Clough Hebrews Lesson 46

Finality of the Better Sacrifice – 9:23-28

Turn to Hebrews 9, we’re coming down the home stretch on the last of the major sections in Hebrews, the last, that is, of the section that goes to 10:18. We started the epistle, we divided the book in half and we said everything from 1:1-10:18 dealt with the basis, the doctrinal basis of exhortation. And then from 10:19 on through the end was actually the specifics of exhortation. We also said and we’ll just recall it since we haven’t reviewed it for a while, that this epistle is the model epistle for those of you who think you have the gift of exhortation. If you have the gift of exhortation, which means the ability beyond that of the average believer, to encourage and to bring to conviction individual believers, then that ability is exhortation. That’s what exhortation means, scripturally. So as we look at the argumentation of Hebrews, just keep this in mind, that you are to duplicate this in your life.

Now the last small section that we’ve dealt with has been from 9:11-10:18 and that’s dealt with the better sacrifice, that Jesus Christ has made a better sacrifice. In verses 11-14 it was the efficacy of the better sacrifice, particularly verse 14, “How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God,” being something…a deep reaching effect of the ministry of Christ that is unattainable on any other grounds; no psychotherapy is going to cleanse your heart such as Jesus Christ can do according to verse 14. And He doesn’t charge $50 an hour to do it.

Hebrews 9:15-22, the necessity of the better sacrifice; this was the argument, you recall, particularly in verse 16, “where a testament,” or a covenant or contract “is there must also of necessity be the death of the testator,” and that we found meant that every contract that you read about in Scripture is basically a testament; that means something, some one that is living has to die before that testament or contract goes into effect. Then last time we ended with verse 22 so now we’re going to start verse 23 and go through at least the end of chapter 9 tonight.

Hebrews 9:23, “It was therefore necessary that the patterns of things in the heavens should be purified with these; but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these.” Now this section represents one of the strongest passages in the Word of God against the Roman Catholic doctrine of Christ’s perpetual sacrifice. Tonight we are not on an anti-Catholic tirade so just relax, but we are going to show the particular doctrine of Roman Catholicism, that it is a doctrine that Protestants have long fought, the Reformers fought it for a long, long time, and because they fought it for a long time would give you the suggestion that probably an important issue is at stake. And we’ll find as we move through this an important issue is at stake.

So when I try to bring these doctrinal controversies before you we’re not trying to develop a Ku Klux Clan or something; we’re only interested in defining religious issues and you’re ignorant if you don’t realize that there are competing doctrines and you ought to be able to thread your way through some of these, realize that some of your friends who are Catholic believe this way or at least they’re being taught this. They may not even be aware of it but if they go to mass they essentially believe it. So these are doctrines that conflict with the Word of God and it’s your job as an ambassador for Christ to represent Christ in every area and this is one of them. Now this is one of those areas where we can tell that the modern neo-charismatic or neo-Pentecostal movement is not of God because where we have had tremendous infiltration in the Roman Catholic Church of Pentecostalism. I might add that Pentecostalism is increased in the Catholic Church far faster than it is in the Protestant church and the reason that it is is because it’s basic theology is the same; it’s a heart-centered rather than a heaven-centered theology. This being so, if the Pentecostal movement were genuinely of God you would expect, if the Holy Spirit is moving behind it, that the Holy Spirit would draw attention to what the Holy Spirit wrote 19 centuries ago, and obviously the Holy Spirit or whatever the spirit is that’s involved is not drawing attention to what the Holy Spirit wrote in canonical Scripture.

So as we study this passage keep in mind that we’re facing very volatile grounds and we’ve come to one of those places where the grounds have to be faced and the next few verses this will be the area where Rome collides with Geneva, where the Protestant position collides with the Roman position. Now let me just summarize the Roman Catholic position logically, then we’ll do the text, then I’ll read to you from some of their writings as we work through some of these verses.

The Catholic position can be summarized in this syllogism. Point one of the syllogism is that Christ’s priesthood is perpetual; in this they are correct and we would agree that it is taught by the Word of God that Christ’s priesthood is indeed perpetual. We have no fault with Rome on this matter. We agree with Rome in this matter, that Christ’s priesthood is indeed perpetual. Their second point in their syllogism is that sacrifice is an integral part of the priesthood; a priest must always sacrifice to conduct his priesthood, so that sacrifice, or the act of sacrificing cannot be disjointed from the act of being a priest. This is their second proposition. With this we differ and we believe that this epistle denies the second point of their syllogism. We believe that the act of sacrifice is separable from being a priest. The Roman Catholic third point and the conclusion to their syllogism is that therefore Jesus Christ offers perpetually a sacrifice for us before God. The amplification of the third point is that the mass is a reenactment of what Christ is doing in heaven at that moment. So wherein the mass you have a bloodless sacrifice, so also in heaven at this point. So you have the mass as a reenactment of what Christ is doing in heaven.

This should help some of you who may have Catholic friends understand how they think. You can’t witness or converse with people unless you know how they think. If you don’t know how they think you might as well forget it because you cannot carry on a conversation with somebody for any length of time, and communicate, without understanding how they think, and this is why some of your Catholic friends think so much of the mass, and you may think it’s an act of hypocrisy, you see them trotting off to mass at 8:05 or 8:35 or 9:05 so on and you kind of laugh at it. Well, viewed from their point of view it’s very important and that’s why mass is important to them because this represents a reenactment of Christ’s work and obviously if we believed that, if we were in our communion like that then we would have the same response. So don’t laugh at the response the response is just simply logically consistent with their position. Mass would be taken very seriously by one who believed that that really was what was happening.

Let’s look at Hebrews 9:23, “For it was, therefore, necessary,” the word “therefore,” those of you with your Greek texts, oun. I encourage you to use your Greek texts, even if you have just one semester of Greek, if you are thinking of taking courses at Tech and you have to fill in the hours with something, fill them in with Greek, that’s one place that you get something that you can use once in a while.

“Therefore,” oun, and when you see these in the Greek texts this is a signal that a new section is beginning. When you start study seriously with the Greek and you know a little Greek watch these particles like this, and conjunctions, and words with inference, they’re key words. You can always tell, by the way, whether a preacher knows Greek by the way he outlines Scripture. I can sit and I can listen to somebody and I can tell exactly where they break the text by whether the man knows the original language or not because if he’s breaking the texts at these points he’s obviously studied the Greek and he’s obviously studied the Hebrew, but if he’s not breaking this and his outline doesn’t follow this, you can tell he’s just studied out of the English, just like everyone else and it doesn’t always follow this way.

So here we have a break; we enter another little thought that starts at verse 23 and continues through verse 28. “Therefore,” therefore because of what, “it was necessary that the patterns of things in the heavens should be purified.” The “patterns of things in the heavens,” that’s the Old Testament ritual. Do you see where the word “therefore” relates? It goes up a little bit, a few verses. You see, the whole content of verse 19, 20, 21 and 22, it’s all talking about ritual. That’s why the “therefore.” This section begins picking up picking up the thought of verses 19-22 and now it’s going to add to it. Now this is the concept of building “precept upon precept,” the man has laid one idea down, now he’s going to build another one on top of it and his signal to us is “therefore,” because of all of this, now let’s go on to another truth.

So he presupposes by verse 23 that we all understand that in the Old Testament things were cleansed, or “purified,” the same word, to cleanse. It is a present infinitive, it is a passage thing, that it is necessary for them to continue to be cleansed. It’s a process. Now the cleansing, back in the Old Testament, what was that cleansing about? Let’s take an Old Testament saint who came to the tabernacle. Now from what we’ve studied in Hebrews, what are the two areas where that Old Testament believer faced the problem of forgiveness. We face it, in a way I guess you could argue we have two areas where we face it too, but he had two distinct areas. Every citizen of Israel had one area where he had to be concerned with forgiveness, and then the faithful remnant had the second area. All right, let’s look at all the citizens and then just look at the remnant.

When any Hebrew came to the tabernacle to offer sacrifice, he was seeking theocratic forgiveness, that is a political forgiveness or religious or a cultic forgiveness. It was a ceremonial forgiveness. Now nobody kept a record but the priests would know that if this man had obviously sinned, broke some overt proposition of the Law and did not do sacrifice it would be the duty of the priest to say hey, stay away from here, we’re not going to invite you to the [sounds like: feast] of tabernacles, or we won’t let you partake of the cultist, we won’t let you near the temple unless you perform this ritual. So all the citizens, by virtue of the Law, the Torah, had to seek theocratic forgiveness for crime and the theocratic forgiveness was by the physical sacrifice.

But now the people who were real believers in the Old Testament, and we have no idea what percent, though at sometimes you can kind of guess, we have no real hard facts on what percent of the Hebrews were true believers but if you were a believer you not only had to have theocratic forgiveness but you had to have actual forgiveness and that was done with appropriating what Jehovah was going to do. Now I doubt that an Old Testament saint would have fully understood about Jesus Christ, probably wouldn’t have been able to sit down with us tonight and tell us how Christ was going to die on the cross but he certainly had the faith that God, Jehovah, would provide en toto for his sins by grace. And trusting that God would provide en toto for his sins by grace this man either would become a Christian or become a believer, or if a believer, then would be forgiven of his sins. So those are the two parts to forgiveness. Keep that in mind because you’ll have this cleansing.

Now the “cleansing” mentioned here in verse 23 is not the cleansing that the remnant was talking about, it’s not actual cleansing of the conscience which was all the spiritual relationship for believers only. The cleansing mentioned in the first part of verse 23 is the theocratic cleanliness. “It was, therefore, necessary that the patterns of things in the heavens,” now this is another little point that we’ve run into in Hebrews several times, that “the patterns of the things.” The word for “patterns” is a word that indicates copies and it shows us that the heavenly places, whatever it was in the heavenly places, was revealed. This is what Moses saw on the Mount and the plans from which he build the tabernacle. Those patterns were not products of Moses’ finite reasoning, and this is where you re face to face with the Biblical doctrine of verbal revelation that undercuts all major philosophic presuppositions. Moses has this revealed to him and he is able to talk about it; with subject and predicate.

“Therefore, he patterns of things in the heavens should be purified with these,” “these” are the rituals described in verses 19-22. But now we have a very complicated thing, “but the heavenly things themselves,” “…the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these.” Now “the heavenly things themselves” this is just a little note of emphasis but for those of you looking at the Greek you will see this, autos, notice what position it has in the sentence; it is in the predicative position and when it’s in the predicative position like this it intensifies and draws attention. You have an article plus autos, plus a noun it means “the same thing” but when you have it like this, when you have autos plus an article plus the noun, this is a different kind of positioning, and it means draw emphasis, hey look at this. So there’s syntactical emphasis on “heavenly things” which means the author wants us to focus in on what those heavenly things are.

Now we’re face to face with an interpretation problem. And since this is the Hebrews class and anyone who has the guts to sit here and go through Hebrews ought to know how to interpret. So how do we interpret “heavenly things?” What’s one of our first rules. It’s not totally clear in the context what it is so how are we going to deal with it. Well, you start fanning out in the immediate context for the usage of this word, “heavenly.” We did that a number of evenings ago so I’ll just kind of summarize what we learned and I’m going to add one point to it. The first thing that we learned is that “heavenly things” in the Bible, in the New Testament, isn’t just some vague thing, it’s a technical word which means things that are not empirically observable now. It doesn’t mean they’ll be forever empirically unobservable, it’s just that right now no one can touch them, no one can see them, no one can really know them and it has that meaning, John 3:12. Jesus says if I tell you heavenly things, you’re not going to believe if you don’t believe when I tell you earthly things that you can check; if I tell you that the world was created the way Genesis says and that implies that there’s a discontinuity in the animal and plant realms and you come up with a theory of evolution that says that nature is one continuum, and you supposedly can prove this by the fossil evidence, if you can really show that nature is a continuum then you’ve disproved Genesis and if you’ve disproved Genesis you’ve shown that were God spoke in the earthly realms it was falsified and if you can’t trust God where you can check Him, then you certainly can’t trust God where you can’t check Him. That’s the argument of John 3:12.

So the first thing we know about “heavenly,” it’s a sphere which is unobserved; it’s a sphere of mystery, it is unobserved. It doesn’t mean it can’t be observed some day in the future, it just means right now it can’t be observed.

Second, which is just an addition on the first point on heavenly, by Hebrews 8:5 which is very similar to the idea, Moses seeing this pattern of things in the heaven, it can be observed under conditions of revelation. This is necessary to know, that “heavenly” can refer to things that you can know if God speaks them to, such as fulfilled prophecy, one obvious illustration, or Moses on Mount Sinai, getting the pattern of the tabernacle; the blueprint of the tabernacle was shown to him on the top of Mount Sinai. Why do I make such a point about this? Anybody one now one of the great fathers of philosophy who spoke of the Ideal world, the realm where you have Ideals with a capital “I”. Plato. Now all down through the Church Christians have had to fight this thing. Plato had some good things, the problem is that you can easily get sucked into his system and then you start reading that Bible through the eyes and ears of Plato. Now this is one point that will keep you from getting sucked off on Plato. These things, the “heavenly things” are not ideals that can’t be reached; they can be reached so it’s not Platonic; we’re not talking about that when the Bible talks about heavenly things. Right now we can’t touch them but someday we can touch them.

Now another strange thing about “heavenly things” and this is critical to understand the problem that’s about to come up in the text. Turn to Ephesians 6:12, here’s a place where a related word is used, “heavenlies,” and up to now, at least if you’re like me, and you see the word “heavenly” you tend to think of something that is distant in terms of location and space, and you think of something heavenly as distant. That is not always the case and it’s necessary to correct those ideas by turning to Ephesians 6:12, “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in,” location, “in high places,” or “in the heavenlies.” Now if you look at 6:12 there’s an act of wrestling, no one needs to be told that wrestling is a contact sport. And since it is a contact sport it means that the wrestling, the very selection of the verb in verse 12 indicates that the spiritual realm is touching us; we can’t see it but the heavenlies are not something 80,000 miles away. The heavenlies may exist 1/8^th of an inch from the top of you head. So “the heavenlies” do not necessarily denote great distances though sometimes it does, it doesn’t necessarily, it can include the unseen realm in your immediate presence. Because if it can’t, then how do you explain the verb to “wrestle” in verse 12. Obviously if the Christian is wrestling and in contact with the heavenlies it must be something immediately present.

Now let’s see if we can turn back to Hebrews and guess what is going on. Hebrews 9:23, “It was, therefore, necessary that the patterns of things in the heavens should be purified with these, but the heavenly things themselves,” whatever these things are that are in the heavenlies, those “things themselves should be purified with better sacrifices,” than the Old Testament. Now since the verb to “cleanse” has already occurred once before in the context, if you look up about a dozen verses, just scan quickly the text of the last 12 or 13 verses, where previous to this verse did that verb to cleanse show up. The last time it came out very forcibly. In verse 14, and in 14 what is cleansed? Your conscience. Now here’s something astounding; the author of Hebrews is claiming that “the heavenly things,” these things which are in the realm of the heavenly includes the consciences of believers.

And here is an ultimate label for your conscience, which now sets us off on a little discussion of the conscience. The human conscience is one of the most important things that you have going for you. How you treat your conscience determines your present life. If you’re a person who is suffering, apart from organic problems, if you are a person that has unusual depressions, if you’re a person that has euphoria and so on, these kinds of things, mental phenomenon, emotional phenomenon, much of those actions are results of a tampered conscience. Now I’d like to survey just quickly again, I’ve done this once or twice before in the Hebrews series, if you’ve been coming consistently you can kind of sit back because this is old stuff to you but a review on the conscience.

The conscience is the place, and we can’t be any more specific than that, the conscience is the place or faculty or something where God-consciousness is, that men are innately aware of God. 1 Peter 2:19, this explains, this is the ground of Christian epistemology, that man is not born with a clean slate, Tabla Rosa concept of learning. Man is born with something innate, it’s not the truth that’s innate but there’s something, a receptacle for truth in his soul. Pascal was the one who said there is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart that can only be filled through Jesus Christ. He captured the idea of Scripture very well, that the human soul is structured with receptacles for truth. A baby, for example, growing up doesn’t have any problem discerning between a person and a non-person, between an animal and a person. Now why is that? Because ultimately the baby must be prepared to know what a person is before he sees the person or he doesn’t know what the person he sees when he sees it, how does the baby know those categories. The same with the concept of God. Romans 1:18 and following also teaches that men know God innately; they don’t know everything about God but they know of the existence of a God.

And that’s the ground for what? Why must the Christian basically hold this, that all men are surrounded with the knowledge of God and they can recognize God. Well, one thing is that the Bible never proves God’s existence. Search the Bible from one end to the other and it never has an argument for the existence of God. There is not one argument for the existence of God in Scripture. Romans 1:18 is not an argument for the existence of God, like some Christians think. Romans 1:18 presupposes a knowledge of God to make the argument effective. So if the Bible never proves that God exists, it must, if it is the Word of God, it must imply thereby that men know that He exists, and ultimately that isn’t ever an issue; the issue is, what do we know about God, and thus Romans 1:18 proceeds. But the conscience is the center of this action, the conscience is what man has and animals don’t. Animals can physically do many things, they can think, but they don’t have conceptual thought in the sense of what is right and what is wrong. Animals do not have conscience. Sometimes you’ll think… you’ll train a dog and if he’s done something wrong he’ll walk around with his tail between his legs but that’s not because he’s got a violated conscience; that’s just because… he’s associated a mess on the floor with what you’re going to do with him, but that isn’t the conscience, that’s just fear, he’s associated the thing.

Now with man that’s not true. With man he has a sense of what is right and what is wrong and that has more to do with a fear of what God is going to do with the mess on the floor. It’s an ultimate judgment. [someone asks a question] No, sometimes you have to deal with the question of whether God exists or not but sometimes in a discussion with a non-Christian you have to go over in his chair and sit and view the world from where he is looking at it currently and show him what’s wrong with it. But ultimately in the back of your mind you must never forget that every person you talk to does know of the existence of God. This will control your strategy but it doesn’t negate discussions for the evidence of God’s existence because the evidences for God’s existence simply point further to the rebellion of man. Man expresses his rebellion by denying the existence of God, so every time you deal with the evidences for God’s existence, it’s not that you’re trying to prove it, all you’re doing is you’re bringing to the surface more rebellion on the person’s heart.

Okay, what does the conscience do in Scripture. The conscience does many things and we’ve gone through these before. The conscience provides a common ground with all men. This is taught in 2 Corinthians 4:2 and 2 Corinthians 5:11, that Paul when he preached, preached to the conscience of individuals; he engaged their mind but more than just their mind he preached to their conscience, what is right and what is true and what is false. It was not just a cafeteria where he shared ideas; what brought conviction of preaching was the fact that he taught the idea and addressed the idea to the conscience of the individual.

The second thing that the conscience does, it is a restrainer in society. It restrains two ways, it restrains from inside out, it restrains from outside in. For example, if you have someone in your presence there are things you wouldn’t do because you’re afraid and you can say well, you’re afraid of what they might think. No you’re not, ultimately you’re afraid of the fact that they are a creature made in God’s image who will condemn you, whose conscience also is active. And you can use this little goodie for help; if you have a –R learned behavior pattern and you’ve tried to work with thing, as we’ve shown you, in getting out of it, often times it will help you to have someone else around that is a strong Christian in certain situations where you may be tempted. And what you’re doing is you’re leaning on their conscience for a while until you can develop a habit pattern.

The conscience orients the ego, it gives a compass, 1 Timothy 1:19, the very image of a shipwreck is used there. The consciences orients the ego, it lets the ego always know that there is an absolute point of reference, that everything is not relative, there is an absolute point of reference.

The conscience is the faith switch, it turns faith off and on, Romans 14:23. Ever wonder why sometimes you can’t believe something? Because your conscience has switched your faith off. And you have no control over this, it’s very interesting. There will be areas in your life that you cannot believe, no matter how hard you try and the reason is that your conscience isn’t letting you believe.

I’ll give you an illustration, oftentimes you come across this in counseling, someone cannot trust that God will bless them in some endeavor that they’re going to do, no matter how many verses of the Bible no matter how many hours of theological discussion you have, even though they know God is there, even though they can count the attributes, they can define the attributes, they know God is omnipotent, they know God is able, still when it comes right down to the clutch they can’t trust God to bless them, no way, they just don’t have any confidence God is going to bless them. Now when you start dealing with that kind of a situation you are not faced with an intellectual problem. You are faced with a conscience problem and the reason that the person can’t believe that God is going to bless them isn’t because they have a warped view of God, they will get one if they keep in that groove but at that point that’s not the issue.

The issue at that point is that they’ve violated their conscience somewhere and the real reason why they can’t trust God is going to bless them is because they know that they haven’t done what they ought to have done and like a disobedient child they know that if they come go God He’s going to hit them with a stick, and so they don’t want to really come to close to God because they know if they do He’s going to bring up the old issue, so therefore they can’t come to Him with a new issue of trusting Him, so what it amounts to is unconfessed sin, and the conscience will remain violated until that past sin is confessed and forgiven and we move on. But this is why you get smashed.

Now there are other reasons, there are other reasons because of lack of evidence, you can’t believe that too, 1 Corinthians 8 is a great long discussion about that, that if you haven’t go the evidence to believe, don’t. That’s why I’m not forcing people to accept Christ. I believe in presenting the issue but when you’re witnessing and there may come a time when you can say to the person, all right, I’ve presented the evidences, you know Jesus Christ is who He claimed to be, you know that He is your Savior from all sin and there’s nothing more that can be said, it’s up to you and you can kind of exhort them up to that point. But you have to be careful when you do that and you have to do that quite rarely because you never can tell what’s going on in the insides, and the person may have some genuine questions and until those genuine questions are ironed out, their own conscience will not permit them to believe… it just will not permit them to believe.

Look at it again as Pascal, there’s a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of that individual. Now if that person hasn’t got all the information that he needs to believe you haven’t presented him with a God big enough to fill that vacuum. So his conscience, being structured to accept only a truth that will fit rejects it. And so often times you have to work and have to struggle and have to discuss and have to discuss and have to discuss some more, have to go back to Scripture and it may be a long process of time before you genuinely see a conversion and this person genuinely trusts in Christ, and if you were to arm-twist them you’d get them to make a phony decision and then you’d have a problem because then, since it wasn’t a genuine decision their conscience condemns them for the decision; now you’ve got guilt added to the problem. Now you face a situation where every time they see you they head the other way and you wonder what happened, you got BO all of a sudden, what’s the trouble. It’s because you created guilt by your pressure. They’re afraid of you because they don’t want to admit that they didn’t believe and so now you’ve got all this extra junk added into the problem. It’s far easier to just stick with the issue of the gospel, content, content, content, content, content of the gospel and then let the Holy Spirit take it from there.

The conscience also stores our record, Romans 2:15, it’s like a magnetic tape, it stores our record and the record, the tape recorder goes on and on and on and on, you can’t pull the plug on the tape; you can’t erase the tape. This is one tape that is impermeable to all erasure and instrumental failure. The conscience day and night records every thought, every word, every deed. No this is why, in the 20^th century when men started in depth psychology it wasn’t all wrong. When Freud discovered a seething caldron in the human unconscious he was very correct, it is a seething caldron. If you can imagine the conscience recording all the crud that goes through your mind every 24 hours and never forgetting it, just piling it up down there, you can imagine what it looks like? All right, Freud was right, the subconscious or the unconscious of man is very dark and black. So the conscience is the store house.

Another thing that the conscience does that we studied in Hebrews 4:12 is that it is a means of discipline. Under conditions where the mind has violated the conscience and the mind refused to submit to the authority of what is right and what is wrong, what is true and what is false and you begin to develop scar tissue here, so that the mind… really what it is doing is drawing the blind down. Visualize a window with a shade on it, the light is outside, if you don’t like the light you pull the shade down. There are ways we all have of pulling the mental shade down over the light of the conscience and problem with this is when that shade gets pulled down it’s hard to get it back up again, very hard to get it back up again. It can be done through grace but only through grace, the person himself basically can self-destruct by destroying his conscience and there have been times in history when people have done this.

Pharaoh of the Exodus is a man that destroyed through rejecting the conscience, rejecting it more, and God calls it hardening the heart. What God does is... it’s like a shade or a blind, He pulls that blind down, it’s like He has a little ear on there with a ratchet and it only goes one way, so you pull the shade down and you never can get it up any more; you can pull it down so more but you can’t get it up. And if it were not for common grace when we violate our conscience we’d be faked out. Fortunately for us God is very gracious and He reverses the ratchet every so often so that we get more light. But that’s the process we pray for when we pray for illumination. When you pray that God the Holy Spirit illuminate your heart you may not realize what you’re going but you’re praying for elimination of any of that scar tissue that’s developed so that the curtain will go back up and you’ll get more light.

All right, if God can’t get our attention this way then God will get our attention by working on the emotions and so you begin to have emotional disorders. And this is why sometimes it’s a mystery what causes the emotional disorders because the person may genuinely say I don’t know what the trouble is. Well, they don’t because one time they did but now they’ve forgotten where it was that over so many sessions and so many incidents and so many situations they’ve said no, no, no, no, to the conscience, now it’s bugging out as an emotional problem and the emotions are the second level of the problem here.

Now if God can’t get our attention that something is wrong by emotions then he starts working on the body and you get physiological illnesses. The body was never designed to take the full weight of sin. And this is why every illness known to man can be aggravated by personal sin. A violating conscience will always increase every illness that your body is facing. And on the contrary, a cleansed conscience is always health, it’s always a health factor so before you go to a doctor use 1 John 1:9, you might save yourself a medical bill.

Now in Hebrews 9:23, let’s go back t the conscience, “It was, therefore, necessary that the patterns of things in the heavens should be cleansed with these, but the heavenly things,” that is the consciences “with better sacrifices than these.” Now Hebrews 9:24 this is the basis for the assertion of the last part of verse 23, the sentence translated in the King James that begins with “but the heavenly things,” that is an addition of new truth. The first part of verse 23 is just a reiteration of the previous but the last part of verse 23 is this next precept built upon the previous precept, and in verse 24 is the basis for saying this. “For Christ is not entered into the holy places made with hands, which are figures of the true, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God for us.”

Now whereas there is, apparently, a heavenly tabernacle, it is also true that down through history, including pre-Biblical history, we have men thinking that the tabernacle represents the soul so that whereas you have the mind in man and you have his conscience, so in the tabernacle you have the Holy of Holies and you have the Holy Place. And this is a thought that was at Qumran, incidentally, it’s been kicking around for many, many centuries. In the Holy of Holies what did you have there? You had the Shekinah presence of God, you had the indwelling Holy Spirit, you had what in the ark of the covenant? What was in the ark of the covenant when it first was made? What did they put in there? The ten words or the Ten Commandments. So you have two things in that Holy of Holies, don’t you. You have the Spirit of God and you have the Word of God.

Now if it is correct that the conscience is the analog in your for the Holy of Holies, that’s where the Holy Spirit comes when He regenerates you and that’s where the Word of God goes when you are exposed to it, so that in the future when you face the judgment seat and I do, we are going to be held responsible for the exposure that we have to the Word of God. This is why, and John Warwick Montgomery entitled his book, people can be Damned Through the Church, in the sense that when you walk into a church that teaches the Word of God you’re exposed and God holds you responsible for that to which you’ve been exposed. You might plead ignorance in some issues but you can’t after you’ve been exposed to them, God holds you responsible for it.

All right, in the Holy Place, what was in the Holy Place? What were some of the things in the Holy Place. You had bread, the light, the candlestick, and the incense. The incense was the symbol of prayer. Remember the incense, the picture of prayer to God, the bread is the nourishment and the light is so you can see. And this represents the self-consciousness of the soul and that in the self-consciousness is where the prayer is being made.

“For Christ hasn’t entered into the holy places made with hands,” the argument is simple, the argument is well, if Christ is our priest where’d He go; He didn’t go into a building, He went into the heavenly places, so this author reasons, it must be in the heavenly places that which needs to be cleansed. Jesus Christ went into these heavenly areas, into the spiritual realm, and when Jesus Christ ascended into heaven, obviously it was a place because in His humanity He has to be located in a place, we don’t know where it was but when Jesus Christ sat down at the Father’s right hand from that point, He began to start a holy war “in the heavenlies.” See, here’s the beginning of the holy war in the heavenlies; before it was more or less of a direct satanic confrontation through physical means, such as Nebuchadnezzar in the book of Daniel, such as the Canaanites in the book of Joshua and Judges, now we have a tremendous battle going on in the heavenly places, all around us there’s a battle. And Jesus Christ could start that battle once He took command at the Father’s right hand in the heavenly places.

Now the imagery that is used here, “appear,” must be clarified. You’ll lose the context of verses 24-28 unless you get the picture the author has in his mind. Those of you who know the Greek, do you notice the verb tense of the last verb, “appear” in verse 24? If you have the same Greek text I do it’s aorist. Now what strikes your attention about an aorist tense there; aorist is a point. Now you don’t have to know Greek to answer the question. The aorist is kind of a point action; what strikes you as odd about making “appear” in verse 24 point action and not continuous action? [someone answers] Yes, definitely yes. So that author here must be talking about some aspect of what He’s doing because we’ve seen elsewhere in this epistle that he’s always used the present tense for this. So we know that that’s what he’s teaching but when he says “to appear” he has something else on his mind than what we’ve been taught so far. This is something new coming up and he signals it by the tense he’s using. He says I’m not going to use present tense, this is an entrance type thing, once and for all type thing. [someone says something] All right, that could be it but in the context we have a clarification of the thing. In verse 24 where it says He has entered,” that was aorist, He has entered, “now to appear in the presence of God for us,” “appear” when it’s used in the aorist tense is like… say the movie star so and so made his appearance at the fair. Now that means at a point in time he made his appearance. The effects of the appearance may last but he made the appearance at a point in time.

Now if you drop down to Hebrews 9:28, the return action is given. So Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many; and unto them that look for Him shall He appear the second time,” and this is the future, “He shall appear.” Now there are two actions and these two actions bracket the text. In verse 24 He goes into God, and in verse 28 He returns. Now what is this looking at? This is looking at the ritual of the day of atonement. Turn back to Leviticus 16:17, remember these people are Jewish to whom this was written and they’re sharp on the Old Testament and this guy can just kind of borrow images out of the Old Testament, no sweat, because everybody, of course, knows the details of the Levitical ritual. I wonder what the author would have done if he had to teach in the 20^th century.

Leviticus 16:17, this is the middle of the ritual on the day of atonement. Remember, the high priest here goes inside the Holy of Holies, everybody waits outside the Holy of Holies. Let’s look at verse 17, “And there shall no man,” you see in verse 16 he’s going in, verse 17, “there shall be no man in the tabernacle of the congregation when he goes in to make an atonement in the holy place,” in other words, they evacuate the area, they get out, everybody’s scattered, there’s only one man in here and he’s got blood and he’s got the sacrifice and now he’s going to walk in behind that tent to get into that Holy of Holies. They only do this on the day of atonement, so as this Old Testament priest would walk in, they’d clear out the area, when he goes in “until he come out, and have made an atonement for himself, and for his household, and for all the congregation of Israel.”

Now to show you the effect that this had and the suspense, as the people would wait, he’d disappear behind the curtain and he could have died back there, because if God didn’t accept the offering He’d kill him and he’d never come back out, and if he never came back out it means that the people’s sins had not been atoned for that year. So everybody stands outside and we have a passage of Scripture written during one time when the high priest actually went in. And this is from the apocrypha, it’s written in Ben Sirach, chapter 50, verses 5-10, it describes how one of these high priests walked in one day and it describes the people as they wait expectantly outside. [5] “How glorious he was when the people gathered around him as he came out of the inner sanctuary; [6] Like the morning star among the clouds, like the moon, when it is full. [7] Like the sun shining upon the temple of the most High, like the rainbow gleaming in the glorious clouds, [8] Like roses in the days of the first fruit, like lilies by the spring of water, like fire and incense in the censer. [9] Like an olive tree putting forth its fruit, when he put on his glorious robe and clothed himself and went up,” and that’s a picture of their conception of the high priest suddenly walking out and whew, the sins of the nation are atoned for that year, and there’s a sense of relief that the priest has come back. All right, now let’s turn back to Hebrews.

[someone says something] Apparently there must be because every person I’ve read on the subject says there was the danger of it happening and I just haven’t been able to dig up a specific instance but everybody speaks as though as it must have happened once in a while, he’d just… and they’d have to have somebody reach in, they couldn’t go into the curtain or they’d die, they just had to kind of reach in with a hook or something and pull him out. [someone asks something] No, they have no temple, that went out in 70 AD. When they get a temple back they might start doing it. But of course they don’t have the serious problem because, see in the Old Testament they had the Shekinah glory there, they had the high voltage that killed and see, after 586 that went out and they just kept on the ritual. [more said] Well, they don’t go through this particular ritual, this, they have, kind of feasts, I think, something like this. See in the tabernacle…of course they have Rosh Hashanah which is the Jewish new year.

Let’s look here at what happens to get the imagery, verses 24-28. Hebrews 9:24, here’s the imagery, now watch. In verse 24 Jesus Christ goes in, verse 28 He comes back out. [someone asks question] I think they do, he asked me cold and I don’t know, you’d have to read up on it, I’m just cold on what they do, they obviously were doing something in the last October war, your last war that you had in the Middle East came right around the day of atonement; in fact, I’m not so sure it didn’t come on the day of atonement, it was that weekend that the day of atonement was on that the Arabs struck. But I just don’t know what they do.

All right, the imagery is clear from verse 24 Christ is entering, verse 28 He comes back. Now within these verse here is where we have the Protestant position so clearly stated. [24] “For Christ is not entered” there’s your entry, [into the holy places made with hands, which are the figures of the true; but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God for us,] now verse 25, “Not yet that he should be offering,” present tense, “not that He should be offering Himself often, as the high priest” present tense, “keeps on entering into the holy place every year with blood of others.”

And then verse 26, the reductio ad absurdum argument, in other words, if Jesus Christ is offering sacrifices continually, then He should have offered sacrifices before, in other words there’d be a continuity that’s unobserved, “For then must He often have suffered since the foundation of the world; but now once for all,” literally, there’s hapax in the Greek, “once for all in the end of the world has he appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice” singular “of himself.” So it’s a point tense, so Jesus Christ sacrificed, the cross, once and for all. Now He enters the Holy of Holies with the results of His sacrifice, He doesn’t re-sacrifice Himself. There is no perpetual sacrifice being done. What He is doing is continually applying the results of a once and for all sacrifice. And then it says, “He has now appeared at the end of the world,” at the completion literally, “of the ages, in other words with the New Covenant you have the end era in sight, Christ is in position now, and although the earth hasn’t received its full benefit of the New Covenant, the New Covenant is now in effect and thus we have” the end of the ages, He has appeared to put away,” literally in the Greek, “the sin by the sacrifice of Himself.” What is “the sin?” “The sin” is emphasis on a particular sin, the sin that separates us from God, it’s just a class of sin, but he says that sin, you know, the sin that separates us.

Hebrews 9:27, now the conclusion, verses 27-28, it’s just an “as,” see verse 27, verse 28, verse 27 is one truth, verse 28 is another truth, parallel truths. So, “As it is appointed unto men once for all to die,” in other words he’s saying look at the physical realm of every day experience, you don’t see people dying over and over again, only once do they die; “it is appointed unto men once to die, and after this the judgment.” Now the judgment isn’t immediately after death; verse 27 is talking about the historic judgment in time. This is the judgment when Christ returns and all the judgment associated with that. So there’s a gap, say a person dies in 1850, from the time that he dies, once and for all, until the time that Christ judges him will be a time interval. So don’t think of verse 27 as teaching judgment immediately after death, it just means after death there will be certainly a judgment. Once men die, after this the judgment; a simple truth, that’s the curse of Genesis 3.

But now another truth is added as a result of all this entering into the tabernacle business. [28] “So Christ having been offered once for all,” it’s an aorist participle passive, He, having been offered once for all, so the action precedes the main verb, Christ having been sacrificed, “to bear the sins of many;” now, “He will appear the second time.” Now the “bear the sins of many” is a quotation from Isaiah 53:12, which teaches you what about the way first century Jews interpreted Isaiah 53? There are two ways Jewish people interpret Isaiah 53, that the suffering servant of Isaiah 53 is Israel or the suffering servant is the Messiah. What does this verse argue about the way they must have interpreted it in the first century? Messiah, because this man is obviously… he just quotes from Isaiah 53, brings it right into the argument, no problem. He wouldn’t have done this had there been discussion about the problem of Isaiah 53. He would have stopped and said now Isaiah 53 isn’t the nation, it’s the Messiah. But he doesn’t do this. So the very fact that he doesn’t stop to clarify it shows you something. It shows you that in the synagogues of the first century Isaiah 53 was definitely taken to be the Messiah.

[someone says something] The “sins of many” is an exact quotation of Isaiah 53. [someone says that’s still talking about that He died for the sins of all…] That’s right. [more said] no, but you won’t get in the problem if you read it in the context of Isaiah 53. The idea of “sins of many” there is the idea He’s not dying for His own, He’s dying for the sins of many. There’s a contrast, see, he’s not trying to say He died for the sins of all, though he certainly believes that, the idea is He didn’t die just for one person, He died for many. That’s the concept.

So, “Christ, having offered to bear the sins of many, shall appear,” now you’ve got to kind of work the words around in the last part of verse 28, they’re all screwed up, [“and unto them that look for him shall he appear the second time without sin unto salvation”] in their word order but that’s because in the original they are, for emphasis. In the English that’s not the way you emphasize a sentence, at least here. So let’s look at it carefully, “He shall appear the second time,” so you see even our terminology we use, the Second Advent of Christ, that’s a Biblical terminology. Here it’s used, “the second time,” so we have precedence for saying the Second Advent of Christ, here it is. “He shall appear the second time, without sin,” that means the sin issue will have been clarified, He was without sin when He went in, but when He comes back, see, here’s an entering into the heavens, in 30 or 33 AD, 32 AD depending on which chronology you follow, He entered in and now He’s coming back at the Second Advent, and when Jesus Christ comes back sin will have been totally dealt with. In other words, the issue is sin is no longer there, He made a perfect atonement, He was perfectly acceptable to God the Father, He has carried on a very faithful ministry of intercession. “…and He shall appear … unto salvation.”

Now you see the contrast in verse 27: death—judgment; Christ dies, substitutionary atonement—salvation. So you have those twin themes that we’ve gone over and over with in the basic framework, the doctrine of judgment/salvation, because Christ was judged for our sins, we have salvation. And that’s the only reason we have salvation, it’s not just Jesus loves you because you have salvation. The fact of the matter is Jesus loved you to die on the cross is why you have salvation and you can go around saying Jesus loves me, Jesus loves me and if He didn’t express His love by going to the cross for you, you wouldn’t have any salvation. So when you say Jesus loves me, make sure you understand it’s Jesus loved me, past tense, enough to get to the cross. That’s what you’re saying, not this gooey business.

“And He shall appear unto them that look for Him,” now that passage that I read to you from Ben Sirach, that is the passage that describes how people eagerly awaited in the Old Testament, the idea, is he going to come out, is he going to come out, is he going to come out. Well, here’s a picture of the Jews, Hebrew Christians waiting for Christ to come back out of the heavens into empirically observable reality to enjoy the present, and when He does, Israel will be back in fellowship. See, there’s your premillennial doctrine; the nation Israel will be restored when Christ returns. The nation, just like the nation in the Old Testament, was restored when their high priest came back from the tabernacle and they said whew, again we’ve got a year of atonement. So the nation Israel will one day be regathered and be cleansed of her sins when she recognizes Messiah has come, Christ returns, just as the high priest returned out of the tabernacle.

Now I want to go back through in summary here to just point you to some things and as I do I want to show you something about this problem of the difference between Protestants and Catholics. This is an explanation from a Roman Catholic missile on what is the mass, and I’ll read you the section on it and then consider the verses before us: “Mass is the sacrifice of Calvary, at mass what we see is like the last supper, but what we offer is truly the sacrifice of Calvary; Jesus, the victim of Calvary offers Himself at the mass; the altar crucifix and the many signs of the cross made by the priests during mass remind us that this is indeed going on. Mass is the best or prayers it contains all things that are important.” So here you have the mass as an actual crucifixion of Christ, whereas in this passage you couldn’t have a stronger one, in all of the New Testament, that Christ once and for all suffered. Notice again, verse 26, the reductio ad absurdum of the idea that Christ re-sacrifices Himself. “For then He must have suffered since the foundation of the world. But now once and for all, He appears to put away sin by the,” singular, “sacrifice of Himself.” And then in verse 28 the aorist, “So Christ, having been offered to bear the sins of many … He will appear again.”

Next week we’ll start with chapter 10.