The Better Sacrifice (Hebrews 9:23-28 Jeff Kliewer)

Morning everyone. We are going to get started this morning with a few announcements. We're so thankful and glad that you could be with us here this morning to worship. Our Isaiah study is continuing to meet.

We'll be meeting this week as well. We are up to Lesson 26. If you're unable to.

Attend in person. On Wednesday, we know that we have this inheritance that has been won for us. If you could stand with me.

Christ’s Entry Into Jerusalem and the Kingly Welcome

The day has dawned clear and bright and Jesus told his disciples today we will.

Enter Jerusalem. As he led them toward the city gates, an amazing thing happened. The crowd around Jesus became bigger and bigger. Hundreds and thousands of people poured out of the city to welcome him, cheering and shouting.

They called him the son of David. It was a welcome fit for a king. Just outside Jerusalem there was a wooden hillside called the Mount of Olives. When Jesus reached this place he sent two of his disciples to get a donkey.

Jesus rode into Jerusalem on the donkey. Many of the people tore palm branches off the nearby trees and waved the palms for Jesus. The people saw Jesus as their king, the one who would deliver them from the Romans.

But Jesus was not that kind of a king. He rode on a donkey to show the people that he was on a mission of peace. When Jesus entered Jerusalem it seemed the whole city was shouting, Hosanna to the son of David.

Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Even as the people cheered him that day in Jerusalem, Jesus knew they would soon betray him, kill him, and he would rise from the dead. Today Jesus is seated on his heavenly throne ruling and governing his church from heaven.

The way Christ governs his church is through the Holy Spirit that regenerates and sanctifies the heart of those who believe and trust Christ for personal forgiveness from sin.

I've heard your commission to go into all creation and preach the good news.

You told us to make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey everything you have commanded. Lord, we also know that the world tells us to be quiet, culturally and even sometimes politically, commanding them to preach no more in this name.

But Lord, if we're silent even the very rocks will cry out, for you are worthy. And we pray in Jesus' name that this morning you would light a fire in our hearts. Give us boldness with your gospel to preach the gospel clearly as we ought to.

Give us courage and open our eyes to see the lateness of the hour that we would be motivated to go forth proclaiming the name of Jesus. In his name we pray, amen. To be a Mennonite in the 1940s in Poland or in Eastern Germany is to be caught between two dictators.

Off to the west was Adolf Hitler and off to the east of them was Stalin. And I don't know which of the two was worse. They were both horrible dictators. But when the Nazis rolled over Europe and conquered this land, many of the men were impressed into the military.

One of those men was my grandfather, Paul Kleewer, who was drafted and impressed into the military of the Germans and forced to go, even though he was a Mennonite. Now the Mennonites were pacifists and they did not believe in the Nazi regime, but if you didn't go you died.

So off to the eastern front went Paul Kleewer. I don't know how, but very quickly he was shot by the Russians and the soldiers approached him in his woundedness. He couldn't lift his arms to surrender so he almost died that way, but fortunately they took him into captivity.

In 2007 I got a 27-page paper from my Aunt Pauline and it was one of the greatest Christmas gifts I could ever have been given because she had found a six installment article written by Paul Kleewer in 1966.

It was the story of his captivity in the Russian gulags. And in 2007 I got that and was able to read and learn about what happened, but at that time we didn't have YouTube the way we do today. I'm sure it was probably invented by then, but I never thought to Google or search for something that I read.

But in that paper Paul Kleewer talks about how when he was captured in July of 1944 they took him along with tens of thousands of other Germans and paraded them down the streets of Moscow. And he comments how there were video cameras filming this event.

So just a couple days ago I got to thinking as I read this paper again, I wonder if there's footage of this. So I googled July 1944, Germany, German soldiers streets of Moscow and sure enough there is video footage that I could watch of 60 ,000 German soldiers paraded through the streets of Moscow.

It was fascinating to think that as I'm looking at this video one of those little dots is Paul Kleewer. Well of those 60 ,000 that were sent then from that moment into the gulags of Russia, only 6 ,000 of them would return.

So as I stand here today, a descendant of Paul Kleewer, the odds were slim that I would be here, that he would have survived the gulag, but of course he did. When they took him to the concentration camps there as work labor, he was wounded and at first wasn't able to, but eventually got his strength and began to lift stones and bricks into the trains.

And at one point he crushed his hand and so he had some leave, but all that he had with him during those four years in the gulag was a Bible that he smuggled, a leather-bound Bible. And every day he read it and drew close to the Savior.

He had a friend, a Lutheran friend, that they would take turns reading and out loud. Sometimes they would come and look for paraphernalia on the prisoners and he would hide his Bible, because the communists had outlawed the Bible, he would hide his Bible in a water canteen so they wouldn't find it.

And passing it around among the prisoners, eventually the cover of it wore off and the pages were beginning to fall out. So he gave away one day of his rations. Now in a Russian concentration camp, in a gulag, a day's food might be the difference between life and death.

They kept them basically on the verge, strong enough to work but barely enough, they were constantly hungry. So he gave up a day's food for someone who knew how to fix Bibles and they found some leather and he repaired it.

That's how much he treasured and valued the Bible that he had. As the four years in the gulag came to a close and the prisoners are returned, he rode on a train and was encountered by a man that called himself an anti-fascist.

Sound familiar? Today we have what are called Antifa, anti-fascists. And this man tried to convince the prisoners to become communists and had no luck at that. But I wanted to read for you page 19 of this letter I got from my Aunt Pauline where Paul tells the story of his reunion with his wife.

Now when he was on that train he began to store food because he didn't know when he was getting back his family would have had food themselves. So he had a little bread box, 11 by 7, where he had packed as much Russian bread into it as he possibly could.

So he had his Bible and his bread box on the train on his way back to see his family. I took my little bread box in which I had the Russian black bread and my Bible, my bread of life. I took both my Bible and my bread box to the USA as mementos of my time in Russian captivity.

Because the Bible was given to me twice, it has become especially valuable to me. The Russian bread box has turned into a shoe polish box. This is him writing in 1966. We walked through Granao Park and I was chatting with the mail carrier, Jacob Enns.

We turned a corner and suddenly I saw my wife coming toward me. She wanted to be sure that she was the one to get me from Granao. A Mrs. Fast, who now lives in Canada, had come with her. This reunion remains totally unforgettable.

We were reunited by the hand of our Good Shepherd. To him be all praise. We walked together to the resettlement center in Ypres. I was used to camp life. We walked past the refugee hospital, not knowing that I would have to spend time here to heal my lungs.

But the physician of all physicians has done everything well. As we neared the camp, our children came toward us. They did not recognize their father. This was the greatest wound I had ever received. Now remember, he had been shot.

He had been crushed. But he said this was his greatest wound. The bond between father and children had been broken. Seven years. But thank God, this did not continue for long. After the children became Christians, they were fully restored to God's glory.

I can say that all of our children have received full assurance of salvation. And I can testify as the nephew of Henry, and Herb, and my Aunt Marty, and one of my aunts I didn't really know, Aunt Tilly, she died in a car accident.

Herbie, Willie, Henry, all of them, and my father Walt, all of them know the Lord and have walked. Four of them have passed on to glory. But they continued with that assurance of salvation, which was the most important thing to Paul.

It says, at the entrance to the camp, I was greeted with a song from my family and relatives. It could hardly contain my tears. They were singing worship music as he came in. There was a welcome cake.

God will reward those for their love. What happened to my black bread? I do not know, but my wife had just received some white bread. This wonderful reunion occurred on August 8th, 1948. For over seven years, we had lived in servitude and domination by two power-hungry men.

More or less, I had suffered under both. Because when a dictator rules, you are enslaved. Here in the Mennonite Center, run by Christian men and women from America, freedom ruled. In this center, nobody needed to be hungry or cold.

Here we had freedom of religion, freedom to express our opinions, and freedom to work. Here in America, we have freedom. The question is, why is it that in Germany, the most Christian of countries, the seat of the Protestant Reformation, the place where Martin Luther nailed the 95 Theses, how is it that many years later, it became the seat of totalitarian nationalism?

How is it that Russia, which was Orthodox and supposed Christianity, departed so far that it banned Bibles and burned the ones that they could find? What happened? Well, the story does not begin with Adolf Hitler.

It really comes to climax with Adolf Harnack, who died in 1930. He was the most popular theologian in Germany, and he, along with the German higher critics, had dismantled the Bible. Harnack's work that he wrote was against Christian dogma.

Harnack said that the enemy was the dogmatic teaching of the doctrines of the Bible, but he wanted to keep Christianity and redefine it in social terms. So Walter Rauschenbusch, who studied under Harnack in Germany, came to America preaching the social gospel, and in the 1910s, that movement gained strength in America.

The best-selling book in America was written on the social gospel by Rauschenbusch. However, when the First World War happened, the German teaching of higher criticism went into disfavor, and so America didn't go that way, but Germany did.

And by the time Hitler came to power, the so-called Christians in Germany did not believe the doctrine and the dogma of the church. There were very few left in that remnant church in Germany. That explains what happened.

They chose a social gospel over the dogma of Christianity. And Russia, the same thing, without having biblical doctrinal teaching, they got swept up in a political social movement instituted and instigated by Karl Marx.

Communist Manifesto. It was born forth in Russia, in the USSR. That explains how it is that nominally Christian people can turn into totalitarian lunatics and destroy the world. Couldn't happen here, though, right?

Because we rejected that in the 1910s. Just this week, I read from the leading anti-racist in America. His name is Ibram Kendi, Ibram X. Kendi. He wrote the book, How to Be an Anti-Racist. But interestingly, language in Newspeak, Orwellian Newspeak, often means the opposite of what the word is given.

Anti-racism can mean racism. But the real enemy of Kendi is the evangelical who preaches the old rugged cross. It's actually not a political issue. What the Russians did, demonically, under Stalin, was opposition to the dogma of Christianity.

And Hitler's hatred was ultimately a hatred of God. In the same way, when Kendi is writing today and popularized all across America, Jesus was a revolutionary, and the job of the Christian is to revolutionize society.

He's only repeating Rauschenbusch. He's only recirculating the old social gospel. The job of the Christian is to liberate society from the powers on earth that are oppressing humanity. So who are the powers on earth that are oppressing humanity?

In short, those powers are the evangelical Christians. That is the enemy of liberation theology. Liberation theology opposes savior theology, according to Kendi. And what is savior theology? He says the form of Christianity that 80 of white evangelicals have when they voted for Donald Trump.

This is the job of the Christian to go out and save individuals who are behaviorally deficient. Now watch this. Those evangelicals, and he's concerned about who they vote for, not I, these evangelicals are trying to change people who are behaviorally deficient.

This is very important. In other words, we're to bring them into the church, these individuals who are doing all these evil, sinful things, and heal them and save them. Well, that goes right in line with racist ideas and racist theology.

Evangelicals say the reason many people are struggling on earth is because what they're doing is behaviorally wrong. And it's my job as a pastor to sort of save these wayward black people or wayward poor people or wayward queer people.

That type of theology breeds bigotry. So anti-racists must fundamentally reject savior theology. Liberation theology breeds a common humanity against those structures of power that oppress us all. Catch the language of Kendi, because it's the language of Harnack.

Before there was an Adolf Hitler, there was an Adolf Harnack. And before the next totalitarian arises, there will be many theologians going out claiming to be Christian, but opposing the message of the cross.

We preach a heavenly message. We preach about invisible realities, what Christ accomplished on the cross, the death for sinners. And in that gospel, we call men to repentance. We call sin what it is. And we call for people to repent of sin and turn to Christ who was crucified.

We preach the meaning of the cross, which is the subject today in Hebrews 9, 23 to 28. We are looking in Hebrews 9, 23 to 28, about the meaning of the cross, the better sacrifice. But I set this story up this way for a very important reason.

Our culture is beginning to silence Christians the way it was done a hundred years ago in Germany and in Russia. And any place that communism has ever gone, it is the message of the cross that must be silenced.

Let's read from Hebrews 9, 23 to 28. The context of Hebrews 9, 23 to 28, is about Jesus being the superior. He is the superior person. He's the superior priest. He has a superior covenant. And now in chapter 9, we're seeing how his sacrifice is superior.

But these are heavenly realities. These are doctrinal matters. And the teaching of social religion is that doctrine doesn't matter. Heavenly realities are just private beliefs. What matters is society and politics and social religion.

That's the teaching of our culture. But it stands in direct opposition to the Word of God and the necessity of the death of Jesus for sinners. Let's read it first and then we'll see three points. How the death of Jesus was heavenly, it was satisfactory, and it saves those who wait for him.

Thus it was necessary for the copies of the heavenly things to be purified with these rites. But the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these. For Christ has entered not into holy places made with hands, which are copies of the true things, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf.

Nor was it to offer himself repeatedly as the high priest enters the holy places every year with blood not his own. For then he would have had to suffer repeatedly since the foundation of the world. But as it is, he has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself.

And just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment, so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin, but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him.

So when Jesus came to Jerusalem the first time, what were the people looking for? A political revolutionary, someone that can overthrow the oppressive Roman power structure, the ones that were holding down the Jews.

When Jesus didn't do that, and the Jewish people saw him beaten and bloody and about to be crucified, they turned on him very quickly. He didn't come for that kind of social deliverance from oppression.

He came to deliver from sin. He came to save sinners like us. And he will come again to bring righteousness to the earth and full justice in every way, shape, and form. But that appears at his second coming.

Here in verse 23 we see the first major idea, the necessity of the death of Jesus. Now as we look at these verses 23 and 24, I want you to see the contrast between Old Testament bloodshed and the offering of Jesus.

And this is precisely what the world does not want us talking about. This is very heavenly. This is very invisible. And you know, the death of those animals that Moses instituted, that began 4 ,000 years ago and it stopped in 70 AD.

The death of Jesus, that's almost 2 ,000 years ago. And so it's very arcane. And the world wants to say it's irrelevant. That's just a matter of private belief and history and whatever you want to think of it.

That's how the world will cast this conversation. But the word necessary, the fourth word here, thus it was necessary for the copies, indicates how important this subject actually is. As old as those sacrifices were, the sprinkling of blood on the book and on the altar and on every article in the tabernacle, this was very important.

And especially so because it reveals something about Jesus Christ. In my Bible I've circled the words but, not, and but in verses 23 and 24. The reason I did that is because the meaning here is one of contrast.

We're supposed to see one thing in contrast with another. There's some reality that we're supposed to look at and then look at Christ. And by seeing the two things in contrast to one another, the glory of the superior shines forth.

Thus it was necessary for the copies of the heavenly things to be purified with these rites. We need to think about all the bloodshed of the Old Testament, how everything had to be sprinkled with blood, but the heavenly things with better sacrifices than these.

All of that bloodshed in the Old Testament was to point to a heavenly reality. The idea here is that what was happening in the tabernacle was earthly. The articles were man-made. The tabernacle itself was made by human hands.

But what Jesus does, in contrast to that, is heavenly. You have earthly sacrifices and now you have a heavenly sacrifice. For Christ has entered, verse 24, not into holy places made with hands, which are the copies of the true things, but into heaven itself.

The idea here is that the tabernacle with all its articles, that was made after the pattern of what God saw in heaven. So when you picture heaven, I want you to imagine what the tabernacle held being there.

Tables and showbread, cherubim, angels, not carved and made by human hands, but actual angels worshiping in the presence of God. Holy, holy, holy, kadosh, kadosh, kadosh, they sing all day long. Picture that.

But the essence of heaven is found in verse 24. It is the presence of God. You see, when Jesus died on the cross, he didn't just merely do an earthly transaction. As he was hung up between heaven and earth, from heaven's viewpoint, he was entering heaven by his dying and opening a new and living way, tearing the veil between God and man.

He was opening heaven to us. You see, here's the problem. Sinners cannot go to heaven. The sexually immoral cannot go to heaven. Those with fits of rage can never go to heaven. The liar can never go to heaven.

The thief can never go to heaven. There can be no sin in the presence of God. Think of that for a moment. His eyes are too pure to look upon evil. This is the issue. It says in verse 23, it was necessary to cleanse the earthly things.

How much more, the very presence, the very throne room of God, the presence of God was shut off from us. Unless someone can go there on our behalf and open the way. We need a forerunner. Verse 24, so here he goes on our behalf.

So the big first idea is that we're dealing now with something heavenly. His sacrifice is not merely earthly. We are talking about eternal heavenly realities and here's where the essence of the gospel comes forth.

Verses 25 and 26, nor nor is a contrast, right? Nor was it to offer himself repeatedly as the high priest enters the holy places every year with blood not his own. For then he would have had to suffer repeatedly since the foundation of the world.

But as it is, he has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself. So the analogy here that we're to think about shifts to Leviticus 16, there's a great high priest, once a year he can go into the holy of holies and offer blood on the mercy seat.

But even though he does that, as soon as he does it, they're accruing sin again. And the very next year, on Yom Kippur, he could go in again, he must go again, and offer the same sacrifice all over again.

So the point of contrast is that a high priest has to keep doing the same thing over and over again. 1 ,500 years this goes on, and it never satisfies God. It's never satisfactory. Now kids, have you ever gotten an S on your report card when you were in elementary school?

S means satisfactory, but it's not the best grade, right? It's not excellent. It's like, okay, it's satisfactory, you passed, you can move on. Now when I say satisfactory, I don't mean it in that sense.

Satisfactory means it meets the needs of the case. Turns out that what Jesus does in satisfying God's demand, it is outstanding, and it's perfect, and it's absolutely grand and amazing, but I want to talk for a moment about the meaning of satisfaction.

Because this is the essence of the gospel. Picture these priests again and again offering the same sacrifice as a covering for sin, but it never satisfies. It's never satisfactory. Do it again. Another year rolls around, do it again.

The contractor comes to your house, and he rebuilds your kitchen, and it looks worse than when he started. You say, do it again. It's not satisfactory. It's a job left undone. Satisfaction, by contrast to those earthly sacrifices, this heavenly sacrifice is satisfactory.

It accomplishes the thing that it was sent to do. This is so important for understanding the gospel. Turn with me or look in your notes. I have it here printed, if you have the notes to the sermon, to Isaiah 53 verses 10 to 12.

Isaiah 53 is one of the clearest pictures of the meaning of satisfaction. We've already been told in Isaiah 53 that all we like sheep have gone astray. We've turned everyone to his own way, but the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

We're wandering sheep. We're just doing what we want to do sinfully, but God has given a lamb and laid the sin of the wandering sheep on the lamb. Now look at verses 10 to 12. This explains the concept of satisfaction.

Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him. He has put him to grief. When his soul makes an offering for guilt, he shall see his offspring. He shall prolong his days. The will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand.

Consider that for a moment. When Jesus died on the cross, did he die a victim? Did he try to lead a revolution, but failed to lead the revolution for lack of power? And victimized by the Romans, he was strung up on the cross.

Is that the case? God forbid. It says in verse 23, I'm sorry, in Isaiah 53 10, it was the will of the Lord to crush him. He has put him to grief. The father crushed the son. How could this be? When his soul makes an offering for guilt, he shall see his offspring.

We are the offspring of this transaction. He shall prolong his days. Though he be crushed, he will rise. The will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand. Listen to this. Out of the anguish of his soul, he shall see and be satisfied.

The doctrine of satisfaction is crucial for understanding the gospel. That the father was satisfied with the death of the son as a payment for a particular people. Who are these people? It says, by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities.

There is a people called the many whose iniquities he bears in his body. This is a substitution. There are many people. Now, the Israelites thought it was only them. In Leviticus 16, the high priest would go in and he would offer a sacrifice only for the assembly of Israel.

He wasn't paying for the Amorite and the Moabite and the Egyptian, anybody else on earth. It was for the assembly. But in the New Testament, in Ephesians 3, we learned that God has extended this out to anybody who calls on the name of the Lord.

And what seemed like a small group, the nation of Israel, is actually the many. All the earth, all who would come in faith. But notice it's particularly for their iniquities, the many's iniquities. Therefore, I will divide him a portion with the many, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong.

Because he poured out his soul to death and was numbered with the transgressors, yet he bore the sin of many and makes intercession for the transgressors. Now, I recognize we are wading into some very deep waters.

I also recognize that the Spirit of the living God can make heavenly realities known to the minds of children. Deep subjects taught by a deep God. The Spirit of God can teach us these realities. And the essence of the gospel is that the Father has accepted the death of Jesus, the one, and his one-time payment for sin in the place of the many.

In Mark 10 45, we're told that Jesus is a ransom for the many. In Ephesians 5 25, Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. Jesus gave his precious blood in our place. A heavenly transaction that actually satisfied God.

When Jesus was nailed to the cross, his blood flowed, but he intended that blood for you who believe in him. It counts. And here's what many people miss. If God were to look upon a sinner and just wink at that sin and say, you know, I'm going to be merciful to you and pass over the sinner and not punish that sin.

If God were to do that, he would not be a just God. When we speak of justification, justification means to be declared righteous. And we are declared righteous before God. But justification is not only a declaration over us.

It is the justification of God. How is it that a righteous and holy God can be holy and yet admit sinners like us into the very presence of the throne room of God? How can sinners stand in the presence of a holy God?

If he's just, he must punish sin. Romans 3 24 and 25 teach us that he made a propitiation for sin in the blood of the Son in order that he would be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in him.

In other words, God vindicated his own righteousness. He upheld his own justice. He demonstrated to the world that he is righteous. And he actually punished your sin. If he doesn't punish your sin, if he only has mercy, he's not a just God.

But if he does punish your sin, without mercy you go to an eternal hell away from him. This is the great conundrum. This is the great human problem. We fell in sin in the garden. And God is too holy to just overlook that.

And so the meaning of this life, the meaning of life, is that God sent his one and only Son. They call him Jesus. And he was hung on a cross to take into his body the payment for sin that we deserve. This is the gospel.

This is the meaning that I'm afraid that most evangelicals who claim the name evangelical in America do not understand, know, or believe. That God, it was necessary, go back to Hebrews 9 23, it was necessary for God to punish sin in this way.

To satisfy his own character. The attribute of his justice, which is a part of himself. To satisfy the demands of justice, he had to sacrifice the Son in our place. He put away sin by the sacrifice of himself.

Does that make you love him? Does it make you love the priest who did not bring blood not his own? Verse 25, like all the others had to do for all those thousands of years, blood not their own sprinkled on the mercy seat, but our priest sacrificed himself?

He brings his own blood and makes the payment of his own life. Lastly, verse 27 and 28. We've seen the contrast in verse 23 and 25. Earthly, heavenly, repeated, final. Now we see a comparison, that's a similitude.

27, just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment, so Christ. So this is not a point of contrast, it's a point of similarity. And we often take verse 27 kind of as a proof text to fight against reincarnation and stuff like that, and that's not wrong because it says what it says, but look at the context here.

It's a similarity between one thing and another. Verse 27 is what all of you know, and everybody who listens to this sermon, you know this. And verse 28 is the revelation that you can't know apart from this special revelation, this Bible.

27 says, just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment, you know, according to Romans 1 20, that there is a God with eternal power and divine nature. You know, according to the law of conscience, your own conscience, sometimes excusing you, other times holding you guilty.

You know that you cannot stand before that God. It is appointed to man to die once, and after that face judgment. Every person knows that, but they suppress the truth. I was watching a Ray Comfort video, which I would recommend.

He evangelizes on the street. Ray Comfort was out, and there was a girl who had right here on her collar tattooed the word, mortem. Mortem, which means death. And Ray Comfort picked up on that as he was evangelizing this poor girl, and preached the gospel to her, and pointed out that you bear death as a mark over you.

You know that you will die, and the reason for death is sin. But then he turned and preached the good news that there is one who died. That turning to him, you would not die but live. And she rejected that gospel.

But you could see in her eyes that she knew. Every person that you talk to evangelistically knows that there is a God. They suppress the truth and ungodliness. They exchange the truth of God for a lie, and make idols, images, in exchange for what they know.

They're suppressing what they know. There's coming a judgment. Every person knows that they're going to die. I preached a funeral on Monday, and the text that I chose was Ecclesiastes 7 .2, because it says it's better to go to a house of mourning than a house of feasting.

Because people recognize that they're going to die, and they take it to heart. You see, everybody knows they're going to die, but that is a thought that they suppress from their minds. It's intrinsic to all people to know that you will one day stand before a holy God.

And so, verse 27 draws on that common knowledge. It's just common knowledge. Makes me think of, I have a cousin, actually two other cousins became pastors. John Fillmore and John Cleaver. John Fillmore was older than we were growing up, and we were trying to quiz him, because we thought he was the smartest man on earth.

And John, if you ever watch that, we still think that, if he's watching online one day. But I remember this one event that happened, I don't know why I'm telling this story, just to lighten the mood for a second.

He said, we asked him, he said, John, what's the capital of India? And he said, Calcutta. And me and my brother's like, what? How do you know this? That's amazing. You know the capital of India. We had no clue the capital of India.

Just, this guy knows everything. And he said, it's common knowledge. And that's the point here, in verse 27. Listen, there is a common knowledge. Just common knowledge. Everybody knows that you're gonna die.

Everybody knows there's a God, and you'll stand in judgment. Now, here's the point of similarity, and then we're done. Verse 28. So Christ, having been offered once, so just as everybody's gonna die, and you know that death is waiting for you, there is one who died.

And he died once. He didn't go to judgment for his own sin. He was judged on the cross, and he bore the sins of many. The same particular people that we saw in Isaiah 53. The many. He will appear a second time, not to deal with sin, but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him.

Jesus came the first time, once, and made a heavenly transaction, a sacrifice that actually satisfied God. He bore away our sin, and put those sins away on the cross. For who? The many. And who are the many?

Those who eagerly wait for him. You put your faith in what he did in his first coming, and you look for him to come and establish justice on earth. It's the believer. So in closing, the heavenly meaning of the cross.

That Jesus died for God. He died to satisfy God's demand that the one who sins must die. He died as a substitute sacrifice for us who believe in him. The many, all around the world, who call upon the name and wait on his coming.

Did you know that in 2016, Russia outlawed evangelism? They made it illegal to preach the gospel. We actually had, and have, missionaries that we support, that we are friends with, that we knew from from school, from seminary.

And Angela and Petra were kicked out of Russia because they could no longer evangelize there. And that phenomenon is not Russia alone. China is doing the same thing. Nepal did the same thing. Sri Lanka did the same thing.

And you'd say, well, we're probably safe from that here in the West because we have the First Amendment in America, right? We're good? Just look at our northern neighbor Canada that just imprisoned James Coates for preaching the gospel.