When Hebrews 10:20 speaks of “a new and living way being opened up for us,” there must be something ‘old and dead’ it was replacing. Which it was: Hebrews pictures it as “old” and “new” covenants – the old one being “obsolete, aging and soon to disappear” (8:13), and the new one replacing it being “superior” and “founded on better promises” (6).
Which seems odd, though, that God would set up a system with built-in obsolescence, in which “Day after day the priests did their religious duties, offering the same sacrifices over and over again, but nothing in what they did took away sins,” Hebrews 10:11.
Jesus was also recorded as saying to his Father, “Sacrifices and offerings, burnt offerings and sin offerings you did not desire, nor were you pleased with them” – yet “the law required them to be made” (8). So here we have God requiring a system he didn’t like, that also made it “impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins” (4).
But Jesus clearly knew what was going on, because in verse 9 he said, “Here I am (Father), I have come to do your will.” And that was enough to “cancel that old system and put in place a new one,” because Jesus understood God’s will, that the only way in which we humans are “made holy is through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once for all” (10).
Jesus, therefore, perfectly fulfilled what God created the office of high priest for, to “do away with sin” (9:26) – not “by (the old) means of the blood of goats and calves, but by entering the Most Holy Place once for all by his own blood and securing our redemption forever” (9:12).
And having “offered for all time one sacrifice for sins, Jesus sat down at the right hand of God” (10:12), where he now “lives to intercede for those who come to God through him” (7:25), meaning that we can now “enter the Most Holy Place (where he is) with confidence” (10:19), and “draw near to God with full assurance of faith” (22).
The Israelites under the “old” system never experienced this, because “the way into the Most Holy Place had not yet been disclosed” (9:8), but for us “a new and living way (into the Most Holy Place) has been opened up” (10:20).
A “new way” replacing an old way is easy to understand, but “What does ‘a living way’ mean?”….(next blog)
Buck To Basics 