What a blessing it is to walk with our Lord, living our lives in His Word each day during this time of Lent.  I hope to share thoughts about the daily readings from Hebrews and Matthew.  Please share your thoughts with me via email at holyfaith@verizon.net!  (Past posts may be accessed by clicking the Home page footer “Lent:  Walking with Christ.”)

What a wondrous High Priest we have in Jesus!  With Jewish-Christians tempted in the face of Roman and secular persecution to leave Christ and return to Judaism, and with the importance of the earthly High Priest vivid in their minds, the author of Hebrews blesses them and us with an awe-inspiring vision of the greatest High Priest we have!  He serves in the divine tabernacle/temple/church that God has created:  Heaven!

You see, earthly priests of the tribe of Levi served in the earthly, man-made temple of God.  Of course it has its place to strengthen faith-lived lives.  The temple was filled with ritual ceremony based upon the old covenant.  Priests would perform ritual sacrifice over-and-over again, with the High Priest entering the Holy of Holies once a year on Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement).  There had to be life for life.  The offering of blood and its sprinkling on the people symbolized the atonement (at-one-ment) that God wanted His people to have with Him.  It pointed to the Jesus to come.  But it was all simply a shadow of the Father’s house, a reflection of what Jesus came to do.

It was all based on the Old Covenant which was flawed.  The flaw wasn’t present by God’s design.  The Old Covenant worked in and of itself.  Jeremiah (some 600 years before Christ), quoted by the author in vv. 8-12, says it well, “…they did not remain faithful to my covenant…”  It was a two way, conditional (Ex. 4:8), and sinful humankind just cannot live up to it to be at one with God.  The fault didn’t rest with the covenant.  God found fault with sinful people!

God, in His all-knowingness and in His love for humankind, from the beginning planned for a new covenant.  The word translated here “covenant” can mean a two-way conditional contract or it can be translated “will” or “testament.”  God already had a new covenant or last-will-and-testament in His divine will for us.  And it would require a Mediator, Jesus, who would shed His own blood to make things right with His and our Father.  God has written the boundaries of His will in our hearts (the Law) so that with the forgiveness of our God (Gospel), offered by our great High Priest, we can live in Christ’s strength, keeping the Law (yet imperfectly) out of love for our Lord.  He establishes a New Covenant, a one-way last will and testament from Him to us, giving us the inheritance of everything He has earned on the cross.  We have His Supper where He is both Host and Food.  He sets the table and Himself gives us His body and blood, are foretaste of the Feast to come.

 Jesus entered the Holy of Holies in God’s temple once.  On a Friday we call “Good” only because of the forgiveness we now receive, Jesus willfully, in love with us gave His life once and for all on a cross.  We will mournfully remember in Tenebrae (darkness) His sacrifice in just a few short weeks.  The Yom Kippur above every Yom Kippur, when Jesus proclaimed “Father forgive them” and “it is finished” within the action of His loving sacrifice, everything for us to be free from sin, guilt, and death has been and remains completed for us!  Remember the earthquake that split the thick, metal mesh curtain covering the entryway to the Holy of Holies?  We have direct access to our God, He to us and us to Him.  And then Jesus signed, sealed and delivered His last will and testament by His glorious resurrection!  All of God’s promises for us are fulfilled in Him.

Christ is the One!  Because of our Great High Priest, as God said through Jeremiah so long before,  “I will be their God, and they will be My people…  For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.”  How hard that is for us to do, right?  How often the words are shared by those flawed with sin: “I will forgive them, but I can’t forget.”  Yet our omniscient, all-knowing God, who could remember every itty-bitty detail of our most egregious sin chooses to remember those sins no more!  If God has so let go of our sins because of His Son, we can too with one another!

Pray with me:  Jesus, we thank You for being THE High Priest for us.  You sacrificed Yourself once-and-for-all so that we are forgiven and right with our God.  Continue to bless our Lenten walk.  Empower us to love and forgive each other as our God loves and forgives us.  It’s all because of You!  In Your name.  Amen.