Hebrews 9:13-20 – Worshipping the One whose Death Bestows The Eternal Inheritance

Translation & Sermon by Nate Wilson for Christ the Redeemer Church of Manhattan, KS, 12 May 2019

Omitting greyed-out text should bring spoken presentation down around 45 minutes.

Intro:

• In Hebrews 9, we have a treatise on the Old Testament temple and its rituals, and their correspondence to - and replacement by - the person of Jesus Christ as the “way in” to a holy relationship with God in which we can experience ultimate love and acceptance.

• In verses 13-20, our author employs several classical rhetorical devices to argue against continuing the Old Testament form of worship and for engaging in the New Testament form of worship. I think this passage neatly divides into four sections pointing to four key parts of New Testament worship, namely, Repentance, Receiving God’s promises, Resting in faith, and Rehearsing Jesus’ grace through the sacraments.

• Verses 13-14, we move into a classic a fortiori argument “from the lesser to the greater” that contrasts the Old and New Testament worship forms in terms of how they demonstrate...

I. Repentance

vs.13-14 For, if the blood of bulls and goats and the sprinkling of a heifer’s ashes sanctifies those who had been rendered unclean/defiled - to the purification/cleans­ing of their flesh, 14 how much more will the blood of the Anointed One (who, through the eternal Spirit offered His faultless self to God) purify y’all’s conscience from dead works for devotion/service to the Living God?

• The Present-tense of the verbs in v.13 indicates that, at the time of writing, goats and bulls were indeed being slaughtered in the temple, and that holy water mixed with ashes (Num. 19) was indeed being used to ceremonially cleanse folks - who had had a baby or who had buried a relative or who had petted a dog - so that they could go into the temple and worship God again.

• The Greek grammar structure in v.13 also indicates that the “if” is a true condition – it is taken for granted that the O.T. sacrifices worked. Every good Jew believed that if they of­fered that goat and got that lye-water sprinkled on them, they wouldn’t get struck by lighten­ing if they walked into the temple courtyard to have a fellowship meal.¹ As David said in Ps. 51:7 “Thou shalt sprinkle me with hyssop, and I shall be purified: thou shalt wash me, and I shall be made whiter than snow.” (Brenton’s English translation of the Greek Septuagint)

• But now comes the zinger in v.14. “What if there was something more powerful than the blood of a bull and more pure than red-heifer-lye-slurry? What if, instead of the blood of dumb animals, the blood of the long-awaited Messiah Himself were to be used as the sancti­fying agent? And what if the Messiah were a not only as blemish-free as a sacrificial goat’s hide but also morally innocent of any sin? Would this not achieve an even more spectacular result in the relationshp between God and Man? “...much more will the blood of the Anointed One (who, through the eternal Spirit offered His faultless self to God) purify y’all’s conscience from dead works for devotion/service to the Living God?”

• I want to focus in on three phrases describing this amazing circumstance: How did Christ “offer Himself through the eternal Spirit”? How does His “blood purify our conscience from dead works”? And What is His goal for us of “service to the Living God”?

1. How did Christ “offer Himself through the eternal Spirit”?

• Bible scholars are divided on whether to interpret this as

  • a statement that the Holy Spirit was involved with Jesus in our atonement²,

  • or whether this is a statement about the nature of Christ as being not only fully human but also fully divine and therefore able to atone for more than one person³.

  • The capitalization of the word "Spirit" in the English versions does not necessarily prove that those translators agreed that it is the Holy Spirit; I think they were choosing a neutral term which could go either way.

• Neither interpretation is necessarily wrong:

  • In favor of the first interpretation, F.F. Bruce wrote, “[B]ehind our author’s thinking lies the portrayal of the Isaianic Servant of the Lord… [who] in the power of the Divine Spirit… accomplishes every phase of his ministry.” That is indeed Biblical; but is the current line of argument in Heb. 9 focused on the Holy Spirit or on Christ?

  • In favor of the second interpretation, my favorite Biblical Theologian, the 19^th Cent­ury Princeton scholar Geerhardus Vos wrote, “‘[T]hrough ⁴eternal spirit’… [means] ‘through the heavenly aspect of His deity’… [T]he purification which the readers need is a purification in the sphere of the spirit, a purification of the conscience… [T]he passage actually implies the deity of the Savior and… his deity imparting transcendent efficacy to his sacrifice… [T]he personal initiative, the voluntariness forms the most important element in the pneuma-character of the offering…”

    • Personally, I don't see how Jesus can be considered as "offering Himself" if the offering was "by the agency of" "the Holy Spirit."

    • 20^th Century Commentator P.E. Hughes agreed, drawing correlations between “Christ offering himself through eternal spirit” and other statements in Hebrews 7 regarding Christ’s divine nature like: Heb. 7:3 “...having neither beginning of days nor end of life, but having been likened after the Son of God -- He remains a priest in perpetuity… 16 not according to a law of a command from flesh, but rather according to power from an indestructible life… 24 He... on account of His remaining forever, has the intransient priesthood.”

    • This is why 1 John 2:2 states that “He Himself is appeasement concerning our sins (and not concerning ourselves only, but also concerning the entire world).”

2. How does Christ’s “blood purify our conscience from dead works”?

• “Dead works,” as you may recall from when we encountered that phrase earlier in Hebrews 6:1, refers to sins - everything we do apart from faith in God.

• All of us carry this baggage. No descendant of this human race is without sin. “All have sinned and come short of the glory of God.” (Rom. 3:23, KJV)

• But Heb. 9:14 teaches that Jesus was different. He was innocent of any sin - “blameless.”

• This Greek word ἄμωμον/faultless/without spot/unblemished is the one used throughout the book of Leviticus to describe the perfection of any animal offered to God on the altar. The moral sinlessness of Jesus was the fulfillment of the physical blemish-free skin of the sacrificial animals.

• God’s plan of salvation was to allow that a blameless, innocent victim could be substi­tuted for a guilty sinner and put to death to atone for the sins of the sinner. And that is what is being described here of Jesus.

• 1 Pet. 1:18-19 “...y'all were ransomed out of your empty lifestyle passed along from fore­fathers... using precious blood from Christ, [who is] like a lamb without blemish..." (NAW)

• Hebrews 10:10 “...we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all… 14 For by one offering He has perfected forever those who are being sanctified… 22 Therefore let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience..." (NKJV)

3. What is Christ’s goal for us “to serve/minister/be devoted to” [eis to latreuein] the Living God?

• 1 Thess. 1:9 “...you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God," (NKJV)

• This is the Greek word used throughout the LXX to speak of worshipping a god.

• It is the key verb in the second of the 10 Commandments – “you shall not make any grav­en image; you shall now bow down and latreuses/serve/worship/live in devotion to it.”

• It is also the verb God used to describe what the priests and Levites did as their job in the temple (e.g. Numbers 16:9)

• It is also our destiny in heaven: Rev. 7:13-17 ..."Who are these arrayed in white robes, and where did they come from?" ... "These are the ones who… washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb [an outward picture of the inner cleansing of the conscience]. Therefore they are before the throne of God, and serve Him day and night in His temple... the Lamb who is in the midst of the throne will shepherd them and lead them to living fountains of waters...." (NKVJ) That is Christ’s goal for you!

• The second New Testament worship form of Receiving God’s spoken promises comes in v.15 as a pithy, one-verse thesis on the theology of salvation.

II. Receive God’s promises

v.15 So, on account of death having taken place for the redemption of the transgres­sions upon the first covenant, He is the mediator of a new covenant, so that the ones who have been called may receive the promise of the eternal inheritance.

• This is so rich! Let me attempt to break it down in terms of its verbal structure.

  • In this verse there is: a perfect tense verb (“called”),

  • a past-tense verb (“death having occurred/taken place”),

  • a present-tense verb (“is the mediator”),

  • and a future-subjunctive verb (“may receive”).

  • Let’s look at them in this time-sequence order:

• There is a “calling” that takes place, an inviting of a plurality of persons into the status of heirs-to-an-inheritance, which implies adoption by a new father – a father who has an inheritance to give.

  • Rev. 19:9 “... "Blessed are those who are called to the marriage supper of the Lamb!'" (NKJV) Mt. 22:8 uses the same verb in Jesus’ parable of the marriage supper.

  • The Greek Perfect tense “having been called” in Rev. 19:9 and Heb. 9:15 denotes that a particular set of persons were issued invitations. “The called” - may receive the promise of the eternal inheritance.

  • Mat. 9:13 Jesus sais, “...I did not come to call righteous men but rather sinners." (NAW)

  • Romans 8:30 “Moreover whom He predestined, these He also called; whom He called, these He also justified; and whom He justified, these He also glorified.” (NKJV)

  • Romans 9:11-13 “...that the purpose of God according to election might stand, not of works but of Him who calls... it is written, "JACOB I HAVE LOVED, BUT ESAU I HAVE HATED." (NKJV)

  • 1 Corinthians 1:9 God is faithful, through whom you were called into the fellowship of His Son Jesus Christ, our Lord." (NAW)

  • Galatians 1:6 “...Him who called you in the grace of Christ...” (NKJV)

  • Ephesians 4:1 “I, therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you to walk worthy of the calling with which you were called” (NKJV)

  • 1 Peter 2:9 Y'all, however, are a select kind, a priestly royalty, a holy ethnicity, a people made to be around [Him] in such a way that y'all might extol the virtues of Him who called y'all out of darkness into His marvelous light… 3:9 y'all were called in order that y'all might inherit blessing… 5:10 the God of all grace who called y'all into His eternal glory in Christ Jesus will Himself renew [y'all], He will confirm, strengthen, & establish." (NAW)

  • 1 John 3:1 “Look at what a love the Father has given to us so that we might be called [to be] children of God..." (NAW)

  • Clearly this calling is something no one deserves; it is initiated by God graciously.

  • And if you believe that Jesus did these things and offered them to you, then you are one of the called.

  • In fact, if you care enough about it to want Jesus to make you right with God and to wor­ry whether or not you are called, that’s a good indication that He has already called you.

  • And if God has taken that kind of initiative to bless you with His love, it is our “reasonable service” for us to thank Him and to devote ourselves to being His followers!

• The next verb in the time sequence of v.15 is the “occurrence of a death”

  • “...on account of death having taken place for the redemption of the transgressions upon the first covenant...”

  • From the temple analogy that frames chapter 9, the mediator of a covenant must be a priest who brings the blood of a sacrificially-slaughtered creature before God to prevent God from killing people as their sins justly deserve.

  • Heb. 2:2 “...every transgression [parabasis] and disobedience received a just payback" (NAW)

  • What are “transgressions upon the first covenant”? Every act of disobedience to the 10 Commandments!

  • But a death has been posited, the death of the Son of God Himself, to pay for all the sins committed against the law of God, so that a new covenant could be set up.

  • Philippians. 2:6-8 “Jesus... humbled Himself, becoming obedient unto death – even death by crucifixion.” (NAW)

• Now, with the calling and the death in place, all is prepared for salvation, so we get to the present tense main verb, the verb-of-being in the central statement: “He [Jesus the anointed Christ] is the mediator of a new covenant.”

  • We’ve already read in Heb. 8:6 “... He is the mediator of a BETTER covenant ..." (NAW)

  • Once Jesus had taken on human flesh and blood, God was able to make a covenant with Him as human representative of our whole race, that if Jesus would obey all God’s laws, God would be his God, and He - and His - would be God’s people. Jesus has kept all of God’s laws, and so this new covenant can’t be broken by us because its conditions of law-keeping were not made with us; they were made with Jesus. As long as we are in Christ, then, we are beneficiaries.

• This brings us to the future-oriented verb “may receive”

  • It’s actually an aorist pointing to a singular event, but it is part of a purpose clause⁵ that looks forward to what Jesus’ present mediation hopes to accomplish in the future. What is the goal of the new covenant? “He is the mediator of a new covenant, so that the ones who have been called may receive the promise of the eternal inheritance.”

  • What is the “eternal inheritance”? The only other verse in the Greek Bible that has both words (“eternal” and “inheritance”) in it is Numbers 18:23, stating that Levites in Moses’ time, would for “eternity” have NO “inheritance” in the promised land like the other tribes would⁶. Those priests were mediators of the old covenant, trying to keep their fellow tribesmen right with God so that God would not get mad and kick them all out of the promised land for breaking that covenant. They failed in that task.

  • The apostle to the Hebrews draws the parallel to the priestly work of Jesus Christ, the mediator of the new covenant who keeps those He calls right with God so that God won’t get mad and kick us all out of heaven. The difference, is that, unlike the old covenant made with sinful Israelites which could be broken by them and which resulted in them not keeping the inheritance of the promised land forever, the new covenant is made with the faultless Jesus and cannot be broken by Him, and that results in Him being able to promise the inheritance of heaven to us forever!

  • Part and parcel of that inheritance is also the “promise” of the Holy Spirit, whom we also have with us “forever.” Galatians 3:13-15 “Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us (for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree’), that the blessing of Abraham might come upon the Gentiles in Christ Jesus, that we⁷ might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.” (NKJV)

• Have you received that promise? Do you believe that it is true? Do you trust Jesus to bring eternal blessing on you? Are you welcoming the Holy Spirit whom He has sent to operate within you? Are you letting the Holy Spirit control you, or are you “quenching” the Spirit? Brothers and Sisters, we are called to receive the promise!

• The next couple of verses point us to the New Testament worship form of Faith - the confid­ence we can have in the validity of God’s new covenant to make us right with Him and to give us that eternal inheritance:

III. Rest in Faith

v.16-17 For, where there is a covenant, the death of the covenant-ratifier is a neces­sity to be carried out, 17 because it is over dead [bodies – the Greek word for “dead” is plural here] that a covenant is confirmed, since it is never in force while the covenant-ratifier is living.

• One issue to address is the fact that the Greek word diatheke, which is translated “covenant” everywhere else in the book of Hebrews, is suddenly translated “testament/will” for these three verses in the KJV, NIV, and ESV. Has our author actually switched from talking about “covenants” in chapter 8, to a different topic but used the same Greek word anyway, or has the topic not really changed?

• Part of the difficulty lies in this provision that the diathemenou of the covenant has to be put to death.

  • Does that mean, as the NASB reads, that the covenant-maker has to die in order to make a covenant?

    • That doesn’t make sense. If I hold a garage sale and my neighbor comes over and sees a baby crib in my driveway and asks, “How much do you want for that crib?” and I tell them “$10,” and my neighbor pays me $10, we have just made a covenant. That doesn’t mean he has to kill me or that I have to kill him; we were just contracting the sale of a crib; nobody has to get hurt.

    • So we need to get the right translation for the Greek word diathemenou in this verse if we want to make sense of it.

  • Should we then translate it, like the KJV, NIV, and ESV, as the “testator” of a will who writes out a document stating that whenever he dies, his heirs may receive his earthly possessions, but they can’t steal his stuff and call it theirs as long as he is still alive?

    • That does make more sense, but the problem is that this is only one of many different kinds of covenants, and the plain reading in Greek is that all diatheke’s require death, not just the small percentage of contracts that are related to last wills and testaments – and even last wills and testaments have legal force before the testator dies.

    • Nevertheless, the covenant between God and Man certainly has to do with death.

      • Basically, it’s “if you disobey you die, if you obey you live.⁸”

      • But legally, God, the “maker” of the covenant, had nothing to lose, whether His creatures obeyed or disobeyed. God is the “living God.”

      • He didn’t have to die to put the covenant of works into force, but it did mean the death of man.

    • Furthermore, when God made covenants with Adam and Noah and Abraham and David, it wasn’t God who died; it was an animal that died

      • the animal whose skin clothed Adam and Eve,

      • the animal that Noah burned up on the altar,

      • the animals Abraham cut in half for God to pass through –

      • and I believe that points us in the right direction.

  • I am indebted to the 19^th century Scottish theologian John Brown for suggesting that this word diathemenou – the root of which is the Greek word for “covenant” – should be translated along the lines of “that which ratifies a covenant” rather than “the one who makes a covenant.”

    • In the Old Testament, the Law-Covenant with Israel was ratified and confirmed by a ceremony in which a victim was put to death – a victim which was neither the coven­ant-maker nor a covenanted person, and its blood was sprinkled upon the people with whom the covenant with God was made. But the covenant could not be legally-bind­ing, until that covenant-ratifier had been put to death.

    • Nowadays, we do that with signatures instead of blood. A legal document has no authority if it hasn’t been signed. The signatures at the bottom of the page of the parties to the contract are what makes the contract valid. If one party refuses to sign, then there is no contract. We may not like the idea of divine covenants needing blood instead of a signature, but that’s just the way God said it had to be.

    • Then Yahweh-God also made the new covenant: Heb. 8:10 "...this is the covenant which I will contract [diathesomai] with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord, giving my laws into their understanding I will indeed inscribe them upon their hearts, and I will be to them for a God and, as for them, they will be to me for a people."

    • Heb. 7:22 “...Jesus became the assurance [engnuos] of a better covenant." (NAW) &

    • Heb. 3:14 asserted that this covenant by which “we have become companions of the Anointed One” has been confirmed [βεβαίαν]. (NAW)

    • How was this New Covenant confirmed and assured? It was through the role that Jesus took on as covenant-ratifier, the death of which brought legally-binding status to the new covenant just as it did to the old.

• Will you rest confidently in Christ, or will you live in anxious fear that maybe these promises aren’t true – maybe you won’t get the eternal inheritance because maybe God thought this wasn’t a good enough deal for Him and declined to sign this covenant and make it valid?

• Believers in Jesus, your salvation has been confirmed! Your status with God is assured. The covenant has been sealed because the blood of Jesus has been shed to ratify this covenant. No fact in history is more well-attested than this!

• Jesus died so you could serve Him; Jesus signed with His blood, as it were, so you can re­ceive the promise of an eternal inheritance, and you can be confident that He will deliver on His promise. He even instituted ordinances to ratify and commemorate this, which is our fourth New Testament worship form:

IV. Rehearse God’s Grace to You

v.18-20 It follows that the first one wasn’t dedicated without blood either. 19 for, after every commandment in the law had been uttered by Moses to all the people, [and] after taking the blood of the calves and goats with water and scarlet yarn and a hys­sop-branch, he sprinkled both the book itself and all the people, 20 saying, “This is the blood of the covenant about which God issued orders to y’all.”

• The Greek text behind this verse doesn’t have an object for the adjective “first,” so we are left to supply it: “the first” WHAT? Once again, things are a little ambiguous as to whether we are speaking about the first covenant or the first tabernacle,

  • but most English versions supply the word “covenant” because verse 19 clearly describes the covenant-ratification ceremony under Moses from Exodus 24.

  • The Greek word ἐγκεκαίνισται (translated “dedicated/ inaugurated/put into effect) is never used anywhere else in the Greek Bible for making a covenant with God; it is used in 1 Kings 8:63 and 2 Chron. 7:5 to describe Solomon dedicating his new temple⁹, but that wasn’t without a blood-sacrifice either, so the point in v.18 remains that none of the ceremonies were valid without a sacrificial death!

  • Exodus 24:4-10 “...the children of Israel... offered whole burnt-offerings, and they sacrificed young calves as a peace-offering to God. And Moses took half the blood and poured it into bowls, and half the blood he poured out upon the altar. And he took the book of the covenant and read it in the ears of the people, and they said, ‘All things whatsoever the Lord has spoken we will do and hearken therein.’ And Moses took the blood and sprinkled it upon the people, and said, ‘Behold the blood of the covenant, which the Lord has made with you concerning all these words.’ And Moses went up, and Aaron, and Nadab and Abiud, and seventy of the elders of Israel. And they saw the place where the God of Israel stood...” (Brenton)

• The details of this Old Testament ceremony are mentioned almost in passing:

  • The law – perhaps the first part of the book of Exodus – was read out loud to the assembled nation of Israel.

  • Then Moses took blood from calves and goats. (The NIV’s removal of the goats from this verse because only one old Greek manuscript left them out seems a bit extreme.)

  • Moses mixed the blood with water in a bowl, added a bit of wool that had been dyed scarlet with the juices from a local insect, dipped a hyssop branch into it all (Hyssop was a common shrub with a head of stems that would have provided a lot of surface area for the liquid to adhere to.), and flung the mixture out into the crowd.

  • There is a lot of symbolism of guilt and innocence in this ceremony. For instance, wool was thought-of culturally as a standard of whiteness, and was used to symbolize innocence, whereas blood and the color red was used to symbolize guilt. Notice how that imagery is explained in Isaiah 1:18 “...though your sins... be as scarlet, I will make them white as wool." (Brenton) So there seems to be symbolic significance in taking white wool and dying it red, as though an innocent party were being colored with someone else’s guilt.¹⁰

• I think it is more than coincidence that the only other place in the N.T. that mentions wool is Revelation 1:14 describing Jesus¹¹: “His head and hair were white like wool... and His eyes like a flame of fire;" (NKJV) The whiteness is symbolic of His purity – his moral perfection.

  • Then remember what they did to Jesus before putting Him on the cross to die for our sins? Matthew 27:28 “they stripped Him and put a scarlet robe on Him." (NAW)

  • I don’t want to go too far with allegorization, but I suspect that the symbolism of substitutionary atonement, whether the historical players had any idea of it or not, was intentional in God’s providence.

• And when Jesus took the fourth cup of wine after His last Passover Supper and shared it with His disciples saying, "Drink out of it, all of you, for this is the blood which is mine, of which is the New Covenant, [and] which is being poured out for the many for the purpose of for­giveness of sins,” (Matt. 26:27-28, NAW) He was very intentionally using the same words Moses did with a new direction, instituting a N.T, ceremony for His people to observe.

REVIEW: What should our response be to such a great gift – an eternal inheritance?

1. Repent. Serve God instead of disobeying Him v.14 – Jesus “purified you... from dead works for service to the Living God.”

2. Receive God’s promise v.15 - “...He is the mediator of a new covenant, so that the ones who have been called may receive the promise of the eternal inheritance.” You haven’t received the fullness of the eternal inheritance, but you can at least accept the promise as true and organize your life around what God has said in His word.

3. Reject fears regarding your relationship with God and rest confidently with faith in Christ’s finished work. The covenant is signed with His blood and is totally valid (vs. 16-17); you can trust on Jesus to give you His eternal life!

4. Rehearse God’s grace to you by participating in the initiatory and ongoing ordinances given by our Lord. If you haven’t been baptized, ask for it today! The New Testament ordinance of baptism finds one of its equivalences in the Old Testament covenant-ratification ordinance under Moses (and, to be sure, there are other equivalences). And don’t miss out on the weekly remembrance of our Lord at the communion table! These commands were given to us to help us remember God’s grace to us!

APPENDIX: Side-by-side Greek Text & English Versions of Heb. 9:13-20^A

APPENDIX 2: Comparison of Ex. 24:5-8 with Hebrews 9:19-20

Note the differences in Greek words faded to white between the LXX and Heb. 9. The wording of Heb. 9 could easily have been derived in a loose translation of Ex. 24, omitting the last phrase. My conclusion is that the author of Hebrews is not quoting the Septuagint but is rendering his own translation of Ex. 24:8 and had an accurate understanding of the details of the ceremony from Ex. 24, from which he brought in a few more details in addition to his quote of Ex. 24:8.