Hebrews 9:1-28

This chapter of Hebrews will speak to all of you who feel like you are not forgiven for something or other that you've done in your life.

Read it. And read it again. Copy the verses that are particularly meaningful to you -- those verses that bring you peace when their meanings flow like a river through your consciousness.

This particular chapter is one of my favorites in the entire Bible. I hear God speaking to me especially through these verses. I feel Christ looking over my shoulder as I write about him. I feel the comfort of the Holy Spirit once again reminding me that Christ's death on the cross brought a whole new meaning to the fulfilment of my worship.

If this doesn't happen to you in a single read-through of this chapter, I encourage you to read it again. And again. And again until the words take root in your heart.

This chapter promises to unlock answers to the secrets that you've anguished about. I pray most earnestly that this the Holy Spirit will bring you the profound peace of knowing that Christ's salvation is a gift that is yours for the claiming. You can't earn it. You don't deserve it. And even if you had been willing to die for it, it wouldn't have been good enough because your blood is contaminated by sin.

This great atonement had to be fulfilled by someone who was without sin.

The first part of this chapter -- verses 1-5 -- is a description of the Holy Place and the Most Holy Place.

If I have it right, there was this huge curtain that separated the two parts of the tabernacle. It was thick as a man's palm. It was sixty feet tall -- that's six stories high! And it took 300 priests to get it in place. So there it hung.

Nobody could go into the Holy of Holies, or the Most Holy Place, except the High Priest. And he could only go in once a year on the Day of Atonement (also known as Yom Kippur). On that day the High Priest sprinkled the sacrificial blood that was a sin offering onto the atonement cover of the Ark of the Covenant. This atonement cover was a slab of pure gold. It is also called the mercy seat and this is where God's presence appeared. At either end of this atonement cover are two cherubim.

What the author of this letter to the Hebrews is doing is reminding the Jewish people that God was very precise in his expectations of just how the sacrifices were to be offered to him under the old Mosaic system.

Be sure to remember that part of the Ark of the Covenant that refers to the Mercy Seat. This is where God's presence was. When the high priest came back there to offer the special sacrifice on Yom Kippur, you just know that God was watching.

And then things changed. God decided that the old Mosaic system wasn't good enough anymore because it didn't have any way for people to become inwardly clean. To be redeemed from their sins.

The Mosaic system had a bunch of sacrifices that could be offered up for all sorts of things that people do wrong in their lives. But there was no sacrifice at all to cleanse people on the inside -- in that innermost part of their being that is their soul. This is the place inside each of us where God comes to rest; watch how we're thinking. How we're behaving. What we're doing with our lives and how we're serving him.

Each one of us has this place inside. In a way it's a Mercy Seat where God himself is seated. It's the very seed of our spiritual being. It's where God lives inside us. It's our soul.

What this chapter of Hebrews is telling the Jewish people, and is telling us today, is that the Mosaic system was replaced forever when God sent his son to become the sacrifice for all the sins that had ever been committed and will ever be committed -- even for people who hadn't been born yet. It's that forever thing that God does.

The blood of animals was the sacrificial offering that God told Moses he wanted. And every year after that, the high priest entered the Most Holy Place and offered the sin offerings by sprinkling the blood onto the Mercy Seat of the Ark.

In verses 14-15 we have the great tipping point in this message of salvation: How much more, then, will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself unblemished to God, cleanse our consciences from acts that lead to death, so that we may serve the living God! For this reason Christ is the mediator of a new covenant, that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance -- now that he has died as a ransom to set them free from the sins committed under the first covenant.

This chapter also explains how the tabernacle was ritually cleansed by the sprinkling of animal blood. But wait. This new covenant is better than that because Christ didn't go into the earthly tabernacle and purify it. Rather, he went into the heavenly most most holy place and offered himself up. This heavenly holy of holies is where God the Father sits.

But Christ doesn't do this again and again, year in and year out. No indeed. He only did it once. And it was for all time. We don't see Christ coming back to earth each year to re-sacrifice himself.

Oh, for sure, we honor what he has done in our remembrances in worship, but these are not re-sacrifices in the literal sense. No indeed. Jesus Christ is sitting at the right hand of God right now, as you are reading this.

Christ is renewed and is now free of any pain that he suffered during his crucifixion. We are made new again, each and every time we ask for forgiveness from our sins. It is how you can know with full certainty that salvation for you is assured. It's how you know you are going to heaven. It's how you know your soul will never die for that is where God lives inside you.

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