Reppazent, y'all!

Thoughts from study of Hebrews 2:17-18 V.17-18 speak of Jesus identification with mankind. If I were going to truly try to help someone in an inner city project or in a place where there is little food, water, or other basic resources necessary for survival, could I do that if I did not go to that place? Of course, I could hear about it and send those resources, but would I really be able to help all that much if someone didn’t go there? How do you stamp out the root of the problem that causes a shortage of those resources if you don’t go and investigate in order to put a solution in place? The situation with Jesus becoming our sacrifice is a little like that. The major difference is that Jesus wasn’t just providing a resource for our survival. He WAS the resource. As we know, the OT sacrifice was an animal of some type. This animal was never going to be a complete sacrifice for mankind as it was simply not the same trade. The trade was simply blood for blood. In the OT case it was animal blood for human blood. If the sacrifice were to be truly complete, it would have to be human blood for human blood. Furthermore, it would have to be perfectly sinless human blood for sinful human blood. Animals can’t sin as they have no will to defy God, so it is true that a bull is a sinless sacrifice. However, as I just said, the bull can’t represent a human. Even some humans can’t represent other humans. You would never send a Chinese national who had never been to the United States in his life to go to the UN to represent the interests of the United States. Neither could God, at the end of the day, say that all humans on the planet could be redeemed by the blood of something that was not human. “But doesn’t this mean that God supports human sacrifice?” Well, I would agree with that if God ever allowed a mere human to be an adequate sacrifice for our sins, which He has never done in history. The one “human” that died for sinful mankind wasn’t JUST a human being. He was the God-man. He was human, but ALSO divine placing him in a class set apart from humanity. He linked humanity to the divine, but he was separate from humanity as well. So we have Jesus represented here as the sacrifice and as the High Priest who offered the sacrifice. As our high priest, Jesus offered Himself for us. Jesus was made like us, His brethren, in all things (V.17) so that he could perfectly represent us in all things. The way that Jesus represented us on the cross was as a substitute. Jesus stood in the gap for you and me. He basically said, “Yes these people are guilty. They are sentenced to death. Something has to die. That something will be me.” Death as separation from God has always been the penalty for sin. In the OT, when a person sinned, something had to die. It was either the person who sinned or an animal. An animal was not always going to work (3.5 billion people on the planet today X the number of sins committed daily = not enough animals to go around; therefore people would have to die for their sins for a literal lack of enough animals to die for sin). So what’s the answer? One final sacrifice for all forever. We don’t rely on death after our sin in order to be made right with God. We rely on a death that happened a long time ago. The problem FOR death is that death didn’t work on Jesus. He didn’t STAY DEAD! So now, instead of putting our faith in the blood of animals, we put out faith in the blood of Jesus, who overcame death. I won’t pretend to yet understand all of what happened when Jesus overcame death, but I will say that when Jesus overcame death on the cross, he became the sacrifice to which we could look and put faith for salvation. I think that the death that Jesus overcame was the necessity for any further death on the part of any animal or human to die for sin since He did it for us. I mean, we all still die. Jesus’ death didn’t make us all immortal or something crazy like that. It just means that His one death was the final one that was necessary for salvation if we decide to place faith in Him. The difference between believers and non-believers, even in the OT, was whether or not they placed their faith in the death of something to atone for sin. If a person let an animal be the sacrifice for sin in the OT or if they let Jesus be the sacrifice today, they are still putting faith in a system that God put into place for them.