The Last Sacrifice Ever Needed

The writer had already told his friends they had a great high priest who knew exactly how they felt. Now he had to explain what a high priest was for, and that meant talking about blood.

At the temple in Jerusalem, the smoke of the old sacrifices still went up every morning, and a few of his friends, worn out from all they had lost, were wondering, "Wouldn't it be easier to go back?"

So the writer reminded them of the most solemn day of the year.

On that day, and only that day, the high priest went behind the thick curtain into the Most Holy Place, where God had promised to meet his people. A bull was killed for the priest's own sins and a goat for the sins of the people, and he carried their blood inside and sprinkled it there. Everyone else waited outside for him to come back out. (Nobody else was allowed in, not even to peek.)

Out he came, and everyone went home. The next year they did it all again.

The writer went back further still, to Mount Sinai, where Moses read God's law to the people.

"Everything the LORD has said, we will do!" they shouted.

Moses dipped a bunch of hyssop, a scratchy wild plant, into the blood of calves and goats and flicked it over the book and over the crowd. "This is the blood of the covenant," he said, "the promise God has made with you." (If you had stood in that crowd, you would have felt the drops land on your arms.)

"Without blood," the writer explained, "there is no forgiveness."

But the blood of animals could only make people clean on the outside. It could not reach a guilty heart.

Jesus Christ did it differently. He did not go into a room built by human hands, which was only a copy. He went into heaven itself, to stand before God's face for us. He carried no goat's blood. He offered himself, with no sin in him at all, and he died. That one death took sin away for good. Now hearts could be washed clean to serve the living God.

The writer used an example everyone knew. A will is a letter saying who gets your things after you die, and it only works once the person who wrote it has died. (No one gets Grandpa's fishing rod while Grandpa is still fishing with it.) God had promised his people a forever inheritance, and Christ's death made it theirs. His blood began a new covenant, a better promise than the one at Sinai.

"People die once," the writer said, "and after that they stand before God." Christ died once too, carrying the sins of many.

Every year the crowd outside the curtain had waited for the high priest, and every year he came out with the job unfinished. Next year he would need another goat, and the year after that another, for as long as the temple stood.

The writer's friends stood in a different crowd now. Their priest had gone in once, with his own blood, and the temple smoke made no difference anymore.

One day he will step out again to the people watching for him. He will not come to deal with sin a second time. Jesus will come to save them, and this time the waiting crowd goes in with him.