In Hebrews 10 he applies the matter to the present state of the believer. He had shown the work of Christ, and His coming again in glory. What comes in between the two? Christianity. And here we learn the direct application. The Christian stands between the cross and the glory of the Lord Jesus. He rests confidingly on the cross, that only valid moral basis before God; at the same time he is waiting for the glory that is to be revealed. “For the law having a shadow of good things to come, and not the very image of the things, can never with those sacrifices which they offered year by year continually make the corners thereunto perfect. For then would they not have ceased to be offered? Because that the worshippers once purged should have had no more conscience of sins.” No Jew could or ought to pretend to such purgation as its result.
I should like to ask whether (or how far) all the believers here assembled can take this as their place with simplicity. You, as a Christian, ought to have the calm settled consciousness that God, looking on you, discerns not one spot or stain, but only the blood of Jesus Christ His Son that cleanses from all sin. You ought to have the consciousness that there is no judgment for you with God by-and-by, however truly He, as a Father, judges you now on earth. How can such a consciousness as this be the portion of the Christian? Because the Holy Spirit bears this witness, and nothing less, to the perfectness of the work of Christ. If God’s Word be true, and to this the Spirit adheres, the blood of Christ has thus perfectly washed away the sins of the believer. I mean his sins now; not sin as a principle, but in fact, though it be only for faith. “The worshippers once purged should have had no more conscience of sins.” It is not implied that they may not sin, or that they have no consciousness of their failure, either past or present. “Conscience of sins” means a dread of God’s judging one because of his sins. For this, knowing His grace in the work of Christ for them, they do not look; on the contrary, they rest in the assurance of the perfection with which their sins are effaced by the precious blood of Christ.
This epistle insists on the blood of Christ, making all to turn on that efficacious work for us. It was not so of old, when the Israelite brought his goat or calf. “In those sacrifices,” referring to the law to which some Hebrew Christians were in danger of going back, “There is a remembrance made again of sins every year. For it is not possible that the blood of bulls and of goats should take away sins.” Therefore all such recurring sacrifices only call—sins to remembrance; but what the blood of Christ has done is so completely to blot them out, that God Himself says, “I will remember them no more.”
Accordingly he now turns to set forth the contrast between the weakness and the unavailingness of the Jewish sacrifices, which, in point of fact, only and always brought up sins again, instead of putting them away as does the sacrifice of Christ. In the most admirable manner he proves that this was what God was all along waiting for. First of all, “Sacrifice and offering Thou wouldest not, but a body hast Thou prepared me: in burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin thou halt had no pleasure. Then said I, Lo, I come (in the volume of the book it is written of Me) to do Thy will, O God.” There we find these two facts. First, in God’s counsels it was always before Him to have One more than man though a man to deal with this greatest of all transactions. There was but One that could do God’s will in that which concerned man’s deepest wants. Who was this One? Jesus alone. As for the first Adam and all his race, their portion was only death and judgment, because he was a sinner. But here is One who proffers Himself to come, and does come. “In the volume of the book it is written of Me”— a book which none ever saw but God and His Son. There it was written, “Lo, I come to do Thy will, O God.” Redemption was the first thought of God—a counsel of His previous to the dealings with man which made the necessity of redemption felt. God meant to have His will done, and thereby a people for Himself capable of enjoying His presence and His nature, where no question of sin or fall could ever enter.
First, He makes a scene where sin enters at once. Because His people had no heart for His promises, He imposed a system of law and ordinances that was unjudged in them, which provoked the sin and made it still more manifest and heinous. Then comes forth the wondrous counsel that was settled before either the sin of man, or the promises to the fathers, or the law which subsequently put man to the, test. And this blessed person, single-handed but according to the will of God, accomplishes that will in offering Himself on the cross.
So it is said here, “Lo, I come to do Thy will, O God. He taketh away the first” (that is, the law), “That He may establish the second” (that is, God’s will, often unintelligently confounded by men with the law, which is here set in the most manifest contradistinction). Next the Apostle, with increasing boldness, comes to the proof from the Old Testament that the legal institution as a whole was to be set aside. “He taketh away the first.” Was this Paul’s doctrine? There it was in the Psalms. They could not deny it to be written in Psalm 40, “Sacrifice and offering Thou wouldest not, but a body hast Thou prepared Me: in burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin Thou hast had no pleasure. Then said I, Lo, I come (in the volume of the book it is written of Me) to do Thy will, O God.” All he does is to interpret that will, and to apply it to what was wrought on the cross. “By the which will” (not man’s, which is sin, but God’s) “we are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.”
This leads to a further contrast with the action of the Aaronic priest. “Every priest standeth daily ministering and offering oftentimes the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins: but this Man, after He had offered one sacrifice for sins, forever sat down on the right hand of God.” Jesus sits down in perpetuity. This is the meaning of the phrase, not that He will sit there throughout all eternity. Εἰς τὸ διηνεκές does not express eternity (which would be εἰς τὸν αἰῶνα, or some such form of words) but “for continuance.” He sits there continually, in contrast with the Jewish priest, who was always rising up in order to do fresh work, because there was fresh sin; for their sacrifices never could absolutely put away sin. The fact was plain that the priest was always doing and doing, his work being never done; whereas now there is manifested, in the glorious facts of Christianity, a Priest sat down at God’s right hand, a Priest that has taken His place there expressly because our sins are blotted out by His sacrifice. If there was any place for the priest, one might have supposed, to be active in his functions, it would be in the presence of God, unless the sins were completely gone. But they are completely gone; and therefore at God’s right hand sits down He who is its witness.
How could this be disputed by one who simply believed Psalm 110? For there is seen not only the proof that the Messiah is the One whom God pronounced by an oath “a priest forever after the order of Melchisedec,” but the glorious seat He has taken at the right hand of God is now worked into this magnificent pleading. Christianity turns everything to account. The Jew never understood his law until the light of Christ on the cross and in glory shone upon it. So here the Psalms acquire a meaning self-evidently true, the moment Christ is brought in, who is the truth, and nothing less. Accordingly we have the third use of the seat Christ has taken. In the first chapter we saw the seat of personal glory connected with atonement; in the eighth chapter it is the witness of His priesthood, and where it is. Here it is the proof of the perpetual efficacy of the sacrifice of Christ. We shall find another use before we have done, which I hope to notice in its place.
But the Holy Spirit’s testimony is not forgotten. As it was God’s will and the work of Christ, so the Holy Spirit is He who witnesses to the perfectness of it. It is also founded on one of their own prophets. “This is the covenant,” says He, “that I will make with them after those days, saith the Lord, I will put My laws into their hearts, and in their minds will I write them; and their sins and iniquities will I remember no more. Now where remission of these is, there is no more offering for sin.”
Then we hear of the practical use of all. “Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holies by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way, which He hath consecrated for us through the veil, that is to say, His flesh; and having an high priest over the house of God; let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast the profession of our hope [for so it should be] without wavering (for He is faithful that promised); and let us consider one another to provoke unto love and to good works: not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is; but exhorting one another: and so much the more, as ye see the day approaching.” But the higher the privilege, the greater the danger of either despising or perverting it.
In Hebrews 6, we saw that the Spirit of God brings in a most solemn warning for those who turn their back on the power and presence of the Holy Spirit, as bearing witness of Christianity. Here the Apostle warns those that turn their back on Christ’s one sacrifice. It is evident that in these we have the two main parts of Christianity. The foundation is sacrifice; the power is of the Holy Spirit. The truth is, that the Holy Spirit is come down for the purpose of bearing His witness; and he that deserts this for Judaism, or anything else, is an apostate and lost man. And is he better or safer that slights the sacrifice of the Son of God, and goes back either to earthly sacrifices or to lusts of flesh, giving a loose rein to sin, which is expressly what the Son of God shed His blood to put away? He who, having professed to value the blessing of God, abandons it, and rushes here below into the sins of the flesh knowingly and deliberately, is evidently no Christian at all. Accordingly it is shown that such a one becomes an adversary of the Lord, and God will deal with him as such. As in Hebrews 6 he declares that he is persuaded better things of them, than that they would abandon the Holy Spirit; so here he expected better things than that they would thus dishonor the sacrifice of Christ. In that case, he says, God was not unrighteous to forget their work and labor of love; in this case, he lets them know that he had not forgotten the way in which they had suffered for Christ. There it was more particularly the activity of faith; here it is the suffering of faith.
This leads into the life of faith, which was a great stumbling-block to some of these Christian Jews. They could not understand how it was they should come into greater trouble than before. They had never known so great and frequent and constant trial. It seemed as if everything went against them. They had looked for advance and triumph and peace and prosperity everywhere; on the contrary, they had come into reproach and shame, partly in their own persons, partly as becoming the companions of others who so suffered. But the Apostle takes all this difficulty by the horns, as good as telling them, that their having suffered all this was simply because it is the right road. These two things, the cross on earth and glory on high, are correlative. As they are companions, so do they test a walk with God; one is faith, the other is suffering. This, he maintains, has always been so; it is no novelty he is preaching. Accordingly the Epistle to the Hebrews, while it does put the believer in association with Christ, does not, for all this, dissociate him from whatever is good in the saints of God in every age. Hence the Apostle takes care to keep up the real link with the past witnesses for God in faith and suffering, not in ordinances.