Sermon Tone Analysis

Nothing But the Blood

Hebrews 9:15-28

Introduction

Children may be dismissed to children’s worship.

The rest of you please turn in your Bibles or on your device to Hebrews chapter 9. We are going to spend the morning in verses 15 through 28.

If you were not here last week I want to encourage you to go on our website hopeofdixon.com

or our audio podcast feed and listen to the message.

This morning is a bit of a sequel to last week.

It’s almost like part two.

For two thousand years, Christianity has been known as a bloody religion.

I can remember a man at one of the churches I served at named Jack Daniels.

Not kidding, that’s his real name.

His wife’s name is Jacquie.

No lie.

Jack would tell me stories about going to a little Baptist church in this small town and singing what he called “The Bloody Three.”

It was three hymns that I think they sung together all of the time.

I think it was What Can Wash Away My Sin, There’s Pow’r in the Blood, and There is a Fountain Filled with Blood.

These and many other songs like them have marked Christian worship for many, many years.

In the last several years there has been a movement in more liberal circles to remove some of the more “uncomfortable” occurrences of blood and the theme of blood from some of the songs and verbiage in churches.

This gives you an impoverished telling of the gospel.

It’s not just important that Jesus died for your sin but it’s greatly important the way that Jesus paid for your sins.

Al Mohler wrote that “…how Christ achieves our redemption more fully demonstrates the glory of God.

We can’t honor, appreciate, and worship God for what he has done for us unless we understand what it cost to achieve our salvation."

In the first half of chapter nine, the writer of Hebrews explained that because of the new covenant and Jesus’s work of salvation, we who have trusted in Christ, having been called to Him, get full access to God.

We don’t have to go through a priest but can enter straight into the holy place where previously we would have been forbidden to go.

Now we can go to God because we have a mediator who shed His OWN blood to seal this new covenant.

That is what we are going to unpack a little more this morning.

What did that inauguration of the new covenant look like and what did Jesus go through as our mediator.

What did He purchase as an eternal inheritance for His followers?

READ

This is the Word of God.

Let’s pray and ask God to help us believe, understand, and apply it to our lives.

PRAY

The book of Hebrews leads us through understanding the contrast between the old and new covenants.

The writer was writing to a group of Hebrew Christians who were being pressured to drop their new found faith in Jesus and go back to the old covenant Jewish ways of religious ritual and celebration that were incapable to save.

In fact, everything in that old covenant was pointing forward to the need for a better sacrifice and a better mediator.

It all pointed to Jesus and was eventually fulfilled in Him.

Verse 15 tells us that Jesus is the mediator of the new covenant.

And His mediation ends up with us getting an eternal inheritance.

A mediated, eternal inheritance.

I.

A Mediated Eternal Inheritance

A. The Definition of Mediator

Mediator is an interesting word because of our modern use cases for it.

We might lean toward thinking about this word in a different way than what the book of Hebrews uses it here.

We think we know what the word means and assume that a mediator is someone who gets two people or opposing sides together and tries to work out a compromise or some kind of agreement between them.

Example: world peace/conflict… This person looks for some common ground where they can come together.

The big problem in this case is that there is no common ground between a holy God and sinful humanity.

A few years back I was teaching a Bible class at a high school and I asked the students where they would start in telling someone about God and specifically about his characteristics.

Unsurprisingly, they started with God being love.

They started by describing God as loving.

And to be sure, He is love.

But my instruction to them was that instead they start with the fact that God is holy.

Because unless we understand our sin as offensive and separating us from a holy God we won’t see our need for a savior.

We need to know the bad situation we are in before the good news will truly sound like good news to us.

Romans 3:23 tells us that we have all sinned.

Romans 6:23 tells us that the wages of that sin is death.

Sin can not be in the presence of a holy God.

Sin must be judged and the wrath of God must be poured out upon it.

So we either get the wrath of God for eternity OR we have a mediator that stepped in.

Our mediator, Jesus, steps into the situation and agrees with God that our sin deserves infinite outpouring of His wrath.

He agrees that our sin is ugly and He agrees with the Father that there is a sacrifice needed.

As our mediator He puts Himself forward as the sacrifice for us, in our place.

He mediates the relationship and reconciles us to God.

According to verse 15, those who God has called, the church, will receive a promised eternal inheritance.

This happens because a death has occured, namely the death of Jesus Christ upon the cross.

His death redeems us from transgressions committed under the first covenant.

All of our sin and our war with God by breaking His commands was put on Jesus and He took the punishment for us so that we could have this eternal inheritance.

Let’s look into this idea of an eternal inheritance.

B. Our Eternal Inheritance

In verses 16 and 17 the writer of Hebrews mentions this illustration of a will when someone passes away and their inheritance is handed out to who is designated as the beneficiary in said will.

The scripture says that the death of the one must be established for it to take effect.

It’s not in effect while the person is still living.

That’s why it was wild in the story of the prodigal son that the younger son went to his father and asked for his inheritance while the father was still living.

It’s like he was saying, “I wish you were dead.”

But that’s a story for another sermon.

The Greek word used here can designate a will.

This is the legally binding final directions of the person who has died.

It could also signify an ancient Near Eastern covenant.

This covenant would have required a sacrificial animal in order to be put into effect.

Another place in Hebrews the word here is translated as covenant.

Either of these understandings actually work because they both only come into force after a death has occured.

The implication is that the new covenant and our eternal inheritance as followers of Christ was instituted at the time of Christ’s death.

A death had occured and so the inheritance would be passed on.

The covenant had been sealed by the sacrifice.

We therefore have the inheritance of the present and future benefits of Jesus’s saving work.

Our present benefits are sanctification, relationship with God, prayer, service, sharing the good news with others, and unity with the body of Christ, the church.

We have these in addition to eternity with God in heaven and these are guaranteed for those Jesus has saved.

That guarantee of our eternal redemption and inheritance was sealed with the blood of Jesus Christ because the old covenant blood of animals was not sufficient.

It had to be continually offered.

We needed a better blood.

II.

The Necessity of A Better Blood

The old covenant did not completely solve the problem of sin in the world.

People still committed sins under the old covenant.

The blood of animals was not enough to take away the sin of people permanently once and for all time.

Blood still had a very prominent place in the old covenant.

Verse 18 tells us it was inaugurated with blood.

The reference here would likely remind the initial audience of what we see in Exodus 24:4-8.

Exodus 24:4–8 (ESV)