Sermon 2951. With or Without Shedding of Blood
(No. 2951)
A SERMON PUBLISHED ON THURSDAY, AUGUST 31, 1905.
DELIVERED BY C. H. SPURGEON,
AT THE METROPOLITAN TABERNACLE, NEWINGTON, ON LORD'S-DAY EVENING, MAY 30, 1875.
"Without shedding of blood is no remission." Hebrews 9:22.
WEEK after week, standing before this congregation to preach the things concerning the Kingdom of Christ, I sometimes sayto myself, "I wonder how much longer I shall have to point out to some of these people the way of salvation before they willwalk in it-I wonder how many times I shall have to preach to them the Doctrine of Justification by Faith in the CrucifiedChrist of Calvary and how often I shall have to urge them to an immediate decision for Christ, the renunciation of their self-confidenceand the forsaking of their sins?" It seems to me that after I have done this, the right thing for me to do is to keep on askingyou, "Have you given due attention to these Truth of God? Do you know them in your soul?" For, "if you know these things,happy are you if you do them," but the very opposite of happy are you if you leave them undone!
I am going to try to enlist the attention of any earnest, thoughtful persons who are here, any of those who are still unconverted,but who have begun to consider their ways and to turn unto the Lord. To you, dear Friends, I mean to preach nothing but thesimple Gospel of Jesus Christ-and not to preach it as though I were addressing the settlers in Australia or the pundits ofHindustan-but to preach it distinctly to you and to urge you to accept it here and now. If you have not accepted it by thetime the sermon is done, it shall be through no fault of mine-the blame must lie at your own door, that you have been directedto the way of salvation, but have not walked in it-or that, having heard the Gospel and taken some interest in it, you havewillfully rejected it.
The subject of my discourse is to be the remission-the putting away and getting rid of sin-and that concerns every one ofus, from the youngest child to the oldest man or woman, for we are all sinners. It is very common for people to say, "Oh,yes, we are all sinners!" But I do not use that expression as they do. I mean that you have done wrong and that I have donewrong and that we have, all of us, done wrong! "We have done the things which we ought not to have done and we have left undonethe things which we ought to have done, and there is no health in us." We have chosen the wrong instead of the right. We havechosen to please ourselves rather than to please God. We have even lived as if there were no God! If there had really beenno God, our conduct might not have been materially affected. We have all sinned in some way or other-
"EEach wandering in a different way, But all the downward road."
And, dear Friends, we all of us need to be cleansed from this sin. There is not one among us who can afford to live in sin,or who can afford to die in sin. We may find a temporary pleasure in it, but it must end in eternal loss to us unless therecomes a time when God's Grace saves us from it-we cannot be truly happy while we are out of gear with God. And since we areimmortal beings and our soul will not die, but will live on forever, there will come a time in which the sin which is unforgivenwill be a sore plague to us. So it is vitally important that we should enquire whether, being sinners, we have been forgivenor not!
I hope I shall be able to reach the conscience of each person here while I try to talk to you about two contrasts. First wehave, in our text, sin unremitted and sin remitted. And then, secondly, we have without shedding of blood and with sheddingof blood.
I. So, first, we will consider these two things which are so opposite to each other-SIN UNREMITTED AND SIN REMITTED.
The Apostle says, "Without shedding of blood is no remission." I do not like the sound of those words, "no remission" Theyseem to me like a funeral knell-"no remission." That might have been the sound in the ears of every sinner from the time ofAdam until now-"no remission." It would have made this world a dreadful prison if everywhere, when we sat down to think ofour sin, there stared us in the face the words, "no remission." This is, indeed, one of the inscriptions across the vaultof Hell-"no remission," "no remission." I say that I cannot bear the sound of those words, yet they must be sounded aloud,for there are still some persons to whom they apply. I trust that the sounding of those words in their ears may be the meansof their awakening!
What does it mean when we say that a man has sinned and that there is no remission for him? It means, first, that he is theobject of the daily anger of God. God has a benevolent regard for him as one of His creatures and is not willing that he shouldperish. God would infinitely prefer that the sinner should turn to Him and live, but, viewing him as an impenitent sinner,we read that "God is angry with the wicked every day." I have learned not to take much notice of other people's opinions,yet I do not like to make anybody angry if I can help it. If I have ever done so-and sometimes it has happened unintentionally-Ihave had no pleasure in reflecting that someone was angry with me. And if it was somebody who would not be angry without acause, it has been a very painful thing to live under a consciousness of his displeasure. I want you whose sins are unforgiven,to reflect that God is angry with you every day. When He looks upon you, He cannot regard you as a father regards a dear childwho has done everything he can to please him, but He must look upon you as a rebel-as one who has revolted against Him anddefied Him to His face. When He looks upon your sin, His anger must flame forth. A man who is not angry with sin must be aguilty man and, in proportion to the holiness of God must be his abhorrence of evil.
Reflect, then, upon what a sad condition you are in. If God should never smite you in His righteous wrath-if He should continueto give you the mercies of this life every day just as He has done, I think, dear Friend, that it ought to trouble you allthe more that you are still provoking Him by your continued sin. If you really are of the noble spirit that I hope you are,you will not be so ungenerous as merely to regret your faults because of the suffering it will bring to yourself, but youwill lament it because it offends so loving, so good, so tender, so gracious a Being as the God of the whole earth! Were Hevindictive-had He no heart of compassion-if He had made no proclamation of mercy and no terms of Grace-I could understandhow you could brazen your forehead and defy Him. But how can you live in enmity against the God who has been so gracious toyou? Let the thought of the mercy of God make your unremitted sin such a burden upon your conscience that you will not restuntil you have repented of it and been forgiven!
Remember, dear Friends, that, in addition to being the object of the daily anger of God, you are in constant peril of sufferingthat anger to the fullest. A single step may cause you to fall-and that fall may lead to the grave. Who among us can tellall the perils of this mortal life? I remember reading a work in which there were collected together numerous instances ofthe simple means by which men have died, such as the swallowing of a fruit stone, or the sticking of a small bone in the throat,the breathing of some invisible noxious gas, or the failure of some almost imperceptible organ in the body to perform itsusual functions. How suddenly death often comes! A friend said to me, this morning, "Do you know that So-and-So is dead?"He was a dear fellow servant of Christ, an eminent preacher of the Gospel. I had no idea, when I saw him a little while agoin robust health, that he and I should never speak to each other again in this world! You, also, must often have heard ofthe death of friends-and someday people will tell the survivors that you, too, are gone. With unremitted sin upon you, youknow where you will go, do you not? I need not tell you where they are driven whose sin has never been forgiven-and whosesin never will be forgiven-as they have passed out of this world unwashed in the precious blood of Jesus!
May I very earnestly put to all of you who are still unsaved, this question-"How will you be able to die with unremitted sinupon you?" There are some of us who believe that there is a spot on this earth where our mortal remains are to lie-and itis possible that the tree of which the planks will form our coffin has already been cut down. We expect to die unless theLord shall soon come and that will amount to much the same thing. And, expecting to die, we would like to be ready to dieand to have our house in order. I like to meet a sensible man who insures his life so as not to leave his wife and familyin poverty, or who, when he has means at his disposal, lays by for a rainy day that should he be out of
work, he will not need to go and beg. Now, if such provision as this is commendable-and who will say that it is not-is itnot much more commendable with regard to eternal things? Are we to be careful about lesser matters and yet to make no preparationfor that last moment in which we must pass out of this world to undergo the solemn testing in the scales of unerring Justice?If unremitted sin is upon you-and it is to be fearful that it is upon very many of you-I pray you to consider what you willdo in that dread hour when the immortal tenant of your house of clay makes her fatal leap without a wing to buoy her up-andsinks into despair and into yet deeper despair in the bottomless abyss! God grant that none of our spirits may ever know whatit is to be found disembodied with unforgiven sin and afterwards to hear the trumpet of the great Day of Judgment ring out-andto go back into our risen bodies with sin unforgiven-and to be cast, body and soul, into the lake that burns forever and ever!
This is, surely, enough for me to say upon that sorrowful theme, so let us now think upon the brighter theme of remission.Our text seems to me to be musical with hope-"Without shedding of blood is no remission." Then it is clearly implied that,with shedding of blood, there is remission! In the Gospel we always have glad news to tell. Unconverted Sinner with your unremittedsin, we have glad news to tell you! And this is it-your sin may be remitted! There is no sin of which you can repent, whichmay not be forgiven you! There lives not a mortal man who, if he repents of his sin, shall not find mercy! There is a sinwhich is unto death, but those who commit it never ask for mercy, or desire it. They are dead even while they live, theirconscience is seared as with a hot iron, and they rush to Hell willingly. But never has a man sincerely anxious for salvationcommitted that sin! Let no penitent man despair, for there is remission for every sin of which any man truly repents and forwhich he exercises faith in the precious blood of the Lord Jesus Christ!
The remission of sin which God gives to His people is complete. That is to say, it wipes out all his sins, whatever they mayhave been. Now look, Believer, there is the list of your sins, it is a huge roll! If I were to unroll it, how long would itbe? Would it not belt the globe and reach from the earth to the sun and back again? Can you see all the sin that is recordedthere? Yet the moment that the blood of Jesus is applied to that roll, the whole record is blotted out and there shall neverbe any more sin inscribed there, for Jesus Christ never yet divided a man's sins, forgiving some, and leaving others unforgiven!He deals with sin in the mass, takes it all up and flings it into the sea, or buries it in His own sepulcher! And never shallit have a resurrection, for, says the Lord, "the iniquity of Israel shall be sought for, and there shall be none; and thesins of Judah, and they shall not be found." In the Epistle from which our text is taken, the Lord says, "I will put My Lawsinto their hearts, and in their minds will I write them; and their sins and iniquities will I remember no more." King Hezekiahsaid to the Lord, "You have cast all my sins behind Your back." And King David wrote, "As far as the east is from the west"-andthat is an infinite distance-"so far has He removed our transgressions from us." So you see that God completely sweeps awayour sins when He remits them!
Further, the man who gets remission of sin, gets a clearance from all danger of any penalty resulting from sin, so that hecan sing-
"If sin is pardoned, I'm secure, Death has no sting beside! The Law gave sin its damming power, But Christ, my Ransom, died."
In dying, Christ bought my pardon so that I have no cause to fear the punishment of my sin! What a blessing it is that thesin is gone and the penalty is gone too! When a man's sin is remitted, he comes to the position which would have been hisif he had never sinned. We fell, federally, in Adam, and we fell, actually, by our own sin. But Christ has put us back whereAdam was in his state of innocence. No, He has done more than that for us, for man was but man before he fell, but now manis linked to the Eternal in the Person of the God-Man, Christ Jesus, so we are nearer to God than Adam was before he fell!I said, Sinner, that God was angry with you, but if your sin is remitted, His anger is gone! What does a forgiven sinner sayto God? "Though You were angry with me, Your anger is turned away and You comforted me." "Like as a father pities his children,so the Lord pities them that fear Him." Jeremiah wrote, "The Lord has appeared of old unto me, saying, Yes, I have loved youwith an everlasting love; therefore with loving-kindness have I drawn you." It is sin that separates us from God-when thatis put away, there is no longer any separation-but we are one in blessed amity, sacred relationship, holy concord and nearand dear communion!
Do all of you, dear Friends, know what this remission of sin is? There are some of us who could boast of this-not that wecould boast of anything that we are, but we could boast and glory in the great goodness of the Lord to us, the very chiefof sinners! There are many here who could join with me in this declaration, "We were guilty and Hell-deserving, but, havingbelieved in the Lord Jesus Christ, we know that our sins, which were many, are all forgiven. We are 'clothed in the righteousnessof Christ and are accepted in the Beloved!' And we knowit and there is, therefore, now no condemnation to us who are in ChristJesus. And we are not afraid of any, for, 'being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.'The peace we have, through believing in Jesus, is so full, so rich, so deep, that it cannot be broken! Death itself will onlydeepen it. We are not afraid to die-why should we be? With the robe of His righteousness upon us, we shall stand boldly evenin the great Day of Judgment-and with the name of Jesus upon us, He will welcome us and say to us, 'Come, you blessed of MyFather, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.'"
I wish with all my heart and soul that every one of you had received the remission of your sin! I bless God that there aremany in this place who are humbly resting on the great atoning Sacrifice. My Brothers and Sisters in Christ, do not questionthe remission of your sins, for, to question that is to question the Word of God itself! God Himself declares that every believerin Christ is justified and saved. But many of you who have heard the Gospel, have not believed it. "This is the condemnation,that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil." This is yourgreatest sin-that you have not believed on Jesus Christ, whom God has sent! Oh, that God the Holy Spirit would convince youof the sin of unbelief and enable you to repent of it and to lay hold on Jesus Christ by a act of childlike faith, that youmight live through Him!
II. This brings me to the second point of my discourse, which divides itself into two parts-WITHOUT SHEDDING OF BLOOD-ANDWITH SHEDDING OF BLOOD.
"Without shedding of blood," says the Apostle-wherever that is the case, there is no remission. It is not possible that anysin should ever be forgiven to any man without shedding of blood. This has been known from the very first. As soon as manhad sinned, God taught him that he needed a sacrifice. Adam and Eve, after they had sinned, tried to clothe themselves withfig leaves, but that was not a sufficient covering. God must kill some animals, shedding their blood and, in their skins ourfirst parents must be clothed. When Cain and Abel had grown up, the only sacrifice that God would accept was the slain lamb.To Cain and his sacrifice of the fruits of the earth, God had no respect. Job is, perhaps, the earliest of the Patriarchs,but he offered sacrifices for his children lest they should have offended God while they were feasting. He did not think nordid any of those ancient men who feared God think of finding acceptance with Him and remission of sin-without shedding ofblood.
This belief has been almost universally held. There is scarcely to be found a tribe of men who have not believed in this.Wherever explorers go, they find that wherever there is any conception of God, there is a sacrifice in some form or other.Many people have thought it necessary to make very great sacrifices and some have even imagined that they could only expiatetheir guilt by offering up their own children, so deeply-seated is the thought in our humanity that there must be a sacrificefor sin! I scarcely know of any religion, except Socinianism, without a sacrifice. Humanity craves for it and cannot do withoutit. If anyone should proclaim a religion without a sacrifice, you would soon see how quickly this building would be emptied,or any other place of worship! There are always more spiders than people where the Atonement is left out. Men must have asacrifice-in their inmost hearts they know their absolute need of it when they seek to approach the Lord.
The old Mosaic Law revealed this need of a sacrifice for sin. The most prominent thing about it-that which must have stuckeverybody-was the blood. I do not know whether you have ever realized that the Tabernacle, which was praised for its beauty,must have looked like a veritable shambles and the gorgeous Temple, itself, must have needed abundant arrangements for itscleansing because of the continual sacrifices offered there-because so much of the service consisted in the shedding and sprinklingof blood. The most prominent idea that a worshipper would get would be that there was something for which an atonement wasneeded and that this involved the presentation of life before God. And that is just the thought that God would have us stillretain in our minds, for, "without shedding of blood is no remission."
Do not quarrel with this Truth of God, dear Friends, for you cannot alter it. It is not for me to stand here to justify theways of God to men, or to propound any theories of atonement. I have no theory. I simply say what the Apostle says, "Withoutshedding of blood is no remission." And there is no remission otherwise. You may stand and weep for sin till you become avery Niobe, or be transformed into a dripping well, or waste away in one continual shower of penitential lamentation, butno sin will ever be washed away so! To repent of sin is a part of your natural duty. And attention to one part of duty cannotatone for the neglect of another part.
"Oh, but!" you say, "in addition to this weeping and lamentation, I mean to amend." Well, suppose you do? If, from this timeforth, you never sin again-if a wrong thought, or word, or act should never again stain your character, you will have doneno more than it was your duty to do! And the fulfillment of your duty will be no atonement for the faults of the past-allyour tears and all your efforts cannot put away the guilt of the past, for "without shedding of blood is no remission." Andrepentance and good works are not shedding of blood!
Suppose you add to these things what you call religiousness? Very well. Do so. Attend the House of Prayer, join in the petitionsof the saints as far as you can, sing with them, but, all the while mind what you are doing, for you may be adding to yoursin instead of decreasing it, by relying upon such things as those! I repeat the declaration that you have only done whatyou ought to have done and that cannot make amends for your previous misdeeds and neglects, so that there, too, you rest upona broken reed.
Are you so foolish as to hope that sin can be put away by some sleight of hand that may be practiced by so-called "priests"?A plague upon them! They swarm on the face of this earth-these men who say that they are endued with some strange power bywhich they can remit human guilt by the muttering of certain words and by passing you through certain performances which aregenerally attended with the transference of some part of your substance to the pockets of the so-called "priests!" O Sirs,be not deceived by them! Open your eyes and see for yourselves what there can be in one of your fellow men just because therehave been laid upon his head the hands of a man wearing lawn sleeves, that he should have the power to put away your sins!If this folly is to be believed, do not let us hear any more about "the enlightened 19th Century." It would be a disgraceto the people of any century to believe in such a transparent lie as that! Go to the living God for pardon, for He alone cangive it! Make your confessions at His feet- only there they will be valid! And when you have confessed your sin to God, donot in any degree rely on sacramental efficacy, or on priestly power, but trust wholly to the shedding of blood! There isyour hope! But without shedding of blood, priest or no priest, sacrament or no sacrament, you will be lost as surely as youare a human being and a sinner!
My last point is to be with the shedding of blood there is remission. That is a much more delightful topic. If God had notprovided the Sacrifice for sin, my text would have sounded the death-knell of all our hopes. "Without shedding of blood-noremission," would have been like the flaming sword of the cherubim keeping us back from the Tree of Life. "My son, God willprovide Himself a lamb for a burnt offering," was the sweet assurance of Abraham to Isaac. But to us there is a still sweeterassurance-God has provided the Lamb for a burnt offering! Listen to this, you who would have remission! God Himself came intothis world. He who was offended by man's sin, condescended to become the Sacrifice to put away that sin! And coming here,He took upon Himself a human body, spotless and without taint of original sin. And here He lived as Man, perfect Man, yetjust as truly very God of very God. When He had reached the appointed time, He offered Himself upon the altar as the one Sacrificefor human sin and, by the shedding of His blood, there is remission for sin! Think of this great Truth of God! Here was aninnocent Sufferer, the value of whose life was worth more than an innumerable number of ours. It did more for the honor ofGod's Law for Christ to die than if we had all died, for all created beings will see how just God is when He will not letHis own Son escape even when guilt is only imputed to Him.
Jesus Christ has died. The Son of God has offered Himself as a Sacrifice for sin! So now, whoever believes on Him shall haveimmediate remission of sin. It hardly matters how I tell you this great Truth so long as I make it clear to you. If I spokeit ungrammatically, if I uttered it so that you had to lean forward and strain your ears to catch the message, it would notmatter as long as you were able to understand it. You are bound to lay hold of this Truth of God, for it is your life! Ifyou do not grasp it, whose fault will it be? If I stood in the midst of a company of criminals condemned to die and told themthat a free pardon could be obtained in a certain way, there would not be one of them who would criticize my voice or my mannerbecause, if they really wanted pardon, they would all be taken up with the thought of getting it! It
does not matter to me what criticism you may happen to make about me. I shall sleep just as well, I daresay, for all that-andlive as long!
But I beseech you not to let any remarks or thoughts about me, or the place, or anything else drive any of you from this conviction-thatyou must either be saved or lost! That you must have your sins forgiven or else you will be ruined forever! That the onlyway of getting them forgiven is through the shedding of blood and that the only way of availing yourselves of the efficacyof the shedding of blood of Christ is by simple confidence in Him! Does anybody misunderstand that expression? Then I putit thus-give yourself up deliberately into the hands of Christ to save you from the consequences of your sin. As one who isfalling, drops because he must, but drops cheerfully because another stands with outstretched arms to catch him, so drop intothe Savior's arms! We are all prone to sin, but if we give ourselves up to Christ, He will change our natures and make uslove holiness. He will renew our hearts so that we shall seek after that which is good, pure, lovely and excellent in thesight of God. Salvation from the propensity to sin, as well as from the guilt of sin, will be given at once to everyone whobelieves in the Lord Jesus Christ!
"But I do not feel right," one says. Feeling right is not the all-important matter. "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, andyou shall be saved."
"I will go home and pray," says another. That is not what I urge you to do first. First, believe, and thenpray. To put prayerin the place of faith is to suggest to God that He should change the plan of salvation, which is, as I just reminded anotherFriend, "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you shall be saved." "What am I to do, then? Am I to believe that Jesus Christdied for me in particular?" I did not say that. You are to trust Jesus Christ whether you have any particular interest inHim or not. You will find out your particular interest in Christ in due time. Just now, look at Christ upon the Cross. Thatis a spectacle that is well worthy of your careful observation! There He hangs, He who made all worlds! With hands and feetfastened to the accursed tree, He hangs there to die the death of a slave-the death that the Romans would scarcely inflictupon slaves unless they had committed some extraordinary crimes. He whom the angels worship, hangs there to die, "the Justfor the unjust, that He might bring us to God." Can you not trust your soul with Him? Will you not believe that God, for Christ'ssake, can forgive you? Will you not now rush into His arms and confess your sins, yet look up and say, "I know that You canforgive, for Christ has died, and I do rest my soul on His atoning Sacrifice"?
I remember-though it was many years ago-when first I really understood that I was simply to look to Jesus Christ and that,doing so, I would be saved. I felt in my heart that I wished I had known it long before, for I had been for years seekingrest and finding none-I only needed to be told that there was nothing for me to do but simply look to Christ! Oh, how I didleap at that message! It was the best sermon I ever heard, yet it was, in itself, a very poor one. But it had in it that whichwas the means of saving my soul. I trusted Christ then with my soul and now I have nothing else to rest on. I have preachedsome thousands of times since that day and God has given me many souls, but I have not found any improvement as to the wayof salvation. I trusted wholly in Christ, then, and well I might, for I had nothing else to trust to! And I trust in nothingbut Jesus Christ, now, and well I may, for I still have nothing else to trust to!
If there is a poor sinner here who sees the lifeboat of faith come close up to him and he is afraid to step in, if it is anycomfort to you, Sinner, let me tell you that if you step into that lifeboat and are lost, I must be lost, too, for I do notknow of any other way of escape! If there is anyone who trusts in Jesus Christ and is damned, I must be damned with him-Iam perfectly willing to go with him to prison and to death. If my Lord Jesus Christ is not able to save a sinner just as heis, then He is not able to save me. And if the blood of Jesus Christ cannot wash out sin, then mine will never be washed out,for I have nothing but the blood of Jesus Christ to trust to, and I say to Him-
"Other refuge have I none- Hangs my helpless soul on You." O Sinner, you can hang where I can hang and where all God's peopleare hanging! "Ah," you say, "you do not know what a great sinner I am." No, and you do not know what a great Savior He is!"Ah, but I have such a hard heart!" But His heart was broken and He can break yours! "Yes, but it will be an amazing thingif He ever saves me." Ah, there you are right, and so it is when He saves anybody-and He delights to work wonders of Grace!I wonder which will be the biggest wonder in Heaven-you or I-or someone else here or elsewhere? Well, we shall see when weget there, but mind that you get there! God bless you, for His dear Son's sake! Amen.
EXPOSITION BY C. H. SPURGEON: HEBREWS 9:18-28; 10:1-25.
Hebrews 9:18-22. Whereupon neither the first testament was dedicated without blood. For when Moses had spoken every precept to all the peopleaccording to the Law, he took the blood of calves and of goats, with water, and scarlet wool, and hyssop, and sprinkled boththe book, and all the people, saying, This is the blood of the testament which God has enjoined unto you. Moreover he sprinkledwith blood both the tabernacle and all the vessels of the ministry. And almost all things are by the Law purged with blood;and without shedding of blood is no remission. Under the Law of God, some things were purified by fire or by water, but, "almostall things" were "purged with blood" and there was, and still is, no remission of sin "without shedding of blood."
23-26. It was therefore necessary that the patterns of things in the Heavens should be purified with these, but the Heavenlythings themselves with better sacrifices than these. For Christ is not entered into the Holy Place made with hands which arethe figures of the true, but into Heaven itself, now to appear in the Presence of God for us: nor yet that He should offerHimself often, as the high priest enters into the Holy Place every year with blood of others; for then must He often havesuffered since the foundation of the world: but now once in the end of the world has He appeared to put away sin by the sacrificeof Himself. In every respect, our great High Priest was superior to the high priests under the Law, though, in some points,they resembled Him and were types of Him.
27, 28. And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment: so Christ was once offered to bear the sinsof many and unto them that look for Him shall He appear the second time without sin unto salvation. His one offering so fullymet all the claims of Divine Justice on behalf of all His people that there was no need of another offering for sin, and noroom for it, so His Second Coming will be "without a sin offering unto salvation," as the passage may be rendered.
Hebrews 10:1. For the Law having a shadow of good things to come, and not the very image of the things, can never with those sacrificeswhich they offered year by year continually make the comers thereunto perfect This refers to the old Ceremonial Law, underwhich the Jews lived so long. They always had to go, year after year, offering the same kind of sacrifices because the workof atonement was never perfectly done-men were not cleansed or saved by it-so the process had to be continually repeated.
2. For then would they not have ceased to be offered? Because that the worshippers once purged should have had no more conscienceof sins. There would have been no need to bring another lamb to be offered if the one which was presented had put away sin!There would have been no need of another Day of Atonement if the sacrifice on the one day had really made atonement for sin.
3, 4. But in those sacrifices there is a remembrance again made of sins every year For it is not possible that the blood ofbulls and of goats should take away sins. Their blood was only a picture, an emblem, a type of far more precious blood-theshadow of the real Atonement which was afterwards to be offered.
5. Therefore, when He comes into the world. That is, the true Messiah, the Son of God, Jesus of Nazareth, our Redeemer-"WhenHe comes into the world"- 5. He says. According to Psalm 40:6-8-
5-9. Sacrifice and offering You would not, but a body have You prepared Me: in burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin Youhave had no pleasure. Then said I, Lo, I come (in the volume of the Book it is written of Me), to do Your will, O God. Abovewhen He said, Sacrifice and offering and burnt offerings and offering for sin You would not, neither had pleasure therein;which are offered by the La w; then said He, Lo, I come to do Your will, O God. He takes away the first, that He may establishthe second. He takes away the type because the great Antitype has come! He abolishes the offering of bull, goats and lambsbecause HE has come whom they all foreshadowed!
10. By which we are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once and for all Or, "once." It can neverbe offered again. The pretence of offering up the body and the blood of Christ in the "mass" is sheer profanity! It has beendone once and there is no need of a repetition. To suppose that it could be repeated is to imply that it was incomplete onthe first occasion! But it was not, for by it we are already sanctified!
11, 12. And every priest stands daily ministering and offering oftentimes the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins:but this Man, after He had offered one Sacrifice for sins forever, sat down at the right hand ofGod. It was done, wholly done,and done forever! Nothing was to be added to it and, therefore, Jesus "sat down" in the place of honor and power "at the righthand of God"-
13, 14. From henceforth expecting till His enemies be made His footstool. For by one offering He has perfected forever themthat are sanctified. Or, "set apart." He has fully saved all those for whom He died. His one Sacrifice was so effectual that,by it, He has forever put away the sin of the whole multitude of those that believe in Him.
15. Whereof the Holy Spirit also is a witness to us. And what more veritable Witness can we have? That to which the Holy Spiritbears testimony must never be questioned by us.
15-17. For after He hadsaid before, This is the Covenant that I willmake with them after those days, says the lord, I willput My Laws into their hearts, and in their minds will I write them; and their sin and iniquities will I remember no more.What a wonderful Covenant that is-not that He will bless you if you keep the Law, but that you shall be enabled to keep itand that He will lead you to do so by putting His Law, not on tablets of stone where your eyes can see it, but on the fleshytablets of your heart where your soul shall feel its force and power so that you shall be obedient to it! Meditate on thoseglorious words-"Their sins and iniquities will I remember no more."
18. Now where remission of these is, there is no more offering for sin. If the sins themselves have gone and God will rememberthem no more, no further sacrifice is required for them! What need have you of cleansing if you are so clean that God, Himself,sees no sin in you? O glorious purgation by the atoning Sacrifice of Christ! Rejoice in it and praise the Lord for it foreverand ever!
19-25. Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enterinto the holiest by the blood of Jesus, by a new andliving way, whichHe has consecrated for us, through the veil, that is to say, His flesh; and having an High Priest over the house of God; letus draw near with a true heart, in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, and our bodieswashed with pure water. Let us hold fast the profession of our faith without wavering; (for He is faithful that promised)and let us consider one another to provoke unto love and to good works: not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together,as the manner of some is; but exhorting one another: and so much the more, as you see the day approaching. Notice the practicalteaching of this great Truth of God! If you have been thus washed, do not defile yourselves again. If, by God's rich mercy,you have been delivered from the transgressions of the past, let gratitude move you to holy living and endeavor not only togrow in Grace, yourselves, but to help others in the same direction, so that the abounding mercy of God may have abundantpraise from us. God grant it for His name's sake! Amen.