Well, now we come to our second scripture reading, and that's been announced already as being in the ninth chapter of the letter to the Hebrews, and that's on page 1005, if you have this particular edition of the ESV, which I think a few of you may have in your hand. I'm reading the first 14 verses. Now, our first reading was from Bukovar Leviticus, And this letter to the Hebrews, it's the only letter in the New Testament about whose author we really know nothing. For that reason, the early days of Christianity, people were hesitant to accept it into the New Testament. But because it so wonderfully links Christ to the Old Testament and explains the significance of much in the Old Testament to us. The church very soon realized that this book was not just any ordinary religious book. It was like the other books of the New Testament inspired by God. The church did not confer authority upon the books of the Bible. They recognized the authority that God had already embodied in them because they were his inspired word. So let's read from chapter 9, and again we have another of the Old Testament sacrifices described, not an individual one like the peasant who comes with his sheep or his bull, but the special offering on the Day of Atonement that was made once a year. And first of all we have an explanation of the layout of the sacred tent, or the tabernacle as we call it. The same layout was basically embodied in the temple later. Verse 1, Now even the first covenant had regulations for worship and an earthly place of holiness. For a tent was prepared, the first section, in which were the lampstand, and the table, and the bread of the presence. It is called the Holy Place. Behind the second curtain was a second section called the Most Holy Place, having the golden altar of incense and the Ark of the Covenant covered on all sides with gold, in which was a golden urn holding the manna, and Aaron's staff that budded, and the tablets of the covenant, that is the Ten Commandments. Above it were the cherubim of glory, overshadowing the mercy seat. Of these things we cannot now speak in detail. These preparations having thus been made, the priests go regularly into the first section, performing their ritual duties. But into the second Only the high priest goes, and he but once a year, and not without taking blood, which he offers for himself and for the unintentional sins of the people. By this the Holy Spirit indicates that the way into the holy places is not yet opened as long as the first section is still standing. which is symbolic for the present age. According to this arrangement, gifts and sacrifices are offered that cannot perfect the conscience of the worshipper, but deal only with food and drink and various washings, regulations for the body imposed until the time of reformation. But when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things that have come, then, through the greater and more perfect tent, not made with hands, that is, not of this creation, He entered once for all into the holy places, the heavenly places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves, but by means of his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption. And the next few verses we will particularly focus on this evening. For if the blood of goats and bulls and the sprinkling of defiled persons with the ashes of an heifer sanctify for the purification of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ who through the eternal spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God. And this is God's Word. Let us receive it and live by it. Let us pray. As we turn now to search out the meaning of your holy word, O God, grant us the enlightenment of your spirit. Open our minds to receive its truth. Move our hearts to believe it and our wills to live by it. We pray you in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, we're looking at this chapter this evening, and we see there how the Old Testament sacrificial worship illustrates the significance of the death of our Lord Jesus on the cross. In this letter, the writer is addressing Jewish Christians, people who were thoroughly familiar with the Old Testament, And in particular, he refers us to the first five books, the books of Moses. There we have the moral law, the Ten Commandments given through Moses, and then the ceremonial law, the system of sacrifices also given on Mount Sinai. Now, I can remember that as a boy, I had to learn the Ten Commandments, and that was a common thing a couple of generations ago. Sadly, today, I don't think many children in our schools would really know very much about the Ten Commandments, far less know them by heart. Now, God knew that His people, the tribes of Israel, though they had pledged themselves to keep the moral law, would fail miserably in their promise. Even while Moses was on the mountain, they set up an idol, the golden calf, so that God gave Moses the pattern of the tabernacle and the system of sacrificial offerings so that when the people's sins were recognized and repented of, they could be assured of God's forgiveness. We note that in these verses the writer is at pains to show us that the Old Testament ceremonies, indeed included in what we call the Old Covenant, only provisional. That does not mean they were not important because they pointed forward very definitely to the new covenant which the coming Messiah was to establish. Ultimately, as we will see, it was only that final sacrifice offered by Jesus, the Son of God on the cross of Calvary, that could provide for the deepest needs of mankind. pardon from sin, and a renewal of our fallen nature. Now, as we read from the book of Leviticus, there were precise instructions given for the burnt offering. The Hebrew peasant would come to the sanctuary with his animal, most likely a sheep. If he was a prosperous farmer, then a bull. If he was desperately poor, then a couple of pigeons or turtle doves and these were offered on his behalf. I want you to note in verse 3 of Leviticus, just quoting it, they were offered that he may be accepted before the Lord. And again in the following verse, quote, He shall lay his hand on the head of the burnt offering, and it shall be accepted for him to make atonement for him. After he had killed his animal, the Hebrew priest would then collect his blood and sprinkle it against the side of the altar on which the carcass was to be burned. Now, all this was more than just a primitive ritual from a bygone age. We see in the book of Leviticus certain basic principles which illustrate how we are to find acceptance with our Creator. For at the end of the day, and at the end of life, there is nothing more important than that we should find acceptance with the One who created us, and who knows us through and through, and who will justly judge all mankind. Now what was it that led this Hebrew peasant to bring his animal to be sacrificed and offered to God? It was his awareness that he had fallen short of what God demanded of him in the way that he lived. That he had offended his God by his sins and that he must appease Him. He also needed relief for a troubled conscience. He needed assurance that he would be accepted, and God's law prescribed the appointed way by which in the Old Testament all of this could be achieved. The laying on of the hand on the animal's head gave him confidence to believe that his guilt was somehow being transferred to another, although as the writer to the Hebrews points out, it ultimately was not the animal's that could achieve anything in the way of forgiveness was only when Christ came later. But still it had that significance, guilt being transferred to another. The shedding of blood indicated that something very precious was being given up on his behalf, the life of the victim. It became a substitute for him, offered in his place, and thus he was assured that atonement had been made for his sin. Significantly, the word atonement in the original Hebrew Bible indicates that God's anger against him had been turned away. In reading our verses from Hebrews 9, we found the description of the layout of the sacred tent, the tabernacle of Moses' day, and all its furnishings, where the culminating sacrifice, the great day of atonement, took place just once a year. It was still being observed annually and in the temple in the days of Jesus. On that occasion, a special sacrifice was offered, not just for the sins of an individual, but for the sins of the nation. On that day alone was the high priest allowed to enter the inner shrine where he sprinkled sacrificial blood on the atonement cover, sometimes called the mercy seat, which lay over the Ark of the Covenant. Our author then goes on to make this wonderful comparison between the high priest of the Old Testament age and Jesus, our great high priest, whose sacrificial offering of himself, acting both as priest and as victim, fulfilled all that was foreshadowed of him in the earlier age, and whose priestly and redemptive work was all sufficient and complete for all mankind and for all time and need never be repeated. Let me just read verses 11 and 12 to you again. But when Christ appeared as High Priest of the good things that have come, then through the greater and more perfect tent, not made with hands, that is, not of this creation, He entered once for all into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves, but by means of His own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption. And of course, the holy places refers to His entry into heaven, where now He intercedes for us. All of this Old Testament background may be somewhat unfamiliar territory to many of you, but be assured, these teachings can be very illuminating. So let's now focus on these last two verses that take us right over into the New Testament age. For if the blood of goats and bulls and the sprinkling of defiled persons with the ashes of a heifer's sanctify for the purification of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God. We can recognize three features of the sacrifice that Christ has offered on behalf of sinful mankind. First of all, its costliness. The Apostle Paul speaks of this when he writes, He who did not spare his own son, but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? Not only did it cost God the Father a great deal to surrender His Son to a lost world, which would dishonor Him and crucify Him, but the cost to Jesus in seeking to rescue this lost world was immeasurable. Our text says He offered Himself to God to fulfill this grand purpose. in the dark shades of the Garden of Gethsemane just before He was betrayed into the hands of His enemies, we see Jesus sweating great drops of blood in His agony as He prayed to His Father that He would remove from Him the bitter cup of suffering that He saw ahead of Him. And yet, He willingly submitted on our behalf, fully aware of what was to come. the agony of a death in which he would bear the crushing load of the sin of the world. Now, 200 years ago, the German rationalistic philosophers had a strong influence on the thinking of the age. And this began a movement, and I've referred to this earlier, the movement known as theological liberalism, and it has gradually permeated and sometimes totally changed many churches throughout the world. The liberals thought that the Bible was not a revelation of divine truth from God. That it was a merely human book. That Jesus was not divine. That a mere man, a good man indeed, one whose thinking was far ahead of his time in search of God, and therefore one to be followed and admired and who showed great fortitude in the face of a cruel and unjust death, but to speak of the shedding of his blood as being of any value as far as the forgiveness of sins is concerned, the liberals thought, this is a total misunderstanding. Believe me, there are still many of them around. They maintain that it's God's nature to be absolutely forgiving, that He can pardon sin with, as it were, a mere wave of the hand. And so they despise Christians who love to sing about the power of Jesus' blood to forgive sins, and about the Lamb of God offered as a sacrifice for us. They would tell us that ours is a slaughterhouse religion. Well, I suppose in one sense the Old Testament tabernacle and then the temple, they were slaughterhouses. And so they would say we haven't gone beyond the primitive concepts of the Old Testament. Now let me ask you this question. Do we despise the sacrifice made by those who shed their blood in defense of their homeland in the two terrible wars of last century. Isn't their blood a symbol of what it cost to maintain our freedom? Is it for nothing that emblazoned on numerous memorials from the smallest bush town to the great cities of this Commonwealth, we see the words, greater love, greater love. has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. Words first spoken by Jesus himself before his own death. And Jesus' death surely was far and infinitely more significant than that of the most loyal serviceman or woman. Second, not the perfection of Jesus' sacrifice. Our text says of Him, through the Eternal Spirit, He, Jesus, offered Himself without blemish to God. Now let me just note in the passing that this is a Trinitarian statement. This is a Trinitarian text. We believe in one God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. and all three planned together and worked together to achieve the salvation of a fallen and ruined world. God in three persons. Blessed Trinity. Jesus was God in human flesh and as such was the only perfect man who has ever walked on this earth. He is the only one who has ever perfectly obeyed God's law. And therefore the offering that he made on behalf of those who have broken God's law is fully acceptable to God. Whether we like it or not, God requires perfection of all of us. It is perfectly clear from the scriptures that God takes our sin very seriously, and that He cannot tolerate the slightest trace of sin in His presence. That makes it impossible for any of us to find acceptance with God on the basis of our own good deeds, even if we assume, and this is a false assumption, that our good deeds can ever outweigh our sin. The Bible has a curt answer to any who would claim that they are good enough for God. The words of Isaiah, who cried out as he confessed the sins of the nation and lumped himself together with the nation and its sin. All our righteous deeds are like filthy rags. Not our unrighteous deeds, mark you. All our righteous deeds are like filthy rags. The trouble is that we judge ourselves merely against those who live around us. So often our argument is, well, nobody's perfect. I wouldn't claim to be perfect, but I'm a lot better than the guy next door. I'm a lot better than that woman across the street. And as for that mob around the corner, they're not even in the same league. We fail to realize just how incredibly damaging is the sin that is hidden in our hearts. how miserably far short we fall of the perfect example that we see in Jesus, and just how far we are removed from God in His perfection. Why is it, I would ask you, is it that the average Aussie today, decent, living according to the standard of his or her mates, has no real interest at all in worshipping the God who has given them their very life and breath. If then even our best is not good enough for God, what hope do we have? Only through Jesus, only through Him who lived an absolutely blameless life and offered up to God a sacrifice of perfect righteousness, only through Him can that righteousness be reckoned to our account. Only He can cover the filthy rags of our own miserable efforts to live rightly with the spotless robe of the life He lived for others and gave up in His death. That prize we can only win when we surrender to Him in utter repentance and humble faith. Now third, think about the effectiveness of Jesus' sacrifice. The blood which He shed on behalf of sinners, our text says, has power to purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God. Now the phrase dead works simply means deeds that are worthy of death and that bring us under God's just condemnation. This cleansing or purification of the conscience means that we are set free from guilt and from the domination of our sinful nature and that we are liberated to serve the living God and thus to fulfill the ultimate purpose for which He created us and why we are on this earth. I want to deal with the question of conscience in a moment, but first of all I want to Look at another question. Just why is it that we claim the self-offering of Jesus on the cross is so wonderfully effective? How is it that the death of an obscure Jew who had little formal education, who was condemned by the Jewish council because he claimed to be the Son of God and who was put to death by the Romans with a caption written above his head, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, How could such a death in any way relate to the predicament of the human race, which, if the truth be told, has lost its way as far as God is concerned? I would simply make two points in reply. First, that his claim to be the Son of God was true. He wasn't a charlatan, an imposter. He wasn't crazy. when he made that claim before the high priest at his trial. Second, the death that he died, as we are discovering here, was in essence a substitutionary sacrifice. Now, surely it's clear that the principle of substitution is embedded deeply in the Old Testament sacrificial system. And we must insist that if there is to be any coherence at all to the message of the Christian gospel, then it must present Jesus as the one who died, not just somehow to benefit us by giving us a good example, but one who actually died in the place of sinful men. And sadly, the liberalism of which I've already spoken has in this last hundred years eaten the heart out of many churches by destroying the true message of the gospel. And I knew, as I mentioned earlier, that as a young teen that that message, that all we have to do is to learn to be good like Jesus, was totally inadequate. The liberals are prepared to say that Jesus died on behalf of man, but not that he died in the place of man. They deny substitution. They will tell you that Jesus is to be admired because he endured suffering unjustly inflicted with great fortitude, that he died to show that love can triumph over hate, But they will never say that Jesus took the place of sinners, because their view is that it's quite unnecessary. God, they say, is a loving God who can pardon sin without any need for retribution. All you need to do when you finally meet God is simply to say, I'm sorry, and he'll let you in with a wave of the hand. All I can say in response to that It's not what I find in my Bible. What's more, the liberal message is one that has weakened so many churches, some almost to the point of extinction. And personally, I have to say, if Jesus in His sacrifice on the cross was not dying in my place, then I am altogether without hope. There is no way that I can face up to God the God who cannot even tolerate the slightest trace of sin in His heaven. Even if God was able to forgive sin with a wave of the hand, I still would not be fit for heaven because of the fatal tendency of my fallen nature to choose what is wrong and what is right. That is no condition in which anyone can be accepted into the presence of God. only a complete transformation of my whole being which Jesus alone can accomplish by the virtue of His sacrifice and by the renewing power of His mighty Spirit. Only thus can I be enabled to lift up my head and look Him in the eye when at the last I must appear before Him. Without such a Savior, my friends, I'm lost, abandoned to the out of darkness and utter hopelessness, shut off from God forever. You know, speaking about my teens when I became a Christian, I used to love singing some of these old hymns that we rarely sing these days. And I love them not just because of their way in which they wonderfully distilled Christian truth, and because of their obvious expression of devotion to the Lord whom we love, but because of their high poetic quality. I might be permitted just to make a comment here. We live in a prosaic age, of course. people don't read poetry anymore and the people who write poems they don't write for the common man they write for that little coterie of other people like themselves to read at their poetry readings and I think if someone in a hundred years time had to compile an anthology of Christian poetry for the previous 600 years, that the last 50 or 70 years would have some pretty slim pickings. I know that the important thing about what we sing is that what we sing accords with scripture, that it represents the breadth of scriptural teachings, that it conveys the gospel. and that it represents the devotion of our hearts, that's the essential thing, but I do miss the poetry of some of these great old hymns. And I'm going to quote one now that I know that Phil loves, because we have sung it in St John's sometimes, and it was a hymn that I love to sing in my teens Elizabeth Clefane's hymn, Upon That Cross of Jesus. Mine eye at times can see the very form of one who suffered there for me. And from my stricken heart, with tears, two wonders I confess. The wonder of his marvellous love and mine own worthlessness. Now the final topic, and this is one that we don't think about much in preaching, I don't think. The cleansing of the conscience. And we have noticed that it was conscience that brought the Hebrew worshipper of old to the altar with his sacrificial offering. So what is conscience? In English literature, some of the poets refer to it as the voice of God. But while it is undoubtedly God who gives us a conscience, it is really part of the self. We are created in the image and likeness of God, and our conscience is part of the impress of the divine upon our human nature. The derivation of the word can help us here, I think, in a similar way to the original Greek word of the New Testament, the Latin, that lies behind our English word divides neatly into two parts. The prefix con-, meaning in company with, and the word scientia-, meaning knowledge or knowing, this being the origin of our word science. So, conscience, conscience, is knowing in company with, not someone else, but in company with ourselves. Our conscience, as it were, stands beside us and tells us certain things. It enables us to be self-aware regarding the moral aspect of our being, our sense of right and wrong. The Apostle Paul teaches that even in heathen societies, who lived in ignorance of the moral law, the God-given standard for how we live, they were ignorant of it, but he says their conscience either approves or disproves their thoughts and actions. However, because we are fallen creatures and the image of God within us has been sadly marred, and at times is almost totally defaced, so our conscience is far from being a reliable moral compass. But it is there nevertheless, and God has put it there, Now modern psychology would try to tell us that conscience is nothing more than a set of inhibitions resulting from social conditioning. If you live in India, where the cow is regarded as a sacred animal, and as you drive you accidentally kill a cow that's wandered onto the road, you will fear great retribution and you will perform the necessary rituals to try to avert that retribution. Now in Australia, where 70 years ago the prevailing Christian ethic and the fear of unwanted pregnancies meant that young couples generally exercised considerable restraint and avoided premarital sex. Today they appear to have no inhibitions about sleeping together. If not on the first date, then not very long after that. Go into any student residence and the first thing that you will see is an array of condom vending machines. And here we are in the year ten classroom this evening. And provided they are of age, hardly anyone bats an eyelid if two year tens go off and have sex together. Two generations ago the concept of salvation was recognized as having something to do with the Lord Jesus Christ. But today salvation is regarded as being in any way a valid category then it has something to do with a little piece of rubber. So what has become of conscience, particularly as regards sexual behaviour? Yes, perhaps if you've been brought up in a Christian home, your conscience will ring a warning bell, but the prevailing attitude is that anything is permissible barring rape and child abuse. And sex today, wouldn't you agree, is regarded as primarily recreational and only as an afterthought, if you're so inclined, procreational. The outcome being that, apart from the immigration, that the population of Australia has been shrinking quite markedly in the last couple of decades. The moral compass seems to have disappeared, but not entirely. The social consequence emerging from all of this we can only describe as alarming, insoluble, to the social psychologists who are left struggling to pick up the pieces. And these poor folk who have to struggle with these dysfunctional families, these people working for the Department of Human Services, No wonder many of them can only stand it for a few months. Let me just say that your sexuality, which is God-given, is far too important an aspect of your person to be regarded as merely recreational. Under the influence of peer pressure, your thinking can too easily become wrongly shaped and distorted. And I know that some of you have suffered agonies in this area of your lives. But what may have become a source of intense misery can, in God's good plan and in the right context, become a supreme blessing. The Christian guidelines, though now seen as entirely counter-cultural, have patently been given us for our own good. If we repeatedly act against our conscience, what happens? Eventually it becomes anesthetized, even apparently dead. The Apostle Paul warns us against false teachers, hypocrites, whose consciences, he says, have become seared as with a hot iron. The picture is one of ancient surgical practice. There were no anesthetics, and so if a limb had to be amputated, the surgeon would sear the severed flesh with a red hot iron, in a crude form of anesthesia which destroyed the nerve endings and contrary to what we might think it relieved the pain so likewise the conscience can be deadened by harmful behavior but be warned one of the great problems if we think we can ignore it is that of submerged guilt which can lie buried for years and is so destructive of the personality. So this evening may I just ask you the question, what is the state of your conscience? Is it alive and healthy and sensitive? Made clean by the blood of Jesus? Or have you smothered it with clever arguments The Scriptures warn us that we are all masters of self-deception. Perhaps your conscience has become virtually dead and needs to be awakened from a state of turmoil. May God awaken you tonight. The most dramatic example in Scripture of such an awakening is to be seen in the experience of Saul of Tarsus, the arch-persecutor of the church. the very mention of his name would have caused a shudder of fear in the hearts of early believers in and around Jerusalem. He was at the spearhead of a deliberate campaign to obliterate the name of Jesus from the earth. A man who hated and cursed the very name of Christ, who treated his followers with great cruelty and imprisoned them Until the day came when on the Damascus road he encountered the risen Christ and was blinded by his glory, the light shining from heaven. He heard the Lord's voice, Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? It is hard for you to kick against the goads. Who are you? He replied, I am Jesus whom you are persecuting. Now this Saul, who was to become the Paul the Apostle, had persuaded himself that he was serving God by persecuting the Christians. But his buried conscience sprang to life. Like an unwilling bullock at the plough, he was kicking against its continual prodding until he had to surrender to the Lord Jesus. A conscience amazingly resurrected by the power of God's Spirit. A life completely turned around that made him the greatest missionary who has ever lived. Maybe tonight there is someone here whose conscience has suddenly become alive. There is only one way to find relief and that is to look to the Christ of Calvary to cast yourself on His mercy and to seek the cleansing power of His precious blood. Let us pray. The words of the psalmist, Search me, O God, And know my heart. Try me and know my thoughts. And see if there be any wicked way in me. And lead me in the way everlasting. Amen.