist for God and just walk around and say, by the way, God loves you the way you are, everything's fine, and just keep on doing what you're doing and just kind of add Jesus, try Jesus, you're going to keep all your friends.
But if you dare to go up to someone and say, maybe you're friends, maybe it's someplace else on the plane, maybe it's just getting to know people, and basically say, everything that you think is right is wrong, and if you believe what you're going to believe now and what your grandparents believed and what your kids believed, you're going to bust hell wide open.
Do you think they're going to say, wow, thank you, sir, may I have another? That is so great. I used to think BBC was a cult, and now I just think it's the love boat. They're not going to do that. And you look at every person who had a grain of holiness in his system or her system, from John the Baptist to Mary Schleser, they loved other people enough to tell them the truth.
And the truth is, 80 of your neighbors believe that Jesus needs to be re-sacrificed today. And that's a lie. You tell me, I love those people, therefore I could never talk to them about the gospel.
And I tell you, you don't love them. Because if you loved them, you wouldn't want them to go over the precipice of eternal damnation forever when the eternal redemption through Christ is offered to all and should be preached to all.
We don't just learn this for our own edification. We learn it so we can tell others that Jesus has a priesthood continually, permanently, effectually, with finality. And there's only one way to get forgiveness, and that is through Christ and His perfect sacrifice.
And when Jesus said it is finished, it is finished forever. And we know that God said it was perfect because He demonstrated it visibly by raising Jesus from the dead. Jesus doesn't have to come back and deal with sin.
He's already dealt with it. If I had the wisdom of Solomon, R .L. Wheeler said, the patience of John, the meekness of Moses, the strength of Samson, the obedience of Abraham, the compassion of Joseph, the tears of Jeremiah, the poetic skill of David, the prophetic voice of Elijah, the courage of Daniel, the greatness of John the Baptist, the endurance and love of Paul, I would still need redemption through Christ's blood, the forgiveness of sins.
Some years later, John Wesley was preaching at a church. A successful businessman came up to him. He said, Do you recognize me? No. Should I? I was the thief that took your money. And you said to me, Don't forget, the blood of Christ can cleanse from all sins.
And it was because of what you said to me and because of you, John Wesley, I am now a Christian man living for the Lord Jesus Christ. And John Wesley said, It wasn't me that saved you. It was the blood of Christ that cleansed from all your sins.
Let's pray. Lord, what a joy it is to be forgiven. I rejoice that for myself and for these dear people, we will not stand before you to pay for one sin. No frowning, no disgust, no holy wrath, no how could you, no eternal hell, but we would be able to stand in your presence with great joy.
Thank you for that, Lord. Thank you that we have been rescued, we've been saved, and we have been saved because of Christ Jesus once for all sacrifice. How much better He was than Moses. How much better He is than Aaron.
Lord, we have a great Savior, Christ Jesus. And I would pray for our church. I would pray that this translation of the greatness and superiority of Christ Jesus would show itself within the church in service and outside the church with a willingness to, certainly in love with our delivery, tell other people the truth.
And Lord, you have told us the truth so that we might tell others. I pray that you give us a tender spirit, kind heart, gentle, yet we still have to tell the truth. And so I pray that you would give us that boldness.
If Paul needed boldness to do it, Lord, we need so much more boldness. I pray for those men that go to work tomorrow. I pray that you give them wisdom so they might not get paid to witness, witness at work, but there would just be good times and there would be wise times that they would see and they would be able to tell people about who Christ is.
That they would see opportunities to invite those others to their homes for meals and other things. And that we as a church, whether it's at school or WPI or wherever it might be or at home even teaching our children, that we might all have lives that show Jesus is superior.
And I know, Lord, you would be pleased with that. Amen.