Hebrews 9:1-14.  Life is interesting.  I hope someone out there has missed me.  I certainly have missed the intense time with God each day that these posts represent.  Same crazy work schedule and then a two day illness have been daunting me.  But again I will try and am happy to be back.  The home work is done for the next couple of days and hopefully I will now be able to keep up but I am pretty tired still and there is at least another week of the crazy work schedule.  So lets go.

In our last reading we saw that the new contract or new deal that God had was planned from long ago, it was mentioned by Jeremiah one of the Jewish prophets, so Jewish believers (like the original readers of Hebrews) didn’t need to feel like they were abandoning their faith (like they were being told by family and friends).  In yesterday’s reading the author told us that the system for understanding our relationship with God that Moses set up was a “pattern of what was show to him on the mountain.” (Hebrews 8:5)  The word pattern is the Greek word “tupos” from which we get the English word “type”.  When I fist think of the word type I think of a group of things that are similar, they are the same type or kind.  The next thing I think of is what I am doing right now, typing.  Interestingly the two ideas merge together in this Greek word.  Before computers we had typewriters. The older ones had arms connected to the keys that swung up and hit the paper when you hit the key (look inside of a piano sometime when someone is hitting the key and you might get the idea).  On the end of the arms were bums in the shape of letters and symbols.  Between the paper and the hammer was a ribbon with ink in it.  As the hammer struck the paper through the ribbon it would leave ink in the shape of the symbol or letter on the paper (and a little letter or symbol shaped dent).  The mark on the paper was a “type” of the raised form of the hammer.  That is what the word “tupos” means.  Scholars have a word for the shape of the hammer too, antitype.  So in Hebrews 8:5, where the author is specifically talking about the tabernacle and the offering s for sin made there, we see that the Jewish form of honoring God was a “type” and that things in Heaven were the “antitype”.  Heaven is the real deal and the Jewish religion was just a reminder.

In today’s reading we see the author focus in on a specific detail of the old system of understanding our failures and the better reality of the new system.  The old system had all kinds of activities that the Jewish people were to do.  One of them involved the High Priest entering a special room in the tabernacle (later the temple) once a year with the blood of a special sacrifice.  He would sprinkle some of this blood on various objects in this special room as a way of showing that he (and the people he represented) understood that they had offended God and were dead or separated in their relationship with him.  The Jewish people call that day “Yom Kippur”, the Day of Atonement.  The whole thing was just a reminder though and didn’t really make things right with God (Hebrews 9:9).  The price for offending God is ours to pay not some bull or goat.  That stuff is all the “type”, a dent in the paper made by what Moses saw in Heaven.

In verse 11 we see real deal, the “antitype”, and it is Jesus.  Christ is a title that means “anointed one” (anoint means to pour something over a persons head and was a way of showing that someone was the chosen or picked or special one.  Think Gatorade and football here and you might get the idea) and it specifically applies to Jesus (See for example John 20:31). We see Jesus in the real sanctuary making the real offering, his own blood.  As the eternal God-man his offering of his life, his blood, on the cross was enough to satisfy God’s justice for all men forever.  He paid the fine for all of the sins (disobedient and rebellious acts) for all men for all of history and his payment would be enough for God to be satisfied for ever.

Now you might read all of this and think,  “What kind of God is only satisfied by watching his son die on a Roman cross?”  Lot’s of people think that way.  You need to understand what I mean by “satisfy”.  Lets say you are very thirsty, very, very thirsty.  It’s 103° out and you haven’t had any thing to drink all day and no shade either.  You come into my lab and ask me for a drink of water.  Above you, you hear toilets flushing and you see a bunch of pipes connected to a big tank.  I walk over to the tank and open a valve and fill a beaker (it is a lab remember) with some brownish liquid and offer it to you.  “No way” you reply.  So I pour the liquid through a coffee filter into another beaker, still you refuse.  “Too brown?”  So I drop in a drop of bleach and the liquid turns clear, you shake your head back and forth.  So distill the water (boil and condense) several times into a clean beaker each time.  Run it through a highly sophisticated filter and you are still skeptical.  Finally I put the liquid into a mass spectrometer that proves to you that the only thing in the beaker is H2O absolutely 0 impurities.  “Are you satisfied now?”, I ask.  And you say, “Yes”.  That is the kind of satisfaction we are talking about here, it’s about God’s purity and character not about his feelings.  So don’t that Jesus’ death made God feel good, it didn’t, but it did honor his character.  By the way if you never drank the water you might have been satisfied about the purity of the water but your thirst would not have been satisfied.  God is satisfied with respect to honor and justice and purity but you will not be satisfied unless you take advantage of what Jesus has done for you either.  The last verse in today’s reading tells us that we don’t need to feel our guilt anymore and keep trying to work our way to Heaven.  Instead we can honor God with our lives by serving him each day.

Lord help my life please you, satisfy you, not with respect to your purity because I am continually unclean.  But I know that Jesus took care of that for me so now help me concentrate on living a life that honors you.  Thank you for dealing with my failures.  Thank you for coming and restoring our relationship.   Thank you for the Holy Spirit in my life to help me live for you.  Thank you for giving me a clean conscience and dealing with my guilt.  Let me live a life of appreciation to you today.

Hebrews 8:1-13.  Wow 5 posts in the last month.  The dictionary defines ludicrous as “so foolish, unreasonable, or out of place as to be amusing; ridiculous.”  I’m tempted to say the last month of my life has been ludicrous but there is nothing funny about not meeting with God each day.  It’s not that I haven’t had any contact with God over the last month beyond the five posts, I have.  IN fact I have been praying a lot, and letting him know that I miss this time together.  I also have been listening to sermons on the radio whenever I am driving around for work.  Part of the definition of ludicrous is ridiculous.  I keep track of the time I spend working each day and the last five weeks have gone like this:  58.75 hours, 60.75 hours, 69.25 hours, 85.5 hours, and 83.75 hours.  That’s 358 hours in five weeks or more thatn 71 hours per week.  And the work is physical, hanging and finishing drywall, roofing, finish carpentry, though there is some paperwork and driving around.  So if it hasn’t been ludicrous it might seem a little ridiculous.  It doesn’t leave much time for meals, showers and studying my Bible. (Remember on top of the work I do FNA and Sunday Scripture Exploration too).  I could just read and type a quick post but this is god’s word and I need to be careful not to misrepresent God.  I hope that this post begins a new string of consistent days with God and with you.

Remember that this letter (Hebrews) was written to a group of Jewish believers in Jesus.  This group probably contained several displaced priests who had lost their jobs when they started to believe that Jesus was the promised coming Jewish leader.  We also want to keep in mind that this letter was probably written during the time of a war between the Jews and the Roman authorities.  There would have been a lot of pressure on anyone who was a Jew to come back and be united with his relatives in all respects.  In the last couple of readings we have seen the author making a case for Jesus being a “High Priest” (“High” meaning the leading priest) but the argument has gone that Jesus is not just “a” High Priest but that he is the ultimate High Priest.  He is a High Priest by special appointment by God not just because he was born into a certain family (which he was not).  This would have carried a lot of weight for all Jews and even more for Jews who had been priests.

In today’s reading the author moves from who to what or why.  We learned at the end of our previous reading that under the Law of Moses a High Priest had to make regular sacrifices both for themselves and for the people.  Jesus on the other hand as a perfect and permanent High Priest offered a once for all sacrifice that dealt with the penalty of sin.  Peter wrote that Jesus died “once for all the just for the unjust in order that he might bring us to God” (1 Peter 3:18) and John wrote that Jesus died for the sins of the whole world (1 John 2:2).  IN today’s reading we see that Jesus’ offering is a done deal when we see that he is sitting on a throne at God’s right hand.  High Priests had to stand to make their offerings but Jeus is here sitting, his work of offering is done.

We also see a contrast made between the place where the High Priest’s on earth offered the sacrifice and the place where Jesus operates.  In verse 5 the author tells us that the tabernacle was just a shadow or hint of the true reality in Heaven (The tabernacle was the original place where the Jewish people made offerings to God.  It was a sort of portable church that eventually was replaced by the permanent Temple in Jeursalem).  The tabernacle was the place where they were reminded daily of the “contract” between them and God (a covenant is a contract or promise).  According to verse 7 the original contract was “faulty”.  It wasn’t entirely faulty because it had the purpose of helping the people see that they could not live up to God’s standards.  The fact that it could not ultimately deal with our sins (disobedience and rebellions against God) was the way in which it didn’t measure up.  Verses 8-11 are a quote of Jeremiah 31:31-34.  In those verses Jeremiah reminds the Jewish people that God will keep his promises to them, but it is going to be down the road a bit.  In those verses in Jeremiah he uses the term “new covenant”.  This is important.  The Jewish believers reading the letter to the Hebrews needed to see that their fath in Jeus was not a big break from their old faith.  The were not abandoning the God of their fathers but were honoring him by following the new and better promise that Jeremiah had predicted.  While the old contract lead to a knowledge of failure through it’s teachings the new one would have the effect of helping us fail less often and of dealing with the times when we do.  Notice verses 10-11.  The law would not be some set of rules in a book plaguing us as we fail they would become a part of us as we live them out for Jesus our savior, priest, and king.  No one will need to teach us because we will know God personally.  That really is a great new deal, much better that the old one which left us guilty and on the out side with God.

God thank you for the better priest.  Thank you for his sacrifice.  Thank you that his work is done.  Thank you for the new deal.  Thank you for a way back to you.  Thank you for your mercy.  Help me live each day for you.