A Better Sacrifice

For where there is a testament, there must also of necessity be the death of the testator... Therefore not even the first covenant was dedicated without blood... And according to the law almost all things are purified with blood, 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)

Two covenants, two sacrifices—and why the better one cost the blood of the Son of God.

Imagine a Life Under the Old Covenant

Imagine it's the sixth time in two months you've made the trek 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. 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—because as hard as you try, you are completely unable to live perfectly according to the commandments.

Over the last few days you've taken account of your life—the things you said, did, thought, or the faithful things you failed to do. So you come to the temple with a lamb selected from your flock, the best one you could find, because the law requires the best, not something maimed, lame, or blind. Standing before a priest, with your family and children beside you, you lay your hands on the head of that lamb and confess your sins. The priest takes an impossibly sharp blade and slits its throat. That lamb stands in your place, taking your sin, dying as your atonement.

Faithfulness is costly. Six lambs in two months, almost forty last year. But it's a small price to pay 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 justice, your hope of resurrection—all of it resting on the sacrifice you bring to the temple.

The Promise of a New Covenant

If this were your life, there is no doubt the words of Jeremiah, given 2,500 years ago, would be something you longed for:

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; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people... For I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more. (Jeremiah 31:31-34)

What hope there would be in those words: I will remember their sin no more. Every single time you went to the temple, there was a remembrance of sins committed and a payment due. Yet here is a promise of forgiveness, of no more remembrance of sin, of your conscience being completely cleansed of guilt. That is a very good promise.

This is the New Covenant Jeremiah spoke of, the one Jesus establishes—a covenant built upon better promises. As Hebrews 8:6 says, Jesus "is the Mediator of a better covenant, which was established on better promises."

The Better Promise: An Eternal Inheritance

What is the better promise? Look at Hebrews 9:15. Again Jesus is called the Mediator, the one who establishes this covenant, "that those who are called may receive the promise of the eternal inheritance." That is the better promise—not something temporary, as the Old Covenant sacrifices were, but something eternal.

How did our Mediator secure this promise? Hebrews 9:11-12 tells us Christ came as a High Priest, and "with His own blood He entered the Most Holy Place once for all, having obtained eternal redemption." The Old Covenant offered a measure of atonement, but it was incapable of eternal redemption.

This is point number one: Christ secured our eternal inheritance by shedding His own blood. It seems heavy, almost insane, that He would have to shed His own blood for us. Why did He have to die? Because at Sinai the people said, "All that You have said we will do and be obedient," and within days they were already breaking the law—not because they were worse than us, but because we are no better. By means of His death, He redeemed those transgressions so that we might receive the promise of the eternal inheritance.

Why Blood Was Necessary

Covenants between God and humanity are established by the shedding of blood. The Old Covenant was no exception. Hebrews 9:18-21 recalls how Moses read the law to the people, and they all said, "All that You have said we will do." Then he took the blood of calves and goats and sprinkled it on the book of the law, on the people, and on the tabernacle and all its vessels. They were bound by blood to fulfill that law.

Yet even with all this, the first covenant proved insufficient. Its sacrifices, offered every day, every week, every month for 1,500 years, were temporal and temporary. They dealt with sin only in an earthly, passing way—offer a sacrifice today, and you'd sin again later and need another. Solomon once offered a thousand sacrifices in a single day; I guarantee that by day's end he'd sinned again and needed more. It was never enough, not because the Old Covenant wasn't good enough, but because we aren't good enough.

It's like a great debt. Every month the credit card company sends a bill. You owe thirty thousand dollars, but they're "kind" enough to require only a minimum payment. Pay it, and they're appeased for thirty days—then the bill comes again, and you pay until you die, leaving it for someone else. The Old Covenant sacrifices were like the minimum payment on an eternal debt. As Hebrews 10:4 says, "It is impossible that the blood of bulls and goats could take away sins."

A Will Takes Effect Only at Death

An inheritance is given only to those named in the will, and only upon the death of the one who made it. That's 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, "In the case of a will, it is necessary to prove the death of the one who made it... it never takes effect while the one who made it is alive."

Why did Jesus have to die? Because this covenant, this last will and testament, becomes effective only upon the death of the one who wrote it. "Without shedding of blood there is no remission" (Hebrews 9:22).

This is point number 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 under the New Covenant is not merely important—it is essential. This is why the church has commemorated it ever since the cross. On the night He was betrayed, Jesus 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." Every time we take the bread and the cup, we remember that Christ had to die.

Copies of Heavenly Things

Therefore, Hebrews 9:23 says, "it was necessary that the copies of the things in the heavens should be purified with these, but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these." Under the Old Covenant, Moses was commanded in Exodus 25-40 to build a tabernacle, always in the middle of the camp. It held an altar of incense, an altar for burnt offerings, the table of showbread, the lampstand, and the Ark of the Covenant.

But all these were only shadows or copies of the true temple of God in heaven. Moses built the earthly tabernacle after the pattern God showed him, and it had to be purified with the blood of calves and goats. Christ, however, "has not entered the holy places made with hands, which are copies of the true, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God for us."

He did not enter to offer Himself repeatedly, as the high priest entered the Most Holy Place every year with the blood of another. Otherwise He would have had to suffer often since the foundation of the world. "But now, once at the end of the ages, He has appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself."

One Sacrifice, Once for All

Consider the staggering number of Old Covenant sacrifices—every day, every week, every month for 1,500 years, plus the feast days like Passover and Yom Kippur. The historian Josephus records that on one Passover, two hundred thousand lambs were offered in a single day. The Old Covenant would have been PETA's nightmare. Because of what Jesus does, He should be their dream—for He offered one sacrifice, once for all.

This is point number three: Christ shed His blood once for all, offering a far better sacrifice. Remember, this letter was written to Jewish Christians being pressured by family and friends to keep going to the temple. Why do we no longer need to? Hebrews 10:1-2 answers: the law was "a shadow of the good things to come," and the same sacrifices offered year by year "can never make those who approach perfect." If they could, they would have ceased, for the worshipers would have had no more consciousness of sin. Instead, those sacrifices were a yearly reminder of sin, "for it is not possible that the blood of bulls and goats could take away sins."

The New Covenant Was Always God's Plan

The author then proves his point from Scripture, quoting 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. People ask where we get the Trinity; we find it in passages like this:

Sacrifice and offering You did not desire, but a body You have prepared for Me... Behold, I have come—in the volume of the book it is written of Me—to do Your will, O God. (Hebrews 10:5-7, quoting Psalm 40)

"He takes away the first that He may establish the second. By that will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all" (Hebrews 10:9-10).

This is point number four: The New Covenant was God's will and plan from the beginning. Sometimes we read the Bible—39 books in the Old Testament, 27 in the New—and imagine the first two-thirds was God's failed first attempt. We picture Him on a cloud thinking, "This isn't working; let's try Plan B—Jesus, go clean it up." But Psalm 40 shows the New Covenant was God's plan from the start. The purpose of the first covenant was to prepare us for the second, to show us our need for the new.

If you had to live faithfully under the Old Covenant, you'd better invest in a lot of livestock, because you'd fail often and need many sacrifices. If one thing is clear from Leviticus—that speed bump where so many year-long Bible plans stall—it's that righteousness costs a great deal. The Old Covenant shows 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.

The Priest Who Sat Down

Look at Hebrews 10:11. "Every priest stands ministering daily and offering repeatedly the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins." Imagine the job: rising each morning, performing a ritual cleansing, putting on perfectly white linen, then standing from sunup to sundown as people bring animals, lay hands on them, confess, and you slaughter them—a bloody mess, over and over—knowing it can never take away a single sin.

"But this Man, after He had offered one sacrifice for sins forever, sat down at the right hand of God" (Hebrews 10:12). Done. Paid in full. "For by one offering He has perfected forever those who are being sanctified." And the Holy Spirit witnesses to us, 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."

This is point number 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." As He died in our place, He declared the work complete.

Come and Find Rest

This is why Jesus could say in Matthew 11: "Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest... for My yoke is easy and My burden is light." The burden of the law is great. Many of you have felt it. Perhaps a consciousness of sin first led you to church, because God wrote a conscience on your heart and something told you that you weren't living as you should. You tried and tried—and failed.

Paul describes it in Romans 7: "The good things I want to do, I do not do; the bad things I do not want to do, I practice." Then he cries, "O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?" Notice he says who, not what—he understood it wasn't the law, the temple, or the priesthood that could save him. And thank God he doesn't end there: "I thank God—through Jesus Christ our Lord."

Maybe today you're still trying to make yourself right—if I just keep this, stop that, go to church, give more, serve more. You will never undo the mess you're in, and thank God you don't have to, because Christ did it once for all. Am I saying we shouldn't seek to live righteously? No—because He says, "I will write My word on their hearts and minds," and He directs us to walk in His Spirit, while still forgiving our iniquities and remembering our sins no more.

There is great rest in Christ. The Old Covenant showed us how far from God we are and how we could never reach up to Him; the New Covenant says, "I will come down to you, and I will redeem you and give you an eternal inheritance." What great news. It's the end of our striving and the entering into rest. God is good in what He has done for us. Amen.

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 through the prophet Isaiah You said, "Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow." Jesus, You purify, sanctify, cleanse, and redeem—You buy back what was lost in slavery to sin and death and 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 the 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—that they would see Your transforming power, a peace where there was anxiety, a love where there was indifference, a joy where there was hardness. Transform us, and help us display this fruit of the Spirit, for by Your grace You have rescued us. We praise You, Jesus.

And if you have been trying in your own efforts to make yourself right before a holy God, the Bible makes clear it isn't possible by our own strength. Jesus did what we could not. The law was weak through our flesh, but Jesus came and fulfilled it all to forgive our sins and renew us. If you'd like to receive His grace today, 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 sins, and I confess my need for You. Come into my life, forgive me of my sin, and help me to follow You by faith. Amen.