There are no words to explain it. What troubled the audience of our writer troubles us still today. We are fallen. There is a vast gulf separating us from Eternity and eternal things. We can posit terms such as "the Spirit Realm" but have no means to understand it. This was the whole point when Jesus explained the necessity of using parables to teach the Kingdom of Heaven. While the mind of necessity must capture something of the truth, else the will cannot choose any proper obedience, ultimate reality largely bypasses the human consciousness, and operates on a wholly different level. Logic will only get you so far before it fails utterly. When presenting higher truths, it is necessary to use symbols, far more complicated than mere types and allegories. The ultimate truth of God's revelation escapes human faculties, so all Platonic and Aristotelian categories of pure logic fall far short. Truth is not taught; it is caught.
Everything which matters in the end is from God's own hand. Unless and until He reaches out to you, you cannot turn to Him and embrace His revelation. The greatest minds in apologetics and debate cannot change a single thing in any human soul, because it's not a matter of logic. It's far above logic. To assume faith must be reasonable is to cripple its power. To accept the notion anything other than logic is mere subjective wishfulness is to surrender. True faith is utterly unreasonable, because it demands you surrender everything you are and following One you cannot experience directly. We make the most audacious claims in the world, utterly without sufficient evidence to prove anything at all. The death of some obscure man in an obscure little corner of history's greatest empire is somehow the means to saving all mankind. If God doesn't plant that in your spirit, you'll never accept it.
Judaism and the Covenant of Moses died on the Cross with Jesus. Jews got really comfortable with their rituals, their rules, the glorious trappings of their national character and religion. The physical structure and layout of the Tabernacle was symbolic from the start. For all its rigorously enforced separation from mundane use, it was never more than a mere symbol. If you want the details, you can read them in the Pentateuch. For all the beauty of the Ark of the Covenant, only one man saw much of it, and that once in any year. Just for that one peek, he had to carry a blood sacrifice, still warm from the animal. This blood was the ritual covering for his sins, and the sins of those he represented outside. It only covered unintentional sins. It could by no means change the heart of any man.
The way to God's cleansing power of forgiveness was never actually opened by that ritual and apparatus. It was little more than a call to behavior modification. It gained what little could be gained by human effort. Not that it was completely unimportant, but it was never more than a symbol of things which mattered eternally.
Christ came as the final Heavenly High Priest. His coming was prophesied in every detail of the symbolism built into the Tabernacle's design. The Tabernacle where Christ serves was not built by human hands, required no service of maintenance by an army of Levites. He did not enter this Tabernacle with blood from some poor unfortunate goat, lamb or bull, but with His own blood. He only had to do it once. If all that animal gore could have actually accomplished anything, it was mere ritual purification of things temporal. Could the priest's inspection of an animal really find any sort of perfection? Could he truly know the inherent nature of the victim about to die? Yet, we know Jesus Christ came before God with God's own purity, sinless and spotless because His nature defined holiness.
The power of that offering was real in the Spirit Realm, more real than here on this temporal plane. It has the power to reach inside a soul and completely change any human, to remake him into a new creature, to fit him for an eternal life not confined to his earth. Not just making his sin hidden from God, but removing it, overpowering it, rooting it out from his very nature. A gap is inserted between the flesh and soul, and widens as God's Spirit redeems ever more of the life, until the soul is ready to dismiss the flesh. Thus, God sees not the awful evil in which we are all born, but He sees His Son. In making that great sacrifice, His Son inherited everything God had desired to offer in Creation in the first place.
We know an inheritance requires someone die before it is passed. Until death, a man's will is just a piece of paper. The Covenant of the Law given through Moses was God's will in that sense. It had no real power. While in all grave seriousness it was inaugurated with the sacrifice of many animals, and a long ritual of dedication, it did not grant actual physical control to anyone. It had tremendous potential, concerning the inheritance of all Creation, but no power to make it happen until someone involved in making the will died. Moses didn't make it; he just passed it on as an attorney, a junior law clerk. Someone in the godhead must die before anything changed. The Law was a mere promise, which Israel was to keep as one locks such documents up in a safe. In due time, when the death took place, the will would be executed and the estate would pass.
In ancient times, a covenant was solemnified -- purified, set apart, made holy -- by a blood sacrifice. It was pretty well understood that was a symbol of the seriousness of the matter. You might have paid in the blood of an animal you owned, but it implied you expected to pay with your own blood if you failed to keep the covenant. Given all the physical symbols of the Law were solemnified in this way, with animal blood, what would be the source of blood for solemnifying the real stuff in Heaven? Again, we note the real Tabernacle/Temple of God is in Heaven. The earthly Tabernacle carried and maintained by Israel, and the Temples later, were never more than a mere shadowy symbol, a physical model of the God's Heavenly Courts above. Christ brought His own blood.
In this fallen world, the human mind continually slips back into sin. It requires a constant reminder of God's standards, brought home forcefully, to keep us on track. Not to keep us faithful -- no external force on earth can do that. Rituals and laws only keep us conscious and aware of our sinfulness. Heaven isn't like that. Once a thing is done, it is eternal. Jesus didn't have to keep dying every year in Heaven like sacrificial animals here on earth. You'll note here on earth any given victim could die only once. Once Jesus brought His blood before the Throne as the only possible sacrifice acceptable for human sin, it was done. Then He sat down on that Throne Himself, unlike the human high priests who simply splashed a little blood on the symbolic Mercy Seat. Jesus eternally took His place on the Mercy Seat in Heaven.
A fundamental principle of human existence is you live only once. You die and then face God's judgment. Jesus died and faced that judgment for us, since there was nothing in Him to judge. He has inherited the Kingdom. We are used to images of heirs taking the bequest before a judge, paying a tax, and having the judge validate their inheritance. At some point, the heir returns to the property in question and takes physical ownership. As Heaven counts time, it will be only a short passage between Christ taking His throne in Heaven and then returning to actually rule and reign physically. He won't come the second time in the form of fallen mankind, but in His true form. When He comes, He will change all things into that same Heavenly form.
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Ed Hurst
17 April 2008
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