In Jesus “offering himself unblemished to God,” Hebrews 9:14, his sacrifice also “cleanses our conscience from dead works.”
Surprisingly, verse 9, what the author of Hebrews meant by “dead works” were “the gifts and sacrifices being offered (by the Old Testament Israelites).” Perhaps even more surprising is that, despite all those sacrifices and rituals being perfectly designed by God and strictly obeyed by the Israelites, they “were not able to clear the Israelites’ conscience.”
The sacrifices were able to make the Israelites “outwardly clean,” verse 13, so their bodies didn’t die the death they deserved, but that entire religious system was useless when it came to clearing up the consciences of the Israelites enough for them to enter freely into God’s presence (8).
In short, therefore, that old religious system amounted to nothing but “dead works.” If it crossed the minds of the Israelites, therefore, that by putting even more effort into their religious duties it would then turn those dead works into good works that would please God enough to let them into his presence, they’d soon find out that it would not, because they were still stuck with “God finding fault with them” for their “hearts always going astray” (3:10).
So the problem was their weak heart, which could not be cured by all those “dead works” sacrifices that only kept the Israelites alive physically. But God had made provision for that by “making a new covenant” (8:8), in which he promised to “put my laws in their minds and write them in their hearts” (10) – as well as clean the slate totally of all their past wrongdoings (12).
Not only in this new covenant, then, were the Israelites’ consciences scoured clean from the memory of all their past sins, they were also scoured clean from the pressure of doing all those “dead works” sacrifices to be good enough to enter God’s presence. And now, thanks to God giving them the heart they’d always lacked, they could, from now on, willingly and happily “serve the living God” (9:14).
This too, then, is included in the “new and living way opened up for us into God’s presence by the blood of Jesus” (10:19-20). And it was Israel of old that played an essential part in that – in teaching us that this new living way is entirely “By faith, not works”….(next blog)
