Sermon text: Hebrews 10:5–10
The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.
Even as the writer of Hebrews recalls the sacrificial system of the Old Testament, he says that actually, holiness is in the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ — not by the body of animals, but only in the person of the work, the physical body of the Son of God, the Son of Man. So if there’s going to be salvation, the incarnation of God is the necessary reality of the faith, the articles of faith, and the concrete way in which God redeems human flesh.
The call of Isaiah, for example, in chapter 6, to the prophetic ministry is an example of how important physicality — that is, the body and the blood — is in the economy of God’s salvation. In Isaiah chapter 6, the prophet tells us what he saw and heard when he was taken into the heavenly temple to be in the presence of the LORD God. He wrote: “I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him stood the seraphim. Each had six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. And one called to another and said: ‘Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!’ And the foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of him who called, and the house was filled with smoke.”
Here’s the point: Isaiah was taken up into the heavenly temple in his body, and he saw the physical body of the LORD sitting on the throne, and the physical body of the angels crying out the call to the evangelist, the prophet. He stood in God’s physical presence. And as a sinner, he knew he didn’t belong there. It’s something that Christians today seem to forget a great deal. “Woe is me! For I am lost,” the prophet said. “I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts.”
What follows after this declaration of sin, this confession of sin, is the atoning work of Jesus Christ. Forgiveness of sin is then distributed to Isaiah by an angel in the form of a hot, burning coal from the sacrificial altar, which brings about the forgiveness of all of Isaiah’s sin and makes him holy in the sight and the company of the LORD God, Yahweh Elohim — all done in the body. We read: “Then one of the seraphim flew to me, having in his hand a burning coal that he had taken with tongs from the altar. And he touched my mouth and said: ‘Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for.’ And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?’ Then I said, ‘Here I am! Send me.’”
Now, the truth is that only the LORD God, Yahweh Elohim, the God of the Old and the New Testament, is truly holy in and of Himself. He needs nothing else. He is perfect. He’s totally other, totally unworldly, uncommon, undefiled, set apart from all the rest. That’s all that meaning packed into the word “sanctified” or “holy”: and free from sin, death, and the power of the devil. His holiness reveals His one-of-a-kindness. No other god and no other being in creation is holy like our LORD God Himself is holy.
Yet this holy God — the one who made man in His image, who created everything out of nothing, and still preserves all things by His grace, and preserves them for you, above all else — He preserves for you a way in which you can be made holy in His sight. Leviticus 19:1 and 2: He makes it clear what His standard for fellowship, for participation with Him in a relationship, is. 19:2: “The LORD spoke to Moses, saying, ‘Speak to all the congregation of the people of Israel and say to them, You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy.’” That is, we are to be just like Him in His holiness and righteousness.
Now, there’s much that stands in the way between you and me and our heavenly Father in terms of holiness. We, first and foremost, are sinners. We are not only unholy, we are unclean, and continue to sully ourselves all the time. We are defiled within and without, in thought, word, and deed. What right do we have to share in His holiness? What right do we have to draw near to Him and enter into a relationship with the LORD God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? What right do we have to draw near to Him, to approach His holy presence, so that we can be sanctified and share in His holiness?
No one comes before God on their own terms. No one comes into God’s presence on their own plans, by his means and merit, no matter how great a good deed may seem to men and mankind. Only through true Christian faith enables one to come into the presence of the Holy One of Israel. One of my New Testament professors back at Concordia College in 1983, Dr. Arthur Grimstead — still an old-fashioned Lutheran at that time — reminded his students all the time, of which I was one of them: God, not man, dictates the terms of a relationship with Him. So if He requires perfection, perfectness, holiness, and righteousness to enter into His presence, that is the requirement. And you and I, and nobody else, has any right or appeal to good deeds, good intentions, good works, or anything in and of us.
But none of this stops God from coming to you. As holy and as righteous as He is, making you and me holy and giving access to Him is what Christ Jesus came to do. And He has this particular way of doing it: namely, to make you holy requires a body, a physical presence — a second Adam. That’s how it’s always been. God has always wanted to make His people holy, and He’s always done it through a physical body. That’s what the whole sacrificial system in the tabernacle and the temple was all about. The sacrificial system was established by God to atone for Israel’s sin and to draw His people unto Himself by making them holy.
This holiness is a holiness that’s imputed. It’s a fancy word for meaning given to you, wrapped on you, put on top of you. It comes from outside of you. Nothing inside. See, bad fruit comes from a bad tree, good fruit from a good tree — Jesus’s teaching. God’s chosen people could never, never be totally set apart from the world like their God is set apart. But when they’re given to share in His holiness, that separates us from the world and joins us to our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
“For I am the LORD who brought you up out of the land of Egypt to be your God,” declares the LORD to Israel, “and you shall be holy, for I am holy.” He repeats Himself. That’s 11:45. He makes it clear over and over again to the children of Israel, to His first church, that they are to be holy on account of Him and through the bodily works that He does. The only way to approach God, this holy God, is on His terms, according to what He does in the means of grace which He has established for us, that we would know, in fact, He has imputed us with His holiness.
That’s what the book of Leviticus is all about: the gracious means of accessing holiness that is not a part of us — alien. All the rules and the rubrics, the timing, the location, the particular animal to be sacrificed, everything laid out so that Israel could draw near to God and know that He was making them holy. He was, in fact, sanctifying them in His own eyes. There’s no works-righteousness in the Old Testament. There is not a different God or a different way of being God between the Old Testament Jews and New Testament Christians. There are not two ways someone is saved from sin. It’s called two-covenant theology. And especially in the media these days, they don’t quite understand what they’re teaching. They’re teaching that you could be saved apart from faith in Jesus Christ, if you would adhere to the laws, the rubrics, and the sacrifices in the Old Testament. That’s a two-covenant theology, and it is condemned by this book called Hebrews.
Holiness in the Old Testament covenant came through the bodily sacrifices of animals to the faithful. In the Old Testament age, it was by bulls and goats. In the New Testament age, which has come — it is now here and now — in the bread and wine, in the water and the word of baptism, in confession and absolution. Then it was by daily, monthly, and annual offerings. But now it’s by baptism, the ongoing status of repentance, the hearing of the word, the preaching of the word, the reception of the word, and the gospel as embodied in the Lord’s Supper, the sacrament of the altar, where you receive mysteriously the body and blood of Jesus Christ at the altar.
The letter to the Hebrews doesn’t deny that the saints of old were sanctified in some sense in sacrifices. But it strongly warns Christians against going back to what is old when the new has come. Consequently, when Christ came into the world, He said — our reading: “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.’”
The speaker is Christ. When the Son of God, the promised Messiah, came into the world, He came into the world in the form of an infant child’s body. Within this body, He came to do the will of His heavenly Father. He came to atone for the sins of the world and to sanctify all who would believe in Him by dying the sinner’s death. But why a body, you might ask? Why not just by fiat forgive the entire world? Why not simply thunder a word of absolution that covers everybody from all time and all places and all spaces, and avoid the messiness of flesh and blood?
Well, as it’s said of old, it is, always and always will be, that forgiveness of sin requires blood. Leviticus again: “For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it for you on the altar to make atonement for your souls, for it is the blood that makes atonement by the life.” Hebrews says the same thing: “Indeed, under the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.” To have blood, there must be a body. To have a body, there must be blood. It’s the life of the world.
The old covenant: the blood of bulls and goats was offered repeatedly to provide a sort of temporary sanctification of the people. But now Christ has come, and the body prepared for Him was a body prepared for death, for the shedding of blood, for the forgiveness of sins and the sanctifying of His people. Holiness in the New Testament comes through the bloody sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross of Good Friday. It was never the body and the blood of the animals that took away sins or granted access to holiness. It was faith in the promised Messiah to whom the sacrifices of animals were tied. They were prefigures. It was by these that the atoning work of Jesus Christ was distributed and given to God’s people.
Through sacrifices as through sacraments, Israel gained access to God and shared in His holiness. I repeatedly taught that the sacrifices of the Old Testament are the old means of grace, the old sacraments of the Old Testament, that have been replaced by the sacraments of the New Testament. It’s the difference between pre- and post-Christ. They were types, these animals: figures, means of grace, delivering the one whose blood alone forgives sinners.
When Jesus came, everything changed. And His body offered on the cross, and the blood that flowed from His back and His head and His hands and His feet and His inside, was all a once-for-all and one-for-all sacrifice of all time. This was the real payment, the real sacrament, the opening of the heavenly gates to sinners such as us. For those sacrifices in Christ on Good Friday won the forgiveness of sins for the whole world.
Here in the body of Jesus, we have full atonement and final access to God. We share in His holiness by His grace. So if we’re given all of this by faith in Jesus Christ, why go back to the old ways? Why return to the temple, to the old laws, the old rites, the old sacrifices, the old types and figures, which always pointed forward to the advent of the promised Messiah?
God never intended anyone to trust in the sacrifice of an animal itself. If only we only have absolution because of the sacrifices tied to Christ. When He said above, “You have neither desired nor taken pleasure in sacrifices and burnt offerings and sin offerings,” rather He says, “Behold, I have come to do your will.” That is: you’re not saved by the laws of the Old Testament rites and rituals and sacrifices. You’re saved instead by the fact that the Messiah came and fulfilled the law completely in your stead. “Behold, I have come to do your will,” the Messiah says to God the Father. And He does away with the first — that is, the old system — in order to establish the second — that is, this system that we live in and on. And by that, we all are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all. No repeated sacrifice again and again and again and again. It’s done. In Christ on the cross, all sufficient.
That’s why good works are utterly meaningless. First of all, we can’t do them. Secondly, if we think we have, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. God wants to sanctify His people. He wants to make you holy. For that, He needs a body: a body prepared for Him that would be offered once and for all as a sacrifice. Through Him and His offering, we have access to God. We are invited to share in His holiness.
The old is gone, the new has come. Sacrifices and offerings no longer in the Old Testament way provide access to God. But in this place, this little building, He comes to you in the word and sacrament ministry. He gives you His body and blood in, with, and under the bread and wine. And He speaks His promise of forgiveness, life, and salvation. Here He draws close to you, that you may be found in Him. Here He comes to do the Father’s will and imputes His perfect obedience to you. He has come to make you holy, for He Himself is holy, and that’s what He requires in the relationship.
So take and eat the very body and blood of Christ, given and shed for you for the remission of sins. For where there is the remission of sins, there is by necessity life and salvation. He has come to make you holy. For you are holy. So here in a bit, take and eat the very body of Christ given for you. For your sins have been forgiven. You are saints: obviously holy ones in Christ Jesus. Amen.
May the peace that surpasses all understanding keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.