Christ: The Living Sacrifice
Hebrews 10:1-18
In Hebrews, chapter 10, we come to verses 1 through 18 for our study tonight, a most significant passage that we might entitle "Jesus Christ, the Perfect Sacrifice." In a small village, it is said, somewhere in England, there stood a chapel. And beside the chapel was an arch. And over the arch was written, "We preach Christ crucified."
For years, godly men preached there, and they presented a crucified Savior as the only means of salvation. But as the generation of godly preachers passed, there arose a generation that considered the cross and its message too antiquated, and they began to preach salvation by Christ's example rather than His blood. They didn't see the necessity of His sacrifice.
And ivy crept up the side of the arch, it is said, and covered the word "crucified." And so it said, "We preach Christ." And they did, but not crucified. After some time, people asked why the sermons had to be confined to Christ and the Bible. So the preachers began to give discourses on social issues, politics, philosophy, moral rearmament. And the ivy continued to grow until it wiped out the third word. It simply read, "We preach."
The apostle Paul, in cultured Corinth, was determined, he said, to "know nothing among you save Jesus Christ, and Him crucified." Here, we preach Christ crucified, the only hope of men. And that's the blessed theme of the tenth chapter of Hebrews, the first 18 verses. For this is the record from, not the historical standpoint, but the theological standpoint, of the death of Christ. This is the depth of what His death meant, in all of its richness.
Now, you'll remember that the theme of the Book of Hebrews, as we have repeatedly said, is the absolute sufficiency and superiority of Christ over all of the features and people connected with the old covenant, that He is writing to Hebrews, obviously, and the author we do not know. We assume the Holy Spirit's inspiration, and so we say most of the time that it was written by the Holy Spirit, for it was.
But the author here, under the power of the Holy Spirit, is presenting to Jewish people the fact that they can put all of their trust in Jesus Christ, that they don't need, even if they're saved Jews, to hang on to the Temple services, to the priesthood, to the rituals, to all of the circumstances of Judaism. They can let go of them.
And He's also speaking to the unsaved Jew who is intellectually convinced and stands on the edge of salvation and saying, "Come on. You can put your trust in Christ. You can come from Judaism to Christianity. It will be sufficient." They don't need the Temple. They don't need the priests. They don't need the sacrifices. They don't need the offerings. They don't need the washings. They don't need the holy days. They don't need the ceremonies. It's all been done away. All of that was baby talk, kid stuff. Jesus Christ brought maturity and perfection.
And so in this study of Hebrews, He is showing us how it is that Jesus is better than all of these things. And the heart of it, we began to discover from chapter 5 on, is that Jesus is a better priest. And, as a better priest, He secures a better covenant and makes a better sacrifice. And, of course, as I've told you before, the priesthood issue was the heart of Judaism. And so when He presents Jesus as a better priest, that becomes the most important feature of the book. And then He takes that priesthood in the dimensions of its covenant and its sacrifice. And so all through the Book of Hebrews, Christ is shown to be superior to everything in the Old Testament.
Now, as we come to chapter 10, He comes to the fact that Jesus' sacrifice is better. Not only is He a better priest, not only did He secure and become the surety and the mediator of a better covenant, but He made a better sacrifice. The death of Christ became that great and final sacrifice that accomplishes for eternity what an eternity of the other sacrifices couldn't accomplish for time.
Now, we saw in chapter 9 some weeks ago the need for a sacrifice. In chapter 10, we find the character of the sacrifice. Chapter 9 told us how necessary it was in verse 16. It said that "where there is a testament, there must be the death of the one who leaves it." Where there's a will, there has to be a death to make the will valid.
And we saw also that forgiveness demanded blood, in verse 22. "All things are by the law purged with blood, and without shedding of blood is no remission." So somebody had to be a sacrifice. And then the necessity of sacrifice was again stressed in verse 28. "Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many." Salvation demands substitution.
So in chapter 9 we learned that a testament demands death, forgiveness demands bloodshed, salvation demands substitution. And the demand, then, for a death that would be superior to all the sacrifices of the Old Testament is laid down in chapter 9.
Now, as we come to chapter 10, we find the characteristics of the death of Christ, which supply all that was lacking in the old sacrifices. And some of the things in chapter 10 are repeats of what was in chapter 9 and expanded here in chapter 10.
Now, we're going to look at just a simple contrast in this particular series of verses. First of all, let's look, in the first six verses, at the ineffectiveness of animal sacrifices. Now, you'll remember that in the Old Testament the priests were busy all day long slaughtering animals, just constantly, constantly. It was a bloody mess from dawn to sunset. All day long they were engaged in bloody sacrifices, repeatedly, thousands upon thousands upon thousands of them.
It is said at some Passover times there would be as many as 300,000 lambs slain within a week. It was a massive thing, and so much so that the blood would often run out of the temple ground and down certain prepared places into the Brook Hedron, and at the time of Passover the Brook Hedron could be running with the blood of all the lambs that were being slain. And so there were sacrifices, sacrifices and more sacrifices. But they were ineffective. All of them had failed, because they were unable to satisfy God's holy demands.
Now, let me give you the reasons they failed. Number one, and we'll look at the text and see these reasons unfolded. Number one, they couldn't bring access to God. And the great cry in the heart of a man was to be in the presence of God. But they couldn't do it. Even the priest at his best on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, could not take the people inside the veil. The veil always remained. Remember how we studied that? They couldn't bring access to God. All those sacrifices, even the one on the Day of Atonement, couldn't bring access to God.
Look at verse 1. "For the law," and that refers to the Old Testament ceremonial law, the sacrificial ritual, "having a shadow of good things to come, and not the very image of those things," watch this, "can never," did you get it? "Can never with those sacrifices which they offered year by year continually make those who come to it perfect." And what did we say the word "perfect" means in the Book of Hebrews? It means what? Access to God. Access to God.
We saw that in chapter 7, verse 11. "If therefore perfection were by the Levitical priesthood," then you wouldn't need the new one. So it can't bring perfection. Then the definition of perfection came over in verse 19. "For the law made nothing perfect, and the bringing in of a better hope, by which we draw near unto God." What did bring perfection? The better hope. And what is perfection? Drawing near unto God. And, you see, the old covenant couldn't do that. The veil always remained. There never was access to God. It couldn't come.
Now, you notice that in verse 1 it says the law was only a shadow and not the very image, and it could never, never, even though it was continually done over and over again, make those perfect. But that it was a shadow. And in that there is a redeeming factor, and we'll talk about that in a moment. It says it was a shadow of good things to come.
Now, what are the good things to come? Well, that speaks of the privileges and blessings that came through the sacrifice of Christ. And the law pictured those things. All of the blessings and all of the privileges which come to us in the death of Christ were foretold in the Old Testament sacrifices. For example, when John first saw Jesus in John 1:29, he looked at Him and said, "Behold," what? "The Lamb of God, which taketh way the sin of the world." And there he was relating Christ as the fulfillment of all the Old Testament pictures. And so they definitely were a shadow of good things to come.
There's a verse that comes to my mind. In Colossians 2:17, it talks about all of the old things. It talks about the feasts and all of those things. And it says, "which are a shadow of things to come, but the body, or the substance, is Christ." So Christ, then, is the fulfillment of good things to come. It's not talking about prophetic things here in the sense of the kingdom. It's talking about the coming of Christ. And Colossians 2:17 verifies that the coming of Christ was the substance of the good things shadowed in the old covenant.
Access to God and security and power and all of those things were really not there in the old covenant, but they were pictured there. They were pictured there. The old was a shadow, not the very image. The old covenant could never bring a man into the presence of God.
Now, notice these two words, "shadow" and "image," because they're important. He uses the word, first of all, schia. Now, schia means a pale shadow. The law, or the ceremonial ritual, was only a pale shadow of Christ. It was...the word really means a nebulous kind of reflection. It's used to refer to a silhouette, or an outline, a form without reality, a form without substance. Shadow is probably the b