According to Hebrews 10:19-20, “We’ve been given complete freedom to go into the Most Holy Place, because the death of Jesus opened a new way, a living way” for us, so that now, verse 22, “we can come near to God with a sincere heart and a sure faith.” So, what is this “living way” that only becomes available to us through Jesus’ death?
There’s a clue in Hebrews 2:14-15, that Jesus “by his death destroyed him who holds the power of death – the devil – to free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.”
Before Jesus’ death, then, no such means of destroying the devil’s power of death existed. The devil had free rein to tempt and deceive Adam and Eve into rejecting and resisting God, the result of which – for them and anyone else the devil influenced into sin – was slavery to the fear of death, exactly as God had promised in Genesis 2:17.
For the Israelites in the Old Testament, however, God relieved that fear of death by cleansing them of their sins through the death of animals on the Day of Atonement once a year (Leviticus 16:29-30). So the death of animals dealt with the consequences of the Israelites’ sins, but never did it stop the Israelites from sinning in the first place. The gory parade of death, therefore, just kept on going year after year. But what a way to go, when the only way of dealing with death from sin was more death, in the killing of millions of innocent animals.
It was totally “a death way” of dealing with sin, but a solution came along in the person of Jesus, who “Unlike the other high priests (in Israel) does not need to offer sacrifices day after day for the sins of the people,” because he “sacrificed for their sins once and for all when he offered himself,” Hebrews 7:27. And that included all the sins that all the Israelites had committed; he “set them free” from the whole lot (9:15).
Because when “Jesus entered the Most Holy Place once for all by his own blood, he obtained eternal redemption” (9:12). Never again, therefore, would sin – past, present or future – need to be dealt with by death. Jesus’ own death took care of that. This, then, is the new “living way” Jesus introduced, so that the devil no longer holds the power of death, and we’re no longer in fear of it either.
And just as important, Jesus’ death was also the new “living way” of “Cleansing our conscience from dead works” too….(next blog)
Buck To Basics 