Clough Hebrews Lesson 42

Tabernacle Ministry; Doctrine of Conscience – 9:6-10

In this section of Hebrews we have the continuous narrative, so to speak, or at least one subject covered from 8:1-10:18 and we summarized the thought of this major section of Jesus Christ’s priestly work involved a better covenant, a better tabernacle and a better sacrifice than in the dispensation of Israel. Three things, a better covenant, a better tabernacle, a better sacrifice, and we dealt last time, summarizing the better covenant. This is tough, as we are finding out, but important. And I’ll go over those points, some of you said I went through it too fast last time.

The points on the better covenant: the first point is that the better covenant belongs to Israel and not to the nations or to the Church; it is a covenant that has been written in agreement with the Jewish nation, Israel and no one else. Nobody else has signed the agreement, the Church hasn’t signed the agreement, nor have the nations signed the agreement, Romans 3:2 and Romans 9:4. The New Covenant is a covenant with Israel.

The second point is that the purpose of the covenant is to bless all men through Israel. The idea is, the first point is that it’s with Israel, but the second point, it’s not just for Israel by way of benefits. The benefits are supposed to spill out through Israel to all men, Genesis 12:3.

The third point, at Pentecost the Holy Spirit came to establish this New Covenant, Acts 2:16. The Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost came to establish the New Covenant, that’s why Peter said, “This is that which was spoken of by the prophet Joel,” etc. etc. etc.

Four, Israel, however, rejected her Messiah nationally so the Holy Spirit couldn’t establish the New Covenant at Pentecost. Because Israel nationally rejected the Messiah, the Holy Spirit could not establish the New Covenant. This is implied in the promise of Acts 2:36-39; please notice Acts 2:38 falls in there. That passage deals with explaining the New Covenant.

Point five, the Church Age was then established which, in other words the Church, lives off the benefits of the New Covenant through Jesus Christ. See, Jesus Christ is a Jew and therefore that’s our link with the New Covenant. Our link to the New Covenant is through Jesus Christ because Jesus Christ is the Son of David. Since Jesus Christ was a Jew, then Jesus Christ is one of the beneficiaries of the New Covenant, as well as the executor, and this being the case, then by union with Jesus Christ we are plugged into the New Covenant. We share part of its blessings by virtue of our union with Christ, Romans 11:17.

Point six, the Church is a final revelation to God, therefore, and we don’t need any continuing prophets and we don’t need any restorations or additions, the Church represents a finished work of Christ in history; no need for any further prophets, Ephesians 2:20, Greek students, aorist voice, the Church has been built, time past, on the foundation of the apostles and prophets.

That’s the better covenant, so now the whole big point, backing off from all these little points and trying to boil all of them down to a simple idea, the big point about this better covenant thing is that we have an unchanging setup; it’s not going to be revamped like the Old Testament set up was. So therefore the concept, such as prophets coming to restore the Church or give new revelation to the Church and all the rest just don’t fit with the flow of thought in the epistle of Hebrews.

Now the second point in Hebrews 9, besides the covenant, is the tabernacle; the New Covenant was chapter 8, the tabernacle is chapter 9, at least the first ten verses of chapter 9, a better tabernacle. Now before we get plunged into the details again let’s back off and see the importance of the tabernacle. Lots of details, all these details are important but you can kind of get buried under a pile of details. So let’s just forget the details for a minute, back off and see simply why is the better tabernacle, why make a federal case out of that.

What was the tabernacle? What’s its importance in the Old Testament, just think in terms of the Old Testament now. So what, we’ve got a tabernacle; what does the tabernacle represent theologically, not what it represents the work of Christ but what was its function in the Old Testament, the tabernacle? [someone answers] Okay, to show the presence of God. And what happened at the tabernacle? Worship. So the tabernacle was the place where men met God. The tabernacle, if you want the technical word for if, you like to read theological works or something, here is the word that you’ll see authors using, not talking about a cult but it’s just called a cultist. This is the place where worship occurred, the Old Testament cultist was the place where God met man and man met God.

Please notice that this is not a violation of one of God’s attributes, His omnipresence. God is fully present everywhere, doctrine of His essence. But when we say that God elects to make a point location, it means that man must come there to meet God. Now that’s the meeting ground, right there. So the cultist, being a place of meeting, means necessarily it is a place of meeting, a place, location. If that’s the case, and the Old Testament cultist was not permanent, what has it been replaced with? Nine times out of ten Christians are going to answer the wrong way. Nine times out of ten the answer you tend to get, it rises up in your heart quickly, is that I meet God in my heart or God meets me in my heart, and that answer is half true, but remember the whole Protestant Reformation was fought on the basis of whether or not the primary meeting place is a man’s heart or the primary meeting place is in heaven. Protestants hold that it is in heaven and Roman Catholics hold that it is in man’s heart. And this is a whole Reformation issue and so don’t get fuzzy about this. When we talk about a better tabernacle we’re talking again about a location. And we’ve got to be specific where is this location that man meets God; is it in our heart or is it before God’s throne.

Now why is this critical. All right: the first candidate is heaven; the second candidate is the human heart. The place where God meets man and man meets God, if it’s going to be a true meeting must be a place that is +R, or absolutely righteous or you don’t have a perfect meeting. God is absolute righteousness, and His righteousness will not tolerate the presence of sin. So if man is to meet God on amiable terms, he’s got to come to a place where there’s perfect righteousness or he can’t have a perfect meeting. So now look at it, of the two where is absolutely perfect righteousness, and the answer is obvious. Absolutely perfect righteousness is in heaven where Jesus Christ conducts His intercessory ministry as the great high priest, so thus the tabernacle then, the better tabernacle, right now is in heaven. Eventually it will be on earth, that’s the last chapter of Revelation, the new heavens and the new earth, God will dwell with man, but that’s not so now. God does not dwell with man in the full sense of the word.

Now it’s true that we have communion with God in our hearts, yes, but that communion is only secondary to the primary place which is in the throne room. Jesus Christ in His human form, being God-man, His body has to be some place tonight, it’s not just dissolved, it isn’t eclipsed into a [can’t understand words] some place, Jesus Christ’s humanity has to be some place. Where is it? We don’t know exactly where its coordinates are, we can’t pin them down in time and space, we know they’re some place in the universe and wherever that place is that’s the throne room of God. Jesus is at the Father’s right hand; that’s what that expression or idiom means in the Bible, He’s at a place. And the place is where we meet God.

Now since we do not visibly meet God, you can say well, that doesn’t do me any good, meeting God in heaven because I’m not in heaven, but our representative is in heaven; Jesus Christ is our representative; in His humanity He is a perfect representative, so we have a perfect “in” with God. And because Jesus Christ is our perfect representative we don’t have to go through any intermediary; our representative is already there. There’s nobody standing between me and the Lord Jesus Christ or between you if you’re a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ. No one, no pastor, no saint, no intermediary angelic being. You have a personal union with Jesus Christ and Jesus Christ tonight is your representative before God’s very presence. So heaven is the primary place, not the heart; the heart hasn’t yet been fully cleansed of sin. The regenerating work of the Holy Spirit has not cleansed us from all sins experientially; sanctification isn’t finished yet. So you can’t rest your relationship on the half-done half-baked work that’s done so far in your heart, sanctification. You don’t want that to be the basis of your relationship with God.

This was why Martin Luther was a monk, was so tortured as he considered his own sin. It wasn’t that Martin Luther was ignorant of divine grace, Martin Luther knew the word grace before he became a Christian. The problem that Martin Luther faced was knowing grace and knowing that it takes grace time to operate in his own heart Luther was tortured with the fact that knowing his own sin, which he knew very well, he could never have the assurance that he was wholly acceptable in God’s presence. Not having the assurance that he was wholly acceptable in God’s presence drove the man crazy. And that caused Luther to search for a basis, there’s got to be some other basis of fellowship with God than the condition of my own heart, even though my own heart be regenerated, even though the Holy Spirit dwell in my heart, but my heart is still tainted with sin and always will be until I die. That being the case, then I have to look somewhere else for the meeting place, and that’s the whole story of the Reformation; where does man meet God, in your heart or in heaven. You meet God in heaven.

Now we come, we’ve dealt with Hebrews 9:1-5 which deals with all the furniture, and the guy goes in and points out that this furniture can go on and we talk about the typology and the different kind of doctrines that the furniture teaches. Tonight we’re going to start with Hebrews 9:6 and go through verse 10, the end of this section. Verses 6-10. Now if you have a Greek text you will get an extra blessing out of this because if you look at verse 6-7 you will notice there is parallelism in the word order of the sentences. I am going to put these two sentences upon the board but before we do it I want to use an introductory clause. Notice how verse 6 begins.

Hebrews 9:6, “Now when these things were thus ordained,” the word “thus ordained” is a perfect tense, passive, which means that “these things,” verses 1-5, the way the tabernacle was designed, the way the ministry was conducted in that physical tabernacle, “these things,” from the point that those things became ordained, which was at Sinai, perfect tense, action occurred in the past, results continue down to the present moment. That’s the aktionsart of the perfect. So you have this, this is the ordination that continues. Now, that being so, there’s a comma after the word “ordained,” “Now when these things have been ordained,” now certain things follow.

Now there are two sentences that I want you to look at, one in verse 6 one in verse 7, not always has the translations have the word order of the Greek, of course, and therefore they don’t look parallel in many translations. But let’s write these sentences side by side in two columns. On the left side I’ll write the sentence from verse 6; on the right side or the right column I’ll write the sentence from verse 7 and let’s see if we can notice something about the structure. Another tip on personal Bible study; if you will train yourself to use that ancient archaic method of grammar study that I learned and that was diagramming sentences it will do wonders for your Bible study. Just diagram sentences, find out where the subject is, where the predicate is, nobody ever diagrams sentences; do they still teach that. Oh good. Subject, and you’ll find many of these subjects are omitted or sometimes the verbs are omitted and then you have your direct objects and so on, and you can play with all sorts of clauses and carry this on, but you’ll discover things when you do this because you can’t diagram the sentence unless you look at every word. The one thing you’re guaranteed of is if you try to diagram a section of Scripture you’re going to have to study every word and you’re going to have to plug that word in so it’s a method of forcing yourself to observe the text if nothing else, just observe the text.

When we do that to this sentence you come to an interesting conclusion. First, the subject of verse 6, “the priests.” “…the priests went always into the first tabernacle, accomplishing the service of God.” All right, the subject here is “the priests,” plural notice. “The priests went in” and this is present tense which means there’s a practice, they would continually go in, “into the first tabernacle, accomplishing the service of God.” Four things notice; subject, verb, they went into, object of the preposition, “into the first tabernacle,” and what they did there, which is, in the original language is a participial phrase. “The priests went into the first tabernacle, accomplishing the service of God.” We’ll get into “service of God” in a moment but just don’t get hung up on the words here.

Come on down to verse 7 and look at that sentence. “But into the second went the high priest alone,” so the subject here instead of priest is “high priest alone,” one man only, the others plural. So you’ve got one contrast as to subject. “…into the second he went,” no contrast there; the second contrast though, he goes into the second tabernacle. Now the first tabernacle, if you recall the pictures we showed last time, remember the Holy of Holies and the Holy Place, the first tabernacle as you enter, that’s the Holy Place; that’s called “the first tabernacle” in verse 6. The Holy of Holies, which is the place where the Shekinah glory and the ark of the covenant was, that’s called “the second” tabernacle in this man’s vocabulary. So don’t get confused, he’s not talking about two tabernacles. We would say the first compartment of the tabernacle, the second compartment of the tabernacle, but he doesn’t do that.

Now notice the other thing though, first of all we’ve got a contrast in plural subject, singular subject. No contrast in verbs; there is a contrast in the objects of the preposition, but notice what happens now at the end of this thing. The priests were “accomplishing the service of God,” accomplishing the service of God, accomplishing the service of God, over and over and over again they were accomplishing the service of God, but when he comes to the same place in this sentence all of a sudden a whole new thing starts; he says, “not without blood, which he offered for himself, and for the errors of the people.” So, “he offered blood,” or sacrifice. Now if you have access to a Greek text and you look at verses 6 and 7 does anyone notice what parts of this sentence are emphasized. You can tell it by which comes first. Now I put this in a nice English order, subject, verb, object of the preposition and so on, but in the Greek to emphasize it’s shifting things around. And those of you who are studying Greek or looking at the Greek text, always look at the order the parts of the sentence comes in because that gives you a tip as to what this man’s pointing to.

Now of these parts, which one comes first? In the Greek, then, by the word order we know what he’s trying to tell us; he’s pointing specially to the compartments, so the emphasis this man is giving us in verses 6-7 are the compartments. If he wanted to underline he says look where they’re going, many go into the first one, only one goes into the second one. The services of God are performed continually in the first one, but in the second one blood is offered; in other words, there’s nothing really completed in the second one, it’s just kind of… you’re left hanging. What is the guy doing? Well, he just offers blood, it’s a never ending thing. But the word “service of God” is not used for what is accomplished in that second compartment.

Okay, I think most of you have a background on the two compartments, these are the lesser priests, the high priest is the one man went into this. If you want to see the actual procedure that these men used, if you’ll turn back to Leviticus again just to review so you get familiar with the books of the Bible. The book of Leviticus is easy to remember the content. How do you remember the content of the book of Leviticus; think of the word “Levi,” the first four letters of Leviticus, Levi, priest, service, so the book of Leviticus is primarily a book about the Levites and their service. Said another way, the book of Leviticus describes Old Testament worship procedures, and in Leviticus 16 we have the day of atonement.

The day of atonement was one of those places in the Jewish calendar; remember the Jewish calendar has a spring and a fall cycle; in the spring cycle you have Passover, you have Firstfruits and you have Pentecost; three days that looked forward for century after century after century to the work of Jesus Christ because one day Jesus Christ died exactly on the day of Passover according to the Jewish calendar, Jesus Christ rose exactly on the day of Firstfruits and the Holy Spirit came exactly on the day of Pentecost. Those dates were specified for all eternity, God designed a calendar, dropped it down into history in 1400 BC, that calendar looked forward, forward, forward, forward, forward to the work of Christ. But the fall cycle of the Jewish calendar has never been fulfilled. It include the Day of Trumpets, it includes the Day of Atonement and it includes the Feast of Tabernacles. None of those three important dates have yet been fulfilled. So, we look to the fulfillment of those in the future. The Day of Trumpets will be some event in the future which prophecy only hints at, we can’t draw a big chart and tell you exactly what’s happening, prophecy in the Scripture is not crystal ball gazing, prophecy in the Scripture is just general to give you a sensation that God controls history.

Now, the Day of Trumpets will be some event in which or by which the nation Israel will be alerted to consider the claims of Jesus Christ nationally. The Day of Atonement will occur ten days after that event, and on that day Israel will make a national confession of her sin; she will confess that the Jewish carpenter, Jesus from Galilee, was indeed who He claimed to be, the Son of God. At that time, then, the nation makes a national confession and they fulfill the Day of Atonement; there won’t be any more days of atonement after this because the nation’s sin, they will discover, had already been atoned for centuries and centuries before. Now the Feast of Tabernacles commemorates the beginning of the Millennial kingdom, and so a few short days afterwards the millennial kingdom will begin, Jesus Christ will have returned and go on into the next era of history.

Now it’s this day of atonement that is spoken of in Leviticus 16, and there are some things we want to note, verse 5-6 for one thing, I’ll just point to you out of chapter 16 the things that the author of Hebrews is talking about. In Leviticus 16:5, this is instructions to the high priest, what he’s supposed to do, he doesn’t get in there and blahb blahb blahb blahb, what am I supposed to do, He has the Word of God that tells him what to do, specific instructions. “He shall take of the congregation of the children of Israel two kids of the goats for a sin offering, and one ram for a burnt offering,” and notice in verse 6 who he offers it for, “And Aaron shall offer his bullock of the sin offering, which is for himself, and make an atonement for himself, and his house.” So one of the actions of the high priest is to make an atonement for himself. He can’t go in there, it’s kind of high voltage, he’d get zapped if he goes in there without making an atonement for his own sin.

Notice in Leviticus 16:12-13 a peculiar little thing, “And he shall take a censer bull of burning coals of fire from off the altar before the LORD,” and what this is, as he walks into the second veil, here’s the tabernacle, the Holy of Holies, the Holy Place, and you have this altar of incense out here, he’s going to walk up to the altar of incense and he takes a censer off the altar full of incense, and he walks, whether he walked through the curtain or around it, he walks back in there to where the Holy of Holies is, and when he comes into the Holy of Holies, it says in verse 13, “He will put the incense upon the fire before the LORD, that the could of the incense may cover the mercy seat that is upon the testimony, that he die not.” So what the priest would do, he’d walk behind the veil and he’d take all this incense, there was a fire that was burning back in there and he’d throw it down on the fire and schwooo, it’d just smoke the whole Holy of Holies up.

So all the time that he was going through this procedure of throwing blood on the mercy seat he could not see what was going on, it was just like one big steam shower in there. And the reason for this was that God was not to be gazed upon. He refused, even the man coming having made atonement for his sins, could not gaze upon His presence and so it’s to cloud the whole thing up so he can’t see. This is a micro picture of Mount Sinai. When God comes down to Mount Sinai what does He do geophysically? He clouds the atmosphere. He puts smoke and the people, all they see, they feel the ground shaking, they hear God speaking, but all they can see is the smoke, never can get behind the smoke to see what God Himself looks like. So here is the same thing, he is to observe this, there has to be fog and smoke in there because he’s not supposed to see the presence of God.

Then the other thing, Leviticus 16:15-16, “Then shall he kill the goat of the sin offering, that is for the people, and bring its blood within the veil,” so there’s two acts that he does, the first one, he makes atonement for himself, then he goes in there a second time and makes atonement for the people. All right, now it’s Leviticus 16 that forms the background for Hebrews 9.

Let’s turn back to Hebrews 9, this is why in the end of verse 7, he says the high priest is going to do two things. This contrasts the sentence, we had verse 6, verse 6, he goes into the second compartment of the tabernacle, he offers blood for two things, himself and the people. Where does the author of Hebrews get this? He gets it from reading Leviticus 17. See, this author is not adding anything new, he’s simply showing that the Law has been fulfilled. Before we go to verse 8 I want to explain the word “errors” at the end of verse 7, “the errors of the people.” Now that sounds like that’s a very mild word for sin. Well, why is it called “errors.” In the Old Testament, and I do not profess to know the exact boundaries, I hope by the time I finish Hebrews I’ll have done enough study to be able to show you the exact boundaries, but in the Old Testament there were two categories of sin; the sin of ignorance and the sin of willfulness. The sin of ignorance and the sin of willfulness and they are consistently distinguished in the Law.

The sins of ignorance had atonement made for them. The sacrifices would cover these. The sins of willfulness, excommunication and removal from the community. There was a sharp difference between the sin of ignorance and the sin of willfulness. Now the author here use the same terminology as the Old Testament did; in this verse when he uses the word “errors” he is talking about the sins of ignorance, the high priest made atonement for the sins of ignorance. If you peek over in Hebrews 10:26 you’ll see over there he uses the other word, sins of willfulness and I hope by the time we get to verse 26 be able to develop that a little bit better. But in verse 26, “if we sin willfully after we have received the knowledge of the truth, there remains no more sacrifice for sin.” Now we know what these two correspond to in our Church Age, but it’s hard to specify. The sin of willfulness would be one who dies without having received Jesus Christ. The sin of willfulness is after the person has had full knowledge, full revelation and knows that the judgment of God rests upon him, still chooses his own way; that’s the sin of willfulness, nothing can be done for that. The cause effect has been made clear to the person, if you violate God’s law, then bang, you’re going to get shot. So the person says I know I’m going to get shot and I violate God’s word. Now that’s the attitude of willful sin.

The sin of ignorance, however, is the mystery. Now the word “ignorance” doesn’t mean they didn’t know they weren’t sinning, because these people obviously had a sense of sin so it’s not that. But probably the best remark I’ve seen to date is that by John Calvin when he says that these people were not ignorant of the fact that their acts were sinful but they had been blinded by Satan to the effect of their acts. In other words, the idea was that in the sins of ignorance Satan is clouding the mind so the person kind of does it and puts out of their head the fact that there’s a price to be paid for that sin, the sin of ignorance, whereas in the sin of willfulness the person goes ahead, knowing in advance the full price does fall upon his own head. That’s the best I can do for it, I’m sorry, I can’t push it any further than that. All I can say is that there are these two categories, they are used consistently in the Old Testament, historically they form what the Roman Catholic Church has developed with a great deal of detail, the mortal and venial sin, this is where that came from, but we’re not going into those details, I hope to present to you other details later.

In Hebrews 9:8 we have the interpretation, he’s going to start interpreting history; he says, “The Holy Spirit this signifying,” now what is “this?” The word “this” in verse 8 refers to the procedures of verses 6 and 7, in other words, the procedures on the day of atonement. The day of atonement procedures and since we already know from the original languages that in verses 6-7 he’s emphasizing the compartment of the tabernacle, what is it that makes the compartments? Given the geometric figure that I’ve just drawn, the rectangular, you only have to remove one line to remove both compartments; which line is it: the middle one, remove that line and you’ve removed both compartments because you’ve made it into one. So the emphasis here is on the separating veil, the fact that there’s something entirely different going on in compartment one than going on in compartment two. In compartment one many priests come in, they accomplish the work of God, go out, no problem. But when you get to compartment two you can’t even get in there, you’ve got to drop a load of incense on the fire and schwooo, it goes all over the place, forms smoke and everything, you can’t see what’s going on, you can barely see what you’re doing flipping blood on the mercy seat and then you leave. Now that’s what’s going on in area two. Separating these is the veil.

This is why in verse 8 he now draws the conclusion, “The Holy Spirit this signifying,” notice the third personality of the Trinity is now involved because the Holy Spirit is God’s technician, the Holy Spirit is the One that designed the tabernacle for Moses; the Holy Spirit is the One that indwelt the carpenters, and the tailors and the various people that worked on the tabernacle. So the Holy Spirit built the tabernacle in history and the Holy Spirit inspired the Scriptural record and account of that building so we know a little bit of what it’s like. “The Holy Spirit this signifying that,” now comes the big lesson, “that the way into the holiest of all was not yet made clear, while as the first compartment [tabernacle] was still standing.” The first compartment in verse 8 refers to the first compartment made by the veil, he says as long as you’ve got this two-fold compartment business you’ve got a veil and as long as that veil is there it has a theological significance that you must not overlook.

Literally it is a perfect tense, “has not yet been shown,” that tells us a lot of interesting things, that verb. It’s passive, which refers to the fact that we are dependent on revelation, we can’t sit there and think oh, this is what it means; we have to be shown, that means we have to have it taught to us, that means we must rely on divine revelation. “…it has not yet been shown.” It also tells us, this verb, that these people in the Old Testament, the more spiritual of them, knew very, very well that something was terribly incomplete about this whole ceremony they were going through. The perceptive Old Testament saint, he is saying, knew that that veil was saying something, there’s something strange about this whole thing that we do every year, year in year out, there’s just something incomplete about this whole thing. And this gives you a little insight as to how did those Old Testament saints look upon the world and upon their relationship with God. They looked upon it askance, if we want to used the word, in the sense that they had a very deep sense that everything wasn’t all in place yet.

Now there’s a similar way we look upon history because we’re looking forward to the Second Advent of Christ do the same thing, don’t we. Because time and time again when we deal with the problem of suffering in our lives, when we deal with the problem of reversal, we deal with the problem of sin, we know that we’re not complete, and so there’s something incomplete, all the pieces aren’t yet in place. Now that doesn’t destabilizes us, we don’t say okay I’m going to reject Christianity just because God hasn’t played all His hand yet. Rather, we trust the fact that God has more cards in His hand to play. Now, in verse 8, “while the first tabernacle” and by context it must refer to the first compartment, “while the first compartment was standing,” this is his way of saying while this thing was compartmentalized there was just something missing.

Then he goes in Hebrews 9:9 and says, he explains it, “Which was a figure,” or in the Greek “a parable,” parabole, “a parable for the time then present,” now a parable, what’s important about that. A parable takes a truth of earth, that means visible, and a truth about heaven, which is yet future, and parallels them. So you take, maybe something out of… it may be a seed, it may be a plant, it may be a pearl, it may be some story, you take something that’s down here in the visible world and you use it to illustrate that which is in the invisible world, that’s the parable concept. Now if you’re a real sharp thinker you’re going to see that this parable business has a presupposition behind it. Can anybody spot it? The idea that the Bible is consistently, at many, many points, relying on parabolic explanation, that methodology itself presupposes something very critical about the nature of the universe. [someone answers] All right, it presupposes that the parallels are bona fide, doesn’t it. It presupposes that there indeed is a correspondence between the heaven and earth. It presupposes that there is something down here, when we talk about a seed growing, that is a legitimate picture of what’s happening spiritually.

Now I want to dwell on this a little bit further. This has certain, very, very important intellectual repercussions on the Christian faith. You see why you can’t drop creation out of the Christian system. See this whole thing is one chain that comes back on itself, you cut one link and you bust the whole thing up. If you don’t have one God that created both worlds you don’t have correspondence between the two worlds. You have to have one creator to make the whole parabolic system of explanation go. So the parables presuppose creation; the parables presuppose that the universe is put together the way Genesis says. If, conversely, the universe is built the way Genesis says, then there’s nothing wrong with the parabolic method of teaching. But everything is wrong with the parabolic method of teaching if modern thought is right because if modern thought is right we have no assurance that heaven does fit earth and then every symbol we ever can think of down here, whether it’s water, whether its plants, whatever it is we never can be sure that that means a thing when it comes to the invisible world.

And that’s why your modern theologian as well as your oriental religion talks much of symbols but nothing of truth… talks much of symbols but nothing of truth because you can use symbols and have an emotive reaction, oh I love that symbol, but all that is your emotional response to that symbol. For all you know heaven might be exactly opposite to that symbol, but you use the symbol as a manipulator of human emotion so that now the cross of Christ, which to orthodox Christians means something, is just a symbol. Those of you who like art, look at Salvador Dali’s picture of Jesus Christ suspended in heaven; you can see through it. What’s Dali saying? It’s just a symbol, it’s not real, you can see through the thing. The man that thinks live Salvador Dali completely looks at the parabolic method exactly different than the way we do.

We look upon it naïvely at face value that the parable is valid, that indeed when Jesus Christ tells me that the water of life, that salvation is like water, then I know that as water is pleasing to my body, salvation is going to be equally pleasing to my soul, there’s a correspondence. When Moses talks about the tabernacle here and the various ways of worship, there’s a correspondence with the real state of affairs, because Moses hasn’t dreamed this up. God’s told him this. But, if I think like the modern man, like Salvador Dali or somebody like that, now I can take my symbols and I crank out all the symbols I want to; the symbols I crank our artistically or religiously or in my writing, all these symbols are just nothing more than manipulators psychologically; you dress up with symbols like you’d put on clothes, put on whatever one pleases you.

Now that’s the difference between symbolism in the modern sense and symbols or parables as they are used in the Bible. To interpret parables correctly you’ve got to shift gears out of the way a modern man thinks and go back to the way a Biblical man thinks. He thinks in terms of the Creator who has made both the symbol the man is talking about and everything so it all fits together. Furthermore, in this case, on earth we have the tabernacle, in heaven we have the real tabernacle. Now how did Moses find out what symbol to use. You see, if Moses operated like the modern man, here’s finite Moses, and out of this finiteness Moses says ah, I have an intuition that God is like this and so he builds the tabernacle, saying God is like this, but his symbol has no validity because it’s a product of his on finiteness.

Now forget all that, shoving all that aside for a moment and looking at it the way the Bible reports it you’ve got an entirely different ball game. Instead of finite Moses doing it you have Moses out with a big question mark, God, what do I do? He can’t think of any symbols; God tells him the symbols. And so the symbol has validity because it’s revealed to him. So keep these things in mind when you start talking about symbols and parables. You can kill all Christianity by symbolizing it the wrong way and I’m trying to warn you against this, that people that you will take religion courses from, many of the books that are popular in the press, many of the things that you will read, you’ll see on TV, and you innocently can buy the stuff and not realize what it that you’ve really got onto, is that you’ve got onto a fiercely anti-Christian type of thing that is using what you think are perfectly good things, Christian crosses and everything else and you think you’re talking the same ball game; it’s not, it’s completely different. The symbols may be the same but the rules by which the symbols are used are just as different as football and baseball, two completely different games. So if any of you do think the 20^th century way here, don’t do it while you’re reading this passage or you’re going to screw the passage up.

Okay, Hebrews 9:9, here’s the parable, “Which was a parable for the time then present,” that’s another point about parables, did you notice when I put these two things up here, earth and heaven, I didn’t divide them the way Plato would have divided them or some of the Greeks by saying earth is the place where man is and heaven is the place where man never can be. In other words, heaven is utterly beyond man ever, in the world of the abstract you never get there, and that’s what the Greeks are talking about but that’s not the way this is talking about. Notice the word “time,” … “time!” so if the earth in the Bible is not this, earth in the Bible is where man is now and heaven is where man will be; both places are places where man can be. The difference is not one is abstract and the other concrete, like the Greeks, the difference to the Hebrew is one is one point in time and the other one is linearly ahead of it in time.

So it’s a chronological separation, not a dimensional separation and that makes it much more concrete. See, that’s why the word “time” is in verse 9, “Which was a parable for the time then present,” for that age, for that era of history, in the progress of divine revelation that’s as far as it went at that point. And so when we have the tabernacle, continuing with the illustration, we have the Old Testament cultist. The Old Testament cultist was a picture, not of some abstraction, it was a picture of what one day we’ll all enjoy and that is the New Jerusalem, Revelation 21; it’s not an abstraction, we’re going to be there, time and place. The difference is sequence in history, not dimensional.

All right, “Which was a figure for the time then present, in which,” during that era, “were offered both gifts and sacrifices which could not make him that did the service perfect, as pertaining to the conscience.” Now this tell us gobs about how those Old Testament folks thought. They could look on the tabernacle and see this veil here; so you’ve got God and man pictured with this veil. The veil is physically there; the emphasis is always on this veil, the veil, the veil, the veil, always the veil. Now before we get into the conscience just briefly turn to Matthew 27:51. On the night, or the late afternoon, when Jesus was hanging from the cross, and He died, there were several astounding phenomena reported by the author of the Gospel of Matthew.

In Matthew 27:51 is one of these; verse 50, “Jesus, when He had cried again with a loud voice, yielded up the spirit,” so the instant that Jesus Christ died, the instant that atonement is finished, [51] “Behold, the veil of the temple was rent in two,” and notice not from the bottom to the top but “from the top to the bottom,” deliberately put in there so you couldn’t say there were people pulling it apart, nobody pulled it apart, the thing split from the top down, and apparently there were eyewitnesses to it because Matthew wasn’t in the temple when it happened. Somebody else must have been in there, we can only hypothesize; scholars have felt that some of the priests, at the time were actually doing service in there and went schhlt, like this, and they wondered what happened and finally they went out and some of them later became believers and reported it to the disciples. When did Christ die? Oh, it was about such and such. Hey, what happened then? Do you know when we were serving in the temple, you know all of a sudden the thing split? It did? Yeah. And so it got incorporated into the Gospel

Now why did that happen” Because in the temple God destroyed the physical symbol of separation. He was so intent on getting a message across that something radical had happened, it wasn’t just the Jewish carpenter that got slaughtered out on the hill, it wasn’t just the Jewish carpenter, it was something cosmic that happened at that point in history and to make that point clear, miraculously this thing tore.

Now to see the size of the miracle extra-Biblical accounts, I think it’s Josephus that tells us this; that curtain weighed hundreds and hundreds of pounds, it wasn’t just a little sweet sheet that was strapped up across there, that thing was two inches thick. Now you can see how much cloth it would take to make a two inch thick curtain across there; it was an immense thing. And to shred a two inch curtain from top to bottom took some power; angels must have had a ball, hey, let’s rip it up. So this thing tore and that was the destruction of the symbol, and thereby God said something. Now look at what the tabernacle looks like; here’s your Holy of Holies, here’s your Holy Place. There’s where the priest went and there’s where guy only could go once a year with blood and he had to smoke it all up to get in there and everything else. Now it’s all out, free access; that’s the theme of the epistle, “Come boldly unto the throne of grace, that you may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need.” Do you know what that throne of grace is? The ark of mercy, that’s what it is. So we have access to the throne of God by this mysterious work and the Bible does not explain all the details, the mysterious work that Jesus Christ did outside the city walls.

Now, returning back to Hebrews he says this “was a parable for the time then present,” the “time then present” was up when Christ died and that veil was ripped, “in which were offered both gifts and sacrifices that could not make him that did the service perfect,” “make perfect” means to complete. I want to show you where this word, which in the Greek is teleioo, this word, I want to take you back through Hebrews a minute, turn to Hebrews 2:10, and I’ll show you where this verb is used elsewhere, and you don’t have to say too much if you just look at the text where the verb occurs you can get the flavor of its meaning. Notice what it says in Hebrews 2:10, “For it became Him, for whom are all things, and by whom are all things, in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the captain of their salvation perfect through suffering.” The word “perfect” is teleioo, that means the completion of Jesus Christ’s sanctification; in His humanity it was finished at the last moment He died on the cross. Incidentally, you can think of it this way; Christ is the only man who had a perfect sanctification during time. His experience with sanctification was perfect. There was not more sanctification that needed to be done; when He died He was perfect.

In Hebrews 5:9 it’s used again, same way, “And being made perfect,” teleioo, “He became the author of eternal salvation unto all them that obey Him.” Who is it that’s being made perfect? Jesus Christ, perfect sanctification. Hebrews 7:19, “For the Law made nothing perfect,” the usage that parallels the present passage, and then Hebrews 7:28, in the King James they’ve got the translation screwed here, “the Son, who is consecrated for ever,” which means “the Son who is perfected forever,” teleioo again. So you see how teleioo is used. Now in Hebrews 9:9 when it’s teleioo here, it’s talking about completing the believer’s sanctification. That’s the thing; it’s never complete back there, no way it could be complete, in fact it couldn’t even get started because by themselves they could never deal with the problem of sin.

That’s why he adds the thing down at the end of verse 9, and this thing tells you gobs about where the Old Testament real, real saint placed his trust, even the guys that were the priests, even the guys that saw this go on and on and on and on, even the Levites that told everybody to do it, even David who was very close to it; it says, “as pertaining to the conscience.” Now what does this tell you? It tells you that these Old Testament saints were perceptive enough observers to know that what was going on physically in that tabernacle, no matter how glorious and miraculous it was, didn’t solve their guilt problem, they still had the guilt problem. So they resolved the guilt problem and I’ll show you how they did it in a moment but they didn’t resolve the guilt problem by ever thinking that those sacrifices were solving their guilt problem. That wasn’t it, no matter how tight you make confession and the giving of physical sacrifice in the Old Testament, you can ram, cram and jam those two acts together, you always must maintain some sort of separation. The Old Testament saint distinguished between the overt behavior of offering sacrifices for his sins and the actual sensation of cleansing and forgiveness that he experienced in his soul. He always separated these two.

Let me show you that he did that. Turn to Psalm 32 a moment. I do this to head off at the pass any arguments that they evolved their conscience through time. People weren’t stupid, they had just as active a conscience as you and I have. Notice what David says in Psalm 32:1, “Blessed,” or “Happy is the man whose transgression is forgiven, and covered.” Isn’t that the cry of a man that says thank You that I am forgiven, it drives me crazy not to be. Turn to Psalm 51, at the end of Psalm 51 it’s very, very clear that David did not confuse… Psalm 51:16-17, “For Thou desires not sacrifice, else would I give it; Thou delightest not in burnt offering. [17] The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; and a broken and contrite heart, O God, Thou wilt not despise.” Now David, in verses 16-17, is not undermining the Old Testament sacrifices because David did offer sacrifices. In fact, verse 19 tells us he anticipated giving sacrifices, [“Then shalt thou be pleased with the sacrifices of righteousness, with burnt offering and whole burnt offering, then shall they offer bullocks upon thine altar.”] So however you interpret verses 16 and 17 you can’t interpret it as an absolute antithesis. He’s not saying either or, he’s just ordering it by priority and saying look, I can give all the sacrifices from here to 586 and it won’t make any difference if I haven’t confessed while I’ve done it. So your Old Testament saint knew very clearly he had to give those sacrifices, God told him to do that; but he also knew that those sacrifices weren’t doing anything for him directly. God, in the final analysis, was the One who gave that cleansing sensation of forgiveness.

Now all this is very clear that as elaborate as the Old Testament cultist was, beautiful, educational and all the rest, the forgiveness and the sense of cleanliness was altogether somehow separate from this thing and the Old Testament saint did know that.

Now let’s turn back and finish Hebrews. When he says that it didn’t make us “complete pertaining to our conscience,” he’s simply referring to the fact that, going back to the chart a minute, he’s looking at the soul, and he knows that the conscience condemns his mind, that regardless of what he does he can’t cover it up, the conscience still condemns his mind. And he knows that if he tries to cover up his conscience and say no, I’m not going to listen to it, not going to listen to it, not going to listen to it, not going to listen to it and tries to cover it up with some sort of fig leaves mentally, then the conscience is going to go down here and get him again, second channel, it’s going to wipe his emotional pattern out, all sorts of screwy emotions are going to come into this person, manic depressive or something. All these emotional distortions are going to start. Why? The Holy Spirit couldn’t get his attention one way, hit him another way. And then we find people who have successfully avoided facing reality in the area of their emotions, the conscience works on they physically and comes over here to the body and they get psychosomatic illnesses.

So the conscience is one of the most powerful tools, the most powerful indestructible instrument in your soul. It’s there, we know many verses on it, I would suggest if you want some more verses that you look at the introduction to the Proverbs series. But here are some verses that those of you taking notes might want to look at to show you what the conscience does and how it works.

Definition of the conscience: Conscience can be very simply defined as God-consciousness, 1 Peter 2:19, God-consciousness. The conscience is that strange thing, I don’t know that much about it but it’s that strange thing in us that lets us know that God is there. This is why there’s no such thing as a non-hypocrite atheist; all atheists by definition are hypocrites in the sense that their mind isn’t phased in with their conscience.

So you have, then, the fact that the definition of conscience equals God-consciousness; and you say another thing, what does the conscience do? [can’t understand word] it judges; it does more than just judge. We can list at least six things that the conscience does. One of these is what you think it does, that is, it judges. It does other things. It is the common ground behind all society. 2 Corinthians 4:2 and 2 Corinthians 5:11. The conscience represents the common ground. When I go to explain the gospel of Jesus Christ, whether it’s to an intellectual or whether it’s to somebody else, it doesn’t make any difference, that person inside their soul has a conscience and my gospel appeal is to that conscience, no matter how many intellectual tangents we go on and sometimes we have to go on these; we shouldn’t shy away from doing that, but when all is said and done the appeal is centrally to the conscience.

The second thing the conscience does, besides be a common ground; the conscience in society, in people and in society restrains the individual; the conscience of others restrains the individual. Illustration, Acts 23:1; Acts 24:16. The conscience of other people restrains you. You can do things when you’re alone or with someone else but if there’s a group of people around you don’t do it. How come? Because the conscience works and you know it.

Three, the conscience orients the ego, it gives you stability; 1 Timothy 1:19. It gives orientation to the ego; a person who has zapped their conscience over the years by scar tissue is a person that you’ll watch and they’ll be very unstable. Sometimes it’s hard to see it directly but eventually they just collapse in instability; they’re like this, they decide to do this, decide to do that, decide to do this, decide to do that, just like this all time and you wonder what is wrong with this person, why doesn’t he just do something straight, why is always zigzag, zigzag, zigzag, the whole life is one big zigzag. What’s going on there? It’s like a ship without a rudder, 1 Tim 1:19 says, that’s a graphic illustration, a ship without a rudder, a person going through life without a conscience, he’s just wandering around, no direction.

The fourth thing that a conscience does; at approves or disapproves your faith. You cannot believe if your conscience throws up a red light, no matter intellectually persuaded you may be you will not believe. Romans 14:23; 1 Timothy 1:5 and 19; 1 Timothy 3:9. You may be intellectually persuaded that God is there; you may be intellectually persuaded the doctrine of divine essence; you may be intellectually be persuaded that God is able to help you out of your jam, but when it comes right down to it, you just can’t believe it. Now why do you get in that kind of a jam when you know it can’t be that you don’t… you really do believe that God is able to do it but somehow in this situation you don’t believe God is going to do it. Now that may be a tip that you have done something to displease God, which you’d like to forget about this moment. You’ve done something to displease God and your conscience is trying to draw your attention to it by saying God isn’t pleased with you right now so even though He’s able He’s not going to.

[someone asks question] That’s a special case of a more general problem and that is many of the problems, and you know that we try to deal with intellectual problems here, but when all is finally said and done, usually at the bottom of the intellectual problem, if they keep up, I mean everyone is going to have intellectual problems, if you have them don’t feel like you’re the lone ranger, you should think these things through and ask questions of the Word of God and deal with these things, we’re not against that. But where you have an intellectual problem that persists and persists and persists and persists, and persists, even after the Word of God is so clear, there’s a spiritual problem that’s fogging up the picture there and you might as well call it sin. The most graphic illustration I have of this was a case where I worked with a person who had his doctorate and we were discussing evolution and creation and I was all prepared to discuss the biological aspects and the geological aspects and no sooner had the conversation gone or for about four or five minutes and suddenly out of the clear blue I start talking about… this guy comes to me, and he starts talking about all of her personal life and why he doesn’t’ like God because God did this and God did that and all the rest of it. And I said that was very interesting wasn’t it, I was there and were going to debate on the high level of creation and evolution dealing with mutations, and second laws of thermodynamics, and all the rest of it and what do we wind up talking about, that God was a meany to him. And it was very interesting that this came out in the conversation and it wasn’t basically a biological problem, it was a spiritual problem.

All right, what else does the conscience do? The conscience stores a record of our life, this is the one everybody knows, it stores the record of our life for an accurate future judgment. Romans 2:15, it’s a divine tape recorder. God doesn’t need Watergate tapes, He has his own. Romans 9:1 and other passage.

The sixth thing that the conscience does is that it apparently channels discipline to your soul; it apparently is a channel through which God disciplines your mind, hits you in your mind or your emotions or your body, Hebrews 4;12, that sword thing, which is a picture of judgment, and it pierces, the “dividing asunder of soul and spirit” which is another idiom for conscience. And so apparently discipline is administered through the conscience in some way.

Let’s conclude with Hebrews 9:10, why is it these things didn’t work? These things, and the King James, let me just adjust the translation a moment to make a little clearer, “Which stood only in meats [foods] and drinks, and various washings, all of which were carnal ordinances,” if you look at the Greek you can see what’s happened there, there’s no kai between “washings” and “carnal ordinances.” By the way, if you look at the Greek also you’ll notice, what’s the word for “washings?” Baptisms. Remember how we interpreted baptisms in Hebrews 6 as not baptisms but washings, here’s one of the proofs for the validity of that interpretation. Meats, drinks, and washings, that is, “carnal ordinances, imposed on them until the time of reformation,” which is the beginning of the New Covenant.

What does your conscience need to get straightened out? I’ve gone through this many times but you’re going to have to struggle in your own soul, you’re going to have loved ones faced with this kind of thing, you’re going to see member of your family, neighbors, friends of yours, pay thousands and thousands of dollars for psychotherapy and all the rest and if it is not organically caused, low blood sugar or somebody banged them on the head or something, if it’s not organically caused it’s sin caused. There’s no other deal, it’s one or the other. It may be both at times but the point is if it’s spiritual it involves the conscience. Now what does that kind of a person need? Through the mind… see, they’ve got all this crud built up here, a person that’s really psycho and out of it has a big thick layer of crud, like stuff on your teeth that needs to be cleaned off, between the mind and the conscience. And they, frankly have isolated their conscience; they can look you straight in the face and say I don’t know what’s wrong. And they can mean that because it’s been so many years since they ever listened to their conscience that they honestly have suppressed it. If you want to call it suppression, call it suppression, we just have another word [can’t understand words].

So what you have to do is you’ve got to deal with what is immediate with them; don’t try to probe all the way down to the 8^th story underground to find out what’s going on. What you want to do is develop a pattern of confession… pattern I say, so when you work with this kind of a person don’t get discouraged because you know, you talk to them five minutes and they’re not better, or they pray with you and then tomorrow they’re having a problem again, see, God didn’t answer the prayer. Yes He did but look at how God answers the prayer. You have got to re-establish a pattern in the person’s life. Again, use the tooth illustration, the person’s not used to brushing their teeth and they’ve got a wad of cavities, and you come along and say you, your problem is that you don’t brush your teeth, so fine, for two days they brush their teeth, [can’t understand words] and then they go on and revert to the same old pattern. And this goes on for a while.

What’s happened, they’ve reverted to an old behavior pattern. What you have got to do is keep after them, prod them, so that they will confess their sin. At first it’s just a little bit, and then it gets more and more until some of these sins that may 15, 20 years old, they’re just harboring judges and mental attitude stuff, and I don’t mean incidentally the overt stuff everybody thinks of, I mean mental attitude grudges, these are the things that tear people up, hatred, vindictiveness, resentment, those are the worst sins and those things can be harbored in people’s souls for years and years and years and years and years and years.

When Dr. Adams taught us at Dallas Seminary he shared with us a case that came into his counseling clinic one day, husband and wife problem, and the couple walked in the office, the lady walked in, sat down, and the man kind of walked in and sat down, and he knew immediately what one of the problems was, and he asked this couple, what’s your problem. And they started talking about the problem, so the lady said: Here’s my problem, bang, and she slapped out a big thick, two inch thick notebook, and in the notebook, he started looking through, was every thing that he had done wrong for the last ten years, all carefully catalogued, everything, fine print, typed on both sides, for ten years. Lady, your problem isn’t your husband, your problem is resentment. And it was the most graphic illustration of how one sin perpetuated over and over and over again and over again caused total breakdown.

That’s what we’re talking about. Not this is the forgiveness that this man is talking about that can cleanse you conscience.

Shall we bow……