The Priest Who Sat Down

The Old Testament Sacrificial System in Numbers 28

The Old Testament reading this morning is in the book of Numbers, chapter 28, we'll be reading verses 1 through 15. If you'd like to read a long ear, a few Bibles, that's page 136. Please stand in honor of God's word.

The Lord spoke to Moses, saying, command the people of Israel and say to them, my offering, my food for my food offerings, my pleasing aroma you shall be careful to offer to me at its appointed time. And you shall say to them, this is the food offering that you shall offer to the Lord, two male lambs a year old without blemish day by day as a regular offering.

The one lamb you shall offer in the morning and the other lamb you shall offer at twilight. Also a tenth of an ephah, a fine flour, for a grain offering, mixed with a quarter of a hen of beaten oil. It is a regular burnt offering, which was ordained at Mount Sinai for a pleasing aroma, a food offering to the Lord.

Its drink offering shall be a quarter of a hen for each lamb. In the holy place, you shall pour out a drink offering, a strong drink to the Lord. The other lamb you shall offer at twilight, like the grain offering of the morning and like its drink offering, you shall offer it as a food offering with a pleasing aroma to the Lord.

On the Sabbath day, two male lambs a year old without blemish and two tenths of an ephah of fine flour for a grain offering, mixed with oil and its drink offering. This is the burnt offering of every Sabbath, besides the regular burnt offering and its drink offering.

At the beginnings of your month, you shall offer a burnt offering to the Lord. Two bulls from the herd, one ram, seven male lambs a year old without blemish, also three tenths of an ephah of fine flour for a grain offering, mixed with oil for each bull, and two tenths of fine flour for a grain offering, mixed with oil for the one ram, and a tenth of fine flour mixed with oil as a grain offering for every lamb, for a burnt offering with a pleasing aroma, a food offering to the Lord.

Their drink offerings shall be half of a hen of wine for a bull, a third of a hen for a ram, and a quarter of a hen for a lamb. This is the burnt offering of each month throughout the month of the year.

Also one male goat for a sin offering to the Lord. It shall be offered besides the regular burnt offering and its drink offering.

Christ the Firstfruits and the Resurrection of the Dead

New Testament scripture reading is found in 1 Corinthians, chapter 15, verses 20 -26. But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead.

For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. But each in his own order, Christ the firstfruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ. Then comes the end when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power.

For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. Please remain standing.

The Once-for-All Sacrifice in Hebrews 10

Take your Bibles now and turn with me to Hebrews chapter 10. Hebrews 10. You follow as I read verses 1 -18. For since the law has but a shadow of the good things to come instead of the true form of these realities, it can never, by the same sacrifice that are continually offered every year, make perfect those who draw near.

Otherwise would they not have ceased to be offered, since the worshipers, having once been cleansed, would no longer have any consciousness of sin. But in these sacrifices there is a reminder of sins every year, for it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.

Consequently, when Christ came into the world, he said, Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired, but a body have you prepared for me. In burnt offerings and sin offerings you have taken no pleasure.

Then I said, Behold, I have come to do your will, O God, as it is written of me in the.

Scroll of the book.

When he said above, You have neither desired nor taken pleasure in sacrifices and offerings, in burnt offerings and sin offerings, these are offered according to the law. Then he added, Behold, I have come to do your will.

He does away with the first in order to establish the second. And by that will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once.

For all.

And every priest stands daily at his service, offering repeatedly the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins. But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God, waiting from that time until his enemy should be made a footstool.

For his feet.

For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified. And the Holy Spirit also bears witness to us. For after saying, This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, declares the Lord, I will put my laws on their hearts and write them on their minds.

Then he adds, I will remember their sins and their lawless deeds no more. Where there is forgiveness of these, there is no longer any offering for sin. Father, now we open this book before us, expecting you to speak to us in these words, the living words that are the scriptures.

We expect today that you will teach us, we expect today that you will move us, we expect you to work because of your powerful word. Help us now to listen carefully to your voice as it speaks to us. And we'll thank you in Jesus name.

Amen.

Posture as a Picture of the Human Condition Before God

Those of you who are my age or even older, remember that some of the lessons we had to learn, believe it or not, were about posture. Now, you young folks don't know what I'm talking about. You older folks are shaking your head.

Yeah, we learned about posture. We were taught to sit up at our desks, not to slouch. We were taught not to walk in a slouched manner. Our parents and teachers taught us to walk with our backs straight as if we had a ramrod on our backs, right?

Ramrod straight. But most of all, we were told your posture communicates something. If you walk around slouched over, people are going to say about you, well, he must be some kind of a lazy guy because he has an I don't care attitude.

But if you walk or you sit with good posture, you exude confidence and self-control. There's a reason why the military has all of their people march ramrod straight.

It says something.

The Priest Who Sits Down Because His Sacrifice Is Finished

Well, as we come to our text this morning, Hebrews 10, 11 through 18, we see that the posture of our great high priest, Jesus, communicates an eternal hope giving message. Let's look at our text for today again.

Verse 11, And every priest stands daily at his service, offering repeatedly the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins. But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God, waiting from that time until his enemies should be made a footstool for his feet.

For by a single offering, he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified. And the Holy Spirit also bears witness to us for after saying, this is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, declares the Lord, I will put my laws on their hearts and write them on their minds.

Then he adds, I will remember their sins and their lawless deeds no more. Where there is forgiveness of these, there is no longer any offering for sins. So our pastor writer, as we've seen over all these several weeks, seeks to convince you that your only hope, your only hope is in Jesus.

He's labored all the way through this epistle to convince you of the superiority of Jesus. He wants you to believe that Jesus in his being and in his work is the only way you can approach God. Now, the people of his day, in order to escape the cost of discipleship, had reverted back to those old covenant sacrifices in order to relieve the pressure of persecution.

In our day, we're too easily led astray by people or programs that promise us how we can deal with our sin and our, what the world would call our guilt and our accusing conscience. Or we're just in danger of drifting away from Jesus and we need to be reminded Jesus is our only hope.

Now he's going to make his final argument. This is the end of his argument. From here on, beginning in verse 19, he's going to tell us how Christians ought to act in response to everything he said about the superiority of Jesus.

So here are his final two arguments. Here are his final two arguments about why Jesus is your only hope. Here they are. Jesus' posture should convince you that he's your only hope. And the spirit should convince you that he's your only hope.

Jesus' posture and the Holy Spirit. So let's dive into the argument so that we can gain a full assurance of hope in Jesus Christ. Jesus' posture, he says, should convince you. The very posture of Jesus should convince you that he's your only hope.

Verses 11 through 14. Now, imagine for a moment that you're Simeon or Miriam Ephraim. You've come out with Israel in the great exodus from Egypt. And every day you walk past the tabernacle and its courtyard.

Every day, for some reason, you're walking by that great tabernacle. You walk by early in the morning. As you peek behind the curtains into the courtyard, as you look in the doorway to the courtyard, you see early in the morning that the priests are sacrificing a lamb, as well as preparing a grain offering and a drink offering.

And then you pass some time in the afternoon. Your mom sends you on an errand and you peek into the courtyard again. And you see those priests busy washing things and sacrificing other animals and other grain offerings and so forth.

And as you walk by at dusk, you look in again and you see there they are again, sacrificing an unblemished lamb. And as you see that, it seems that the tabernacle and its environs are like a place of unceasing activity.

For the rest of your life, you see those priests moving all the time when they're at work, performing their religious duties. You see them working day after day, working all day, as a matter of fact. Now, already we read in our Old Testament scriptures this morning from Numbers 28.

Every single day, two lambs were sacrificed. One in the morning, one in the evening, along with a drink offering and a grain offering. And then you add more offerings. We read about some of those at the beginning of every month.

Two bulls, one ram, seven male lambs, a grain offering, a drink offering, and then in the evening, a male goat as a sin offering. And don't forget the offerings at the yearly Passover celebration. And if you keep reading in this chapter, you see sacrifices had to be made at the Feast of Booths and the Feast of Trumpets and this other thing.

Sacrifice, sacrifice, sacrifice. And don't forget the Day of Atonement when that happened once a year. All this to make sure that the priests and the worshipers could approach God. All this activity to make sure you could approach God.

And that's not even considering all the work they did in the tabernacle. Keeping the wicks trimmed, keeping the lights burning, everything. They were constantly doing this. Nor does their work progress.

They don't move on to other tasks. It's the same thing all day, every day, all year long, year after year. They do the exact same things. They offer the same sacrifices and they offer the same sacrifices repeatedly in this endless, futile cycle of sacrifice.

The posture of these priests, continually standing, communicates a message. And that is that those sacrifices, repeated so many times, could never take away sin. They could never take away sin. Since those many sacrifices offered repeatedly never ultimately dealt with sin, or the consciences of the worshipers as we've seen, the priests could never stop.

They could never stop. Day after day after day, year after year, they were moving, they were standing, they never rested. They must always stand since their work was never done. You say, how interesting.

Well, I would suggest to you that the same ineffectual standing priesthood exists today. Catholic priests continually offer, every single day, in mass, the sacrifice of Jesus. Never ultimately dealing with sin.

Never clearing the consciences of the worshipers. Islamic holy men telling their students all the good things that they must do in order to achieve reconciliation with Allah. But never being able to rest.

Never coming to the confidence that their sins have been dealt with. And so, in essence, they stand. Because none of it deals with sin. So the work is never complete. By the way, there's priests in every man.

Everyone is a priest to some extent. Your neighbors, your friends, your co-workers are part of a standing ineffectual priesthood. They offer the sacrifice of penance. They say, oh God, I've got so much, I've sinned against you.

I will give up. I will deprive myself. I will get rid of these things in order to make atonement for the bad things I've done. They offer the sacrifice of turning over a new leaf. Or resolving to do better.

Never ending. Always making the promise. They offer the sacrifice of religious activity and ritual. When I was a kid, growing up where I grew up, off in the distance, to the southeast, you could see this one hill.

It stood above all the others. On it, you could make out the outlines of a church. It was called Holy Hill. It was a Carmelite monastery. When we were teenagers, we used to go there just for fun. We would go there because you could walk up into the steeples and from there, you could look out in the distance and actually see Lake Michigan, which was like 25 miles away.

And so we'd go there for fun. But I remember going there one time and seeing a guy who was kneeling before all these candles that he obviously had lit. Obviously in torment. I couldn't help but think, here, as I look back at that, I can still see it in my mind's eye.

I see a man who was tormented by his conscience, never sure that his sins had been dealt with. Oftentimes, people offer the sacrifice of good works, of altruism. Surely God will accept me if I give myself in sacrificial work on behalf of others.

I remember a guy that I was counseling. He was what the world would call psychotic. Lived a wicked life. A wicked life. I remember him going to the park and just handing out money, stacks of money, handing out his money to people in order to deal with what he was feeling in his heart.

Maybe this will deal with it.

Maybe if I give, that'll deal with it. So they stand because they remain unchanged, unforgiven, unable to say, my conscience doesn't torment me anymore. And so there is this ever-present standing priesthood.

A priesthood of ceaseless, vain, hopeless, exhausting activity. But what do we read in our text? Here's what we see. But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God.

Don't miss that. Jesus has a different posture. He does not stand.

He sits.

And that also communicates a message. Jesus' work stands in contrast to everything the priest had done in the past or anything that the priest in us does now. They offer many sacrifices, but he offers a single sacrifice.

A single sacrifice. They offer sacrifices that never deal with sin ultimately, while his actually removes sin. They offer sacrifices of temporary value, but the benefits of his single sacrifice never end.

The benefits never end. Notice it says for all time, forever. The benefits never end. And so he sits down.

You see?

He sits down. He has accomplished all that needed to be done. The work is finished. The priest can now sit down. Verse 13, though, tells us he sits down in triumph. He sits down in triumph. Once more, our writer looks to his favorite psalm, Psalm 110, and he alludes to it.

The Lord says to my Lord, sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool. Jesus has achieved the work of redemption, and so God the Father invites him to sit down at his right hand. And he now awaits the last act of redemption, which is to make all his enemies, he's going to sit there until his enemies are made his footstool.

We had seen earlier in this chapter, right? We're waiting for Jesus to accomplish that. And now it says since he's accomplished this of removing our sins, now he waits until all is done, until the final enemy of death is conquered.

He will return and complete the defeat of his enemies and our final deliverance from the curse of sin. And he says Jesus can sit down because that single, all-time, forever sacrifice perfects those who have been sanctified.

Now, it says he perfects us. What does he mean here? Remember earlier that he had said that suffering has perfected Jesus? Now he makes it clear as well that Jesus has no moral blemish, that Jesus is not a sinner.

And he does not mean by perfect, moral blamelessness or moral perfection as if Jesus had to achieve moral perfection. He was already there. Instead, he means that through suffering, God had equipped Jesus as the perfect representative, the perfect priest for humanity that is fit for the job.

And so when he talks about perfecting us, he's told us the law and its requirements could never perfect you. That is to say, could never make you fit so that you could draw near to God. It couldn't do that.

It couldn't bring the removal of sin and cleansing so that you could draw near. So we are cleansed for the defilement of sin, and we can now draw near to God. That's what he means by perfect. He's now made us fit so we can approach God, draw near to God.

And who gets that? All those who have been sanctified. He's conferred a holy standard, a holy standing on believers through his offering and his sacrifice. He has cleansed them and forgiven them, all of it possible through that one sacrifice.

You now, as a believer in Jesus, having embraced him, you now stand in a holy position. God relates to you no longer as a sinner, but as a saint. Now don't miss this. If you have embraced Jesus in faith, God looks at you and says, you are holy.

And he relates to you in that way. That is why you are perfected. That is why you are equipped to draw near to God because God now sees you as holy. You got to let that sink in. Do we still sin? Yes. But you're in a holy position, not because of what you have done or not done or because you've worked hard.

You're in a holy position because of what Jesus did and only on the basis of Jesus. And now you can draw near to God because like the priest, this priest, you are now holy. You can now draw near to God.

We've got to get that in our minds. Too many too often, we just say, well, I'm just a sinner. No, you're not.

You're a saint.

You're a holy one who still struggles against sin. That's how you need to see yourself. Without it, you have no confidence to draw near to God. He has perfected those who are being made, who are being sanctified, being made holy.

Those are the ones that draw near. The priest sat down.

It is finished.

The Holy Spirit Bears Witness in the New Covenant

Now, if that weren't enough, our writer goes on to say that the Holy Spirit confirms this. So the Holy Spirit should convince you as well. The Holy Spirit, he says, speaks to us in verse 15. And the Holy Spirit also bears witness to us.

The Holy Spirit speaks to us. But how does he do that? How does he speak to us? He does that in the Scriptures. He does that in the Scriptures. The Spirit spoke through the prophets. The prophets recorded his word.

And that's how he speaks to us. Two weeks ago, Harper Pettit laid it on heavy. She was in her VBS class. And Sharon Green asked the question. Sharon was teaching those little kids. Asked the question, who wrote the Bible?

And Harper immediately responded, holy men of God wrote the Scriptures who were moved by the Holy Spirit. All right, good. Later that evening, Sharon mentioned to her class that God had written the Bible, and so Harper interrupted.

No, holy men of God wrote the Scriptures as they were moved by the Holy Spirit. By the way, that goes into our VBS lore, right? That goes into the story of John's leg and Charlie Fry's maniacal competition.

That goes right up there with it. But she was right. Our pastor turns once more to the prophet Jeremiah and the promises of the new covenant. He says you should be convinced that Jesus is your only hope because that's exactly what the Holy Spirit says.

What does the Holy Spirit say?

What does he say?

Well, in the new covenant, he inscribes his law on our hearts and the minds of his people. That is, God himself puts within you the desire to obey him. The desire to obey God does not come from any spring of human willpower.

The desire to obey is ascribed to the power of God. The fact that you want to obey God now. When you used to hate what he said, now you love what he says, can be ascribed to God and to God alone. For he has written his law in your hearts.

And this points to an obedience from the heart that God expected under the old covenant but is only accomplished under the new. In other words, the Holy Spirit transforms our motivations, our affections, our desires, so that we more and more conform to Jesus.

Now our writer skips over some of the other promises of the new covenant. There are others that are made. That's the first. There are others, but he skips over that and lands on the last promise of the new covenant, which is the promise of the forgiveness of our sins.

The old covenant sacrifices constantly reminded the worshipers of their sin. But under the new covenant, God promises to forgive. That is, to not remember any of our sins or our lawless deeds. Now, let's do a quick review.

What does forgiveness mean? Forgiveness means to not remember. Forgiveness does not mean to forget. The term forgive and forget is not biblical. The term forgive and not remember is. Remember, forgetting is passive.

It just happens. To not remember is active. I'm choosing to not remember. And God cannot forget anything. But what he does promise is he promises, I won't remember your sins. I won't bring them up ever to use against you.

You see this, for example, in Psalm 25, verse 7. Psalm 25, 7. Remember not the sins of my youth or my transgressions. According to your steadfast love, remember me for the sake of your goodness, O Lord.

Ezekiel 18, 22. None of the transgressions that he has committed shall be remembered against him. For the righteousness that he has done, he shall live. And so the promise is God will never. Now get this, get this.

In Christ, God promises that he will never bring up your sins to use against you. God has promised never to use your sins against you. There is forgiveness because of what Jesus did. And so he draws the ringing conclusion in verse 18.

For by a single offering, I'm sorry, where there is forgiveness of these, there is no longer any offering for sin. If God says that he will never bring up our sins to use against us, that means the need no longer exists for sacrifices.

There's no sacrifice needed any longer.

Why?

Well, if there's no need for sacrifice, the Holy Spirit says that in the new covenant, Jesus' single sacrifice has really dealt with the guilt of our sins so that once for all, an offering has been given so that God can say, I will never bring up your sins to use against you.

I will never do that. And where that happens, there's no more sacrifice. The one sacrifice is sufficient. Here's my question to you. What does your posture say? What does your posture say? Are you endlessly seeking to make things right with God by the things that you do, by the things that you promise?

Are you endlessly, ceaselessly, exhaustingly trying to make things right with God, promising him things, doing whatever? What does your posture say?

Listen.

You must be convinced that Jesus is your only hope. Jesus sits and the Spirit speaks, and they both proclaim the same thing. It is simply this. Jesus has offered the one sacrifice that deals with it all.

There is nothing more you can do. The only thing you can do, the only thing you must do is rest completely and entirely in Jesus. Your posture should be one of rest because of what Jesus has done. Where do you place your hope?

Father, your word is beautiful to us because it shows us the magnificence of your grace. It shows us a priest who sits. It says that the Spirit speaks and says there is no more sacrifice for all of our sins have been forgiven.

Oh God, help us to rest then. Help us to rest in what Jesus has done. Remembering, remembering that what he has done.

Is complete, is sufficient,.

And nothing can be added. So we thank you for your grace. In the name of our Savior Jesus, amen.