Hebrews 9:16

For where there is a testament, there must also of necessity be the death of the testator. For a testament is in force after men are dead, since it has no power while the testator lives... And without the shedding of blood there is no remission... but now, once at the end of the ages, He has appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself. And as it is appointed for men to die once, but after this the judgment, so Christ was offered once to bear the sins of many. To those who eagerly wait for Him He will appear a second time, apart from sin, for salvation. (Hebrews 9:16–28)

Why did Christ have to die? Because a covenant is sealed in blood, and only His blood could pay an eternal debt the old sacrifices never could.

The Costly Burden of Faithfulness Under the Old Covenant

Imagine it is the sixth time in two months you are making the trek back to the temple. Thankfully you live in one of the nearest cities to Jerusalem, so if you rise early enough you can make the trip there and back in a day. But what if you lived thirty miles away in Jericho, or a hundred miles away in Galilee? Even then you would make the journey, because your deepest desire is to honor God with your life. This is what faithfulness to His law looks like, and faithfulness requires sacrifice.

You try very hard, but you are completely unable to live perfectly according to the commandments given in that first covenant. So you have spent the last days taking account of your life—the things you have said, done, and thought, and the acts of faithfulness you failed to do. You come with a lamb selected from your flock, the best you could find, because the law requires the best. Soon you will stand before a priest, your family beside you, place your hands on the lamb's head, and confess your sins. The priest will slit its throat, and that lamb will stand in your place, bearing your sin to be your atonement.

Faithfulness is costly. Six lambs in two months, nearly forty last year. But it is a small price, you think, to be right with God. What if you died without a sacrifice? What if, God forbid, one of your children did? This is the only way to be right with God; this is your hope of righteousness and of resurrection. All of it rests upon the sacrifice you bring to the temple.

A Promised New Covenant

If that were your life, the words God spoke through Jeremiah twenty-five hundred years ago would have shone with hope:

Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah—not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers... I will put My law in their minds, and write it on their hearts... For I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more. (Jeremiah 31:31–34)

What hope is in those words: I will remember no more. For every time you go to the temple, there is a fresh remembrance of sin and the payment due. Yet here is a promise of forgiveness, of no more remembrance of sin, of a conscience completely cleansed and the guilt of sin gone entirely. That is a good promise.

A Better Covenant Built on Better Promises

This is the new covenant Jesus establishes, and it rests on better promises. In Hebrews 8:6 He is the mediator of a better covenant, which was established upon better promises. What is the better promise? Skip to Hebrews 9:15: He is the mediator "that those who are called may receive the promise of the eternal inheritance." Not something temporary like the temple sacrifices, but something eternal. That is a far better promise.

How did our mediator secure it? Hebrews 9:11–12 tells us Christ came as a high priest "with His own blood... having obtained eternal redemption," by means of death "for the redemption of the transgressions." What transgressions? Our guilty breaking of God's perfect law. At Sinai the people said, "All that You have said we will do and be obedient"—and within days they were already breaking it. Not because they were less than us; I would have broken it sooner. How quickly our zeal fails.

Point one: Christ secured our eternal inheritance by shedding His own blood. It seems almost insane that He would have to shed His own blood for us. Why?

Why Blood Was Necessary

Covenants between God and humanity are established by the shedding of blood. The old covenant was no exception. "Not even the first covenant was dedicated without blood" (v. 18). When Moses had spoken every precept to all the people and they said, "All that You have said we will do," he took the blood of calves and goats with water, scarlet wool, and hyssop, and sprinkled the book of the law and the people, saying, "This is the blood of the covenant which God has commanded you" (v. 19–20). Then he sprinkled the tabernacle and all the vessels of ministry as well.

Yet the first covenant proved not to be enough. It provided a measure of atonement and forgiveness, but it was incapable of eternal redemption. The sacrifices of Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy—offered daily, weekly, monthly for fifteen hundred years—were both temporal and temporary. Temporal, because they dealt only with sin in an earthly relationship; temporary, because you would sin again that very day and need another. Living perfectly faithful to the old covenant is impossible—not because the covenant is not good enough, but because we are not good enough.

The Minimum Payment on an Eternal Debt

Solomon once offered a thousand sacrifices in a day, and I guarantee that by day's end he sinned again and needed more. It was never enough. It is like having a great debt. A credit card company is awfully nice, isn't it? You owe thirty thousand dollars, but they only require a minimum payment. They are perfectly happy to receive it—appeased for thirty days. Then the balance arrives again, higher than before. You will pay the minimum until you die and leave it for someone else to pay.

Those sacrifices were the minimum payment on an eternal debt. The atonement under the old covenant was a limited atonement; it could never take away sin. As Hebrews 10:1–4 says, the law is a shadow that "can never with those same sacrifices... make those who approach perfect," for "it is impossible that the blood of bulls and goats could take away sins."

A Will Requires a Death

But Jesus gives an eternal inheritance and an eternal redemption. An inheritance is given only to those named in the will, and only upon the death of the one who made it. This is exactly what Hebrews 9:16 says: "For where there is a testament, there must also of necessity be the death of the testator." Or as the NIV puts it, a will is in force only when somebody has died; it never takes effect while the one who made it is alive.

So why did Jesus have to die? Because there is a testament written, and it is effectual only upon the death of the One who wrote it. "Without shedding of blood there is no remission of sins" (v. 22).

Point two: Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness, no pardon, no redemption, no inheritance, no eternal life. The shedding of Christ's blood is not merely important; it is essential and critical. This is why the church has commemorated it ever since. The night He was betrayed, He took the cup and said, "This is the cup of the new covenant in My blood. This do, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of Me." We take the bread that symbolizes His broken body and the cup that symbolizes His shed blood because He wanted us to remember: Christ had to die.

A Copy of Heavenly Things, and a Better Sacrifice

"It was necessary that the copies of the things in the heavens should be purified with these" (v. 23). Moses was commanded in Exodus 25–40 to build a tabernacle to dwell in the midst of Israel. It held an altar of incense, an altar for burnt offerings, the table of showbread, the lampstand, and the ark of the covenant. These were shadows and copies of God's temple in heaven, which we cannot see. Moses was given insight on Mount Sinai and told to build after the pattern he had been shown.

So the earthly tabernacle was a copy, purified with the blood of calves and goats. But the heavenly things themselves require better sacrifices. Christ did not enter the holy place made with hands—He is not even a Levite—but into heaven itself, "now to appear in the presence of God for us." He did not offer Himself repeatedly, as the high priest entered the most holy place every year with the blood of another. "But now, once at the end of the ages, He has appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself."

The volume of old covenant sacrifices is unfathomable. The Jewish historian Josephus records that on one Passover, two hundred thousand lambs were offered in a single day. The old covenant was PETA's nightmare—and because of what Jesus does, He should be their dream. Jesus offered one sacrifice once for all.

Point three: Christ shed His blood once for all, offering a far better sacrifice. "As it is appointed for men to die once, but after this the judgment, so Christ was offered once to bear the sins of many."

The New Covenant Was God's Plan from the Beginning

Why was this necessary? This letter was written to Jewish Christians being told by family and friends that they still needed the temple, the sacrifices, the priesthood. Hebrews 10:1 answers: the law, having "a shadow of the good things to come," can never with the same sacrifices "make those who approach perfect." If it could, they would have ceased; but instead they were a yearly reminder of sins, "for it is not possible that the blood of bulls and goats could take away sins."

The author then proves his point from Psalm 40, written a thousand years before Jesus. There we glimpse the very nature of God—one God in three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the doctrine of the Trinity. "Sacrifice and offering You did not desire, but a body You have prepared for Me"—the incarnation, God becoming man. "Then I said, 'Behold, I have come... to do Your will, O God.'" He takes away the first that He may establish the second, "and by that will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all."

Point four: the new covenant was God's will and plan from the beginning. We sometimes treat the first two-thirds of the Bible as God's failed first attempt—as though He sat on a cloud thinking, "This isn't working; let's try plan B." But Psalm 40 shows the new covenant was His plan all along. The purpose of the first covenant was to prepare us for the second; the plan of the old was to show us our need for the new.

If you read through Leviticus—the speed bump where many year-long Bible readers stall—the one thing you take away is that righteousness costs a lot. The old covenant shows us just how far we are from a holy God, and its many offerings were meant to increase our desire for the one offering of the new.

Rest for the Weary

Look at Hebrews 10:11: "Every priest stands ministering daily and offering repeatedly the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins." Consider that job. Every morning you don fresh white linen, cleanse yourself, and from sunup to sundown people bring animals, confess over them, and you slaughter them, sprinkle the altar, and do it again and again—and these sacrifices cannot take away sin. Talk about futility.

"But this Man, after He had offered one sacrifice for sins forever, sat down at the right hand of God" (v. 12). If you were a priest, that would sound glorious—done, paid in full. "For by one offering He has perfected forever those who are being sanctified." And the Holy Spirit witnesses, quoting Jeremiah again: "I will put My laws in their hearts... their sins and their lawless deeds I will remember no more. Now where there is remission of these, there is no longer an offering for sin."

The priests would teach the people to know and follow the Lord, knowing they would fail, then offer sacrifice upon sacrifice. But Jesus comes once, offers one sacrifice, and says, "By My Spirit I will write My law on your hearts and minds, and I will remember your sins no more."

Point five: the new covenant forgives our sin and puts an end to the continual sacrifices of the old. Remember Jesus' last words on the cross: "It is finished." This is why He can say in Matthew 11:

Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.

The End of Striving

The burden of the law is great, and many of you have felt it. Perhaps a consciousness of sin and guilt is what first led you to church—because God wrote a conscience on your heart, telling you that you were not living as you should. So you tried, and you failed. Paul describes it in Romans 7: "The good that I will to do, I do not do; but the evil I will not to do, that I practice... O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?" Notice he says who, not what—not the law, not sacrifice, not the temple, but a person. "I thank God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!"

Maybe you are still trying to make yourself right: if I just stop this, give a little more, serve a little more, then I'll be okay before God. You will never undo the mess you got yourself into—and thank God you don't have to, because Christ Jesus did it once for all. Am I saying you need not seek to live righteously? No—He writes His word on our hearts and directs us to walk in His Spirit. But He still forgives our iniquities and remembers our sins no more.

There is great rest in Christ. The old covenant showed us how far we are from God and how we could never reach up to Him. The new covenant says, "I will come down to you. I will redeem and rescue you, and give you an eternal redemption and inheritance." That is the end of our striving and the entering into rest. God is good in what He has done for us.

Closing Prayer

Jesus, I thank You for doing what I could not do for myself. We cannot deal with the stain of our sin, and yet You said through the prophet Isaiah, "Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow." You purify, sanctify, cleanse, and redeem—You buy back that which is lost and enslaved to sin and death, and You make us sons and daughters of the holy God. You transform us by the renewing of our minds, by Your Spirit and Your word, and You enable us to walk in the Spirit, not fulfilling the desires of our flesh.

Lord, I pray Your people would know the love, joy, peace, kindness, gentleness, and self-control of Your Spirit, and that it would be evident to those we meet this week—a peace where there used to be anxiety, a love where there used to be indifference, a joy where there used to be hardness. Transform us, and help us display this fruit of the Spirit, because by Your grace You have rescued us. We praise You, Jesus.

If today you have been trying in your own efforts to make yourself right before a holy God, the Bible makes clear it is not possible by our own effort. Jesus did what we could not do. If you would like to receive His forgiving grace, pray with me: Dear Jesus, I know I need You. I cannot deal with my own failures. I thank You that You paid for my failures and sins. I confess my need for You. Come into my life, forgive me of my sin, and help me to follow You by faith. In Jesus' name, Amen.