055 - The Point?

You pick up your Bible and wonder, is there more here than meets the eye?

Is there something here for me? I mean, it's just words printed on paper, right? Well, it may look like just print on a page, but it's more than ink. Join us for the next half hour as we explore God's Word together, as we learn how to explore it on our own, as we ask God to meet us there in its pages.

Welcome to More Than Ink. Hey, you know how sometimes when you're talking to someone, you just stop a mid-sentence and say, wait, what's your point? Where are we going with this? Yeah, what's this all about? Well, today the writer of Hebrews is going to do that very thing.

Pertaining to Jesus, our high priest, he's going to say he's better, better, better in every way. Today on More Than Ink. Well, good morning and welcome to our dining room table. I'm Dorothy. And I'm Jim, and we really are sitting at our dining room table. It's what we do.

Yes, yes, right. We're glad you're with us. We're not lying to you. We're so glad you're here as we open this text in Hebrews and exercise our minds. Oh, this is thinking. You know, that's fitting we're at a dining room table because he says we're going to eat solid food. That's right.

So we're eating solid food at our dining room table in the middle of Hebrews. Thought-provoking new ideas about who this Jesus might be to the Jewish mind and also to us too. So it's his context and promises. And we've been told he's a better priest, he brings in a better hope, he mediates a better covenant.

Oh, that's a lot of big ideas. And you know, he hasn't said what the better means yet. No, he hasn't. But that is coming. It's coming. What do you mean better?

Yeah, it's coming. So we left off last time talking about Jesus as our better high priest. Yeah, and just by way of review, he had already told us he's like us and has been tempted in all things like we are, but he's different because he is without sin. Yeah, he's without sin. He told us at the beginning of the book he is the exact representation of our unseen God, right?

He's the radius, the outshining of his glory. He's better than any human priest, even a priest who serves according to the Mosaic law. So that's kind of where we're at in the argument and we're going to pick up today at the beginning or at the end of chapter seven of Hebrews and then move into the beginning of chapter eight. Yeah, yeah. So he's going to close off, not close off, he's going to bring to a little bit of a point why he's talking about Jesus as our high priest and why he's a superior high priest. And by the way, he already told us this, this particular high priest in Jesus is someone who allows us to go to walk through the curtain, through the veil, into the presence of God, which the old man high priest could not do. Could not do.

Yeah, he's gone in and anchored away inside the veil for us. Yeah. So with that start, should we jump into verse 26 of chapter seven? Yeah, I'll do it. Okay.

Okay. Verse 26 of chapter seven, for it was indeed fitting that we should have such a high priest, holy, innocent, unstained, separated from sinners and exalted above the heavens. You know, he has no need like those high priests to offer sacrifices daily for first for his own sins and then for those of the people since he did this once for all when he offered up himself.

For the law appoints men in their weakness as high priests, but the word of the oath, which came later than the law appoints a son, a son who has been made perfect forever. Oh, stop. We got to stop there. There's that word perfect again. Perfect again. Nothing more is needed. Sufficient. His priesthood, his sonship is absolutely complete and sufficient.

Yeah. So don't misread that last verse of chapter seven that Jesus was sinful at one time and then he was made sinless. That's not what that means. That's not what it means. It just means that he fills a role that's the perfect completion of God's plan for us. That's what it's really talking about there. So yeah, he's much superior. And you know, if you could look back in Leviticus when God tells the priests back then what they need to do, that we know when they're going to offer sacrifices for the people, they got to offer a sacrifice for themselves first because they're sinful themselves.

So that's a problem. Here he makes this really great superior point. Jesus never had to make a sacrifice for himself because he was sinless.

Indeed. What he did was offer up himself for us. As the sacrifice. That sets him apart from those human priests.

Those human priests never were sacrificed. He gives himself to us and for us. So here's the better priest. Here's the superior actions. There's similarities between the high priest then and who Jesus is, but Jesus is clearly heads above.

I mean, he's just totally different than them. This is the first time the writer says it and he's going to say it again in the next few chapters. He did it once for all. Once for all. Once for all.

It is complete, done, been there, done that, over and finished. Yeah. Yeah. We do not need to offer sacrifices anymore. So once for all that his sacrifices made and it affects the atonement for our past sins, our present sins and what's going to future happen.

And what we will do. Yeah. But for the priests in the Old Testament, that wasn't the case. You brought something wrong. You brought an animal and he sacrificed it on your behalf to kind of be a reminder for the sin that happened in your life. Well, and I think sometimes we don't even pay attention to how much and how often the sacrifices were made. You can read those things in Leviticus and in Exodus and in Numbers. You can read about how often they were sacrificing morning and evening and twice as often on the Sabbath and twice as many animals.

Twice as many animals. So, you know, that's that's an astonishing thing. The temple, the tabernacle in the wilderness and then the temple when it was a building attached to the ground, was permanently engaged in the activity of the shedding of blood, the offering of sacrifice. What a stark picture all the time that we live in sin perpetually. Right. That our sin must be constantly dealt with. And that it's an obstacle. It's in the way of the completion of God's perfect promise to us.

Our sin gets in the way. And so, you know, when you talk about the Old Testament temple, you ask, what do they do in the Old Testament temple? Well, they dealt with sin. That's what it was. Pretty much.

Day and night. There you go. It was all about sin. So why would sin be so important? Well, because the issue is, is that to define the fruition of God's promises to us, that our sin is the issue that keeps us separated from God.

And so from God's perspective, where he wants to give the best to Israel, he wants to give the best to us. It's our sin. That's the problem.

It's totally the problem. And so somehow in whatever covenant God puts together for man, it's got to include a solution to the problem of our own sinfulness. Now, interestingly enough, in the Old Testament, there was always understood that the blood of animals didn't take away your sin. David says it in Psalm 50, if you wanted more blood sacrifice, I would give it.

But what you really want is my heart. God says it in Isaiah 1. Who told you to bring all these animals in here and keep this constant sacrifice going? Because it had become a ritual and a rote instead of a real understanding that this animal's shed blood represents my life before God. Right. And to an observant Jew, they would understand the fact that this wasn't solving the problem. It was, number one, a reminder of the problem. But it was also a hint about the fact that maybe something or someone else later is paying that price. Because the writer also says later on that these sacrifices are a stark wake-up call to the fact that because of your sin, something must die. Right.

And so that price was just, it was sobering. And that was the 24-7 action in the temple. There were no marriages there. There were no baptisms there.

There were not a lot of things that went on. Okay, now you're speaking to the culture. We live there.

But there are people maybe listening to this who don't live where we live. Right, right. The temple was about sin.

That's the problem. And it was constantly covered with blood. Even in the inner, the Holy of Holies, where God was separated by that curtain, once a year the high priest went in. And you know what he did when he went into that inner sanctum kind of where God's presence is that no one until I accept the high priest, he would go in there and he'd sprinkle blood.

Sprinkle blood. So even in that place where in God's presence there is the visible sign of the cost of paying for our sins, the blood. So yeah, fascinating stuff.

We digress. Well, but the idea of substitutionary sacrifice, now that's a big term, right, meaning that the sacrifice that I bring as a substitute for my own life. Right. That's what that means. Right.

So that we're going to get into that in the later chapters, in a few weeks from here. And isn't that core to who Jesus is and wanting to sacrifice for us for us? Right, because he said, I died for you.

Exactly. And the scripture says he became sin who knew no sin that we might become the righteousness of God in him. So he was our substitutionary sacrifice. And I think for a Jew at the time and even now, that's an easy leap.

If you say Jesus died as our sacrifice for our sins, they would say, oh, you mean like the sacrifice something had to die in the Old Testament. Except that it's an utterly appalling idea that a human being would do that. Exactly. Yeah, right.

But they would get the connection. The picture had been cemented in their minds that something must die because of that sin. Okay, so let's go back, because he said, and we're really not that far afield, because in verse 27 the writer had said, he did this once for all when he offered up himself.

Offered up himself. There's a different high priest. Okay, so there it is. There's a different high priest.

We need to read on into chapter eight, and I love how this starts. Now, the point in what we're saying is this. It's like the writer knows, okay, now, are you with me?

Is your head spinning here? That's right. Okay, here's the point. The point is this. We have such a high priest.

Yes. One who gives himself, one who is seated at the right hand of the throne of the majesty in heaven, a minister in the holy places in the true tent that the Lord set up, not man. For every high priest is appointed to offer gifts and sacrifices. Thus, it's necessary for this priest also to have something to offer. Now, if he were on earth, he wouldn't be a priest at all since there are priests who offer gifts according to the law. They serve a copy and a shadow of the heavenly things.

For when Moses was about to erect the tent, he was instructed by God saying, see that you make everything according to the pattern that was shown you on the mountain. But as it is, Christ, and that term is Messiah, the anointed one, God sent one, has obtained a ministry that is much more excellent than the old as the covenant he mediates is better since it is enacted on better promises. Better, better, better, better. Surpassing better and better. Yeah, okay.

And he will indeed explain more about what he means by better and all that kind of stuff. But if you go back to the beginning of chapter eight, boy, it's a mouthful in just the first handful of verses. So for instance, I mean, go back for a second. You get the Jews back in, you know, when they leave Egypt and they're wandering him, right? And God says, make a tent for me because I want a tent with you guys out here. And that was called the tabernacle. That was just the temporary moveable place that symbolically showed the presence of God.

He was actually living in their camp, in the center of the camp. And when they would camp, they would bring their tents all around this one central tent, which was the tabernacle, and that was the presence of God. And it served as a portable temple in that sense because it still, like the temple, had this curtain that separated man from the central part where God was. So it was just a portable temple. So everywhere he says tent here, he's talking about that moveable. That moveable holy place. Right, but God's intention, God's visible intention to live in the midst of his people. That was his desire. The problem was he could come in the middle of his people, but his people couldn't come into his presence because of their sin.

It's still a problem, yeah. So when he says that, you take that very concrete action, what they did when they were in the desert and stuff like that, and he elevates this now to a connection with like a heavenly equivalent of the tent. That one is a copy and a shadow of the real one. There is a spiritual reality that is greater and more concrete than the tent or the stone temple. Right, which is why he says, you put all this together, it serves as a copy and gets to verse 4 and 5, it's a copy of the things in heaven, it's a shadow of the things in heaven. So there is a greater reality, it's a spiritual reality, but it's a greater reality that that moveable tent where God lives is kind of like the bigger picture of our involvement with God in a heavenly or in a spiritual sense.

So that's what he's saying. In verse 2 he says, it's the true tent, it's the true tent that God set up, not man set up. So this is coming down to the concrete promise of finding our rest in the presence of God, in the nearness of God.

So that's bigger than just the tent back in the Arabian desert. This is the big tent of heaven where we come to this person. Okay, so even before that, he says, we have such a high priest who is seated at the right hand of the throne of the majesty in heaven. Well, so do you remember in the gospels when Jesus was on trial before the Jewish authorities and they asked him, so are you the Messiah? And he said, and you'll see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of the throne of majesty in heaven.

And they said, there it is, we don't need more evidence, you've heard the blasphemy. But here the writer Hebrews is saying, this is the high priest we have who is actually deity himself. Yes. Seated at the right hand of the majesty in heaven. Yes, so now we have a high priest, a great high priest who is tempted in all things as us, he's man, but he's also fully God. Right. Now this is a mind blower for a Jewish audience.

It's a mind blower for gentile audiences today. How can God be man at the same time? Is that possible? And come and do what he did. And then come and die. No, for Jesus to be the outpouring, the outshining of the glory of God and the exact representation of his nature. Well, the one God sent, Messiah, gave himself for the ones he loved. Is that at the core of the nature of God?

Right. That he gives himself for the benefit of those he loves. His love is to sacrifice himself for the benefit of the ones he loves. What a high priest. What a high priest. I know.

That's why this is just a mind blower, these first four fibers in chapter eight. This is how superior this high priest is. This is how much better this high priest is.

How much better. And operating in a much more concrete place, which is actually the true tent, the true place where you can come into the presence of God. The spiritual reality of entering, drawing near to God happens through him and through his ministry. So at the end of this little passage here, he says in verse six, Christ has obtained a ministry that's much more excellent. It surpasses, blows it right out of the water because he mediates a better covenant, a better agreement on how life is done that's enacted on better promises. Better, better, better.

Well, what makes it better? Yeah, yeah. And we have to hope before we look forward that it has something to do with the solution to our sins, which separates us from God. Right, right.

So that's, well, that is, plot spoiler, that is the better, but in many respects. Okay, but he says he's a minister of a better covenant. He's a mediator. And he has obtained this ministry. Well, a ministry is an act of service. It's an office devoted for prayer and service.

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Yeah, serving the others, bringing benefit to other people. And so that's what his role is.

He is still serving us. Yeah, he's serving us in all of this. And the point is, is to connect us with the promises of God. Right, right. That's what it's all about. It's connecting us with the promises of God. If you go back to the historical account of where they came to the brink of the promised land, do you remember they sent the spies in?

Mm-hmm, right, right. One guy for every tribe, so there's 12 guys that went in, and when they came back out, they said, okay, there's a great land, but there's giants there. There's giants there.

Don't go in, there's giants. So even though God promised this place, we don't think he can take them. I don't know if God's bigger than the giants, but two of the spies, two of the guys from the tribes, Caleb and Joshua, said, no, no, no, no, no, God's got this, God's got this. Well, Joshua's an interesting guy because in a way he is another sort of type of Jesus because he was interceding at that point saying, no, God can do this.

God can bring us into this place of rest. They didn't believe him, and because they didn't believe, they stayed out. But then eventually, when you get out of the book of Exodus, you get into Joshua, and there's Joshua bringing them into the promised land. So Joshua is an interesting type, again, of the role of Jesus, not just as high priest, but as our captain and our forerunner, into the place of rest. Well, there's an interesting little bit of trivia about Joshua, and that is that his name means God saves. Yeah, well, he saves. But in the later form, Yeshua, it's the name that Jesus, Yeshua, as a friend of ours, used to say that Yeshua is the name his mommy called him.

It's the same name. God saves. God saves. So look at this, Joshua who brought him into the place of rest and Jesus who brings us into the place of rest. That is not an accidental coincidence. This is the plan of God so that a Jewish mindset would say, I think I'm getting this now.

I think I'm getting this. You mean Jesus is kind of like Joshua? You mean Jesus is kind of like a high priest? You mean Jesus is kind of like the sacrifice himself? Jesus is God saving. Saving us from our sins, from our problem that keeps us out of the place of rest. And it keeps us out of the center of the promises of the blessings of God.

That's what Jesus does. So the writer of Hebrews says, you know, he reminds us that Moses was told, now see, you make everything according to the pattern that was shown you on the mountain. Because this is modeling for us an incredible spiritual reality.

And we're such elementary students, we needed to have this picture. So God granted them this model of the temple and the holy of holies into which that high priest entered. So the actual design of the temple is teaching us something about our access to God, our relationship with God.

In fact, I'll just even assert, there's nothing that God does in the Old Testament accounts with Israel that isn't teaching something. So these are all quite deliberate, nothing is just perchance or accidental. These things are trying to tell us about, well, the true tent, like he says in verse 2, the invisible but true tent of our relationship with God and our drawing near to God.

These things all have meaning. So if you want to have a fun kind of discussion with others, look at the design of the Old Testament temple, the different chambers, what's inside of it. What happens in each place? What happens in each place?

Who's allowed in there? That is a gigantic teaching device from God to tell us something about how we can find our access into the nearness of God. Yeah, wow. And the role of the high priest is key to that and Jesus is the high priest.

It is. So in verse 6, the writer says, As it is, this Christ has obtained a ministry that's much more excellent, surpassing than the old, and the covenant he mediates is better since it's enacted on better promises. So, you know, that opens the idea of the old covenant and the new covenant. And so for our listeners, I would just encourage you to go back and read in Exodus about that actual setting in place of the old covenant.

You can read about the actual ceremony in Exodus 24, the first 10 or 12 verses, when it says Moses offered the sacrifices and then he took the blood and he sprinkled it on the written word of God and then he sprinkled it on the people and they said, All the Lord has spoken, we will do. So there's the old covenant. God gives the law and the people agree to keep it, which we know that that didn't last more than a couple of weeks. And, you know, you can sort of see why. Because it was really there as a constant reminder of our sin. Well, and it was based on their will and power to obey.

Well, what happens when you don't feel like it or when you just can't? It was based on being your perfect behavior to mirror the character of God, whereas the writer is saying there's a new and a better covenant that's based on God's promise, not your promise. Yes, based on what God can accomplish. Exactly.

Not what you can accomplish. And what he has accomplished for you in the shed blood of his son. So the writer is going to unpack that for us.

Oh, there's more to come on that. But I just wanted to get that out there. I would encourage you to go back and read Exodus 24, because that's going to be important to recognize what happened to the blood, what were they promising to, who was making the promises, what was it based on. That's important to have in mind when we go into looking at the new covenant. Because, again, all the rituals they went through, all the stuff that God wanted them to do was meant to be a deliberate teaching device about the nature of their sin, about their separation from God, about their inability to fully participate in the promises of God because of their own sin. That was the constant reminder. But it never, never solved the problem of their sin. It just reminded them. And the writer here will say this many times, it was a reminder of sin.

That's what the law does. It's a reminder of sin. But it's not a guarantee of a solution to sin. Well, Paul goes even more visible on that when he says in Galatians, the law is our tutor to lead us to Christ. The law makes you aware that you cannot be good enough, you cannot complete perfection and leads you to Christ who himself does.

Yeah, exactly. So the law is not obsolete and it's not, well, I won't say obsolete, it's not sufficient in terms of God's promises toward us. But it's a first step. It's good. The law is good and righteous and tells us what God expects.

It's a good first step. But it's a way in which God's telling us in the totality of our 24-7 lives that we are permeated with sin. We fall short.

We do nothing but fall short. And there is no way you're ever coming into the presence of God being that tainted. But Jesus, our high priest, accomplishes it. So what good news is it that we have a high priest who has entered the holy place and anchored the way for us. He's gone in as a forerunner, as we read a couple of chapters ago, then that his ministry never ends. Such good news.

This is the good news. He always lives and recede for us. And this covenant in his blood surpasses the old, blows it completely out of the water. Right. And yet it was the original plan of God pre-Abraham.

So this is not an afterthought. Many false religions will say, well, God made this promise, but the people didn't have enough faith, so they screwed up. Well, because God's promises were bad, because people couldn't achieve, well, in a real sense, people couldn't achieve, because God's saying, look, here's the deal. You cannot be in my presence if you're sinful.

That's just the way it works. But I've got a solution to that, and that solution is the high priest Jesus. And after all of this talk about covenant that's coming up in the next couple of chapters, in the benediction at the end of Hebrews, the writer's going to talk about the blood of the eternal covenant. The eternal covenant. I'll be your God, and you'll be my people.

Yep, yep. In fact, he'll quote that next week, because what he's going to do, he left us this word covenant at the end of this last verse today in verse six, and now he is going to launch on covenant that this is the plan. It was the plan from the beginning. This isn't just a fixer-upper. This isn't a workaround from God.

This is the way it always has been. Covenant is an agreement designed by God in order for us to benefit from his love. So we're going to jump into that big time. And he's actually going to quote from what a lot of people think is kind of an obscure passage out of Jeremiah, but what he quotes from Jeremiah is a mind-blower. It is the new covenant. The new covenant. And so when Jesus in the upper room, when he was doing the Lord's Supper, he's up there, he says, this blood is the new covenant in my blood.

I pour this out for you. He's saying something huge. Something huge. He's dropping a bomb when he says that, because they would think the Jeremiah passage. They would think new and old covenant.

It's huge. And so Jesus is serving notice to them that he is the key. He is the key to access to the nearness of God. And it's in his blood that this new covenant is founded.

So you can go back right now. You don't have to wait for us for next week. Go back to Jeremiah 31. Start in verse about 31. Yeah, it's a great chapter. And read through about 34.

And just, well, you don't have to read the whole chapter. Read that central part of verses 31 and 34. And read about the new covenant. Yeah, the new covenant. Because the writer of Hebrews is going to jump in up to his eyeballs next week. We're going to talk about that. We're going to run with that for a long time.

Oh, I'm excited. I love this passage. So as much as he introduced the idea of Melchizedek and the connection to Jesus as a high priest, now he's going to say, now let me show you how this works in the new plan, in the new covenant.

The covenant that's mediated by this high priest. You're going to want to hear this. So come back with us next week. I'm Jim. And I'm Dorothy. And we're glad you're with us here on More Than Ink. More Than Ink is a production of Main Street Church of Brigham City and is solely responsible for its content. To contact us with your questions or comments, just go to our website, morethanink.org.