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I'd like to invite you to take your Bibles and turn to Hebrews chapter 10. I'm going to read verses 1 through 10 this morning. Hebrews chapter 7 through 10 deals with Christ, our great priest, our great high priest. He is a better priest, that was Hebrews 7. He's the mediator of a better covenant, that was Hebrews 8. And he offered the better sacrifice, the one that really takes away sin, that's Hebrews 9 and 10. But there is a difference between Hebrews 9 and 10. The focus is somewhat altered. In Hebrews 9, the focus of the atonement tends to be Godward, whereas in Hebrews 10, where we are now, the focus is more subjective, what the cross has done for believers. And as I read this text today, it's going to break down this way, the shadowlands of the old covenant, that's verses 1 through 4. And then the substance that God promised, that God desired, and that meets our need, that's the balance of our text, verses 5 through 10. First, the shadowlands of the old covenant. Would you follow along as I begin reading with verse 1 of Hebrews chapter 10? For since the law has but a shadow of the good things to come, instead of the true form of these realities, it can never, by the same sacrifices that are continually offered every year, make perfect those who draw near. Otherwise, would they not have ceased to be offered, since the worshipers, having once been cleansed, would no longer have any consciousness of sins? But in these sacrifices, there is a reminder of sins every year, for it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins. Consequently, when Christ came into the world, he said, sacrifices and offerings you have not desired, but a body have you prepared for me. And burnt offerings and sin offerings you have taken no pleasure. Then I said, behold, I have come to do your will, O God. as it is written of me in the scroll of the book. And when he said above, you have neither desired nor taken pleasure in sacrifices and offerings and burnt offerings and sin offerings, these are offered according to the law, then he added, behold, I have come to do your will. He does away with the first in order to establish the second. And by that will, we have been sanctified through the offering the body of Jesus Christ once for all. Well the first word in the Greek sentence in Hebrews chapter 10 is the word shadow. It is in that emphatic first position and There is clearly a strong contrast in our text between the law shadows with the true form of new covenant realities. Now, in our text, the shadows are the shadow sacrifices of the old covenant, the animal sacrifices. They were shadows and not substance, if you will. They were promise and not fulfillment. They couldn't actually deal with the reality of our sin. But it wasn't just the sacrifices under the Old Covenant that were shadows. Everything under the Old Covenant was a shadow. The tabernacle, the temple, the priest, everything. Earlier in Hebrews, in chapter 8, verse 5, the preacher had said they, that is the Old Covenant priests, serve at a sanctuary that is a copy and shadow of what is in heaven. This is why Moses was warned when he was about to build the tabernacle, see to it that you make everything according to the pattern shown you on the mountain. Everything under the old covenant was a shadow. We could call it the shadow lands. Living in the old covenant under the old covenant was living in the shadow lands. The Shadowlands of the Old Covenant tell us some important things about the Old Testament. One thing taught about the Old Testament is that it has both continuity and discontinuity with the New Testament. I mean a shadow is connected to the substantial reality that it shadows. For example, if you're out on a September day, late in the afternoon, and the sun is shining on the lawn, and you will see your elongated shadow on the lawn and that tells you that you're there, right? I mean the substantial you is present because the real you is making that shadow. If I'm on the lawn in September and I'm walking on the lawn with my wife and I see her shadow, I know that my wife is present with me. But if I get down on the lawn and I try to hug the shadow, I won't be hugging my wife, will I? I'll simply be getting stares from the neighbors wondering who this weird fellow is. The shadow has a connectivity to the real thing and yet a disconnection with the real thing. The whole of the old covenant foreshadowed the gospel realities in Christ and the preacher has especially in mind in our text the shadows of the day of atonement. He talks about the blood of bulls and goats and of course that was the sin offerings on the day of atonement. And he has in mind that which foreshadowed Good Friday, the substance, the reality of the cross. The law was a shadow of the good things to come, meaning the good things that the God-man would purchase by his cross and by his resurrection. And among those good things are the forgiveness of sin, something that the preacher is going to especially emphasize in Hebrews chapter 10. But the law foreshadowed the Christ who would accomplish all of this. The law didn't accomplish that, it was but a shadow. It couldn't deliver what only the gospel could deliver. Now, to tweak the metaphor of a shadow, we would say that the Old Testament gives us pictures of Christ and the gospel. Now, a picture is not the real thing, and yet it is related to the real thing. Some of you have pictures of your families and you put them on prominent places on the walls of your homes because those pictures are valuable to you. They're not without value, right? But it's not the same thing as having the family over at Thanksgiving and being able to hug them in the flesh, is it? I mean, the pictures are valuable, but the pictures can never substitute for the real people being present. Well, the old covenant, we need to realize, was instituted by God, and therefore it has value, but it didn't deliver the gospel realities that only Christ could. My former pastor, Andrew Kamiga, talked about how pictures can be so very helpful to him or were so helpful to him when he went to the Mexican restaurant. He admitted he didn't know a burrito from anything else on the menu, but when he saw pictures of the various dishes, he could see what he liked and he could point to the waiter and he said, bring me this. And the waiter would bring him whatever he was pointing to. Now when that dish came, he wasn't a billy goat. He didn't eat the menu. You can't be nourished by pictures. No, he ate the dish. He ate the food that was brought to him. Well, that's the way it is in the Bible. The Old Covenant gives us pictures of Christ and the gospel. But our souls need Christ. and the gospel realities that only he has purchased with his blood. The pictures of the law help us to understand, but they're not the new covenant realities. Well, another thing taught from the shadow lands is the centrality of Christ and the cross. The particular shadows in view in our text today were the sacrifices on the day of atonement. These were shadows of Calvary, but not Calvary. The Day of Atonement never got the job done, because if it had gotten the job done, it would have been a one and done, but it was an annual event, and because every year they had the Day of Atonement, it was a testimony that those sacrifices hadn't gotten the job done, and it was more than that. It was a perpetual reminder of human sin. That's what the preacher says in verse 3, but in these sacrifices there is a reminder of sins every year. It was impossible for these shadow sacrifices to save. Verse 4, for it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins. As Richard Phillips says, after all, these were dumb and unwilling animals that were being sacrificed for the willing, volitional sins of spirit-bearing human beings. And so granting that these shadow sacrifices could not put us into a right relationship with God and give us a good conscience that our sins had really and truly and decisively been dealt with, It does not, therefore, follow that the Old Covenant sacrifices were without any use. For one thing, they preached Christ, and for the pious, under the Old Covenant, that was of enormous spiritual benefit to them. They were taught to look beyond these sacrifices, as Abraham himself had instructed them in Genesis 22, to the lamb that God would provide. And they were saved, not by the sacrifices of blood of bulls and goats, by the Christ that the old covenant had taught them to put their hope in and their faith in. And still another benefit of the old covenant sacrifices was that it communicated sound doctrine to the old covenant people. It talked about the seriousness of sin. I mean, it must have been a sobering thing to go into the temple courts and to put your hand upon that beast of burden. signifying the transfer of your sin and guilt to the head of this victim and then to watch that victim die. Some of us have wept when we have had to put our pets down. Imagine what it was for the Israelites to be in that presence of that beast as that beast was slaughtered and to realize that that's what I deserve, I deserve death. It must have been a sobering thing. It communicated something of the seriousness of sin, the holiness of God, the necessity of atonement. It communicated sound doctrine. But the benefit that I especially have in mind is that the old covenant sacrifices preach to us under the new covenant the centrality of Christ and his cross. I mean, every year the Israelites were reminded that their biggest problem was not their warring neighbors. It wasn't the Philistines and it wasn't the Moabites or the Ammonites or the Syrians to the north. It wasn't even their economy. I mean, James Carville would not have gotten any traction in Old Covenant Israel by saying it's the economy stupid. No, when you live with all of these sacrifices, it's your sin stupid. I mean, that message comes at you every day. Every day there were sacrifices for sin. I mean, it was a bloody religion, you know, if you think about it. Every day you were reminded of that. But then you were reminded that it is of central importance because in the very center of their calendar year in the seventh month was Yom Kippur, the day of atonement. It was centrally placed because you see it points to Good Friday and Good Friday or the cross is central to Christianity. There's no Christianity without it. It has to have a central place. in the lives of God's people. It has to have a central place in covenant fellowship of Moneta. When Corrie ten Boom was imprisoned by the Nazis at the end of February of 1944, she was not initially sent to a concentration camp, but she spent some time in a Dutch prison, and she was able to receive letters while she was in that prison, and she got a letter from her sister Nolly. And when she saw the envelope, she instantly recognized something was different. She was very familiar with Nolly's script because Nolly had written her many letters in the course of their lives. But this script was different. Nolly had slanted her letters. And she had slanted her letters in the direction of the stamp. And so Corrie read that letter and then very carefully, after she read the letter, she came back to the stamp and very carefully got that stamp off. And there was a cryptic note under the stamp that said that all seven of the Jews that they had been hiding were safe. Well, the gospel accounts of the New Testament are written like Nolly wrote her script on that envelope. The New Testament documents, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and John, they're all slanted. They're all written with a slant to the cross. I mean, sometimes they've been called passion narratives with long introductions. The Gospel of John, half of it, is the Passion Week. The cross, the cross, the cross is central to Christianity. There is no Christianity without it. It's got to be kept in its center place. It's got to be kept in its central place when it comes to preachers. Paul says that, for I determine not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. Now Paul did not mean when he said that in his letter to the Corinthians that every sermon has to be about the cross. But what he meant is that every sermon needs to be shaped by the cross. It's kind of embarrassing for some of us who preach to think about how many sermons that we have preached in the course of our lives that the Jewish rabbi could have preached down at the synagogue. Don't go back and check out my work, just pray for me and pray for other preachers. We have all stumbled in many ways. But it is our responsibility as preachers to preach sermons that are shaped by the cross. You know, I was actually encouraged recently that even Martin Lloyd-Jones, the great London preacher, had to learn that. In a bite-sized biography on his life, Earl Davies writes, in 1929, after preaching in Bridgen, a small town situated halfway between Cardiff and Swansea, that's in Wales, the Calvinistic Methodist church minister there approached Lloyd-Jones immediately. The minister was troubled because in the sermon, Lloyd-Jones had emphasized divine sovereignty and the necessity of the new birth, but the death of Christ had had little mention Acknowledging the criticism, he began to rectify the serious weakness in his preaching. He read James Denny's The Death of Christ, published in 1903, and other books which enabled him to see even more clearly the centrality of the cross in the gospel. Why is this so important? Well, we're going to get to that eventually when the preacher talks about it in verse 10. But for now, let me just illustrate it this way. Imagine a Christian couple are on their way to church, and maybe it's even the Lord's table Sunday. Seems like that's usually if you're going to have conflict, it'll be on that day, right? On the way to church, they have an argument. and they come into the church building and they're not able to deal with that problem right now because they're in public and they sit down in the worship service and they are miserable and unhappy and there the preacher is droning away. Well, what do they need from their pastor at that moment? What do they need from the preacher? I'm not suggesting for a moment that they don't need, as soon as possible, to confess their sins to God. If they haven't done that already, they can do that in their seats, but they have to clear the air with each other. And before the sun goes down, I think they ought to do that. But what do they need from their preacher at that moment? Well, what they need from their preacher at that moment is a cross-shaped sermon. Because a cross-shaped sermon always reminds us of the grace of God. It reminds us that if you are a child of God, you are clean on account of the word, because you have believed the word, because you have trusted in Christ. You are clean. You've had the bath. You may have to have your feet washed. You may have to confess your sins again, but you are not, because of that argument, somehow out of the kingdom, out of God's good favor. That's not possible. You see, you need a cross-shaped sermon. And I don't know anything that can renew hope in the heart of a Christian who still has a struggle with a sin problem than to know that grace has definitively set you apart forever and ever in Christ, and nothing can undo that. And I don't know anything that can promote gratitude so much as an assurance that Jesus really did pay it all on the cross. And so what we need from preachers is we need cross-shaped sermons. So pray for us preachers that we would be able to do that. Well, secondly, let's consider the substance that God promised and desired and that meets our needs. That's verses five through 10. What God doesn't and does desire was spoken about in Psalm 40 verses 6 through 8. Look at verses 5 through 7 again. Consequently, when Christ came into the world, he said, sacrifices and offerings you have not desired, but a body have you prepared for me. In burnt offerings and sin offerings, you have taken no pleasure. Then I said, behold, I have come to do your will, O God, as it is written of me in the scroll of the book. What God could never be satisfied with were the Old Testament burnt offerings and sin offerings. That doesn't mean that God would have been satisfied if the old covenant Israelite had neglected them. I mean, God, after all, had commanded them and they needed to be done. It was right that they should have been offered in the age of promise. But the sacrifices themselves could never satisfy God. As we just read, the sacrificial blood of bulls and goats can't take away sin. It couldn't satisfy divine justice. It couldn't vindicate divine holiness. Those sacrifices could not please God. Now the pious in the Old Testament were not only instructed to look beyond them to Christ, but the people of God were reminded in places like Psalm 40 that going about the externals of religious life like offering sin offerings was no substitute for heart religion. You know, long before there was the Pharisees, long before there was the party of the Pharisees that we meet up with in the New Testament, the spirit of the Pharisees, you find it throughout the Old Testament, you find it throughout church history, that spirit of the Pharisees is to pay very close attention to the externals of religious life, but ignore the heart altogether. One thinks of King Saul and how he went about his religion. He paid attention to the externals on one occasion. He sacrificed so many sacrificial victims that a stream of blood did flow. But while he did all that, he seemed to be allergic to obedience. And Samuel the prophet confronts him. We read about that in 1 Samuel 15, 22. Does the Lord delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as much as in obeying the voice of the Lord? To obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed is better than the fat of rams. For rebellion is like the sin of divination, and arrogance like the evil of idolatry. Because you have rejected the word of the Lord, he has rejected you as king. Or think about what God says in Micah 6, 6 through 8. With what shall I come before the Lord and bow down before the exalted God? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with 10,000 rivers of oil? Shall I offer my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He has showed you, O man, what is good and what does the Lord require of you. to act justly and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God. Or think about what a penitent David wrote at the end of Psalm 51, verses 16 and 17. You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it. You do not take pleasure in burnt offerings. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart, oh God, you will not despise. And so one of the applications of the text is that as God could not possibly be pleased by the sacrificial blood of bulls and goats, so he cannot be pleased with a religion that is reduced to such externals and that ignores the heart. God cannot be pleased by the so-called faith of the person who looks at Jesus like Jesus is an insurance man, who provides fire insurance. But the angel of God did not say, you shall name him Jesus, for he shall provide fire insurance for careless sinners. But you shall name him Jesus, for he shall save his people from their sins. And in the case of quite a number of the people whom Jesus saves, he saves them from the sin of dead formalism. The heart does matter to God, it always has. What pleases God is the perfect obedience of Christ worked out for sinners like us. Now we have a quotation from Psalm 40. It's a psalm of David, and David is speaking in this psalm, but as you go into the psalm away, suddenly it isn't David that we see anymore. Suddenly his face fades. And the root and the offspring of David suddenly appears, and Jesus comes into the text. For notice, the preacher speaks of him coming into the world in verse 5, which implies preexistence and speaks of the incarnation. And that's a faithful interpretation of what is said in verse 7, where we read, then I said, behold, I have come to do your will, O God, as it is written of me in the scroll of the book. This is why God became man. It was to do the will of God. And of course, the will of God certainly includes obedience to the Ten Commandments, loving God supremely. That's the first table of law, loving our neighbor as ourself. The second table of law, Jesus came to obey the Ten Commandments, to obey it perfectly. He came to do more than that. He said, my food is due the will of him who sent me and to finish his work. He came ultimately for the supreme act of obedience, to be obedient to death, even death on the cross, to die in the place of sinners, bearing the sins of a multitude and of all who believe the gospel. He came to do that and God was pleased with him. Now the preacher is quoting from the Septuagint, which is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible and not the Hebrew original, as he quotes from Psalm 40. And thus in verse 5 he talks about his body. He says, sacrifices and offerings you have not desired, but a body have you prepared for me. Now that's an accurate reflection of the meaning of the original. But the original gives something different. It gives what we could call a synecdoche. And synecdoche is a big word, but I assure you that you use synecdoches all the time and you just don't know that they're labeled by a big word. Every teenage boy uses a synecdoche when he gets his first car. He tells his buddy, I got my, I got me some wheels. No, he doesn't mean he got four tires. He means he got a car, the wheels are apart that are put for the whole. And that's a synecdoche. And the original Hebrew has a synecdoche. It literally says that Messiah has ears that are dug out or some translations have it, Jesus has a pierced ear. And that stands for a life lived in complete obedience to God in the body. And so the Septuagint translation is accurately reflecting the meaning of the text. But the synecdoche, the part that is put for the whole, is the pierced ear. My former pastor, Andrew Kamiga, when he preached on this text, he called his sermon, Jesus had a pierced ear. Now, in order to appreciate that, you have to kind of step back into the Old Testament and kind of put yourself into the shoes of maybe a not so good farmer among the Jews. And he got himself into some trouble. And he wasn't able to pay his bills. And so he had to sell himself into slavery. And he became the slave of this fellow Jewish man. And imagine now. that things are going swimmingly for him. Under Jewish law, he wasn't a slave for life, six years, and in the seventh year he goes free, but he begins to think, you know, my master, he's such a good master, he's such a kind master, and he's such a better farmer than I am, and a better money manager than I am, I'm really better off staying with him. Well, what he could do, you can read about this ceremony in Deuteronomy 15, is he could become a slave for life. And the ceremony was, is they took him to the front door of the home of his master, where the wood post was found, and they got his ear up against that post. They took an awl and they made two marks. They made a mark through his ear, they pierced his ear, and they made a mark on the door post at the height of the man on that particular house because he was that man's slave and not the slave of another household. And every time you saw a Jewish man with a pierced ear, you say, well, there is a man who has a good master. There is a man who is a willing and grateful servant of a good master. And isn't that what Adam should have done in the garden? You know, when he was tempted to sin, he should have said, what are you talking about? I have such a good and gracious master. He has been so good and so kind to me. How can I go against him? That's what Adam should have done, but he didn't do that. And that's how come we, this world is in such a mess. But the second Adam did not fail like the first Adam. That's the good news. That's not how the second Adam responded. Every day of his life he obeyed, obeyed from the heart, obeyed gladly, and then he obeyed like nobody else could have ever obeyed because he didn't just keep the Ten Commandments. He was obedient to that mission that was given to him. to be obedient to death, even death on the cross, and to bear the sins of a great multitude and of all who believe on that cross. And God was pleased with this. And that makes all the difference to people like you and me. And the significance of the fulfillment of Psalm 40 and the life and death of Jesus Christ is spelled out in verses 8 through 10. And the first thing of significance for you and me is that the old covenant law system is is abolished. Look at verses 8 and 9. When he said, above you have neither desired nor taken pleasure in sacrifices and offerings and burnt offerings and sin offerings. These are offered according to the law. Then he added, behold, I have come to do your will. He does away with the first in order to establish the second. Basically what it means is that because Christ, the substance has come, all the shadows are put away. One of the applications in the new covenant community is that we don't mix the old covenant with the new covenant. We don't try to do that. We don't need priests. We don't need a perpetual sacrifice of a mass. We don't need these fancy vestments and so forth. We don't mix these two things because the old covenant has been put away. It was just shadow to begin with. And we must not think even in the Bible-believing church that the sacrifices of the law, the animal sacrifices will be resurrected in a future millennium on the earth. No, all the shadows are gone. and gone for good. Jesus has fulfilled the law and the prophets. The new covenant has come. God is pleased. And let us be pleased with what pleases God. But there's something else here. What Christ obedience means is a believer's positional sanctification that cannot be undone. Look at verse 10. And by that will, we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all. In Christ, a Christian is positionally set apart, definitively sanctified in a place where that person is now clean in the sight of a holy God. And nothing can change that. That doesn't mean that the Christian doesn't still have a sin problem. It doesn't mean that that Christian doesn't need to have his or her feet washed by Jesus Christ on a daily basis. It doesn't mean that we don't have to confess our sins and sometimes confess our sins to other people and clear the air and all that kind of thing. But what it means is you've had a bath and you're clean in the sight of God and you're definitively set apart in his kingdom. You are no longer a sinner but a saint. You know, one of the things that I think happens to Christian people, because we are so conscious that we have a sin problem, that sometimes we are quite ready to beat ourselves up and we say something like, I am such a sinner. I just want to say that God never says that about you. You may say that about you, But God never calls a Christian a sinner in the Bible. He calls you a saint. And he calls you his beloved child. Now, because you're his child, he'll discipline you because he disciplines everyone that he receiveth as a son. But you are his beloved child. You are a saint. You are not a sinner in his sight. That's what Christ has done for you. Nothing changes that. And the good news is also that the way to sainthood is open for every person who is still a sinner. And it is through faith in Jesus Christ. Jesus said so. And I close with his words, John 5, 24. Truly, truly, I say to you, he who hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and does not come into judgment, but has passed, perfect tense in the Greek, irreversibly, has passed out of death into life. Truly, truly, I say to you, he who hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and does not come into judgment, but has passed out of death into life. Amen. Let's pray. Our Father, we thank you for the Lord Jesus Christ, that he is substance, that he is fulfillment, that he has accomplished it all on the cross. We thank you for that. We thank you for the gospel. We thank you for good news. And we thank you that the good news is something that saints can take consolation in. And we pray that today that by your spirit that we would be comforted by the gospel. And we thank you too that the good news is something that sinners can find hope in. And we pray that by your spirit that you would be working in our midst in that way as well. We pray it in Jesus' name, amen.
Beyond the Shadowlands
Series Hebrews
Sermon ID | 5131903751640 |
Duration | 37:31 |
Date | |
Category | Sunday - AM |
Bible Text | Hebrews 10:1-10 |
Language | English |
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