Hebrews 10:26-39

Hebrews chapter 10, verses 1 through 18.

Hebrews 10:1–18

In the email that I sent out this morning to our church, I asked you a trivia question.

Did you see that this morning?

Yeah, what does uh George Clooney and Kira Knightley have in common?

They're self-proclaimed secular humanists.

In fact, before we talk about um Clooney and Kira Knightley, do you remember the song by John Lennon, um Imagine?

Imagine, yeah, it's a it's a nice uh nice song.

Imagine just a world without pain, suffering.

Everybody is just loving each other, right?

Such a good like hippie message.

Came out in 1971, right in the right in the heyday of the hippie movement.

It was this idea promoting um, you know, a world without religious dogma, national divisions, promoting a message of peace, unity, and human connection.

And isn't that a beautiful world?

I mean, that is what we love.

I mean, the idea of peace and love is a beautiful vision.

In order for Lenin to get there, he viewed religion, religious dogma, and nationalism as in the way of this world that he imagined.

Secular humanists, they reject religion and emphasize science, maybe.

They might see guilt, as it were, as a natural emotional response that arises when one's actions conflict with their moral values.

Secular humanists often emphasize the importance of personal growth, empathy, social responsibility to address guilt and improve one's self's society.

Why do I bring that up?

The Christian worldview has this unique paradigm that sees human sin as a first principle issue that needs to be dealt with.

And sin is the great enemy for the Christian because it causes universal death and breaks our relationship with God.

So if you're new to Christianity or you're just learning about what it means to be a Christian, you may wonder: well, what is all this talk about sin?

Why do they care about all the all these moral things of what's right and wrong?

And what we're gonna see this morning is in these 18 verses that nine times sin is spoken of.

It's not just an issue that plagues our conscience with guilt.

No matter whether you have a secular worldview or a religious worldview, you can't escape the reality of sin, not just in the sense of a moral compass where you feel guilty for letting yourself down, or what we would say is failing to please God.

But the world that we live in, the Bible teaches, is deeply broken.

Here's kind of the trajectory, the story of Scripture.

In Genesis 1 and 2, it tells us of a world with no sin.

And that world is a world where everything is good.

Over and over again, we hear that this world is good, that it's God's world that He designed.

We've been talking about that, right, in the morning.

About it's this world that we want to live in.

It's this beautiful world where there is no sin.

But then in Genesis 3, it talks about how humanity rejected God's good design, rebelled, ran away from God, and sin came into the world, and with it the death of humanity.

This is not just physical death, but when we talk about death, we talk about spiritual death, relational death, right?

There's division between the husband and the wife.

Right away, they're blaming each other.

Like, why did he, you know, he's the one that gave me the fruit to eat, and they're standing there naked and they're ashamed.

They're they're um they're they're even the there's a death of their own psychology, their relationship with themselves, because they're not happy with their state of nakedness.

They need covering.

And so this pervasive death in Genesis 3 comes across, comes into the world, and from Malachi 4, uh from Genesis 3 to Malachi 4, there is what I termed here sin remediation shadows.

Sin remediation shadows, where there is this attempt to get rid of sin.

And God is giving and prescribing systems like the old covenant to help remediate sin, but they are just shadows, anticipating a work of Christ to actually remediate and remove sin.

So then we get into Matthew, we go from Matthew 1 to Revelation 19, and I'm just giving you this in broad strokes, but we see forgiveness of sin through Jesus.

And when Jesus came on the scene, what is what's being preached over and over again is this preaching, the forgiveness of sins, the kingdom of heaven and the forgiveness of sins, right?

Is that what you hear when you read the Bible?

Matthew 1 through Revelation 19?

Just this simple message that Jesus came to forgive sins.

Now, here's what I want you to see.

If your concept of sin is a concept of your own personal guilt, then you're only seeing a sliver of a bigger picture.

The Bible teaches that sin, our rebellion, our rejection of God's design, brings in this pervasive destruction and the decay of the world God designed.

And so in Revelation chapter 20 through 22, we see this new heavens and new earth, that Jesus comes and the story, the story of putting away sin from the world is wrapped up.

Revelation 20 · chapter mention

And Jesus comes back to the earth to reign and rule as the king.

All the enemies of God have been placed under his feet, and the world is restored back to God's design.

So that is the overarching narrative of Scripture.

This morning, you and I are living in a world that is not yet experiencing Revelation 20 through 22.

We're still living in a world where deep brokenness occurs.

I mean, obviously, we live in Baltimore City, one of the homicide capitals of the world, right?

This is a city deeply broken, where there's pain, suffering, sickness, poverty, all of those things go into the category where we say these are symptoms of human rebellion.

You may be poor.

Now that doesn't mean your poverty is the result of sin, but it is the result of living in a world that is broken, and it's broken because humanity has ran from God's design.

But that's not where the Bible ends.

The Bible says that God loves humanity, and he has not left us in that place of destruction.

So what we're gonna see in Hebrews chapter 10 is we're gonna see that this story, Genesis 3 through Malachi 4, was a shadow anticipating Jesus coming to put away sin.

Hebrews 10 · chapter mention

And the people who read Hebrews chapter 10, these Christians, they were settling for the shadows of Genesis 3 through Malachi 4.

Hebrews 10 · chapter mention

And they were not truly living in what Jesus accomplished when he came.

They're kind of in this tension, in this in-between place.

So that sets the stage.

Let's look at verses 1 through 4 together.

Starting in verse 1.

Since the law has only a shadow of the good things to come, now this law here that he's talking about, this is the Mosaic Covenant.

Okay?

So Exodus 19, God gives to Moses the Ten Commandments, 613 commands, on how this new chosen nation is to behave and live and embody their their how they're to live in the promised land that they're going into, right?

That law has only a shadow.

Do you see that?

It's not the substance, it's the shadow of the good things to come.

And not the reality itself of those things.

It can never perfect the worshipers by the same sacrifices they continually offer year after year.

So what we have here is that this writer, the writer of Hebrews, deals with his world and disciples and coaches spirituality for these Jesus followers based off principles.

If you're new with us, this is what we've seen over and over again in his writing, that he he deals in the world of principles, first principles.

And so here he's talking about how the law was a shadow and it was incapable, it was incapable of perfecting these worshipers with these sacrifices.

This sets the stage for everything we're going to look at this morning.

Verse 2 says this.

There's nothing standing in the way of you and God.

All of this this morning is dealing with this idea of sacrifice.

What is the acceptable sacrifice?

What is your acceptable sacrifice?

What mediates on your behalf this morning so that your sin is dealt with?

It is your fundamental issue.

If you mapped out your life and like you kind of drew out like the puzzle pieces, one of the big puzzle pieces of your life is this issue of sin.

And the question that the text asks of you and I this morning is what's the sacrifice that is going to deal with the sin issue in your life?

And these Jews, while Christians and followers of Jesus were drifting away from Jesus back into the old covenant.

And so here he's making this case.

Don't you see?

This is a question, wouldn't they have stopped being offered?

If the law was good enough, why would there continue to be these sacrifices?

Verse 3, but in the sacrifices there is a reminder of sins year after year.

This is the principle, the principle of the sacrifices of the old covenant.

It's just a reminder.

It's not dealing with sin.

It's happening, and there's this kind of sick, it's a flywheel of like, you sin, go get an offering, you know, sacrifice, but now we're sacrificing, so we're remembering.

Oh man.

Oh yeah, you won't believe what I did this last week.

Okay, you know, now I feel guilty.

Okay, I gotta go offer another sacrifice.

So it's this flywheel of sacrifice, remembering sin, sacrifice, remembering.

It's like this thing that's going around and round.

For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.

Why?

Why?

Why is it impossible for I thought God told Moses to do this thing, right?

Why did God tell Moses to set up the priesthood if bulls and goats don't take away sins?

Well, I think we probably should keep reading.

What do you think?

Yeah.

So he's going to, now you remember that the writer of Hebrews is, imagine him sitting away from these people with the scriptures somehow in front of him.

Maybe he has access to a scroll.

He's really familiar with the Psalms, right?

And he's meditating on Psalm 40, the one that Moses, no, Marvin, led us in the reading of this morning.

You know.

He's reading Psalm 40, and this is his meditation on it.

He says, Therefore, as he was coming into the world, he said, so he's saying, look at Psalm 40 is a messianic psalm.

In other words, when David wrote Psalm 40, he literally, 1500 years before Jesus comes, he has the words of Jesus given to him by the Spirit in advance.

As he's coming into the world, he says, You did not desire sacrifice and offering, but you prepared a body for me.

Verse 6.

You did not delight in whole burnt offerings and sin offerings.

My clicker's slow today.

Then I said, See, it is written about me in the scroll, I have come to do your will to God.

After he says above, you did not desire or delight in sacrifices and offerings, the whole burnt offerings and sin offerings, which are offered according to the law, he then says, See, I have come to do your will.

He takes away the first to establish the second.

So what we have here, before we get to verse 10, what we have here is this pastor meditating on Psalm 40, giving us Psalm 40 and saying, see, this is proof that the sacrifice in bulls and goats were not good enough.

He's contrasting, he's contrasting God's lack of desire for animal sacrifices with Jesus having a body willing to do God's will.

I've come to do your will, he says.

He takes away the first to establish this.

What's the first?

The Mosaic old covenant, right?

The law of Moses to establish the second.

And the second is the new covenant from Jeremiah.

Let's go to verse 10.

He says, by this will, in other words, by God's will, that Jesus, Jesus looked at his body and he says, This body here you gave me to do your will.

It's a good thing.

I mean, do you think that that's on Paul's mind in Romans chapter 12 when he says to offer your body as a living sacrifice?

Romans 12 · chapter mention

Seems pretty similar.

Seems to overlap, right?

Overlapping material.

When you look at your body in the mirror in the morning, I'd encourage you to follow Jesus' example because he says, look, it's by your will that we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all time.

That's just kind of blows my mind.

Just in passing, the fact that Jesus saw his body as an instrument for accomplishing the will of the Father, and it's through just that simple act of obedience that our sanctification is accomplished.

Now, I don't want to overstate it, but what could good could God do with your body?

By you simply saying, God, I'm ready to take and do with my body your will.

When you look at Adam and Eve, they have a body.

They got naked bodies right there in the garden, right?

And God's given them simple instructions.

He wants to be their source of wisdom, of good and evil.

He said, just don't eat of this tree, right?

Just don't eat of that tree over there.

And yet they decide, nope, I'm going to take my body and I'm going to consume this forbidden fruit.

And by using their body in that way, all of the world is cursed.

What we do with our bodies seems pretty significant, huh?

If you take Adam and Eve and you take Jesus, we have body activity, bodily activity taking place.

We have the curse of all humanity through Adam and Eve.

We have the redemption of all of humanity through Jesus' body.

Your body's important.

That's oftentimes overlooked in Western Protestant Christianity.

The Catholics get this one a little bit better.

They understand that our bodies are not just vehicles for carrying our heads around.

Our bodies are important.

Our bodies are important.

And it was through Jesus' body that our sanctification was accomplished.

But here's what the pastor is saying, right?

He's kind of emphasizing that, but he's really wanting to draw out this idea that the law was replaced, it was a shadow that was replaced by the new covenant and that was enacted or inaugurated through the offering of the body of Christ.

That's why we're going to celebrate communion in a couple of minutes.

We're going to take communion together because it that's our party, that's our commemoration of what Jesus did with his body.

Let's look at verses 11 through 13.

In verse 11, he says this every priest stands day after day ministering and offering the same sacrifices, time after time, which can never take away sins.

Now, if you've been with us, we've covered this before, but he's emphasizing, like when somebody says day after day or time after time, what word comes to mind?

Repetition, right?

Repetition.

We have the priests repeating their activity time after time after time.

And then he says in verse twelve, but this man, so it's in contrast to the priesthood, we have this man.

Who's this man?

This is Jesus.

But this man, after offering one sacrifice for sins forever, sat down at the right hand of God.

Now, do you remember back at the beginning where we had Genesis 1 and 2, Genesis 3 through Malachi 4, we have Matthew through Revelation and then the end of Revelation, right?

I put that chart up here on the screen for you.

Here, this pastor is looking into the future.

He's talking about how Jesus sat down at the right hand of God.

That happened at the ascension.

The next verse is going to bridge us over to that final scene in the Bible of the new heavens and the new earth.

He is now waiting until his enemies are made his footstool.

Jesus is sat down at the right hand of God in heaven, and he's waiting for Revelation chapter 20, 21 and 22, where sin and death and Satan are all destroyed.

Revelation 20 · chapter mention

And he's in this position where his victory, the victory of the cross, is fully realized.

And yet these Christians are hanging out in the old covenant, still doing Moses.

They're looking to the law to purify their conscience, to deal with this issue of sin.

It's good that they understand sin and how it just brings about comprehensive destruction.

But the fact that they're looking to Moses and the blood of bulls and goats to take away sin is the problem.

Let's look at these last few verses here, 14 through 17, and then we'll close with 18.

For by one offering he has perfected forever those who are sanctified.

This is in contrast to the priests.

The priests aren't dealing in the realm of forever.

The priesthood would have to go and offer sacrifices over and over again.

Why do you think that this is not attractive?

Or why do you think that these Christians are falling away from the forever nature of Jesus back to this priesthood?

It's a statement about humanity.

We like to be religious.

We like to be able to engage another person for our sanctification, for our redemption.

There's some messed up part about humanity that wants the Levitical priesthood rather than Jesus.

This is a problem all throughout the New Testament where people are falling from grace and the New Covenant and they're settling for religiosity.

But don't we see that today?

We see people that come to church and it's just like, I'm good.

God, you gotta love me.

I went to church on Sunday.

Like a lot of people didn't go, but I was there, and so I earn, I've earned your favor.

Like, don't you love me now, right?

That's that religious nature that's that that we that we can fall into.

And yet here's Jesus.

By one offering, he has perfected forever those who are sanctified.

We don't have time now, but look get the um Step Bible app on your phone and just click that word perfected.

It's the Step Bible app is a great app that's I think it's the NASB uh publishers, put it out there for free, and every word in the Bible is linked up.

It just gives you an immediate like definition of the word.

It's super simple.

But click on that word, perfected.

And you'll see we've already covered it in Hebrews.

We've already come across it a few times.

And we've come up against it because it says that the old covenant is not able to perfect you and I.

It isn't able to do what we need, it's not able to get rid of this sin issue that is breaking our life and our family and the environment and our city.

It's all of those things.

It's not able, but Jesus, by one offering, has perfected forever those who are sanctified.

Man, it's so good.

We should keep going.

Verse 15.

The Holy Spirit also testifies to us.

Who's the Holy Spirit?

The third part of the Trinity, right?

You have the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

The Bible teaches that God is a triune in nature, that there are three persons that are one God.

Now, how that works, we have a difficult time explaining.

But they are distinct in their personhood, but one in essence.

And the Holy Spirit is the third person of the Trinity, and the Holy Spirit is given to all who follow Jesus.

All who decide, I'm ready to follow Jesus, are given the Holy Spirit, not as a friend to come alongside, like you're holding the Holy Spirit's hand.

No, the Holy Spirit comes and lives in us.

We are the temple of the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit testifies to us.

That means that God's Spirit is inside of you, bearing witness to this fact.

For, and the fact being the previous fact, for after he says, for after he says, This is the covenant I will make with them after those days.

Wait, we've read this before.

Have you seen this material before?

Do you know what he's quoting?

He's quoting Jeremiah 31 again.

We just did this in chapter 8.

Now we're in chapter 10.

He says, This is the covenant I will make with them after those days.

So this is what the Holy Spirit wants to bear witness to us about.

The Holy Spirit who wrote your Bible, this text, is in you, testifying that this is the case.

This is the covenant I will make with them after those days.

The Lord says, I will put my laws in their hearts and write them on their minds.

And I will never again remember their sins and their lawless acts.

Do you see this?

Here it is.

I will never again remember their what?

Their what?

Their sins.

There it is.

And their lawless acts, their rebellion.

Their rebellion.

Remember on Easter Sunday when we had Bryce up here and he drew out the three circles?

This is that promise that Jesus was sent into the world as the sacrifice offered once, not over and over again, offered once so that he will never again remember their sins, our sins, and our lawless acts.

Let's look at verse 18.

Now, where there is forgiveness of these, there is no longer an offering for sin.

That's the implication for this pastor.

Again, he's sitting there with Psalm 40, Jeremiah 31.

Maybe he's memorized it because we know that there wasn't like a lot of copies of this, but he's sitting there and meditating on it, and he's he's burdened for these Christians, and they're just they're falling away from Jesus, and he's just like, this is it.

You look at, you look at this messianic psalm that God doesn't delight in the burnt offerings.

In other words, like I know you're not going to get up tomorrow and like go and kill a goat, you know, and try to offer it.

I know that that's not your temptation, right?

But our temptation, our temptation is to rely on religious acts.

To tie like, and I gave you the, I've given this example before, but when I was in Bible college, I used to like, I shared a room with six other guys, and I was too cheap to buy my own shampoo, and I would steal my roommate's shampoo in the morning, right?

And I had this wiring to think like, okay, if I stole my roommate's shampoo, that's my day's blown.

I can't pray and ask God for anything because you know I'm a sinner and I'm rebellious and I'm a horrible human being because I stole a shampoo.

Right?

We have this way of like just um becoming transactional with God, thinking that because I either obey the law or disobey the law, I can earn God's favor.

And what it says in Psalm 40, and what Jesus quotes, is like, God, you're not delighting in my the blood of bulls and goats.

But I came to do your will.

I came to offer, you gave me a body, and I am I have come to do your will, oh God.

And he takes his body, and in Colossians it says that his body is the veil that's rent so that we can draw near.

In closing, I just want to give you a quote from George and Kira.

George says this I don't believe in heaven and hell.

I don't know if I believe in God.

All I know is that as an individual, I won't allow this life, the only thing I know to exist, to be wasted.

It's very temporal.

Kira Knightley, she says, I'm not a religious person.

My mom's family is very religious in a Catholic way, but I'm not.

I'm very much a humanist.

I believe in people.

A secular person may look at this text, they may appreciate the ethical principles, the values that are expressed in this passage, the idea, a secular humanist would look at Jesus and they would love the fact that Jesus was willing to make, to put his life aside for the sake of others, to lay down one's life, to care about the most needy.

Like George and Kira would appreciate that.

But this passage would rub them the wrong way because it says that fundamentally the world that we live in is one where human rebellion is the underlying breach.

And all of the pain, it's not good enough to just believe in people or the goodness of people.

Because people are not good.

People are fundamentally Romans 3.23 says that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

And Romans 6.23 says that the wages of sin is death.

The world that we live in is broken.

And so it's not a starting place to say that I'm looking for the redemption of humanity through the advancement of scientific research.

We're living in a fascinating time where we have, you know, AI and artificial intelligence.

And I've been talking about it, you know, with my family and our kids.

We were talking about it again this morning.

And I don't know how many of you have played with like Chat GPT.

Anyone here?

A couple of people.

Okay, why don't you do it?

By the end of this year, these c these types of things are going to transform the way that work is done.

Uh IBM announced uh two weeks ago that there's they had 718 job openings for knowledge workers.

They've completely eliminated all 718 jobs.

They said, look, we've got computers.

AI can do this now on our behalf.

Um what computers are capable of doing, I it's hard for me.

I I wish I could, I probably will.

In the future, I will probably do an example because it seems like many of you have not yet played with this technology.

The problem is that AI takes away every human, almost every human excuse about knowledge that has existed.

And so if if you let's say that you were like, you grew up in the city, you didn't get a good education, you had a crummy family situation, and you're like, man, I wish I could be a developer.

You know, I wish I could, I wish I could be like a uh real estate developer in the city.

You can go into Chat GPT and you can say, hey, give me a plan.

Explain to me how real estate investing works, how do I raise capital?

Um, where do I start?

And it'll give you the entire plan, granular detail.

And you can keep circling through it, it'll tell you everything you need to do.

And the problem at the end of the day is that you're looking at yourself in the mirror and you have all this knowledge, and it's just you.

And it's like it's you realize it's not a problem of a lack of knowledge, it's a lack of that you and I are incapable of doing the good that we know exists.

And that's been the problem with humanity going back to Adam and Eve.

It's not a knowledge deficiency, it's an obedience, it's a it's a um, it is this capacity that we've lost in our fallen nature that we lost with Adam and Eve to be restored and to be whole.

And that's why we're given the Spirit.

That's why we're going to be given new bodies when we get to heaven, is because our capacity now is fallen.

Humanity, including George and Kira, do not have a, they don't have something to peg their hope to.

And their starting place is rejects this idea of sin as a fundamental issue.

And yet the Bible says that human rebellion is where this sin comes from.

I don't I don't think my slides would cooperate with me right now, but if you go back to the very first verse and second verse, there is this statement.

It says, since the law has only a shadow of good things to come and not the reality itself of those things, it can never perfect the worshipers by the same sacrifice.

It calls these people that are offering sacrifice, it calls us worshipers.

Is that a title that you bear?

When you look at yourself in the mirror and you you talk, do you call yourself a worshiper?

I think it was C.S.

Lewis that said, we're all worshipers.

Uh Calvin said that our hearts are idle factories.

We are all worshipers.

It's just a matter of what we are worshiping.

He says it in verse 2.

He says, Since the worshipers purified once for all.

The title, I love that title that he gives there, the worshipers.

You and I are worshipers.

Under the old covenant, it's a participation in shadows.

Under the new covenant, we're worshipers of Jesus, participating in reality, having the substance, having the substantive issue of our life being dealt with in Christ, the issue of sin.

We have a framework.

So this is, I would say there's this very much like first principles and philosophical in terms of how we do life.

I just would, I the reason why I bring up secular humanism is I want you to see that in contrast with the Bible's teaching about sin and how Jesus has dealt with this issue, this fundamental issue that is disruptive to your life.

Would you pray with me?

Lord, we are grateful for what Jesus has done on our behalf to put away our sin.

Thank you for the sacrifice, the sacrifice of the cross.

Jesus, we love you.

We're so grateful for uh the fact that you not only knew what our fundamental issue was in sin, but that you have dealt with it through your own body.

I ask God that you would take these things and apply them at a granular level, at a surgical level, to our own lives with our personality and our sin, our personal sin, uh, that you would work in us to perfect us, to sanctify us to yourself.

Pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen.