Hebrews III: The Offering of the Body of Jesus | The Whole Counsel

Welcome to the Whole Council Podcast. I'm Jon Snider and with me again is our special guest Jordan Thomas, pastor at Grace Baptist Church in Memphis, one of many pastors.

So Jordan has been a very kind friend to Christ Church and to me for about 20 years.

So we're coming to our last podcast on Hebrews and we're looking at chapter 10.

So Jordan, kind of give us a picture of how that falls into Hebrews. Well, just hearing the absurdity of our third and final podcast on Hebrews.

Yeah. You know, we've exhausted it. Yeah, you preached seven years on it. Yeah, so three few -minute podcasts.

But yeah, I just have to give a quick concession. I apologize to chapter 4.

I apologize to chapter 9, but we want to look at Hebrews chapter 10 because in my estimation, it's the core of the main theme beneath the superiority of Christ.

The biggest of all the themes of Christ is superior. He's superior to angels,

Moses, Aaron, sacrificial system. But in that superiority to Aaron in the

Levitical priesthood, the biggest portion of Hebrews is Christ is the superior and final high priest.

And that's what chapter 10 is really about. It culminates from chapter 5 through 10, this grand look at what

Christ's priestly work has accomplished and why He is that adequate priest. So with that in mind,

I would like to look at the first 14 verses of Hebrews 10, and I will read it for us.

Hebrews 10, verse 1. But in those sacrifices, there is a reminder of sins year by year, for it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.

Therefore, when He, this is the sign, when He comes into the world, so we know we're talking about the

Incarnation, verse 5 again, therefore when He comes into the world, He says,

Sacrifice and offering you have not desired, but a body you have prepared for me.

In whole burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin you have taken no pleasure. Then I said, behold,

I have come, in the scroll of the book it is written of me, to do your will,

O God. After saying above, sacrifices, offerings, whole burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin you have not desired, nor have you taken pleasure in them, which are offered according to the law.

Then He said, behold, I have come to do your will. He takes away the first in order to establish the second.

By this will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.

Verse 11, every priest stands daily ministering and offering time after time the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins.

But He, having offered one sacrifice for sins for all time, sat down at the right hand of God, waiting from that time onward until His enemies be made a footstool for His feet.

Verse 14, four by one offering He has perfected for all time those who are sanctified.

So much could be said, we'll try to rein in our thoughts, but the main thing we have here is a picture of God the

Son accomplishing what the Old Testament, in particular Psalm 40, said would happen.

So Jordan, how does this portion of Scripture fit into the flow of the argument about Christ's superiority and dealing with all that Old Testament picture of priest, sacrifice, temple?

Yeah, we get the theme of Christ's priesthood throughout the whole letter of Hebrews. It's in chapter 1, we've already dealt with that, but really in chapters 5 through 10, that is the impetus of the whole content.

So in chapter 5, He is designated a priest by God, spoken to Him by the

Father, He didn't take the honor to Himself, it was assigned to Him, and then that's walked out in the order of Melchizedek in chapter 7, and going into the

Holy of Holies chapter 8 and 9, but here in chapter 10, it's a picture of the

Lord Jesus reading the Old Testament, I mentioned Psalm 40, but the flow, it's important to understand a little bit of what comes right before it, namely chapter 9.

So what's happening in chapter 9 is the author of Hebrews is reminding the reader how the

Old Testament sacrifice happened, and where. He's basically painting a picture of the tabernacle and the

Holy of Holies in the beginning of chapter 9. He's even talking about the furniture, and the Ark of the Covenant, and the priest would go in once a year, and he would sprinkle some blood, and then in chapter 9 verse 14, he turns the attention to Jesus, and His high priestly work, and that verse, in a very beautiful, broader context,

I'll just read that one verse, says, How much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal

Spirit, offered Himself without blemish to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living

God? He's saying, these Old Testament priests, and all their sacrifices, could never do that. But you take the cumulative total of all of them, and compare it to the one -time sacrifice of Jesus, and He can do what none of them could have ever done, namely, cleanse your conscience from all your dead works.

Basically, all your efforts to save yourself, to forgive yourself. You know, we say a lot of times at Grace Church in Memphis, that every contribution we try to make to our redemption only worsens our damnable predicament.

It makes it worse. It's a thing for which we should be forgiven. And here, the author's saying,

Jesus's blood cleanses you from all of that. So in the middle of 14, we get that statement.

But it starts getting really, really bloody after that.

It's like Leviticus, in kind of the latter third of Hebrews 9.

And to summarize, try to picture this. I'm a big fan of when you read the Bible, try to envision it. The author of Hebrews definitely wants you to see this.

He talks about how Moses was commanded by God to take this cluster of hyssop, a plant, you know, just a big cluster of, just imagine, long weeds, and to dip it in a basin of blood.

So he's holding the stalks, he's got all these, you know, wisps of this hyssop.

He dips it in this basin of blood, and then he starts just to sprinkle that blood all over the tabernacle, all over the furniture, everywhere.

Then he turns his attention and puts it all over the book, the law, the inspired writings.

He just, the scrolls are doused in this animal sacrificial blood. And then, how would you have liked to shown up to church on this day?

He saturates all the people. You know, you wore your Sunday best, you just got your new suit, you know, straight out of the dry cleaners, and here's

Moses just splattering blood all over the place. Everybody's dripping. But that is because God told him to.

Why? Hebrews 9 tells us. Because that was a portrait, that was a picture of another bloody person who would go into a better tabernacle, the true

Holy of Holies, with a better sacrifice. Not animals, not goats, not bulls.

Chapter 10 just said, blood of bulls and goats, it's impossible for them to take away sin. Listen to chapter 9, verse 24, this is so beautiful.

He, Jesus, the priest who is also the sacrifice, went into the

Holy of Holies and now stands before the face of God for us.

He brought all of his righteousness and all of his redeeming accomplishments, the cross, into the throne room of heaven.

Not just to go to heaven for us, but 924, to bring that sacrifice in front of the face of God for us.

And chapter 10, then, tells us how Jesus embraced the assignment from heaven to do that for our salvation.

So that's how the flow works to get us up to chapter 10, and it's,

I think, helpful to say, had what is found in chapter 10 not happened previously in Jesus's incarnation, somewhere along his earthly life and ministry, then all the glory of chapter 5 to 9 never would have been accomplished.

So chapter 10 is like, it tells us how we got there, after it's told us in 5 to 9 what was accomplished.

So walk us through what comes next in chapter 10. Okay, I'll do my best.

Here's a summary in one sentence. What happens in chapter 10 is at least one of Jesus's quiet times.

It's Jesus, during his incarnation, reading the Psalms. It says in chapter 5, when he comes, verse 5, sorry, chapter 10, verse 5, when he comes into the world.

So we know we're talking about earthly life and ministry, the incarnate Savior. When he comes into the world, he says, well, all the next words come straight out of Psalm 40.

So we know Jesus is reading Psalm 40, and by divine illumination, somehow he is coming into increasing understanding that what's written in that Psalm is about himself, and about this bloody, bodily sacrifice he is to make, according to the will of God, to verse 14 us, to sanctify us forever.

So just to back up, chapter 10 is Jesus reading the Psalms and realizing it's about him being the once for all time priest and sacrifice for the sanctification of the people of God forever.

Now, we mentioned this in a previous podcast, Luke 1, 52, one of those wonderful summary statements that Lou gives us about the ministry of Christ.

But this is before his ministry, about his humanity, the fourfold growth of Christ there.

And it mentions that he grows intellectually. When we talk about the growth of Christ, we're not saying that he is a man who is so holy, and by the help of God, and by God's favor, he grows, and grows, and grows, and reaches a place where he kind of crosses over from being one of us to being son of God.

Yeah. Not that. Right, not that. Not that at all. We're not talking about sinful imperfection in the humanity of Christ, sinful ignorance, none of that.

But what we are talking about is really quite a shocking, for us who have hoped in him, quite a shockingly clear picture of something that we may not have spent time considering, and that is he is truly man, not just truly

God. And therefore, in God providing a representative, a mediator, the final

Adam, he gives us himself, uniting his son to our humanity.

But that humanity, it has to grow. So, he really is born in the womb of Mary.

He is taught by Mary, or Joseph, how to walk, how to clothe yourself, how to eat.

We can understand that, but when it comes to the spiritual aspects, it gets a little trickier for us. We get bothered. So, you're here's what we're saying, that God gave his son on earth the same means that he gives us.

Yes. And the son is perfectly responsive. Yes. And at each stage in life, he is perfect.

But as a five -year -old, he is not a perfect adult. And so, if he would have died at five, you know, the hypothetical, then we're without hope.

He must come to a point where the father says, you are now the perfectly suited mediator.

Yes. It would be joyful, glorious, and personally beneficial to continue to talk on that theme a lot.

I would like to add just a few thoughts, and I'm sure those could lead you to adding more, and we could go back and forth a lot on this theme.

It is treading on the precipice of mystery, right? There are things, there are secrets which belong to the

Lord, but it is clear that what you're saying is a radically biblical truth of faithful biblical

Christology. He did not become the Son of God. He did not grow into a point where the

Father approved him as an adequate Savior. We're not saying that.

But the Scriptures do teach that the Lord Jesus, though divine, increased in his,

I guess I would say, messianic self -awareness. He didn't become the Messiah. He grew in his awareness.

How did he do that? Let's say Hebrews 5 gives us a picture of one of his quiet times in Psalm 110, and it says the

Father said to him, what did he say? You're a priest forever in the line of Melchizedek.

And so Jesus is reading Psalm 110 and saying, that's me. He became that.

He grew in his awareness. Well, Hebrews 10, that's what we're saying. We're saying that he read the 40th

Psalm, and it says things like, sacrifice an offering you have not desired, but a body you prepared for me.

Behold, in the scroll of the book it's written of me, I delight to do your will.

It's like Jesus is saying, I tremblingly understand from Psalm 40, that the reason the eternal second person of the triune

God is incarnate is so that I can now die. No body, no death.

That's exactly what Hebrews 2 says, that because the children share in flesh and blood, therefore he likewise partook of the same, flesh and blood, so that through death he could render powerless him who had the power of death, the devil, and free us, who through fear of death were subject to slavery all our life.

If he doesn't become incarnate, he can't die. What we're saying is that he grew in his understanding during the incarnation of that why he has a body.

So he stood before Pilate and said, for this purpose

I've been born. The whole reason I was born, whole reason I have a body, is so that I could die on a cross.

And so when he resolutely embraced that reality from his reading of the

Psalms and the Old Testament, I believe before his public ministry, he was 100 % aware, he set his face like a flint toward Jerusalem.

He stalked the cross. He hunted the cross. But like you said, he couldn't have died at five or 12 or 20 and been an adequate redeemer.

Shocking way to say it, he had to fulfill all righteousness and bring that active righteousness that we should have lived to the cross where he died the death that we should have died.

So much to say about that glorious thing, brother. Yeah, but I mean, you know, the picture that we see here of the true humanity of the

Son of God interacting with the Word of God is something that we don't often think of.

I mean, I think I grew up in church, and if you were to ask me, you know, even in seminary, if someone would have asked me, okay, explain how he interacted with the

Word, I would have almost have said, I think there was an invisible antenna that went up from his head, and he got direct, and I don't get those, but nobody else, but Jesus did, because he's

God. Well, he is God, but he's also truly man, and so it is a sweet, deep, but beneficial mystery to see our

Lord taking scriptures and being fashioned by their realities, guided by their words.

It does remind me of the passage you just mentioned, Isaiah 50, where it says, morning by morning, the

Son speaking about the Father, he awakens me. Morning by morning, he opens my ear, and then he says, and I did not rebel or turn aside, kind of how you translate those

Hebrew words, two very different pictures. One is to, you know, so the picture is

Christ before the Father and the Word. You can imagine a passage like Psalm 110 or Psalm 40, you're to be, you are given this body to sacrifice it.

Never in the life of Jesus of Nazareth, even the morning he woke up, and that was the day he would give his body, never does he rebel and say, not me, nor does he, the other

Hebrew word for a sinful response, nor does he quietly sidestep it and kind of let it go and just say, well, we're just not gonna talk about that today,

Father. So not only a picture of the beauty of his true humanity and the proof of humanity, but also a perfect pattern for every one of us.

Well, I said, as soon as you say something, it's gonna make me think of more things, but I'd be remiss if I didn't mention

John 12. We're preaching through the gospel of John now, we're not quite to chapter 12, we're just finishing 10.

But the first time Jesus mentions that he's ready to go to the cross in John's gospel is chapter 12.

And it's when the nations come, the Gentiles come looking for him at the feast. So when the nations come to the

Redeemer, not just one subset of humanity, he says, now my hour has come, which is a big theme in John.

But he goes on to add, what should I say? Should I say,

Father saved me from this hour? And it's the most like steely nerve, backbone, resolute, plant a flag in the ground moment in human history, where he says, no, but for this purpose,

I came to this hour, Father glorify your name. And then the Father shouts from heaven and says, great idea.

I've glorified my name forever, and I'm gonna keep doing that. And I'm gonna do it especially through your redeeming labors.

And nobody understood it. The crowd thought that it thundered or whatever. But the next thing

John does, very next thing, he picks up Isaiah. He quotes chapter 6, quotes chapter 53.

And he says, Isaiah spoke these things, 1241,

I think, because he saw Christ's glory and spoke of him.

I take that to mean Isaiah understood not only is the Messiah coming, he's coming to die.

That's what I think Jesus is reading in Hebrews 10. He's reading Psalm 40. But the author of Hebrews is letting us see that when

Jesus read Isaiah, and when Jesus read the Psalms, he understood the primary purpose for his physical frame, and the blood that coursed through his veins was so that he could lay down his life.

And like you're saying, he embraced that divine assignment. I believe increasingly over his early incarnate life, until on this day, when he's having his quiet time in Hebrews 10, there's no more increasingly.

It's, I have come to do your will. It's resolute, steely -eyed.

Like I said, he's stalking the cross. He's hunting the cross. He's going to purchase the people of God.

And it compares him to all the other priests in verse 11. They all stand daily ministering, offering time after time, sacrifices that can't take away sins.

He knows. He's not going to do that. He's not going to do the repeated sacrifice. He's going to do this cataclysmic shake heaven and earth sacrifice that's going to once for all, verse 14, sanctify the people of God.

Jordan, you mentioned verse 14. And again, it reads this way, for by one offering, he has perfected for all time those who are sanctified.

So really one of the gems of the entire Bible. So what do you have to say about that?

Yeah. Well, first off, there's some words in there that sound very churchy, very religious, offering, perfected, sanctified.

Let me just make sure we're on the same page about sanctified. There are theological categories of sanctification, which is an ongoing process of becoming conformed into the image of Christ that happens in the life of every believer.

So the electric current of the power of Christ coming into the life of those who are united to him by faith shows up in being sanctified.

That's not what Hebrews is talking about right here. He's talking about sanctified in terms of clean, pure, holy.

He has forever cleaned you. You are now pure.

You are holy. You are set apart unto God. And he did that. You don't do that.

This is an accomplished reality. It's not an ongoing process. So I just want to make sure before I meditate a little on verse 14's realities, that we're understanding that the deepest longing of the human heart, religious or not, is fundamentally the same.

We're designed by our Creator to want to be close to God and clean before him.

Verse 14 is saying, Jesus did that. So that's the meaning of sanctified. But again, a lot of fruitful meditations could spring from this.

I'll just make one observation and then see what thoughts you may have to add.

And knowing me, your thoughts may lead me to add more. By one offering, that's his bodily sacrifice, he has perfected, completed the work of redemption for all time for those who are sanctified.

What that means is God has no buyer's remorse.

He is not sorry that he saved you. He does not regret because you're such a pathetic excuse for a

Christian and you can't get your act together and you keep stumbling over the exact same sins over and over and over again.

And you come back and you sound like a broken record. It's Jordan again. I'm back, God. Remember the thing that I repented from and just was grieved over and feel like I never could get away from.

But that last time I thought I really finally had a breakthrough. I'm back. I'm here again. Here, the

Father wants us to know that he so values the work of the

Son that he will forever, that's literally his words, for all time, you're clean.

He dealt with your sin, past, present, and future. Well, what's the evidence of that? That I now am sinless? No, it's that I keep, until I meet him face to face and my sin is gone,

I keep bringing my life before him, back to him. I don't fear coming close to him because, this is astonishing, there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

You know, we can think, you talked about hypothetical a minute ago, we could say hypothetically, if God wanted to condemn one for whom

Jesus died, he doesn't want to, but if he did, he can't do it. There's no condemnation left.

Not because he swept it under the rug. Christ took it. That's what verse 14 is trying to say to us.

So it's actually, look at how great Jesus is. Look at the obedience that he carried out because he believed what was said of the

Messiah in scripture. Look at this perfectly spirit -filled man. Look what he accomplished.

And here's where I'll stop. Come close. He regards you as fit for his presence.

You are sanctified, you are perfected, and he'll never change his mind about that. That's how much he values the once for all time sacrifice of his son.

I think that, you know, what you've been covering here, you've been dealing with the great object of truths of Christianity.

So as you mentioned, none of this has actually even introduced your responsiveness to it.

You know, he hasn't mentioned your faith or repentance or, you know, earnest love or, you know, or tenderness or anything.

So he's hammering away at this great marble foundation, this unshakable, unalterable, immutable hope of the believer.

But he doesn't end there. If we had time, we could go on, you know, through especially chapters 12 and 13, where he's beginning to bring to bear, like, because of these facts live this way.

We could think of another portion of scripture that deals like this, where in Romans 3, 4, and 5, halfway through Romans 3,

Paul gives the good news that it's never by rule keeping, but by, not by your rule keeping, but by the rule keeping of Jesus Christ, who became your perpetuatory sacrifice, satisfying the wrath of God, lifting up his honor and his law's honor at the same time as providing mercy.

Chapter 3, chapter 4, that is embraced by faith, because faith, chapter 5, unites you to a new mediator,

Jesus. All that doctrine, and it's not until chapter 6, verse 11, that we meet the very first time in the book of Romans that Paul gives a command.

Yeah. Yeah. So reckon yourselves. Yeah. Live on these realities, calculate them honestly, biblically, and then present.

Yeah. So same thing, object of truth, then experiential or applied truth.

Sometimes we get questions, I don't know, you know, in the church where you're pastoring, because of a heavy emphasis on the application of truth.

Yeah. You can, I mean, there's always, I feel as a pastor, there's always the concern,

I don't want to lean one way too far the other. And I remember a young lady coming to me in college and saying, my church is not quite as experiential in their emphasis as you are, and so which one's right, and how do

I live the Christian life? Because sometimes I think, I don't want to focus too much on doctrine and forget experience, then the other side.

And so I said to her, imagine that you're walking a tightrope, and you have this long pole, and on one side, on the far left side is objective truth, on the far right side is experienced truth.

Now, if you think the Christian life is the tightrope, and the way you keep from falling off is constantly shuffling it back and forth, too much experience, too much objective, too much head, too much heart, then you're gonna, that's not the way to do it, and you would wear yourself out.

It's order. First, the great facts that you just reviewed, then the great devotion of the heart flows in obedience.

Yeah, amen. You know, the theological way to say that is the imperatives are built on the indicatives.

The first half of all the epistles... You didn't like my tightrope illustration, did you? I was...

You're gonna get all brainy on me. I loved it. For those of you that are not in third grade, this is how we say it.

The first half of all the epistles are the indicatives. It's what God has done for us in Christ.

The second half, obviously, there's perforated lines. You know, there's some imperatives in the first, and indicatives in the second, but it's basically that setup.

It's what God has done for us in Christ, indicatives. Now, therefore, do imperatives, but you mentioned how

Romans has its first exhortation. I just taught it Sunday in chapter six on the reckoned.

So five and a half chapters of no exhortation, just breathtaking.

Can I dare to believe this is true? And then He'll tell you what to do. Hebrews is actually the same way, and it's actually in this chapter.

The setup of Hebrews in two parts is chapter one through 10 .18.

10 .19 through the end. The first part, and this is the last...

We're touching the last pinnacle of the first part in 10 .1

-14. But in verse 19, same chapter, therefore, brethren, since we have confidence to enter the holy place by the blood of Jesus, guess what no

Old Testament high priest ever would have said to a million and a half Israelites? The holy of holies,

I can't explain it. Let's just all come in and take a peek. Jesus is saying, well, we're being told in the first 10 and a half chapters,

He is such a redeemer. And then in verse 19, He turns around and says to everybody in the whole camp, come on in to the holy of holies.

And so there are exhortations. These aren't just spiritual ideas to keep in our head.

But if we don't have the indicatives, the work of God for us in Christ, I do think our tightrope illustration, we probably have a default to do.

I think we're workspace more by nature than we are grace -based by nature.

Well, it's really humbling to us to be freely loved, for God to say, there's nothing lovely in you, but I have loved you infinitely.

You think about, if you went home and said to Tracy, your wife, honey, all the way home,

I just thought how much I love you. But really, the truth is, there's nothing about you that's lovely, but I'm just a great kind of guy.

So that, the natural man really doesn't love grace. So as we kind of bring these wonderful matters down to just some practical applications, we've thought about a few.

So let me throw in a couple, and then you can bring us to a close. One I thought of is the very nature of how

God revealed these truths to His Son through His Word is mysterious and wonderful. But to stop and remember that the portions of Scripture that are mentioned here are mostly

Psalms. So what we have is God giving the Son and us, as we're allowed to kind of peek over His shoulder, soteriological, life -altering, eternity -altering truths in a song.

So that immediately ought to alert us to the fact that what's being said is not appropriate if we only discuss it back and forth.

It must lead to the man or the woman or the child who grabs ahold of these truths, it must lead to an eruption of joy that we think of as producing song.

And whether that is expressed in childlike, you know, happy obedience, cheerful consecration, or whether it's, you know, song together with believers, songs in your home, whatever is appropriate, the joyful response.

And again, a quote that we've repeated here is a quote from Richard Roll, an

English Bible translator, prior to the Reformation. So he was in the

Catholic Church, and God had done something in his soul, and so it kind of formed a great...

It was the turning point for him, and he described it this way, I was compelled by God's work,

I was compelled to sing what I had once only spoken. So I think that you and I have both been in seminary, and we've been in discussions after seminary classes, where you can kind of battle back and forth people's views, but what an infinitely superior thing to do, you know, to take these truths, and instead of discuss them, to bring them into the life in such a way that it erupts in song.

Another application, which by the way, there is a book that was in print, no longer in print, at least we've had some trouble finding it, by a man named

Andrew Bonar, B -O -N -A -R, 18th century Scott, who also wrote the memoirs of his friend,

Robert Murray McShane. And Bonar put together a book, Christ and His Church in the

Psalms. I think it was, well, forget, I think it was, because it may not be

Banner that did it originally. So if you go online, you ought to be able to find in our show notes a link to where you can find that, but it's just, it's not a technical commentary, he's just giving kind of warm thoughts of how would

Christ have read this psalm. So really, kind of unique book. My final application is this,

I don't know how you felt about approaching Hebrews as a pastor to preach it, but I remember many years as a pastor, the earlier years, saying to myself,

I am not ready to preach this book because of the harrowing warnings.

And people immediately just want to interrupt the sermon and say, wait, wait, wait, I just have one question, is he talking to a

Christian or not? Can I lose my salvation or not? Okay, first off, that is the absolute wrong question.

These are warning signs along the path of the Christian life. If you believe the signs, you will benefit and you will not fall.

If you are an unbeliever and demonstrate it by ignoring the signs, you will prove you're an unbeliever and fall.

But the point I want to make is, one way we know the measure of the preciousness of the truths that you just mentioned from chapters nine and ten is the level of warning that God the

Father gives us if we don't treasure these and if we turn back, because those are really just terrifying.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think what we were saying earlier about the tightrope of obedience and just embrace of the beauties of Christ or indicative imperatives, if we only think of the high priest and it doesn't bring into our life some obedience, we do set ourself up justly for the import of those warnings.

So I'll just close with a high priest contemplation command that leads to obedience.

It says it in Hebrews. Hebrews 3 .1, therefore, holy brethren, partakers of a heavenly calling, consider

Jesus the apostle and high priest of our confession.

And it goes on to talk about his faithfulness. And so if you're considering Jesus, this glorious high priest of chapter ten that we've talked about, then the life of faithfulness, like flowed out of him, will also by his power flow out of us.

Yeah. Well, thanks for joining us this week, and we hope that this has helped stir your own heart to renew your looking to Jesus.