The Old Way: A Visual Aid

How clear is your conscience? Here the tabernacle and its practices illustrate the ineffectiveness of the old way of knowing God. Because they dealt only with externals, the rituals of the tabernacle could not affect any permanent purification. They could not “clear the conscience of the worshiper” (9). Notice the joint emphases on God’s holiness and human sinfulness. Our sin must be removed if we are to know our holy God. The “Most Holy Place” (3) was where one would be in the immediate presence of God, but such close fellowship with the Almighty was not a privilege available to every ordinary Israelite (7). Even the high priest only had very limited access under strict conditions. One of those conditions was that he could never enter “without blood” (7). The life of a creature was represented by its blood (Lev. 17:11), so the shedding of blood was the key feature of a sacrifice. The blood of the sacrifice acted first to seal the covenant, then to effect it and purify everything connected with it. God’s acceptance of the sacrifice was the worshiper’s assurance that the covenant agreement was still in force. Therefore, as any Jewish reader of this epistle would know, the quality of the sacrifice was of immense importance. We have come to the heart of this epistle. If there was one thing that was fundamental to a relationship between God and people, it was not priesthood, nor even covenant, but the blood of the sacrifice which sealed the covenant. One of the key roles of the Holy Spirit under the old covenant was to point forward to “the new order” (8–10). From the start, the Lord had planned a better way, by which a better high priest would shed his own blood as a sacrifice for us.

Read Hebrews 10:19–25. Then draw near to God in confession, praise and adoration.