The Expositor's Bible: The Epistle to the Hebrews

The Apostle has interpreted the beautiful story of Melchizedek with wonderful felicity and force. The point of the whole Epistle, he now tells us, lies there. He has brought forth the headstone of the corner, the keystone of the arch.142 It is, in short, that we have such a High-priest. Country, holy city, ark of the covenant, all are lost. But if we have the High-priest, all are restored to us in a better and more enduring form. Jesus is the High-priest and King. He has taken His seat once for all, as King, on the right hand of the throne of the Majesty, and, as Priest, is also Minister of the sanctuary and of the true tabernacle. The indefinite and somewhat unusual term “minister” or “public servant”143 is intentionally chosen, partly to emphasise the contrast between Christ’s kingly dignity and His priestly service, partly because the author wishes to explain at greater length in what Christ’s actual work as High-priest in heaven consists. For Christ’s heavenly glory is a life of service, not of selfish gratification. Every high-priest serves.144 He is appointed for no other purpose than to offer gifts and sacrifices. The Apostle’s readers admitted that Christ was High-priest. But they were forgetting that, as such, He too must necessarily minister and have something which He can offer. Our theology is still in like danger. We are sometimes prone to regard Christ’s life in heaven as only a state of exaltation and power, and, consequently, to speak more of the saints’ happiness than of their service. It is the natural result of superficial theories of the Atonement that little practical use is made by many Christians of the truth of Christ’s priestly intercession. The debt has been paid, the debtor discharged, and the transaction ended. Christ’s present activity towards God is acknowledged and – neglected. Protestants are confirmed in this baneful worldliness of conception by their just desire to keep at a safe distance from the error in the opposite extreme: that Christ presents to God the Church’s sacrifices of the mass.

The truth lies midway between two errors. On the one hand, Christ’s intercession is not itself the making or constituting of a sacrifice; on the other, it is not mere pleading and prayer. The sacrifice was made and completed on the Cross, as the victims were slain in the outer court. But it was through the blood of those victims the high-priest had authority to enter the holiest place; and when he had entered, he must sprinkle the warm blood, and so present the sacrifice to God. Similarly Christ must enter a sanctuary in order to present the sacrifice slain on Calvary. The words of the Apostle John, “We have an Advocate with the Father,” express only one side of the truth. But he adds the other side of the conception in the same verse, “And He is the propitiation,” which is a very different thing from saying, “His death was the propitiation.” But what sanctuary shall He enter? He could not approach the holiest place in the earthly temple. For if He were on earth, He would not be a Priest at all, seeing there are men ordained by the Law to offer the appointed gifts on earth.145 The Jewish priests have satisfied and exhausted the idea of an earthly priesthood. Even Melchizedek could not found an order. If he may be regarded as an attempt to acclimatise on earth the priesthood of personal greatness, the attempt was a failure. It always fails, though it is always renewed. On earth there can be no order of goodness. When a great saint appears among men, he is but a bird of passage, and is not to be found, because God has translated him. If it is so of His saints, what of Christ? Christ on earth through the ages? Impossible! And what is impossible to-day will be equally inconceivable at any point of time in the future. A correct conception of Christ’s priestly intercession is inconsistent with the dream of a reign of Christ on earth. It may, or may not, be consistent with His kingly office. But His priesthood forbids. We infer that Christ has transformed the heaven of glory into the holiest place of a temple, and the throne of God into a shrine before which He, as High-priest, presents His sacrifice.

The Jewish priesthood itself teaches the existence of a heavenly sanctuary.146 All the arrangements of tabernacle and ritual were made after a pattern shown to Moses on Mount Sinai. The priests, in the tabernacle and through their ritual, ministered to the holiest place, as the visible image and outline of the real holiest place – that is, heaven – which the Lord pitched, not man.

Now Christ’s more excellent ministry as High-priest in heaven carries in its bosom all that the Apostle contends for, – the establishment of a new covenant which has set aside for ever the covenant of the Law. “He has obtained a ministry the more excellent by how much He is the Mediator of a better covenant.”147 These words contain in a nutshell the entire argument, or series of arguments, that extends from the sixth verse of the eighth chapter to the eighteenth verse of the tenth. The course of thought may be divided as follows: —

1. That the Lord intends to establish a new covenant is first of all shown by a citation from the prophet Jeremiah (viii. 7–13).

2. A description of the tabernacle and of the entrance of the priests and high-priests into it teaches that the way into the holiest place was not yet open to men. This is contrasted with the entering of Christ into heaven through His own blood, which proves that He has obtained for us an eternal redemption and is Mediator of a new covenant, founded on His death (ix. 1–18).

3. The frequent entering of the high-priest into the holiest place is contrasted with the one death of Christ and His entering heaven once. This proves the power of His sacrifice and intercession to bring in the better covenant and set aside the former one (ix. 25–x. 18).

I. A New Covenant promised through Jeremiah

“For if that first covenant had been faultless, then would no place have been sought for a second. For finding fault with them, He saith,

Behold, the days come, saith the Lord,That I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah;Not according to the covenant that I made with their fathersIn the day that I took them by the hand to lead them forth out of the land of Egypt;For they continued not in My covenant,And I regarded them not, saith the Lord.For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of IsraelAfter those days, saith the Lord;I will put My laws into their mind,And on their heart also will I write them:And I will be to them a God,And they shall be to Me a people:And they shall not teach every man his fellow-citizen,And every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord:For all shall know Me,From the least to the greatest of them.For I will be merciful to their iniquities,And their sins will I remember no more.

In that He saith, A new covenant, He hath made the first old. But that which is becoming old and waxeth aged is nigh unto vanishing away.” – Heb. viii. 7–13 (R.V.).

The more spiritual men under the dispensation of law anticipated a new and better era. The Psalmist had spoken of another day, and prophesied of the appearance of a Priest after the order of Melchizedek and a Son of David Who would also be David’s Lord. But Jeremiah is very bold, and says148 that the covenant itself on which the hope of his nation hangs will pass away, and his dream of a more spiritual covenant, established on better promises, will at some distant day come true. It is well to bear in mind that this discontent with the present order lodged in the hearts, not of the worst, but of the best and greatest, sons of Judaism. It was the salt of their character, the life of their inspiration, the message of their prophecy. In days of national distress and despair, this star shone the brighter for the darkness. The terrible shame of the Captivity and the profound agony that followed it were lit up with the glorious vision of a better future in store for the people of God. On the quivering lips of the prophet that “sat weeping,” as he is described in the Septuagint,149 this strong hope found utterance. He had washed the dust of worldliness from his eyes with tears, and, therefore, saw more clearly than the men of his time the threatened downfall of Judah and the bright dawn beyond. In reading his prophecy of the new covenant we almost cease to wonder that some persons thought Jesus was Jeremiah risen from the dead. The prophet’s words have the same ring of undaunted cheerfulness, of intense compassion, of prophetic faith; and Christ, as well as the Apostle, cites His prediction that all shall be taught of God.150

Jeremiah blames the people.151 But the Apostle infers that the covenant itself was not faultless, inasmuch as the prophet seeks, in his censure of the people, to make room for another covenant. We have already been told that there was on earth no room for the priesthood of Christ.152 Similarly, in the sphere of earthly nationality, there was no room for a covenant other than that which God had made with His people Israel when He brought them out of the land of Egypt. But the earthly priesthood could not give efficacy to its ministering, and thus room is found for a heavenly priesthood. So also, the covenant on which the earthly priesthood rested being inadequate, the prophet makes room for the introduction of a new and better covenant.

Now the peculiar character of the old covenant was that it dealt with men in the aggregate which we call the nation. Nationalism is the distinctive feature of the old world, within the precincts of Judaism and among the peoples of heathendom. Even the prophets could not see the spiritual truth, which they themselves foretold, except through the medium of nationality. The Messiah was the national king idealised, even when He was a Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. In the passage before us the prophet Jeremiah speaks of God’s promise to write His law on the heart as made to the house of Judah and the house of Israel, as if he were not aware that, in so speaking, he was really contradicting himself. For the blessing promised was a spiritual and, consequently, personal one, with which nationality cannot possibly have any sort of connection. It is a matter of profound joy to every lover of his people to witness and share in the uprising of a national consciousness. Some among us are beginning to know now for the first time that a national ideal is possible in thought, and sentiment, and life. But there must not, cannot, be a nationality in religion. A moral law in the heart does not recognise the quality of the blood that circulates through. This truth the prophets strove to utter, often in vain. Yet the breaking up of the nation into Judah and Israel helped to dispel the illusion. The loss of national independence prepared for the universalism of Jesus Christ and St. Paul. Now also, when an epistle is written to the Hebrew Christians, the threatened extinction of nationality drives men to seek the bond of union in a more stable covenant, which will save them, if anything can, from the utter collapse of all religious fellowship and civil society. It is the glory of Christianity that it creates the individual and at the same moment keeps perfectly clear of individualism. Its blessings are personal, but they imply a covenant. If nationalism has been dethroned, individualism has not climbed to the vacant seat. How it achieves this great result will be understood from an examination of Jeremiah’s prophecy.

The new covenant deals with the same fundamental conceptions which dominated the former one. These are the moral law, knowledge of God, and forgiveness of sin. So far the two dispensations are one. Because these great conceptions lie at the root of all human goodness, religion is essentially the same thing under both covenants. There is a sense in which St. Augustine was right in speaking of the saints under the old Testament as “Christians before Christ.” Judaism and Christianity stand shoulder to shoulder over against the religious ideas and practices of all the heathen nations of the world. But in Judaism these sublime conceptions are undeveloped. Nationalism dwarfs their growth. They are like seeds falling on the thorns, and the thorns grow up and choke them. God, therefore, spoke unto the Jews in parables, in types and shadows. Seeing, they saw not; and hearing, they heard not, neither did they understand.

Because the former covenant was a national one, the conceptions of the moral law, of God, of sin and its forgiveness, would be narrow and external. The moral law would be embedded in the national code. God would be revealed in the history of the nation. Sin would consist either in faults of ignorance and inadvertence or in national apostasy from the theocratic King. In these three respects the new covenant excels, – in respect, that is, of the moral law, knowledge of God, and forgiveness of sin, which yet may be justly regarded as the three sides of the revelation given under the former covenant.

1. The moral law will either forget its own holiness, righteousness, and goodness, and degenerate into national rules of conduct, or else, by the innate force of its spirituality, create in men a consciousness of sin and a strong desire for reconciliation with God. Men will resist, and, when resistance is vain, will chafe against its terrible strength. “The Law came in beside, that the trespass might abound.”153 But it often happens that guilt of conscience is the alarum that awakens moral self-consciousness out of sleep, never to fall asleep again when holiness has found entrance into the soul. Beyond this the old covenant advanced not a step. The promise of the new covenant is to put the Law into the mind, not in an ark of shittim wood, and to write it in the heart, not on tables of stone. The Law was given on Sinai as an external commandment; it is put into the mind as a knowledge of moral truth. It was written on the two tables in the weakness of the letter; on the heart it is written as a principle and a power of obedience. The power of God to command becomes the strength of man to obey. In this way the new covenant realises what the former covenant demanded. The new covenant is the old covenant transformed, made spiritual. God is become the God of His people; and this was the promise of the former covenant. They are no more children, as they were when God took them by the hand and led them out of the land of Egypt. Instead of the external guidance, they have the unction within, and know all things. Renewed in the spirit of their mind, they put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and the holiness of truth.

2. So also of knowing God. The moral attributes of the Most High are revealed under the former covenant, and the God of the Old Testament is the God of the New. Abraham knows Him as the everlasting God. Elisha understands that there is no darkness or shadow of death where the workers of iniquity may hide themselves. Balaam declares that God is not a man that He should lie. The Psalmist confesses to God that he cannot flee from His presence. The father of believers fears not to ask, “Shall not the Judge of the earth do right?” Moses recognises that the Lord is longsuffering, and of great mercy, forgiving iniquity and transgression. Isaiah hears the seraphim crying one to another, “Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts.” But nationalism distorted the image. The conception of God’s Fatherhood is most indistinct. When, however, Christ taught His disciples to say in prayer, “Our Father,” He could then at once add the words “Who art in heaven.” The spirit of man rose immediately with a mighty upheaval above the narrow bounds of nationalism. The attributes of God became more lofty as well as more amiable to the eyes of His children. The God of a nation is not great enough to be our Father. The God Who is our Father is God in heaven.

Not only are God’s attributes revealed, but the faculty to know Him is also bestowed. The moral law and a heart to love it are the two elements of a knowledge of God’s nature. For God Himself is holiness and love. In vain will men cry one to another, saying, “Know the Lord.” As well might they bid the blind behold the light, or the wicked love purity. Knowledge of nature can be taught. It can be parcelled in propositions, carried about, and handed to others. But the character of God is not a notion, and cannot be taught as a lesson or in a creed, however true the creed may be. The two opposite ends of all our knowledge are our sensations and God. In one respect the two are alike. Knowledge of them cannot be conveyed in words.

3. The only thing concerning God that can be known by a man who is not holy himself is that He will punish the impenitent, and can forgive. These are objective facts. They may be announced to the world, and believed. In the history of all holy men, under the Old Testament as well as under the New, they are their first lesson in spiritual theology. To say that penitent sinners under the Law could not be absolved from guilt or taste the sweetness of God’s forgiving grace must be false. St. Paul himself, who describes the Law as a covenant that “gendereth to bondage,” cites the words of the Psalmist, “Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered,” to prove that God imputes righteousness without works.154 When the Apostle Peter was declaring that all the prophets witness to Jesus Christ, that through His name whosoever believeth in Him shall receive remission of sins, the Holy Ghost fell on all who heard the word. The very promise which Jeremiah says will be fulfilled under the future covenant Isaiah claims for his own days: “I, even I, am He that blotteth out thy transgressions for Mine own sake, and will not remember thy sins.”155

On the other hand, it is equally plain that St. Paul and the author of this Epistle agree in teaching that the sacrifices of the old covenant had in them no virtue to remove guilt. They cannot take away sin, and they cannot remove the consciousness of sin.156 The writer evidently considers it sufficient to state the impossibility, without labouring to prove it. His readers’ consciences would bear him out in the assertion that it is not possible that the blood of bulls and of goats should take away sins.

It remains – and it is the only supposition left to us – that peace of conscience must have been the result of another revelation, simultaneous with the covenant of the Law, but differing from it in purpose and instruments. Such a revelation would be given through the prophets, who stood apart as a distinct order from the priesthood. They were the preachers. They quickened conscience, and spoke of God’s hatred of sin and willingness to forgive. Every advance in the revelation came through the prophets, not through the priests. The latter represent the stationary side of the covenant, but the prophets hold before the eyes of men the idea of progress. What, then, was the weakness of prophecy in reference to forgiveness of sin when compared with the new covenant? The prophets predicted a future redemption. This was their strength. It was also their weakness. For that future was not balanced by an equally great past. However glorious the history of the nation had been, it was not strong enough to bear the weight of so transcendent a future. Every nation that believes in the greatness of its own future already possesses a great past. If not, it creates one. Mythology and hero-worship are the attempt of a people to erect their future on a sufficient foundation. But men had not experienced anything great enough to inspire them with a living faith in the reality of the promises which the prophets announced. Sin had not been atoned for. The Christian preacher can point to the wonderful but well-assured facts of the life and death of Jesus Christ. If he could not do this, or if he neglects to do it, feeble and unreal will sound his proclamation of the terrors and joys of the world to come. The Gospel has for one of its primary objects to appease the guilty conscience. How it achieves this purpose our author will tell us in another chapter. For the present all we learn is that knowledge of God is knowledge of His moral nature, and that this knowledge belongs to the man whose moral consciousness has been quickened. The evangelical doctrine that the source of holiness is thankfulness was well meant, as an antidote to legalism on the one hand and to Antinomianism on the other. The sinner, we were told, once redeemed from the curse of the Law and delivered from the danger of perdition, begins to love the Christ Who redeemed and saved him. The doctrine contains a truth, and is applicable to this extent; that he to whom much is forgiven loveth much. But it would not be true to say that all good men have sought God’s forgiveness because they feared hell torments. To some their guilt is their hell. Fear is too narrow a foundation of holiness. We cannot explain saintliness by mere gratitude. For “thankfulness” we must write “conscience,” and substitute forgiveness and absolution from guilt for safety from future misery, if we would lay a foundation broad and firm enough on which to erect the sublimest holiness of man.

Our author infers from the words of Jeremiah that there was an inherent decay in the former covenant. It was itself ready to vanish away, and make room for a new and more spiritual one.157

II. A New Covenant symbolized in the Tabernacle

“Now even the first covenant had ordinances of divine service, and its sanctuary, a sanctuary of this world. For there was a tabernacle prepared, the first, wherein were the candlestick, and the table, and the shewbread; which is called the Holy place. And after the second veil, the tabernacle which is called the Holy of holies; having a golden censer, and the ark of the covenant overlaid round about with gold, wherein was a golden pot holding the manna, and Aaron’s rod that budded, and the tables of the covenant; and above it cherubim of glory overshadowing the mercy-seat; of which we cannot now speak severally. Now these things having been thus prepared, the priests go in continually into the first tabernacle, accomplishing the services; but into the second the high-priest alone, once in the year, not without blood, which he offereth for himself, and for the errors of the people: the Holy Ghost this signifying, that the way into the holy place hath not yet been made manifest, while as the first tabernacle is yet standing; which is a parable for the time now present; according to which are offered both gifts and sacrifices that cannot, as touching the conscience, make the worshipper perfect, being only (with meats and drinks and divers washings) carnal ordinances, imposed until a time of reformation. But Christ having come a High-priest of the good things to come, through the greater and more perfect tabernacle not made with hands, that is to say, not of this creation, nor yet through the blood of goats and calves, but through His own blood, entered in once for all into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption. For if the blood of goats and bulls, and the ashes of a heifer sprinkling them that have been defiled, sanctify unto the cleanness of the flesh: how much more shall the blood of Christ, Who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without blemish unto God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?” – Heb. ix. 1–14 (R.V.).

With the words of a prophet the Apostle contrasts the ritual of the priests. Jeremiah prophesied of a better covenant, because he found the former one did not satisfy conscience. A description of the tabernacle, its furniture and ordinances of Divine service, follows. At first it appears strange that the author should have thought it necessary to enumerate in detail what the tabernacle contained. But to infer that he is a Hellenist, to whom the matter had all the charm of novelty, would be very precarious. His purpose is to show that the way of the holiest was not yet open. The tabernacle consisted of two chambers: the foremost and larger of the two, called the sanctuary, and an inner one, called the holiest of all. Now the sanctuary had its furniture and stated rites. It was not a mere vestibule or passage leading to the holiest. The eighth verse, literally rendered, expresses that the outer sanctuary “held a position.”158 Its furniture was for daily use. The candelabrum supported the seven lamps, which gave light to the ministering priests. The shewbread, laid on the table in rows of twelve cakes, was eaten by Aaron and his sons. Into this chamber the priests went always, accomplishing the daily services. Moreover, between the holy place and the holiest of all hung a thick veil. Into the holiest the high-priest only was permitted to enter, and he could only enter on the annual day of atonement. This chamber also had its proper furniture. To it belonged159 the altar of incense (for so we must read in the fourth verse, instead of “golden censer”), although its actual place was in the outer sanctuary. It stood in front of the veil that the high-priest might take the incense from it, without which he was not permitted to enter the holiest; and when he came out, he sprinkled it with blood as he had sprinkled the holiest place itself. In the inner chamber stood the ark of the covenant, containing the pot of manna, Aaron’s rod that budded, and the two tables of stone on which the Ten Commandments were written. On the ark was the mercy-seat, and above the mercy-seat were the cherubim. But there were no lamps to give light; there was no shewbread for food. The glory of the Lord filled it, and was the light thereof. When the high-priest had performed the atoning rites, he was not permitted to stay within. It is evident that reconciliation through blood was the idea symbolized by the holiest place, its furniture, and the yearly rite performed within it. But the veil and the outer chamber stood between the sinful people and the mercy-seat. Our author ascribes this arrangement of the two chambers, the veil, and the one entrance every year of the high-priest into the inner shrine, to the Holy Spirit, Who teaches men by symbol160 that the way to God is not yet open. But He also teaches them through the ordinances of the outer sanctuary that access to God is a necessity of conscience, and yet that the gifts and sacrifices there offered cannot satisfy conscience, resting, as they do, only on meats and drinks and divers washings. All we can say of them is that they were the requirements of natural conscience, here termed “flesh,” and that these demands of human consciousness of guilt were sanctioned and imposed on men by God provisionally, until the time came for restoring permanently the long-lost peace between God and men.