We’re carrying on in Hebrews, the book of Hebrews, and we’ve come up to Hebrews chapter 9 tonight. And the past few weeks we’ve been in a section of Hebrews that’s been all about priesthood and temples and sacrifices and laws and regulations and clothing. We said last time that all of those details are all about the bigger concept of covenant. And covenant is God’s decision, God’s determination, God’s choice to make a binding relationship, a commitment to human beings. We said last week it’s the unity of both the law and love that God comes and legally binds Himself to us in total graciousness. It’s the unity of law and love in His covenant making towards us, and that’s why we call it the covenant of grace. And even in the old order of covenant under Moses, under all the regulations of the tabernacle and temple like we looked at last week, we saw that God was always moving us toward a covenant of grace that we could say is unconditional for us because it was completely conditioned upon Him, the second Adam. God’s covenant is unconditional for us because it was conditioned on Jesus Christ. He fulfilled all the conditions. He fulfilled all the promises for us.
And this week, we are staying right there. We are going deeper down and farther in. We don’t come up for air. We go further down into the details of all the stuff that’s happening at the tabernacle. And that’s where Hebrews chapter 9 goes. And 21st century America, Mississippians, the details in this passage are very foreign to us, even if we’ve been bathed in the Bible our whole lives. What can be stranger, what is stranger in any time than the sprinkling of the ashes of a heifer on an unclean person? What’s weirder than that? In the age of lattes and Macbooks and Instagram feeds, there’s strange details in this text. God goes there; God establishes this. And actually, these are the foundational truths of our Christian faith. And so let’s pray together and then we’ll read the text.
Father, we come tonight to ask for so much help as we enter into more detailed text, more difficult text. Lord, this is Your Word, and so we ask that Your Holy Spirit would come and unveil it before us. Give us eyes to see and ears to hear. We ask it in Jesus’ name, amen.
We’re going to read verses 1 to 14 tonight and focus on that. So Hebrews 9:1-14. This is God’s Word:
“Now even the first covenant had regulations for worship and an earthly place of holiness. For a tent was prepared, the first section, in which were the lampstand and the table and the bread of the Presence. It is called the Holy Place. Behind the second curtain was a second section called the Most Holy Place, having the golden altar of incense and the ark of the covenant covered on all sides with gold, in which was a golden urn holding the manna, and Aaron’s staff that budded, and the tablets of the covenant. Above it were the cherubim of glory overshadowing the mercy seat. Of these things we cannot now speak in detail.
These preparations having thus been made, the priests go regularly into the first section, performing their ritual duties, but into the second only the high priest goes, and he but once a year, and not without taking blood, which he offers for himself and for the unintentional sins of the people. By this the Holy Spirit indicates that the way into the holy places is not yet opened as long as the first section is still standing (which is symbolic for the present age). According to this arrangement, gifts and sacrifices are offered that cannot perfect the conscience of the worshiper, but deal only with food and drink and various washings, regulations for the body imposed until the time of reformation.
But when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things that have come, then through the greater and more perfect tent (not made with hands, that is, not of this creation) he entered once for all into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves but by means of his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption. For if the blood of goats and bulls, and the sprinkling of defiled persons with the ashes of a heifer, sanctify for the purification of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God.”
This is God’s holy Word.
So chapter 9 narrows down on an explicit problem that chapter 8, the chapter we looked at last week, only hinted at, and it’s the problem of presence, of God’s presence, and that’s the external problem here. And it leads the writer, the preacher here, to deal with the problem of conscience, secondly, and then the solution of blood. So we’re going to look at God’s presence, our conscience, and His blood tonight.
The Problem of God’s Presence
So first, the problem of presence. Now verse 1 to 5 here is what the writer says is the first time he’s driven down into the details of what’s going on at the tabernacle. And the word here that gets used here for “worship” is “latria.” We’ve adopted this word into English some. “Latria” refers to the “rites” – r-i-t-e-s – of worship; the things that are required, that God requires in worship practices. And here he’s focusing down on the rites of the old covenant worship at the tabernacle or at the temple. And verse 5, he ends this little series of details that he’s just walking us through all the stuff that goes on there, and he says here what every single preacher has said so many times. This is probably a sermon, and he says, “We’ve been going on too long and I can’t go into all the details of this.” And this happened to me this morning in Sunday school. I said, “I’ve been going on too long. I can’t keep going.” And that’s exactly what the preacher here is saying. He’s saying, “There are so many details to the tabernacle worship, and I cannot spell it all out for you right now because we don’t have enough time.” And we don’t either, actually!
But they didn’t need all that because Hebrews was preached and written for Hebrews, for Israelites, for Jews. And we are so far removed from the world that he’s describing here in verse 1 to 5. And even if we’ve read through Exodus and Leviticus and Numbers and Deuteronomy recently, it’s still really difficult to keep all the elements of the tabernacle rites in the back of your mind all the time. And so let’s just very quickly run through the basics of what he’s saying here.
In verse 1, he brings us down to think about Moses’ tabernacle; the tabernacle that God commanded Moses to build. And he says that there are really two sections to it. In verses 1 and 2, it talks about the first section and the second section. But really there are three sections to it. He doesn’t describe the whole thing. So when you would walk up, when you would walk up in the old covenant, in the Old Testament, to the tabernacle, you would have seen a fence that was seventy-five feet long and it would have been draped in white linen and animal skins. And when you approached the gate, the door, the cloth to this fence, you would open it up and walk in and there would be the first section; the first section that he doesn’t mention here. And it’s an outer courtyard. And in this outer courtyard you would have seen a big altar, and on the altar there were four horns where you could secure and tie down an animal for sacrifice. And right behind the altar there was what we call a laver or a basin for the priest to wash between all the sacrifices. This was where normal people went, like us, to make a sacrifice in the old covenant. We would step into this outer courtyard.
But then within the courtyard there was a tent, and the tent, that is the tabernacle. It’s a tent, and it’s forty-five feet long and it’s thirty feet wide and it’s fifteen feet tall and it’s got a flat roof and it’s full of vibrant colors – purple and blue – and embroidered in places with gold. And there are three layers to its coverings. It’s got linen, it’s got multiple layers of animal skins. When you went inside there’s one room, there’s one room there, and in that room there’s the lampstand; it has seven arms to it, this lampstand. And there’s a table with bread on it called the bread of Presence. And there are twelve loaves of bread, one each for the tribe of Israel, sitting in that room. And only the priest could go into this room.
And then beyond that, there’s another curtain that makes a second room in the tabernacle. And this curtain has gold coming down it and it’s got cherubim embroidered into it like angels. And only the high priest can go into this room, and it’s called the Most Holy Place. And in that room is the tablets of the Law, Moses’ tablets, and Aaron’s staff that budded and the ark of the covenant. And on the top of the ark there’s a gold foundation that is often called the mercy seat. It looks like a seat, like somebody could sit on it.
Now look, the point; the point of all these details. This is a geospatial representation of God’s presence on earth. This is the one place, the symbolic place, where heaven and earth meet, where God comes down from heaven into earth; where heaven and earth unite. This is the local embassy of God’s dwelling on earth. Just think about it. Just think about the description that he gave us, that I just rehearsed. In the holy place there’s a tree, a seven-branched tree, that is a lampstand. There’s bread, which is a symbol of life. There’s cherubim, embroidered and built statues around the ark of the covenant; the angelic presence. There’s the most holy, which looks like a throne room with a golden seat where a king could come down and sit on that seat and make that place into his palace. And then Israel would camp all around this tent, this fence, in a circle, and you could draw a circle right around the camp of Israel with the tabernacle in the dead middle of it.
And you see what this is. This is a new assemble; this is a representation; this is a representation of the Garden of Eden come to earth. It looks like garden imagery all throughout and it’s built with the people all in a circle with the palace of God in the center with His throne room in the Most Holy Place, with His throne, with the golden mercy seat there, for Him to come down and sit. This is meant to look like God’s palace come down to earth, like the Garden of Eden all over again. And the reason for that, the issue in the passage is, remember the purpose of a temple – we’ve talked about this the last two weeks if you’ve been here. The purpose of a temple. And the tabernacle is just a small solution, a temporary solution to a cosmic problem. The tabernacle is a symbol of God’s union, God bringing heaven down to earth, because that was always the purpose of creation. A temple is anywhere that God comes to reside, and the purpose of creation was always that God’s presence would come down to earth, that God would be the King of the kingdom, that God would bring the kingdom down to this place, this embodied world.
And we see that all the way back in Genesis 1 and 2, the Garden of Eden. Every Old Testament scholar says that the Garden of Eden is the garden temple of God, and that the tabernacle and the temple is meant to be the representation of the intention of original creation. Let me give you an example of the parallels of this. Remember Genesis 1, God created the world in six days and then He rested on the seventh day. And when God told Moses to build the tabernacle and dedicate it, he was told to dedicate the temple in a space of six days and that His presence would come down on the seventh day. The whole point of it was to mimic creation; it was to look like Genesis 1 all over again – garden embroidery, the cherubim, the tree, the bread, the animal skins, the camp. It looks like the Garden of Eden. It’s mimicking creation.
So the point, the question underlying all of these details – the work, the rites, the worship rites of the tabernacle – it constantly drew people to say that looked at it closely, “Will this camp ever extend again to the boundaries of creation? Will God’s presence go out of His tabernacle, this tent, this fence, and extend to the boundaries of the cosmos with the people, fully and forever, finally again?” In Hebrews chapter 9 verse 8, that’s exactly where the writer takes us to. You look at verse 8. He says, “By this the Holy Spirit indicates that the way into the Holy Place is not opened,” meaning that God’s presence, it’s veiled to us. The tabernacle was a temporary solution of God’s presence coming down into the world again, but even in that it was veiled, it was closed off. Only the high priest could go into the true presence of God in the Holy Place one time a year. And even when he did so, he did so in absolute fear and trembling.
When Moses, when God first came down and met Moses on the mountain, He said, “Moses, Moses, come close to Me. I want you.” And then He said, “But stay back and take your shoes off because this is a temple. This place is holy. You can’t enter into this place or you will die!” And verse 7, the high priest, once a year he would come in but he did it only in fear. When God’s presence first comes down in Exodus, the people are terrified. They’re wailing when God’s presence first comes down into the tabernacle in the book of Exodus. God condescends to us in love, but the way that we’re reading about here is difficult and narrow and it’s deadly. He is not safe. In Hebrews 10:31, in the very next chapter, says, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”
The Problem of Conscience
And so the question is, “Why?” And the answer comes to us in verse 9 in point two, the problem of conscience. The problem, you see, the problem of God’s presence, the veil, the tent, the tabernacle being closed off, is because of the problem of conscience. And you see it right there in verse 9. He says, “According to this arrangement, gifts and sacrifices are offered that cannot perfect the conscience of the worshiper.” In the first temple, in the Garden of Eden, because of human rebellion, our rebellion in Adam and Eve, we were objectively and subjectively exiled from the presence of God. What is objective exile? Remember, Adam and Eve were literally kicked out of the garden; they were booted out. They could no longer be in the physical presence of God in God’s temple, in the Garden of Eden. That’s objective exile. But also there was subjective exile. That’s what Hebrews 9:9 is saying. The point, the old order, the old order for a moment dealt with the problem of objective exile. It brought the people back into the presence of God even though it was veiled. But the old covenant order, the order under Moses, the tabernacle, the temple, never dealt with the real problem – the problem of subjective exile – the core problem, the inner problem. And he calls it here the problem of the conscience.
Now what is it? What does that mean? What is the conscience? It’s hard to define what a conscience is. The way that we all know conscience is because we all experience conscience. The conscience is that thing within us where thoughts rise up within us that either excuse our actions when we do right and accuse our actions when we do wrong. And the Bible comes to the world and says that every single person has a conscience, is aware of guilt. As soon as a little child, when they reach a time of self-consciousness, awareness of their surroundings, the impingement of guilt starts to weigh down on them. They start to feel guilty in their conscience. When they do things that are wrong it starts to weigh down on them.
Now the Bible also does something, the Bible also does something that the modern world refuses to do. And it comes and says that every single human being feels guilty in their conscience because they actually are guilty, objectively. And you see, in the modern world, subjective feelings of guilt do not correspond to objective reality of guilt, according to the modern, secular world. The Bible comes in and says subjective guilt, the feelings of guilt that every one of us has, is because we actually are guilty objectively. It corresponds to our real objective guilt. Conscience, in other words, is the rift between what I should be and what I actually am. Conscience is that faculty in us that speaks into the rift of what we’re supposed to be, what we all know we’re supposed to be, and what we actually are.
And each of us, we’ve all had this experience where we feel in our conscience we feel specific guilt for specific actions that we’re guilty for. This happens all the time, but it comes and it goes. But also there’s such a thing as covert guilt. And in the 20th century, French existential philosophers that were atheists – Martin Heidegger and others, Camus – they talked about this idea of covert guilt; this universal reality of covert guilt. Covert guilt is the lingering existential crisis where I always know that something is wrong with me and I can’t do anything about it. That’s covert guilt. It’s not built upon specific instances of guilt that we feel from doing specific things. It’s covert. It’s always there. It underlies everything. It’s an existential crisis that every human feels that, “There is something wrong with me and I can’t do anything about it.”
In the modern world, in contemporary North America and in contemporary Europe, we are taught that we do indeed feel guilty, it’s a sociological reality, but there is no such thing on the flipside as objective guilt. You can feel guilty, but there’s no metaphysical, invisible reality, no moral order that says to you that you are actually objective guilty. The moral order is a social construct. And in our society, what we’ve done is we’ve made a social contract with each other to simply get by, to not harm. You see, culture develops feelings of guilt but it doesn’t correspond to any objective reality. Camus said in The Stranger, Martin Heidegger pointed out, others in the 20th and 21st century have said the problem is that that throws the world into existential crisis because you can say to people all you want that there’s no such thing as an objective moral order, there’s no such thing as real objective guilt, and yet we can’t get out from under the weight of it. Our conscience impinges upon us. It convicts us. It crushes us. And when you tell people that it does nothing but further throw them into the impossibility of living in this world where there are no real answers, where guilt is merely a fiction. It destroys people lives; it brings chaos.
Abraham Kuyper, who was Prime Minister of the Netherlands in the early 20th century and a theologian in our tradition, he wrote a book where he said that “the mother idea,” as he put it, “of Calvinism, the mother idea of reformed theology, is that we first say that every single human being lives Coram Deo, before the face of God, at all times and in all places” – that God sees all and knows all; He sees the very bottom of who we are. And the existential crisis that we’re talking about here, the weight of guilt consciousness as it’s been called, is because of the fact – the Bible says – that we all live Coram Deo, before the face of God, at all times and every moment, before the divine Creator and the just Judge of all creation. That’s the fact. That’s what drives our conscience to be pricked; to feel guilty.
Now come back, come back from there to this old covenant order, this tabernacle, which said, “If you want to go into the presence of God, you’ve got to be clean. You’ve got to wash. You’ve got to bring the right animal at the right time to the right person.” Why? Because most of us, most of us don’t come to church, probably, without brushing our teeth in the morning and putting on relatively clean clothes and doing our best to be presentable. Humans do that, whether it’s here or work or whatever, because we don’t want to be dirty, for one, and when God comes and says, “You’ve got to be clean. You want to come into the tabernacle in My presence? You’ve got to wash, you’ve got to bathe, you’ve got to do all these things” – look, these external actions, these rites of worship that Hebrews 9 calls “dead works,” are symbols, external symbols that are trying to say, “You look clean on the outside, but what you really need is to be made clean on the inside.” These were external. Wash your body – but that’s only a symbol. You have a problem of conscience that guilt impinges upon you. You are filthy on the inside no matter how good you look walking into the tabernacle on the outside.
In Zechariah chapter 3, Zechariah has a vision, a vision of the high priest going into the temple on that one day a year where he could enter the Most Holy Place. And when the priest enters the Most Holy Place that one day of the year, he takes seven days to prepare for it. He bathes multiple times every day. He wears the most ornate clothing. He’s beautiful externally. He looks so clean on the outside. And when Zechariah has this vision of the high priest entering the temple, what Zechariah sees, as the text tells us, is the high priest walked into the Most Holy Place and he was completely covered in filth. Now that’s not the exact word that the Hebrew Bible uses, but to be polite I’m not going to say exactly what it says – he was covered in filth, filth, filth. That’s what he looked like when he entered the temple, into the Most Holy Place. And you see what the vision was saying. The high priest can look as beautiful as possible on the outside to enter into God’s presence, but he is dirty on the inside, filthy on the inside.
And you know there’s nothing that illustrates this more, the problem of the conscience, than the fact that in the Old Testament the word “conscience” never appears. It comes up multiple times in the New Testament but never in the Old Testament. And in the Old Testament, the conscience is just a synonym for the heart. And the greatest evaluator of our heart, of our conscience, is the Ten Commandments, because you know, it’s theoretically possible that when you read the second table of the Ten Commandments, it’s theoretically possible that a person could go through life perhaps and never dishonor their parents with their mouth, and never commit adultery, and never murder, and never steal. But when you come to the tenth commandment – oh boy! It says, “You shall not covet.” And covet means “to desire.” And you go back through – “You shall never desire adultery or illicit sex in any way.” “You shall never desire somebody’s possessions that are not yours.” “You shall never curse at your parents in your mind even though you never did it with your mouth.” There is no escape. We are filthy from the inside out. All of us, 1 John, our hearts condemn us when we read the tenth commandment that we shall not covet. And the old covenant order, Hebrews 9 is saying, could not fix the inside. Objective guilt meant subjective exile before God.
The Solution of Blood
Now thirdly and finally – and we’ll try to be brief here – the solution is found all over the text. Hebrews is all about saying that the Old Testament, the old covenant order is fulfilled in the new covenant order, specifically in Jesus Christ. And here he says the dead works of giving sacrifices, blood of bulls and goats – verse 12, verse 13, verse 19, verse 20, verse 21, verse 22 and more, all are about blood. There’s blood everywhere. There’s blood everywhere in this chapter. And verse 22 caps it off by saying, “Without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness.” In other words, what it is saying is that the old covenant order taught us that when there is no blood spilt, when there is no death, there is no justice, no ultimate justice. And when we read something like that, as modern people, 21st century people, we say, “Why? That is so old and foreign and primitive. You’re saying that there has to be death in order to bring justice? Is that what he’s saying?”
But look, this is hard for us today, even if we’ve been raised in the church. But you know, there has never been a culture that hasn’t understood that final justice requires some ultimate losing. And we even know this in the way we set up our society. There’s nobody that doesn’t look out and see societal crime. And we have it. And human guilt, because of crime, and says “No” to a court system, a justice system, a system of punishment. We know deep down that we have to have that. We set up our societies in that way because this is the facts of reality; it’s objective. It’s bigger than any society; it is God ordained. He is the just Judge of all the universe that has told us this is the only way to true justice. You see, even in our personal lives we know this because when we are sinned against – let’s say that somebody gossips about you and they hit the wrong button on their phone and send you that text message. And you get it and it destroys you a little bit. And in that moment you have the choice whether you’re going to go to them and offer them forgiveness or not. And look, if you offer them mercy and forgiveness there is a death that occurs. To make this right, a death has to happen. You have to swallow it. Trust has to go. Safety in the relationship has to die. There’s a death that occurs in every single mercy. Justice is never not satisfied in ultimate terms. Something has to die when we break the moral law, when we break the moral order. We know that justice includes punishment and punishment brings wrongs into rights. And we know that as human beings there is a moral ideal that stands above us. Everybody knows, “I must be perfect as the God who stands above me is perfect. And I am not.”
Now look, here he takes us to the old covenant, to the Day of Atonement. And the Day of Atonement was premised on one big idea in the book of Leviticus – that life, God said, is in the blood. Blood, blood, God says, is a symbol of life. And when blood pours out, so life pours out. And so God, in the old covenant order, said that the shedding of blood was to be a temporary stay of justice, but always looking forward to an ultimate pouring of blood and an ultimate justice.
The day of atonement – and we’ll bring things to a close with this – the day of atonement, that’s where the high priest that Hebrews talks about here in Hebrews 9, goes one day out of the year into the Most Holy Place, and before he does that, he takes two lambs. And on the one lamb he symbolically pours the unintentional sins of the people of Israel onto that lamb and he kills that lamb. And he walks into the Most Holy Place and he sprinkles the blood of that lamb onto the altar, saying, symbolically not actually that this place has been made clean and fit for God’s presence. But that lamb only dealt with unintentional sin, not at all with the intentional sin of the people. And so the priest would put his hand on the other lamb and he would send the lamb that bore the majority weight of the sin of the people and cast him out into the wilderness where he would linger and he would wander forever, symbolically. Every single year the people saw the priest do this and they would say, “Could there be a lamb, could there be a lamb who could actually come back from the wilderness and step into the Most Holy Place and truly sanctify this place making it fit, the world, the cosmos, fit for God’s presence; truly fit to deal with the intentional sins of the people?”
When Jesus Christ came into the world, when Jesus was born, you remember the start of His ministry, He goes to the temple but then He goes back out again. You remember the very beginning of His ministry, He’s in the wilderness and He goes into the domain of demons, He interacts with the unclean, He touches the sinners. He goes out anywhere where the darkness stands and He goes there and He touches it. And you remember what John the Baptist said. “This is the Lamb.” You see, they were waiting for a lamb. They sent the lamb out into the wilderness carrying the intentional sins of the people saying, “Could there be a lamb that could truly carry the burden of our sin all the way into the Most Holy Place, even for the intentional sins?” You see what Jesus Christ did? He is the Lamb, the Lamb of the Day of Atonement, who went into the wilderness. He went to the domain of demons. He went to the domain of darkness. He touched the unclean, they became clean, and He absorbed their uncleanliness. When Jesus Christ went to the cross, when Jesus Christ went to the cross He was the total opposite of Zechariah 3. Jesus was so clean on the inside, but they made Him so dirty on the outside. He was stripped naked. He was beaten. He was bloody. Jesus Christ is the Lamb that the Day of Atonement was always talking about.
The problem with guilt, the problem of the conscience – last thing. Jesus Christ comes and – you remember Lady Macbeth? Shakespeare, Lady Macbeth. Lady Macbeth comes and she persuades Lord Macbeth, her husband, to murder King Duncan, the king at the time. And that’s so that they can become king and queen. And it happens; they do that. And at first, she’s happy and her husband is happy, but then the weight of guilt, the blood on their hands starts to overwhelm them and they cry together, they weep together throughout their whole lives. She comes to him and she says, “Look, we can get past this. We can will ourselves out of our guilt. We can forget about the murder and truly be happy one day.” She said, “By my own will, I can make my conscience clean.”
In the middle of the 20th century, Albert Speers, Albert Speers was the only Nazi at Nuremberg to admit his guilt. And he was sentenced to twenty years in prison, a very mild sentence, for the atrocities he had been a part of. He was known as the architect of the Nazi war machine. He had constructed most of the places where they built the weapons. And after his twenty year punishment he came out and he was asked, “You’ve served the sentence that the world has given you. Are you expiated? Are you free from the weight of guilt?” And he said this. He said, “There is no punishment that I could ever experience to make just what I have done to this world.”
And you see, in the modern world people say you feel guilty but there’s no real objective guilt, no real judge that stands above you. Lady Macbeth says, “I can heal my conscience by simply trying to forget what I’ve done.” She went insane. Speers came and he said, “You know what I’ve heard from Lady Macbeth? There’s no healing of the conscience. There’s no way to get out from the weight of what we have done in this world, of what I have done in this world.” The blood of Jesus Christ, the blood of Jesus Christ comes and says there is a way. There’s only one way to deal with the problem of human guilt. Objective justice, subjective cleanliness, shame put on His back, rolling off our backs. The blood of Christ taken to the true mercy seat in heaven and has done it all. The weight of shame can truly be rolled off your back. God’s Word to us – look, you were made to be with God, on the one hand, but you are guilty. And God’s Word to you tonight is this – He has come to dwell with us, presence of Jesus, presence of God, and the Lamb of God takes away the sins of the world. You are truly forgiven if you only believe.
Let’s pray.
Father, we give thanks for how You fulfill the old covenant and the new and how You show us that we can truly be forgiven, that guilt can roll off our shoulders, that we can have a conscience that is clean because of the blood of Christ. We give thanks for this, in Christ’s name, amen.