Jesus Christ Is Our Self-Sacrificing high Priest

Hebrews 10:5-14 From the moment God clothed Adam and Even with animal skins in the garden, the sacrifice of animals was the chief act of worship for God’s people for thousands of years.  It was built into the worship laws that God gave them on Sinai.  It was the very heart of their religious life.   

These sacrifices went on daily from Adam to the destruction of the temple in 70 A.D. and there is no way to know how many tens of millions of animals were sacrificed in those millennia.  But not one of those sacrifices—in and of itself—actually took away sins or reconciled God to man.  The Bible says that:

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.

            When the Bible writer says that God did not desire all of these sacrifices and offerings, he is not saying they were not commanded by God—they were!  There were dozens of rules and laws and regulations given by God at Sinai that guided every aspect of this central act of worship-- and there were sacrifices and offerings for every kind of sin. 

But they were never intended to be an end unto themselves.  They were never supposed to be a merely external act that would somehow remove God’s wrath over man’s sin.  They were never intended by God to be permanent. 

Their only purpose was to literally put flesh and blood on the promise that God had made in the beginning—that he himself would raise up a Savior who undo the works of Satan.  That he was the one who would make right what man’s sin destroyed.

That promise, and its fulfillment, required—not an animal and tens of millions of sacrifices—but instead required the Seed of the Woman—one of us, a real human being with real human flesh who would suffer and die for the sins of the world.  That is what God promised and that is what God delivered.

In the womb of the Virgin this seed of a woman was conceived and was born and entered into the world—one of us in every way except sin—born under the demands of the Law that convicts every one of us because we have failed to do God’s will. 

But this one who bore our flesh would not fail under the law’s demands but would instead fulfill them every way, all his days.  Jesus said about himself:

‘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 and burnt offerings and sin offerings” (these are offered according to the law), then he added, “Behold, I have come to do your will.”

            Adam and Eve were commanded by God to do just one thing—one act of obedience that would demonstrate their submission to God’s will:  to refrain from eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil which they promptly did anyway. 

From that moment on, in their own immediate family, and in the family of man throughout time—all of their children, including us here today, have done exactly the same thing as they did, ignoring and disobeying God’s will in thought, word and deed—in the things that we do and in the things that we have left undone.

But throughout the Bible, the prophets spoke of one to come who would delight to do God’s will—who would render to the Lord the perfect obedience that God expects of us all. 

Moses spoke of the greater prophet to come and David spoke of the perfect King and Isaiah spoke of the priest who would offer the sacrifice that would truly bring peace and healing.

They looked forward to, and spoke of, Jesus Christ, who in every way, throughout his life desired nothing other than to do his Father’s will.  Jesus said about himself, I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me.

God demands of all of us that we be holy in exactly the same way that he is holy-- and yet all of us—from the very beginning have failed to do that. 

Jesus didn’t fail.  He did his Father’s will.  He spoke his Father’s words.  He accomplished his Father’s mission.  Jesus says,

this is my Father’s will, that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him should have eternal life.

The Good News for us is that God counts Jesus’ holy obedience as our own obedience through faith in him and credits that holiness as our own righteousness in his sight.  This is what thousands of priests and millions of sacrifices could never do.  The Bible says that Jesus:

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.

            There was one purpose for the Old Testament priests and sacrifices and that was to point to Jesus Christ—to paint a portrait of what the Savior would do-- and who the Savior would be.

And when he entered into our flesh- and bore our sins- and sacrificed himself on the cross- that purpose was fulfilled for all people in every time and place.

When Jesus commended himself into the hands of his Father, and gave up his Spirit, and died on the cross-- the curtain in the temple was torn in two from top to bottom signifying that the old distance between God and man no longer existed because the bloody sacrifice of Jesus on the cross had paid for the sins of the world and bridged the distance between God and man.

The Old Covenant came to an end, not because Jesus sinfully set aside the very commands of God regarding the worship life of his people, but because he fulfilled it perfectly—as both priest and sacrifice. 

That was a sacrifice that had never happened before-- and would never happen again –and need never happen again--and through faith in Jesus we are holy in God’s sight.

That is what the Bible writer is talking about when he says that we are “sanctified” through the body of Jesus Christ once for all.

Our sins were laid upon Jesus as the Lamb of God and like the scapegoat in the Old Testament he has carried them away.  He is the sin offering whose blood has atoned for our failure to do the Father’s will. 

And through faith in him we are holy in God’s sight and set apart as his children who will one day join him at the Father’s right hand.  The Bible says that:

when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God,

            In the Old Testament, when the priest had finished their work day in the temple, they rested that night, but they got up in the morning to do the whole thing all over again. 

Day after day after day, the smell of the sacrifices never left their nostrils, and the blood on their hands was never really washed away, because the sinning of the people was never done-- with and the sacrifices necessary to remove those sins were never complete.

But when Jesus our great high priest offered up the sacrifice of his sinless body upon the cross, he said “It is finished!” and it was.  The proof of that finished work was given when Jesus was raised from the dead and ascended into heaven.

The restoration and renewal that God has promised in the beginning through the Seed of the Woman was accomplished by Jesus Christ so that now we can once again count ourselves God’s son and daughters and live in perfect fellowship with him as did Adam and Eve in the beginning and we count on the end of the devil and his works and ways.  The Bible says that Jesus is: 

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.

            The fall of man in the Garden of Eden was not just the story of man’s sin, it was also the story of the devil’s deception.  Satan rebelled against almost from the beginning and his assault upon the ways of God manifested itself on Adam and Eve and their spiritual destruction.

And so when God confronted them all in the garden he promised that he would save mankind but he would destroy the devil by the promised Savior.  And so he has. 

The Bible says that the reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil.  And so from Jesus’ victory over Satan in the wilderness-- to every time he cast out devils-- to his death and resurrection, Jesus defeated Satan every step of the way.

And yet, he still prowls around like a roaring lion looking for those he can destroy.  But only for a time. 

When our Lord returns he will judge all of those who have walked with the devil and he will punish them in the fires of hell and along with them the devil himself will be cast into the lake of fire where he will never again afflict the children of men. 

Until that day we can be confident that the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross, into which we are baptized, and by which we are fed, and through which we are brought to faith and declared to be God’s children, is fully sufficient to make us holy and set us apart as God’s people forever.  Amen.