Sermon Page:

Silver Street Mission

Please use your browser's back arrow to return to the previous page

Perfect Sacrifice

Heb 9: 23 – 28

Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday morning, 02 Apr, 2006

THE COMMONWEALTH Games have just ended, and life is returning to normal in Melbourne. The athletes have pocketted their gold, and the hot dog wrappers are picked up.

I find the advertising for sporting events fascinating. It has a growing religious aspect.

Did you see all those “prepare to hug a stranger” ads around the railway stations? For a while, I was adding the tag, “Prepare to hug a strangler” to my e-mails. As I saw these ads, I was reminded of our own services, of our greeting times, of the way we hug one another when we come together. 

But I also notice the way that sports people are being advertised as having “sacrificed”. When the Olympics were on, there was a giant poster up near where Bourke Road and Botany Road cross, which exhorted us to support the sports people who had sacrificed so much.

What is sacrifice? It’s originally a Latin word, and it means, “to make holy.” These advertisers are effectively saying that the sports people have become priests who sanctify the sporting events they participate in. They make the events holy.

The world we live in wants religion, wants sacrifice, wants a sense of contact with God, but it does not want the meaningful sacrifice of Jesus, because that is too high a price.

The famous German Theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, once remarked that grace is free, but it is never cheap. Jesus paid the price to make it free. Will we pay the price so that we don’t cheapen it?

Today, I want to talk about Jesus’ sacrifice:

^{HEB 9:27} Just as man is destined to die once, and after that to face judgment, ²⁸ so Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins of many people; and he will appear a second time, not to bear sin, but to bring salvation to those who are waiting for him.

We will look at how Jesus was sacrificed once for all; we will look at how he was sacrificed to bear sin; and we will look at how that sacrifice leads to salvation.

Sacrificed once for all

We read,

...Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins of many people

The death of Jesus can be viewed in many ways, and there is an element of truth to them all.

Many people with a knowledge of history see Jesus as a sort of Jewish Socrates. Socrates was condemned and executed by the Athenian rulers because he would not fit in with what he saw as immoral and unreasonable decisions. He was a stirrer, and they made him drink hemlock juice so that he would die and no longer be a nuisance.

There are many parallels with Jesus. He overturned the money–lenders’ tables in the temple, he declared war on religious leaders who feathered their own nest at the expence of the poor and the truly faithful.

Others see Jesus as a martyr to his beliefs, like Ghandi, who was assassinated because he tried to bring people together instead of supporting the separatists who wanted to partition India.

A popular idea is that Jesus died to show the way, to demonstrate that some ideas are bigger than death. It’s like the many soldiers who died in World War II because someone had to stop the Nazis, even if it cost lives.

But one dominant theme in the New Testament is that Jesus died as a perfect sacrifice, to supersede the sacrifice of lambs and bulls, and all the other sacrifices in the Jewish temple system.

Think what these sacrifices meant to a Jew, say a century or two before Christ. Then you will understand the problem.

The Jews understood the principle, “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life.” They knew that no animal life could ever truly redeem a human life.

King David sinned with Bathsheba. When he finally repented, he penned that great psalm of confession, Psa 51. He ends with the words,

^{PS 51:16} You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it;

you do not take pleasure in burnt offerings.

¹⁷ The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit;

a broken and contrite heart,

O God, you will not despise.

This is where David’s train of thought about sin and redemption ends. David knew that sacrificial animals don’t really remove guilt. He did go on to say something like, “Don’t give up the sacrifices, though.” But he knew that redemption goes far beyond animal sacrifices.

The prophet Micah also wrote,

^{MIC 6:7} Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams,

with ten thousand rivers of oil?

Shall I offer my firstborn for my transgression,

the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?

^6:8 He has showed you, O man, what is good.

And what does the LORD require of you?

To act justly and to love mercy

and to walk humbly with your God.

Rams and olive oil don’t buy God’s pleasure in us, because it can’t be done.

So our imaginary Jew, even if he is not someone who reflects much on his religion, he knows that there is always a question mark over the sacrifices.

People needed a truly effective sacrifice, a guaranteed sacrifice.

The only sacrifice for a human life is a human life. Jesus came to be that sacrifice.

Bearing sin

A few years ago, I taught an evening college class on the origins of English. Once I explained what linguists call, “inseparable prefixes.” Think of be– in bewilder or bedevil. Or think of mis– as in misbehave or mishear.

We came to for– as in forlorn or forget or forgive.

I explained that this is a prefix with a sense of losing something or being deprived of something. For example, to forget is to be deprived of getting a memory. To be forlorn is to be lost in a way that really deprives you of a sense of location. The other night I visited Neci, and I was lost a few times, but never forlorn, because I could always find myself again with the aid of street signs and my street directory.

When we came to forgive, one of the chaps in the group was onto it straight away.

“You can’t forgive without giving up your right to vengeance, can you?” he said. “When you forgive, you lose the right to come back to the situation and punish the person who has offended you.”

I told him he was exactly right.

That’s what the Bible means when it says that, without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness. Forgiveness comes at a price.

Someone hurt me really badly a few years ago, and I had to struggle with forgiveness. It was no good that people told me that I should forgive. It didn’t solve anything when I talked to myself about forgiving the other person.

The fact was, that to forgive, I had to surrender my right to be proved right. I had to give up any claim to win. To forgive, in one sense, I had to let the other person win.

That was far from easy to do.

I was happy to ignore what had been done. I was content to stew inwardly about it. But I couldn’t bring myself to face it and let it go,

I’ve remarked before that many people talk about forgiveness when they mean toleration. I would rather be forgiven than tolerated any day! But getting to being forgiven is the problem. To get there, I also have to lose. I have to give up the right to stand up as though nothing had happened. I lose the right to justify myself.

Being forgiven and giving forgiveness is a total process of loss. It is a giving up of life, because it means denying the basis of how I have lived to this point.

An acquaintance had been mistreated by many people. He had been abandoned by those he trusted. He had been given a task too big for his capabilities and then damned for not doing it. He had lost money to those who should have protected him.

Another friend, one of those straight–forward, do–it–and–get–it–over people, said, “You just have to forgive them all!”

“But forgiveness costs!” I said. “It’s a process. It takes time to summon the courage to forgive!” Other friends backed me up.

Anyone can say, “I forgive you.” But it hurts. It hurts like the flames of hell to truly forgive. The bigger the offence, the bigger the price to forgive.

We have offended God. Yet he paid the full price so that he could forgive you and me. He commands us to love him; we choose to ignore him. He commands us to love each other, and we love ourselves alone and supremely. He commands us to welcome the stranger and care for the poor and struggling, but we reject the stranger and we walk with the priest and the Levite, far from the man who fell among thieves.

God says that that hurts him. Jesus says, “Inasmuch as you did not do it for that person, you did not do it for me.”

When he confronted Saul on the Damascus Road, as Saul went to murder Christians, Jesus said,

Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?

God suffers when we rebel against him, and he suffered in the person of Jesus to buy you and me back into a relationship with him.

Bearing shame and scoffing rude,

In my place, condemned he stood,

Sealed my pardon with his blood,

Hallelujah! What a Saviour!

As the writer to the Hebrews said,

^8:27 Just as man is destined to die once, and after that to face judgment, ²⁸ so Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins of many people; and he will appear a second time, not to bear sin, but to bring salvation to those who are waiting for him

There can only be one sufficient sacrifice to take away sin, and that is the sacrifice of the perfect man, sent from the Father’s heart to reunite us with God. The High Priest who offers himself as a perfect sacrifice is the one whose blood can take away all sin.

Leading to salvation

The Bible tells us,

²² ...the law requires that nearly everything be cleansed with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.

For there to be salvation, there must be forgiveness, because salvation is the restoration of a broken relationship with God. And, for there to be forgiveness, there must be the shedding of blood, which establishes cleansing.

From our modern perspective, the idea of cleansing with blood seems strange. After all, blood is the biggest of the bodily organs, and it carries all kinds of wastes, impurities and diseases. It is very closely linked to the cleansing out of junk from the body.

And that also means that blood is not good stuff to play with because it can transmit disease. HIV–AIDS is transmitted by blood. So are different forms of hepatitis. Many parasites, like malaria, are conveyed by blood.

But the idea in the Old Testament was different. They had to discard blood for both religious and health reasons. They couldn’t make blood sausages or use blood in different kinds of foods.

But they could use blood in sacrifices, because without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.

Imagine if you were invited to a friend’s birthday party, one of those special occasions, like 18th or 21st or 50th or 75th or whatever. Everyone will be dressed up, it’s a very formal occasion.

You get there, and someone stops and looks at you, and then says, “You‘ve got something on your trousers or your dress.” You go into the toilets to have a really good look and there it is. A great spreading yellow–brown stain. You remember you sat on the seat at the bus stop while you were on your way. There must have been something on the seat. Someone had spilled their food there, or a bird had flown over only minutes before, or... well, whatever it was, it was nasty.

You scrape off what you can, but you know everyone will see it. You feel ashamed. You feel cut off from all the others in clean clothes. When everyone else is going up to the front table to greet the guest of honour, you hang back with your back to the wall. You are not just wearing physically dirty clothes, you yourself are unclean, unfit to go before the most important person.

The ancient Jews knew they were going before the ruler of the entire universe, and they were besmirched with something far worse than half–eaten hamburger or half–dried bird dropping. They were smeared with sin, the most repulsive substance in the universe. Even God, in all his power, has to turn his face away when sin comes anywhere near him. He can’t greet the sinner. He can’t welcome us to his table.

But the sacrificial offering of the life–fluid of an animal was a stop–gap measure to give the ancient Jews some measure of access to God.

And now Jesus has come.

His blood can make the foulest clean

His blood avails for me...

As John writes,

If we walk in the light as Christ is in the light, we have fellowship with one another and the blood of Jesus Christ, God’s Son, cleanses and goes on cleansing us from all sin.

To be saved is to be welcome into the presence of the God who made us and the world we live in. To be saved is to belong to the God who loved us and gave his only son as evidence of that love. To be saved is to be in relationship with the God whose very nature is relationship.

The price paid for that relationship to begin and never to end is an enormous price. It is the life of the pure, holy Son of God in exchange for my polluted life. And Jesus paid it all!

What can we do, but give him all thanks and praise as we surrender our lives to him now and through all eternity?

Let’s do it!

AMEN

© Peter R. Green 2006. Permission is granted for quotation in full for non-commercial purposes provided that authorship is acknowledged and this copyright notice is displayed with the text. Portions also copyright The Bible, NIV (Zondervan Ltd.)