6.17.26 – Yeshua in Hebrews, Part 1

Last week I shared one verse with you: Romans 3:25. This week I am going to try to give an overview of the entire book of Hebrews, which is not going to be very easy. There is one book people turn to in order to say that everything we have said across the entire "Atonement Explained" series is completely wacky and cannot be possible. This is the book people would go to. The whole discussion in Hebrews is basically summarized by saying: Jesus is the sacrifice, He took His blood into the Holy of Holies to satisfy God and buy your access. Case closed. But Hebrews says we cannot do that. We have to take the writing apart one step at a time, because that is far too small a picture of what His work actually entails.

The author of Hebrews himself has already said this book is very, very large. There is a lot going on, and the author stops right in the middle of his letter. He warns his readers that it is going to be hard to understand, so I feel like I am in good company attempting this task for you this week. There is so much to the subject. It is hard to explain. He says, "You have become sluggish in hearing. For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone again to teach you the basics of God's word. You have come to need milk, not solid food." That is pretty harsh. Look at what he is about to ask the people to understand all at the same time: the earthly Tabernacle and its furniture, the sanctuary that the earthly one copied, a high priest not from the line of Aaron but from the line of Melchizedek, blood—more than one kind of blood—doing more than one kind of work, the making of a new covenant, the forgiveness of moral sin, and the cleansing of conscience—things the old system could not manage. That is a lot to try to undertake. Then he is going to take all of that, make his argument, and bring it into one individual. That is a lot to carry. He says it was a great deal for those who grew up in the temple era to understand, and it is far more difficult for us who have never once seen an altar or understood these things from the inside.

Here is what happens when it becomes too much: people take the one piece that sounds very familiar to them—the blood and the death—pull it out by itself, hold it up, and say, "There, that is what it is all about. Jesus died, blood was shed, sin was paid for—finished. That is the book of Hebrews." You cannot do that with Hebrews, because the author told you yourself: you have to use your brain. You have to look at this like it is solid food. It asks you to understand a lot of pieces. So that is what we are going to do—one piece at a time: sanctuary, priest, blood, covenant, conscience. And when they come back together, hopefully you will see that the death, of course, was never the thing. It is part of something far larger. The good news is that we are prepared for this.

We have taken eleven weeks to prepare ourselves. What did we learn? Let me recap it in a short thought. We saw that the sin offering is a purification offering, that blood is all about life. We saw that sin does not only stain the sinner. It sends out an impurity that settles on the sanctuary—on the very place where God meets His people—so that the meeting place itself has to be kept clean, or the meeting stops. We saw that forgiveness flows from the mercy of God while blood purifies and restores access. Then we saw Messiah Himself as the mercy seat, as the place where God made a way for His people to meet Him. That brought us to this week. Every one of those ideas goes into the book of Hebrews with us—a book focused completely from the perspective of Yom Kippur.

Last week I told you that the Messiah is the mercy seat. This week I am going to emphasize that He is the high priest who walks into the sanctuary and carries life inside. Which one is it, you might ask? Meeting place or the one who enters it? One answer is coming. Which one is it? Yes—it can be both. You can have two pictures that do not match perfectly together, like interlocking gears. The author of Hebrews gives you this idea of a place in Hebrews and a high priest to enter the place, and both of them are true. Confusing? Not at all. Hard teaching? Not at all. It just expands the picture. That is what happens when these authors in the first century, trying to find words and expressions and ideas to communicate to their audience just how big what happened was.

First piece: the sanctuary—two sanctuaries, really. I am not pulling out a lot of Hebrew. I am not bringing a ton of Bible verses. You can go back and reread it with my notes. This is a sermon, so you can reread it, and that will be your assignment. The sanctuary: there are two sanctuaries—earthly and heavenly. This is in Hebrews, and Hebrews says that there was some cleaning that was needed. It says, "In the same way, he sprinkled the Tabernacle and all the vessels of the ministry with the blood." It is talking about Moses in Exodus with the people and the altar. Hebrews continues: "Therefore it was necessary for the replicas of these heavenly things to be purified with these sacrifices"—the holy altar, the holy furnishings, the replica of these things—"but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these." He says it was necessary for the copies of these heavenly things to be purified with sacrifices, but the heavenly things themselves with better ones. The same word for "heavenly stuff" he just used for the earthly stuff. But how does the heavenly become impure? I have not denied it. The heavenly sanctuary is not corrupt the way we are. What could possibly need cleaning up there? Well, we already answered this on the earthly level, and the answer will transfer here for us. Let me say—this is at least one perspective; there are others. Remember how impurity worked. Sin sends something out that travels. It drifts into the sanctuary, settles on the holy place—the meeting place—and in the Holy of Holies, on the furniture, even though the sinner never came near it. We use the term aerial miasma. That is why the sanctuary had to be purged—not because the building did anything wrong, but because the weight of human impurity came to rest on the place where God meets His people. Sounds familiar, right? We studied this. Now carry that up. The earthly sanctuary was only ever a copy. The true meeting place has to be clean even more radically. The impurity that sin creates does not politely stop at the earth's atmosphere. It reaches the real sanctuary—the highest place—the one place where God and humanity are supposed to come together for this to work. We put that distance there, and it landed on that spot we most needed kept open. So the heavenly things really were purified just exactly as the author says—not cleansed of any guilt of their own, but cleansed of the separation that we pressed into the meeting place. Understand this impurity: this is what impurity is—the force of death, counting as a force of death, pushing God and humanity apart. Same thing on earth, same thing above. This would take a high priest of a special order to be able to go in—a mediator, someone who can enter the place, clear what stands between us and God, and make the meeting possible again. The blood of bulls and goats could not do this. It could do it on the copy down here, time after time, but the life of Yeshua does it at the source—once. And that takes, as I said, a high priest of a different sort.

Let me make one important little caveat here. The word "heavenly" carries a lot of baggage with it. When the Hebrews talk about a heavenly sanctuary, it is not describing some far-off place where we are going to go when we die and float endlessly and aimlessly on clouds for eternity. That is not the point. From Eden forward, there is this idea of a sanctuary place where heaven and earth meet, where God can be with His people. What Hebrews is describing here is the meeting place—the supernatural meeting place being reopened, heaven and earth drawing near to one another through the mediator. "This age" and "the age to come" are also concepts—and unfortunately, here—and this is a major concept throughout Hebrews: "this age" (ha'olam hazeh) and the next stage, the world to come ('olam haba).

Let us stop for today. 

Alan