Atonement - God's Holiness Demands It - God's Mercy Provides It

God Centered Theology

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The evangelist R .A. Torrey said that when

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Jesus died, he died as my representative and I died in him. When he arose, he rose as my representative and I arose in him.

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When he ascended up on high and took his place at the right hand of the Father in glory, he ascended as my representative and I ascended in him.

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And today I am seated in Christ with God and the heavenlies.

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I look at the cross of Christ and I know that atonement has been made for my sins.

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I look at the open tomb and the risen and ascended

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Lord and I know the atonement has been accepted. There no longer remains a single sin on me no matter how many or how great my sins may have been.

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Now what the evangelist said there is not inspired in errant scripture, there is only one of those.

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But that is a great description of what we find on the pages of inspired inerrant scripture.

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The word atonement means a payment for an offense or an injury.

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The word atone meaning to make amends, to provide some sort of compensation.

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The word atone has in its roots the idea of reconciliation and harmony.

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With the word reconciliation meaning to restore to harmony. So when we speak of atonement, which would obviously include

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Christ atoning work on the cross. But just speaking of it generally, we are talking about something that is made or paid on behalf of one to another.

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To restore harmony, to be reconciled back to a place where no debt is owed.

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The injustice has been made right, so on and so forth. So atonement, atonement for sin, atonement of blood sacrifice for sin is about restoring one to harmony and peace with God for their sin.

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And we are not going to do this this morning, this would be a whole other sermon for another day. But I encourage you this afternoon to just sit and meditate and ponder over the fact that there is actually a way that you can be made right with a holy

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God that involves nothing on your part. Except for the sin that made it necessary.

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You want to talk about being humbled, spend some time thinking about that. It will humble you immensely.

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Now this atonement is necessary because God is holy and we are not.

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Holiness and sin are utterly incompatible. I think so much of the modernized evangelical movement that is wrapped up in marketing and how can we put more butts in the seats has taken the gospel and turned it into, you know, you're not really that bad.

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Everybody makes mistakes. Surely God who is love would accept you just how you are.

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Now notice in my mocking of it, there's some truth there because a lie always has some element of truth with it.

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Yes, it's true that God is love. Yes, it's true that God is graceful. Yes, it's true that God is merciful.

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It involves all those things to provide atonement for our sins. After all, we are talking about the fact that atonement,

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God's holiness demands it and his mercy provides it. But what so often the world and in particular

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Christians forget that not only is God grace, mercy, and love, but he's also holiness.

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He's justice. He's perfect righteousness and righteousness, holiness, perfect justice cannot coexist with sin.

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It must be eradicated. It must be punished. God cannot be in the presence of it.

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So this holy God cannot be in the presence of it at all.

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Now we are not going to go through the entire book of Leviticus. This is the part where everybody goes, yay. But we are going to touch on some parts because I want to focus on Hebrews chapter 9.

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I originally told Andy 10, so that's wrong. I don't know if we put the actual chapter number in the bullet or not, but if it says 10, you can mark it out and put 9.

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Because 9 is fitting more with what we want to cover. But I am going to highlight some sections for you because I want to build first the idea of God's holiness demanding atonement.

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So if you want to turn to Leviticus chapter 19. Leviticus chapter 19, we're going to start there and I'm going to read through for you three little sections here.

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And then I'm going to give sort of a summary, sort of a 30 ,000 foot view of Leviticus, if you will.

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But in Leviticus 19 verse 1 it says, Now notice we are to be holy because God is holy.

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We are not to be holy because we are holy. We are to be holy because God is holy. I'm going to touch on that again in a minute.

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It says, You could translate that there.

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Now turn with me, if you will, to chapter 20 of Leviticus. Now I was going to cover, but when you're deciding these things, you've got to cut something.

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Because, you know, especially in 11 o 'clock service, if you go too long, you have a hostage situation on your hands.

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And a bunch of grumbling bellies, mine included. So the first time I ever got to preach, the pastor that trained me said,

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Andy, the most important thing you can realize in a sermon is edit down, edit down, edit down.

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He said, son, you'll have plenty to say. So, but if I had to cover the earlier part of this chapter, there was a lot of good stuff about child sacrifice and stuff.

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There's so many good, yummy things in Leviticus. Read it. When you get first, first six chapters, it gets a lot better.

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I'm kidding. The first six are good. We're actually going to talk about them in just a minute. I'm just being a little facetious.

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But in Leviticus 20, verse 7, he says, Therefore you shall set yourselves apart as holy and be holy, for I am the

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Lord your God. And you shall keep my statutes and do them. Now notice this.

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I am the Lord who makes you holy.

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We are not holy. We are sinful. We have to be made holy.

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And thanks to the grace and mercy of God, we can be made holy in Christ.

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As we read from R .A. Torrey in his quote, we can be made holy.

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And we as Christians, those that have been saved by the grace and mercy of God, your soul and your spirit right now is as holy as it ever will be.

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Our flesh is what must be brought into submission. And we're going to talk about that tonight at the evening service when we talk about who your worst enemy is.

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But we have to be made holy. Moving on, same chapter, but drop down to verse 22.

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Leviticus 20, verse 22. It says, You shall therefore keep all my statutes and all my judgments and do them, so that the land to which

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I am bringing you to inhabit will not vomit you out. Moreover, you shall not walk in the statutes of the nations which

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I cast out before you, for they did all these things, and therefore I have loathed them. Hence, I have said to you, you yourselves shall possess the land, and I myself will give it to you to possess it, a land flowing with milk and honey.

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I am Yahweh your God who has separated you from the peoples. You are therefore to separate, sanctify, be set apart between the clean animal, the unclean, and we're not going to deal with that a lot today, but a lot of people get this confused and might think in terms of hygiene.

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When we talk about clean and unclean in the Old Testament, we're simply talking about animals that God had signified as being ritualistically clean or the ones that are to be used for these sacrifices, and there are those that are not to be, hence clean, unclean.

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He says between the unclean bird and the clean, you shall not make yourselves detestable by animal or by bird or by anything that creeps on the ground, which

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I have separated for you as unclean. Thus, you shall be holy to me, for I the

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Lord am holy, and I have separated you from the peoples to be mine. Now you have no doubt at some point if you've been in church for a long time, heard sermons and talk about how as Christians we are to be separate from the world, we are separated, meaning we do not participate in pagan evil, we do not accept or adopt the world's worldview.

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You'll hear a common phrase in Christian circles, you know, we're in the world but not of the world.

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That phrase, if you've said it or have heard it, that's a lot of where this comes from, is identifying and seeing how

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God wanted the Israel people to operate in these lands that they were conquering.

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Because a lot of times they'd go in there and they'd be conquered, but they'd still be among a lot of people that were not them, not like them.

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And a lot of the issue God had was they'd go in and marry the women that were there and they'd have families and they'd start adopting pagan practices and worshiping their gods and all these things, and God's like,

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I did not send you here to become them. I sent you here to be holy and be who

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I have called you to be, and then they become like you. So don't live like the pagans, we are to be holy, we are to be separate.

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When you live out in the world, when you live and go to your place of work, or if you go to anywhere in the public square, there ought to be something about you that stands out.

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In certain situations, there should be something in the way in which you behave that is different, holy, than everybody else.

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You see, the book of Leviticus assumes the sin and impurity of the people.

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The book of Romans does no different. Romans chapter 3, all have sin and fall short of the glory of God.

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We're all evil, there's none that seek after God. All are sinful in Adam.

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Now, Leviticus also describes how to deal with that sin and impurity so that the

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Holy Lord can dwell in his people's midst. Now, we're not going to read it, but you'll see this in the early chapters of Leviticus.

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You have instructions on five major offerings. There's burnt offerings, there's grain offerings, peace offerings, sin offering, guilt offerings.

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Now, don't get lost in all the names and all the things. The main thing you want to take away is that burnt, peace, sin, and guilt offerings, so four of the five would involve animals.

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The grain offering obviously involved grain. Well, guilt offerings would use rams.

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All others would use cattle, sheep, goats, and or birds.

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And so they would be used in various ways. And the sin offerings, which a sin offering in particular was specifically for a committed sin, whether unintentionally or intentional.

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We all in our dumbfounded ignorance sin unintentionally at times, and then we obviously sin because our flesh, we just want to.

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But these sin offerings would be there to atone or make amends for the broken relationship with the

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Lord due to their sin. And the ritual, the offering, the sin offering would vary depending on the person, depending on the nature of the sin, the type of animal that would be used, what was done with the blood varied.

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This is why you do see in Hebrews 10, which we were originally going to cover, where it talks about in verse 4 of Hebrews 10, where it talks about how the blood of bulls and goats cannot make one perfect, cannot make one clean, cannot make one holy.

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In chapter 10 of Leviticus, we see

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Aaron's two sons, Nadab and Abihu, killed by God when they offer fire on the altar that was not done in the way in which

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God had commanded. They were too concerned about themselves.

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You think about Cain and Abel, what was the big difference in the sacrifices? Cain brought what he thought in his pride was proper.

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Abel brought what was commanded. Fast forward a few years, we still have people doing the same thing, don't we?

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Oh, we're so much farther down the line than them. Surely we've advanced and evolved, right?

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Yeah. All we've done is found and invented new ways to sin, my friends.

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Sin carries on, which brings us to the day of atonement, which we find in Leviticus chapter 16, the day of atonement when the high priest

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Aaron would enter the most holy place in this, what they call the tent of meeting, this portable tabernacle that they would set up.

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You had the holy place, which is where all of your, you know, sin offering and burn offering, all those things would occur.

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And then you had the most holy place where God's presence dwelled, that the high priest

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Aaron would only go into one time a year. And Aaron would have to go inside the veil and first make atonement for his sin and his family.

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So think about this, and we're going to expand this more when we go over to Hebrews 9.

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The person offering atonement to make amends for the sins of the people had to make atonement for himself first.

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And he had to do it with blood that wasn't his own. He had to use blood of animals to make atonement for people and for himself first, for the people.

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And so, you know, he'd take a bull offering for a sin offering for him and his house. He'd take a ram for a burn offering to make atonement for the priest.

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And then he'd take a male goat as a sin offering to make atonement for the sins of the people. So there was great instructions on how to do this correctly, and he would sprinkle blood, the blood of the animal, on the mercy seat in the most holy place, which was the gold lid on the

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Ark of the Covenant. And so that is a very short 30 ,000 foot view of what this would involve.

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There was a lot more involved in terms of, you know, what Aaron would wear, how he was supposed to carry this out.

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But I wanted to give you just a summary fashion as we move along. I want you to look with me before we go to Hebrews.

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In chapter 16, where the Day of Atonement is covered, look at verse 29 with me. After he, in chapter 16, after it goes through and describes the

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Day of Atonement, what Aaron would need to do, how he would need to do it, we get down to the end of the chapter, verse 29.

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It says, and this, meaning this Day of Atonement, this thing that the high priest will do on behalf of himself and on behalf of you, shall be a perpetual statute for you.

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In the seventh month, on the tenth day of the month, you shall humble your souls and not do any work, whether the native or the sojourner who sojourns among you.

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For it is on this day that atonement shall be made for you to cleanse you.

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You will be cleaned from all your sins before the Lord. It is to be a

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Sabbath of solemn rest for you that you may humble your souls. It is a perpetual statute.

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So the priest who is anointed and ordained to minister as a priest in his father's place shall make atonement.

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He shall thus put on the linen garments, the holy garments. Like I said, it's another part of what he would do. Verse 33, and make atonement for the holy sanctuary, and he shall make atonement for the tent of meeting and for the altar.

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See, there would have to be part of this that we don't have time for this morning. It wouldn't be just for the sins of the people, but he'd have to make atonement and cleanse the place in which he was doing this because even that place wasn't allowed to be defiled with sin.

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And then it says, he shall also make atonement for the priests and for all the people of the assembly. And lastly, verse 34, now you shall have this as a perpetual statute to make atonement for the sons of Israel and for all their sins once every year.

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And just as the Lord had commanded Moses, so he did. Notice something there, my friends? I slowed down for emphasis.

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Once every year. Now, if you spent any amount of time studying the

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English language, there's a couple things you can take from that. If it's being done once every year, does that mean it's permanent?

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No. Does it mean it really, really, really, really, really got the job done? But we've got a problem.

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Because God's holiness demands atonement.

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My friend, your sin, my sin, the sin of every person in this world is cosmic treason against the one that puts breath in your bodies.

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God demands perfect holiness and perfect righteousness to enter his kingdom. And the problem is that none of us can produce it, which is why the gospel is so vitally important.

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And that's what we're going to look at now. We need someone to provide atonement for us in the same way that Aaron would for the people, but his was incomplete.

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It was imperfect. It could not produce perfect righteousness and holiness in these people for they kept on sinning.

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And they'd have to keep doing this. Hebrews 10 talks about how the priest would stand daily, same sacrifices day after day, year after year.

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I don't know about you, but that made me think, what in the world is going on? Why do we keep needing this?

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Because, my friends, perfect atonement can come. Can only come.

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Will come. Has come. In the person of Jesus Christ. Turn with me to Hebrews chapter 9.

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In the last few minutes that we have available to us this morning, I want you to notice a few things.

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Now, I want you to, as we read through three sections, we're not going to read through the whole chapter, but there's three sections of Hebrews 9

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I want to read through for you. And I want you to notice with me this morning the contrasts that appear between what

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Jesus did for us and for His people and what previously in the

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Old Covenant could be done, albeit imperfectly. Because Hebrews talks about the differences between the

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Old Covenant and the New Covenant. The change that has come. The righteousness that has come.

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And we see this, it says in Hebrews 9 verse 1, it says, Now even the first covenant had requirements of divine worship in the earthly sanctuary.

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Speaking of the book of Leviticus and all the things that were instructed to do here. For there was a tabernacle prepared.

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The first part in which the lampstand, the table, the sacred bread, which is called the holy place. Remember? We told you in this portable temple you had the holy place and the most holy place.

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It's talking about that initial larger place, the holy place here, where there was a lampstand, sacred bread, so on and so forth.

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And then notice verse 3, behind the second veil. So there was one veil to enter the holy place, and there was another veil to enter the most holy place.

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And if you remember when Jesus died, what happened to that veil? Torn in two. Showing the world that now there is no need for just a high priest to go in on your behalf.

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But we enter the most holy place because our Savior entered the most holy place.

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He is the most holy place. The second veil where there is a tabernacle which is called the holy of holies.

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Having a golden altar of incense and the ark of the covenant covered on all sides with gold in which a golden jar holding the manna and Aaron's rod which budded and the tablets of the covenant, ten commandments.

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And above it were the cherubim of glory overshadowing the mercy seat. Of these we cannot now speak in full detail.

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Now when these things have been so prepared, the priests are continually entering the first part of the tabernacle, the holy place.

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The first part, not the most holy, but they enter into the holy place performing the divine worship, performing the sacrifices, burn, gil, grain, so on and so forth.

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First five, six chapters of Leviticus. But notice, but into the second, the most holy, only the high priest,

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Aaron from Leviticus chapter 16, enters once a year, not without taking blood, which he offers for himself and for the sins of the people committed in ignorance.

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The Holy Spirit indicating this, that the way into the holy places has not yet been manifested while the first part of the tabernacle is still standing.

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So as long as the old covenant was in place, as long as there was a holy place where these offerings and sacrifices were to be made, there could not be the new covenant, there could not be the way in which the

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Holy Spirit would have us to operate today, which is why we see that in 70 AD the temple was destroyed.

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The old covenant passed off the scene, obviously initiated by Jesus' blood, but part of that work is the salvific work he does on the cross, but also the elimination of the old covenant, because now the new covenant has come in his own blood.

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Notice with me, drop down to verse 11, it says, When Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things to come, he,

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Jesus Christ, entered through the greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made with hands, that is to say, not of this creation.

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Whole sermon for another day, but this verse here right now is pointing to the fact that the one that makes atonement for us had to enter creation.

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The prologue to the Gospel of John, the word becomes flesh. The one that through whom all was created and nothing can be created without him.

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The entire universe, every single one of you, if you have breath in your body, you owe it to your creator, and your creator entered the greater and more perfect tabernacle, being that he was perfectly holy to make atonement for you.

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Verse 12, not through the blood of goats and calves, but through his own blood.

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He entered the holy places once for all, having obtained eternal redemption.

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The old covenant, the sacrifices, the offerings, everything that the priest would do, could provide temporary atonement.

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Temporary redemption, if you will. But Christ making one sacrifice secures and obtains eternal redemption.

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For if the blood of goats and bulls and the ashes of a heifer sprinkling those who have been defiled sanctify for the cleansing of the flesh, 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

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God. Lastly, skip down to verse 22 with me.

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It says, and according to the law, one may almost say all things are cleansed with blood, and without shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.

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And that right there is quoting the book of Leviticus. Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.

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That comes from the book of Leviticus, my friends. And the New Testament writer here is quoting that from there.

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Therefore it was necessary for the copies of the things in the heavens to be cleansed with these, but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these.

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For Christ did not enter holy places made with hands. Christ didn't go into the holy place.

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Christ didn't go into the most holy place that they used. Mere copies, anything created, can never match the creator.

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We can build the biggest buildings. We can come up with some of the finest, most rare elements you can find on this planet.

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And they were still created by God. But into heaven itself, the ascension, remember the quote from A.

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R. A. Torrey, talking about when he ascended, he ascended as my representative. Jesus went into heaven itself now to appear in the presence of God for us.

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Nor was it that he would offer himself often, once a year, over and over, as the high priest had to enter the most holy place year by year with blood.

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Notice this. The high priest would enter year by year often with blood that wasn't his own.

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Otherwise he, Christ, would have needed to suffer often since the foundation of the world.

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But now once at the consummation of the ages, he has been manifested to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself.

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What man can't do, God did.

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You see, the atonement, and not just speaking of the word generally,

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I'm talking about the actual atoning work of Christ, is God -centered.

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God in his mercy provided what we could not produce by ourselves and that which

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God demands, which is holiness. God makes me holy.

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God makes you holy. And we are to live as holy people because our

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God is holy. God demands perfect righteousness to enter his kingdom.

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And the gospel tells us that we can be made righteous because of the grace and mercy of God solely through repentance and faith.

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I thank God for that. What a non -comforting, unsure way to live to think that you would have to continually offer sacrifices.

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And God said, no you don't. I will send my son and he will make one sacrifice and he will make all of you clean.

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He'll make all of you holy. He'll make all of you righteous through your faith. So I leave you with this.

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I hear a lot of people, they'll talk and ask, you know, we talk about things like assurance of salvation. You know, how can

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I know I'm saved? How can I know that I'm really righteous? My friends, the answer to every single question regarding your salvation up to and including whether or not you can be sure that you're saved is

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Jesus Christ. You're saved from your sins because of Jesus Christ.

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You live holy and righteously because of Jesus Christ. You can know that your salvation is sure and secure because of what

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Jesus Christ did. As the evangelist in the quote I read at the beginning said, because we look at an empty tomb and know that he ascended to heaven, we know that our atonement for our sins was accepted.