Hebrews 10:10
"By the which will we are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all."
Do you see why he mentioned the body a few verses earlier? It had to come. We had to have Christ in the flesh. God had to have that body prepared so that it could be the supreme sacrifice. Now again, most of us don't comprehend the idea and the necessity of the blood sacrifice (what most people don't do is dig into the word, take the fig leaf how many know its secret?). It’s beyond our human reasoning or comprehension. One day, when we get to Glory, I think we’ll understand, but I don’t think most of us can even get a smidgen of the understanding of why God has demanded the blood sacrifice. The closest I can come to it is that life is in the blood, but what does that mean? That we cannot get life unless there is first death. I mean that’s one of the laws of nature – for a seed to germinate and have new life, it has to first die. Well, spiritually it’s the same way, see? We cannot experience new life until we have experienced death to the old self willed sin nature. Let’s move on. This power is reserved to God in Christ and the mystery He had hidden in our sight but not our understanding until the Holy Spirit has taken His place within us. So in verse 11, we go back to the old economy.
Now before we can go any farther we need to understand something about the tree to which the axe had been laid as revealed by John the Baptist. This tree just like the sycimore we used earlier was symbolic of the religion of the day and is in fact the symbol of all such religion. When John saw the religious leaders, the Pharisees and Sadducees, coming for baptism, he unleashed a severe denunciation about their being a “brood of vipers,” the offspring of snakes! Or we can say sons of Satan as this is the plight of all humanity until the day of Christ be formed within us. John was the son of a priest, in his day of birth the high priest and the last such son with both parents being of Levi. And may have seen firsthand the hypocrisy and corruption of the religious parties of his day. He knew the sinister and ulterior motives of these religious leaders; they were not coming to repent of their sins. For they held themselves above the common people, supremer in all their ways and self-righteousness. John portrays them as low-down, poisonous snakes, just as Jesus does later (Matthew 12:34; 23:33), and inherent in that designation is the Jewish understanding of the serpent identified with Satan (Genesis 3:1; Revelation 12:9; 20:2), with whom Jesus identifies the activities of such religious leaders and in fact all religion (John 8:44).
John goes on to ask these religious leaders, “Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” (Matthew 3:7). “Are you just trying to save your own skins, and get off the hook?” “The wrath of God is coming,” John asserts in agreement to Psalm 2:9. The opposition of God against all evil. In fact, “the axe is already laid at the root of the trees” (Matthew 3:10; Luke 3:9) of their unproductive and unfruitful religious tenets and practices. John could see that the judgment of God was going to fall upon the religion of Judaism and Israel, and their roots were already exposed for the felling blow. Such a declaration of coming judgment is not necessarily referring to a future and final judgment, but to the judgment of God on all evil and religion as the New Covenant kingdom arrives in the person of His Son Jesus Christ. This hostility is carried to the max with the death of the Messiah as He ends all Judaism and its accompanying legalism and in deed the religions of the world as they all have their root in Satan.
Hebrews 10:11
"Every priest standeth daily (none excepted) ministering and offering oftentimes the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins:
Those sacrifices could never take away sins. It was impossible. And so the whole thing was just a failure. God set it aside. Let me show you just some of the things that the Scripture itself refers to. We’ve used these before and this again is just a little quick review. Come back to Galatians, chapter 4. And of course Galatians is written to Gentiles who were having pretty much the same problem that the Hebrews were in this Epistle of Hebrews. They were being tempted to go back under the ramifications of the Levitical Law. And Paul is just almost screaming at the top of his voice, "Don’t go under that Law!" Why? I’ll show you.
Galatians 4:9a
"But now, after that ye have known God, (that is through our being redeemed) or rather are known of God, (in other words, we are now His. Now look at the question) how turn ye again to the weak and beggarly elements….?"
Well what’s he referring to? The Levitical Law! And their paganism of a false religion. And they were both Weak and beggarly. Now that term beggarly in the Greek I think is even stronger than it is in the English. It means just what it says. It begged for all the things it didn’t have. It had no power. It had no transforming ability in the lives of the people that kept it. And, as I showed you, all it could do was condemn, religious legalism of any form condemns, it does not justify or release man from its hold of death. And so it was "weak and beggarly." Then come on over to chapter 5, still in Galatians, and verse 1. Again Paul is referring to that system of Law when he says for us in Grace:
Galatians 5:1a
"Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, (now here it comes) and be not entangled…"
Now that’s not a very pretty term is it? Have any of you ever been entangled or ensnared again in something? Most of you probably haven’t. In a hunting situation you can find those things a lot quicker than you can a lot of other places. Have you ever been in a briar patch and can’t find your way out? It’s scary. But anyway, this is Paul’s language for the Law. "Don’t get entangled again with the yoke of bondage."
Isn’t it amazing what the human race wants to do to itself? Instead of being out in the freedom of Grace and the glory of it, they’d rather get back where they can get entangled in laws and rules and regulations with all the forms of a godliness but without the power thereof. I can take you to another one from the lips of Peter. Come all the way back to Acts, chapter 15.
Acts 15:10
"Now therefore why tempt ye God, to put a yoke upon the neck of the disciples, which neither our fathers nor we were able to bear?"
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