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Well, if you’ll remain standing and turn now to our sermon text for this evening is taken from the book of Hebrews, Chapter 9.
We’ll be looking this evening at verses 15 through 22. Hebrews, Chapter 9, verses 15 through 22.
Therefore, he is the mediator of a new covenant, so that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance,
since a death has occurred that redeems them from the transgressions committed under the first covenant.
For where a will is involved, the death of the one who made it must be established.
For a will takes effect only at death, since it is not enforced as long as the one who made it is alive.
Therefore, not even the first covenant was inaugurated without blood.
For when every commandment of the law had been declared by Moses to all the people,
he took the blood of calves and goats with water and scarlet wool and hyssop,
and sprinkled both the book itself and all the people, saying,
This is the blood of the covenant that God commanded for you.
And in the same way he sprinkled with the blood both the tent and all the vessels used in worship.
Indeed, under the law, almost everything is purified with blood,
and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.
Amen. May God add his blessing to the reading of this word.
Let’s pray.
Our Father in Heaven, we ask that the same Spirit that has inspired the writing of this word,
has preserved it throughout the time that we have it even now before us this evening.
That same Spirit would be powerfully at work in us as we hear, and in the preaching as well,
that you might be honored and glorified, that your people might be fed.
We pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
You may be seated.
Now if you don’t have an outline for this evening, we normally provide them,
and there are still some on the back table, which you may want before we are done.
This text is a little bit complicated in one of the points.
Have you ever signed your name in blood?
If you were a teenage boy at one point, you probably at least thought about it.
Many a teenage boy has expressed intentions to sign a pact of friendship using their blood as ink.
For the less brave and less important agreements, a solemn swapping of palms of spit would probably suffice.
Ancient tribal practices all over the world throughout history involve sealing deals
or confirming agreements with ceremonial cuts to produce blood to mix from the two parties.
While these practices may seem absurd to a civilized society,
it reflects a common idea across cultures that agreements required skin in the game.
Someone with nothing to lose is much less likely to keep their end of a bargain.
Blood is required for life.
And even those who never heard God declare to the Israelites that the life is in the blood,
they have understood blood to have great significance.
This strange fluid flowing through our bodies is vitally important for our physical lives,
and it has added historical weight and importance to documents, alliances, or treaties.
To seal a death threat in blood was to increase its threatening effect,
but to seal a pact of friendship in blood was an attempt to demonstrate its unbreakableness.
Blood plays an important part in the inauguration of God’s covenant with Israel through Moses,
as recounted in our passage this evening.
As verse 18 says, not even the first covenant was inaugurated without blood.
Blood was the price for inaugurating the covenant,
because blood was also the price for the breaking of the covenant.
Thus we are told in verse 22,
without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.
And we’re going to look at this passage under three headings this evening.
Number one is cutting a covenant.
Number two, diatheke, a will or a covenant.
And number three, blood, convicting or cleansing.
So number one, cutting a covenant.
In verse 15 we’re told, therefore he is the mediator of a new covenant.
Now this is not the first time that we’ve encountered this language.
The author of Hebrews has been talking about Christ as the mediator of a new covenant since chapter seven.
And most of chapter eight was devoted to a long quotation about this new covenant.
But in our passage this evening he’s talking about the ghastly requirements for covenants.
Now anyone who’s spent much time around Christians who believe in Reformed theology
will have heard the word covenant more than a few times.
Sometimes covenant theology is even used interchangeably with Reformed theology.
But despite its widespread usage, a succinct definition is not always easy to find.
Because covenant theology encompasses so many aspects of God’s relationship with his people
and touches so many important truths, it often becomes complicated.
The bottom line, however, the simplest summary is God’s promise to Abraham all the way through repeated in Revelation.
I will be your God and you will be my people.
The covenant means God gives structure, definition and security to his relationship with his people.
Covenant theology is so named because it sees covenants as one of the most important ways
to understand the overarching story of the Bible, particularly two big or main covenants,
the covenant of works and the covenant of grace.
Very briefly, the covenant of works was what God made with Adam.
He told the first man, Adam, obey me and live, disobey me and die.
Now the Westminster Confession of Faith explains this concept in chapter seven.
You can find that in the back of your Trinity Psalter hymnal on page 923.
The first paragraph of chapter seven says this,
The distance between God and the creature is so great that although reasonable creatures do owe to him obedience as their creator,
yet they could never have any fruition of him as their blessedness and reward,
but by some voluntary condescension on God’s part, which he has been pleased to express by way of covenant.
God didn’t have to create Adam in the first place,
so he certainly wasn’t obligated to give Adam life as a reward for obedience.
As a creature, Adam owed God perfect obedience already,
but God graciously bound himself, saying that he would reward Adam with life if he simply obeyed,
but conversely would punish him with death for disobedience.
Paragraph two of the Westminster Confession, chapter seven,
The first covenant made with man was a covenant of works wherein life was promised to Adam
and in him to his posterity upon condition of perfect and personal obedience.
The blessings of the covenant were contingent on Adam’s works, his obedience.
Adam was created morally good and capable of obeying God, yet he instead chose to disobey.
He broke God’s covenant, as Pastor Jeff was talking about this morning.
By rights, God could have said, well, the bargain for death was disobedience.
The bargain was death for disobedience and simply given Adam death, pure and simple.
Instead, God instituted another covenant, which we call the covenant of grace.
Paragraph three of the Westminster Confession, chapter seven,
Man by his fall having made himself incapable of life by that covenant,
the Lord was pleased to make a second, commonly called the covenant of grace,
wherein he freely offereth unto sinners life and salvation by Jesus Christ,
requiring of them faith in him that they may be saved and promising to give unto all those
that are ordained unto eternal life his Holy Spirit to make them willing and able to believe.
One way to think of it is that receiving the reward of life
and escaping the punishment of death isn’t based on our works.
It’s based on God’s grace.
In this way, it replaces the covenant of works.
But in another sense, the covenant of grace fits inside the covenant of works
as an alternative fulfillment of it.
Based on the covenant of works, all sinners deserve the punishment of death.
Yet Christ became a man and obeyed God perfectly.
He fulfilled the requirement of the covenant of works and graciously offers sinful men
the opportunity to swap out their disobedience for his perfect obedience.
Since obeying God perfectly is not an option for sinners like us,
the only way to escape eternal death and inherit eternal life
is on the gracious merits of another.
Both covenants are fundamentally based on obedience to God’s law.
Works.
The difference is whether you receive what your works deserve or what Christ’s works deserve.
Will your eternal destiny be based on your own disobedience or Christ’s obedience?
You’re either relying on your own works or on Christ’s works.
As you can see, this is the whole undergirding framework for the Gospel.
The covenant of works lays the framework for understanding the paradigm in which we find ourselves.
As humans, we’re born into the covenant of works,
deserving death for our ancestors’ disobedience as well as our own additions to that ledger.
Our only hope is a gracious intervention,
which is why we call God’s offer of an alternative fulfillment the covenant of grace.
Without understanding this to some degree, it’s hard to understand why Jesus had to die for sins.
Now that’s the 30,000-foot view of the covenant of grace,
but if we zoom in through the Old Testament,
we see God making covenants with Noah, Abraham, Moses, Joshua, David, and then a new covenant in Jesus.
Covenant theology sees all of these smaller specific covenants as pictures and sketches,
which were pointing to what Christ was going to do.
So they’re all part of one big covenant of grace.
And while there are many beautiful aspects to God’s covenants,
there’s also some ugly bits, specifically the threat of breaking the covenant,
which is represented by animal death.
We see this in Abraham’s practice in Genesis 15, verses 8-10.
Genesis 15, verses 8-10.
But Abraham said, Oh, Lord God, how am I to know that I shall possess it?
God said to him, Bring me a heifer, three years old, a female goat, three years old,
a ram, three years old, a turtle dove, and a young pigeon.
And he brought him all these, cut them in half, and laid them over against the other.
Skipping to verse 17 and 18, When the sun had gone down and it was dark,
behold, a smoking firepot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces.
On that day, the Lord made a covenant with Abram.
The animal pieces were cut to signify the penalty for breaking this covenant.
And while this is not spelled out in Genesis 15,
if we flip ahead to the prophet Jeremiah and look at Jeremiah chapter 34,
we see this threat made very clear, and we understand what was going on.
So Jeremiah chapter 34, starting in verse 18.
The Lord is speaking, and he says, And the man who transgressed my covenant
and did not keep the terms of the covenant that they made with me,
I will make them like the calf that they cut in two and passed between its parts.
The officials of Judah, the officials of Jerusalem, the eunuchs, the priests,
and all the people of the land who passed between the parts of the calf.
And I will give them into the hand of their enemies
and into the hand of those who seek their lives.
Their dead bodies shall be food for the birds of the air and the beasts of the earth.
The normal practice in the ancient Near East was for both parties
who were making a covenant to pass between these animal carcasses
to demonstrate their obligation to suffer a similar fate if they broke the covenant.
The practice was so common and widespread that the way you said
make a covenant in Hebrew is actually the verb to cut.
You cut a covenant.
You don’t create, establish, or make a covenant in Hebrew.
You literally cut a covenant.
And this symbolic slaughter of animals was meant to represent
the threat of death both parties faced for breaking that covenant.
Now our passage in Hebrews this evening focuses in on the covenant ceremony
that was described in Exodus 24 as we read earlier.
The prominence of blood is unmistakable.
Exodus chapter 24 verses 6 through 8 again.
And Moses took half of the blood and put it in basins.
And half of the blood he threw against the altar.
And he took the book of the covenant and read it in the hearing of the people.
And they said, all that the Lord has spoken we will do and we will be obedient.
And Moses took the blood and threw it on the people and said,
behold, the blood of the covenant that God has made with you in accordance with all these words.
It’s a pretty gruesome scene.
Basins of blood from slaughtered animals here and there,
on the altar, the book of the covenant, even on the people.
The inauguration of a covenant was not a neat, tidy affair.
The covenant had to be cut.
Blood had to be spilled.
Psalm 50 that we read in our call to worship mentions it as a sacrifice in verse 5.
Psalm 50 verse 5, gather to me my faithful ones who made a covenant with me by sacrifice.
When the author of Hebrews paraphrases Moses’ words in verse 20 of our passage,
he says, saying this is the blood of the covenant that God commanded for you.
The way he phrases it sounds a lot like Jesus’ words found in Matthew 26, 28.
When Jesus said, for this is my blood of the covenant,
which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.
This is what’s going on in our passage in verse 15.
Therefore, he is the mediator of a new covenant that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance
since a death has occurred that redeems them from the transgressions committed under the first covenant.
Disobedience made Adam’s offspring ineligible for the promised inheritance, eternal life, and fellowship with God.
Abraham’s offspring also broke God’s covenant, as did Israel’s offspring, David’s offspring, and all the rest.
The covenant stipulated death, eternal death.
But Christ came and inaugurated a new covenant in his blood.
His death has been substituted for ours so that we can receive the blessings instead of the curse.
Welcome to the covenant of grace.
As we move through our passage, we’re confronted with some difficulty in the next two verses,
so we’ll spend a little time unraveling a long-standing issue of interpretation.
So, number two, diotheke, a will or a covenant.
This is looking at verses 16 and 17.
Dia what?
Diotheke is the Greek word for covenant.
We’re going to get a little technical at this point, so you’ll want to have your Bibles in front of you
and perhaps your outlines so that you can follow what’s going on.
Now, as we start to look at verses 16 and 17, there’s no question that these are a little challenging to understand.
They’re also challenging to translate.
The writer of Hebrews is rather brief in his wording, and he leaves a lot to be assumed.
Figuring out how these words relate to each other has given translators a bit of difficulty.
There are two main ways that these verses are translated.
One is the way that you have them in the ESV.
And this centers on assuming that the writer of Hebrews is making a wordplay
and briefly using the word diotheke in its secular usage,
but then switching back to the Biblical use for the rest of the passage.
But a minority of Biblical scholars have questioned whether that really makes the most sense of what’s going on.
Here’s the background.
The Greek word for covenant, diotheke, means something slightly different in wider Greek culture.
To the rest of the Greek-speaking world, a diotheke was a will or a testament.
But when the Jews who spoke Greek were looking for a word to use for God’s covenant in the Old Testament
and were translating the Hebrew scriptures, they used this word, diotheke.
They changed the wider meaning of diotheke by using it in this specific sense.
This meant that diotheke had a secular meaning, will, in the culture.
But when it was used in the Bible, it always meant covenant.
There’s nowhere in the Greek version of the Old Testament, the Septuagint, that they ever use a different word.
And they never used diotheke for any other meaning.
Despite this, many good Bible scholars believe that the writer of Hebrews
is making a reference to the secular meaning of diotheke, a wordplay, as a will in verses 16 and 17.
They look at the reference to the inheritance in verse 15
and think that the next two verses must be an attempt to bring the two meanings of diotheke together.
The thinking process of this perspective works like this.
Jesus had to die, so the believers who are redeemed could receive salvation, which is called inheritance.
That’s sort of like a will, which distributes a person’s property after he dies, the inheritance that he leaves.
Perhaps the writer of Hebrews is switching back, making a wordplay,
switching back to the secular meaning of diotheke in verses 16 and 17 for a moment,
to make a point about how Christ died and that gives us the inheritance of salvation.
While this is a cool and interesting idea, which, to be clear, is not out of line with Scripture on the whole,
I don’t think that’s what’s actually going on in this passage.
After studying more deeply this week, I’ve become convinced that it’s better to translate diotheke as covenant
the whole way through our passage, even verses 16 and 17, and not switch it in the middle.
Verse 18, it begins with a strong therefore, a word assuming a tightly coherent argument.
But if we translate diotheke as will, that assumes that the argument is rather disjointed.
A reference to the secular use of diotheke as will at the exact moment when the author is trying to make a point
about the covenant from the Old Testament seems odd.
Furthermore, if the author were making a wordplay, as the ESV translates it,
the logic of verse 16 and 17 still doesn’t quite make sense.
Verses 16 and 17, for where a will is involved, the death of the one who made it must be established.
For a will takes effect only at death, since it is not in force as long as the one who made it is alive.
In Greek and Roman culture, just like our own, a will could be enforced before death.
Although death was the usual point at which property was distributed according to a will,
it was legally enforced the moment it was drafted and signed.
Think of the prodigal son.
While his behavior was rude and foolish, we have no indication that it was considered impossible
or completely unheard of for a father to distribute inheritance early.
So it is strange for verse 17 to insist that a will is not in force while its maker lives.
But the biggest challenge to translating diotheke as will comes from the passage as a whole in the Greek.
The ESV gives a logical flow in English and makes it sound like will makes sense.
But this only comes by translating some of the Greek words in ways that they’re not normally translated.
Now to keep things simple, I’ll point out only one example in each verse,
which makes the translation of diotheke as will unlikely.
If we look at verse 16, it says must be established.
The Greek word translated established doesn’t have that meaning anywhere else it shows up.
It normally means to carry like a load or bear like a fruit, either literally or metaphorically.
The Greek in verse 16 would more literally read for where there is a covenant or will,
it is necessary that the death of the one who made it must be born or represented.
Words can have a range of meanings, and this Greek word has a big range.
But it doesn’t mean established in any other biblical context that we know of.
This passage would be the first and only place that it means established.
Now of course this doesn’t seal the deal by itself.
The way we learn the range of a word’s meaning is by looking at all of its uses in context.
But the main reason to translate it as established here is because of the assumption
that the sentence is talking about a will rather than a covenant.
It’s begging the question, which means assuming the position it’s supposed to be trying to argue for.
Now in verse 17, we have the word death.
For a will takes effect only at death, since it is not enforced as long as the one who made it is alive.
The word death here is actually plural in Greek.
In almost any other context, this word would be translated corpses or dead things.
Things that are dead, more than one.
But once again, in order to support the translation of the deotheke as will instead of covenant,
this normal plural noun is translated as a singular.
It requires a unique translation of this plural noun as a singular in this instance.
The bottom line is that when translating this passage from the Greek,
in order to try to make the translation of deotheke mean will instead of covenant,
it requires translating other words in unusual ways as well.
This boils down to the reality that I think makes the most sense to translate it as covenant.
In every other passage, in every other instance,
the biblical writers all use this same word deotheke exclusively in its technical biblical sense, covenant.
So it seems unlikely that the writer is referring to the secular meaning of will
instead of sticking with the biblical technical meaning.
Well, what might it sound like if we stuck to the translation of covenant all the way through?
Here’s one commentator’s translation.
I put it in your outline so that you can follow along.
He says,
For where there is a covenant, it is necessary that the death of the one making it be represented.
For a covenant is made legally firm on the basis of dead victims,
since it is not valid while the one making it is alive.
You can see that compared with the ESV’s translation below.
I don’t want you to lose the big picture here.
This position is a minority opinion among good Bible scholars.
Most Bible translations translate it as will.
So I don’t want to overstate the importance of this difference.
Before studying for this sermon, I liked the idea of will.
I even wrote a paper on it in seminary.
But I also want to say that ultimately translating it as will instead of covenant,
it doesn’t affect any biblical doctrines.
I think that the translation of will is well-intended and meant to give clarity.
But I still think it is incorrect and less clear.
I believe the best to stay consistent with translating Diotheca as covenant in all instances
and work out the challenges presented in the passage a different way.
Now the commentator that I quoted earlier explains the argument from Hebrews
verses 16 and 17 by paraphrasing it this way.
Once again, I’ve listed this in your outline to help you follow along.
For where there is a covenant, it is necessary that the one making it be represented by sacrifice
in order to demonstrate the curse under which they are placing themselves if they break the covenant.
For a covenant is made legally firm on the basis of a ritual involving dead victims.
Since it is not valid while the one making it is alive.
That is, unless one’s death is legally represented by the sacrificial animals.
This would mean that the author of Hebrews is referring to part of the traditional covenant ritual
in which animals were cut up.
This would form a tight-knit argument with what comes before and what comes after.
The cut-up animals representing the participants cutting the covenant
and symbolized the potential consequences for breaking it.
Although inheritance is mentioned in verse 15, the focus of the whole passage
is not on the distribution of possessions to heirs, but on redemption
and the establishment of a covenant through blood.
In the end, although the translation of Diotheca as well as a popular solution
to the challenge of translating verses 16 and 17 doesn’t solve every issue,
I think it even creates some new ones.
I think the entire passage makes the most sense when Diotheca is consistently translated as a covenant,
which required bloodshed, which leads to our final point.
Bloodshed. Convicting or cleansing.
The description of the covenantal ceremony in our passage, as we stated before,
sounds like a bloody mess.
Verses 18 through 21.
And sprinkled both the book itself and all the people saying,
this is the blood of the covenant that God commanded for you.
And in the same way, he sprinkled with the blood both the tent and all the vessels used in worship.
Blood was spilled and sprinkled on everyone and everything.
It can be easy to gloss over these descriptions and sanitize things in our minds.
I’m extremely grateful I don’t need to bring butcher knives to worship
or to keep bloodstain remover on hand for use after every service.
But for the people in the Old Covenant, blood was a reality of worshiping God.
Atonement is not a clean, tidy affair.
Forgiveness required more than an apology and a promise to do better next time.
The blood would have been a perpetual reminder of what their forgiveness cost.
From the first Passover day, they were delivered from the execution of the firstborn in Egypt
to Mount Sinai to the daily morning and evening sacrifices.
The Israelites were reminded constantly that the favor they enjoyed from God was blood bought.
Their safety came at the expense of another’s life.
Blood in the Old Covenant was intended to convey cleansing,
but also inescapably represented the ever-present threat if they broke the Covenant.
Although the Covenant was a part of the Covenant of Grace, representing that same source of salvation,
it was an incomplete administration.
The bloody mess was pointing ahead to a time when the true sacrifice would be offered
and the people would be clean inside and out.
God offers Israel a famous bargain in Isaiah 1 verse 18.
He says,
It’s an odd picture to suggest that blood can take bright red filth and make it white as snow.
To the outsider, the Bible asserts an odd proposition that things can be cleansed with blood.
Anyone who’s cared for kids or worked in medical settings would probably suggest the opposite.
Blood is what makes things messy.
It’s certainly not what you would use to create a clean surface or garment.
We try to avoid contact with blood and for good reason.
It’s important to remember that sometimes the biblical idea that blood could actually cleanse
may not be intuitive to those around us in our culture.
Blood doesn’t cleanse the outside, but our biggest problem is not what’s on the outside.
The filth of a sinful soul far surpasses any stain on clothing or skin.
The Covenant was inaugurated in blood because it was only through the death of a substitute
that the people could have peaceful union with God.
The only way for him to be their God and for them to be his people was for another to die for their covenant breaking.
For the Israelite, blood was a daily reality.
It was a constant reminder of the cost and consequence of sin.
Perhaps some more thoughtful Christians might ask,
would it be better to have more blood in our worship services to encourage our own awareness of our sin and its penalty?
The Roman Catholic Church is one branch of the Christian tradition that leans very heavily in that direction.
While they don’t sacrifice animals or bring in actual blood,
they assert that in an undetectable way the bread and wine served in the Lord’s Supper
transform into a physical body and physical blood of Christ.
And he has sacrificed anew in each service of mass.
Not only is this view illogical and wrong on numerous levels,
it also misses the point of Christ’s sacrifice, which was meant to be once for all.
Our bloodless worship services celebrate the fact that the full price has been fully paid.
Death is ended because one has died for all.
We’re meant to be distanced from the physical blood,
because with Christ’s death, with his bloodshed, we have nothing to fear.
The threat of death for our covenant breaking has been carried out against Christ,
leaving us with nothing but the benefits of life.
Our bodies are no longer sprinkled with the blood of animals,
because our souls have been soaked once for all in the efficacious blood of Jesus Christ the Righteous.
We remember the immeasurable price that was paid for us to inherit the blessings instead of the curses,
but no longer with actual blood, because the only blood that truly matters has been shed once and for all.
Without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sins.
But with the shedding of blood, the blood of the Son of God, there is complete forgiveness of sins.
As we’ll sing in a moment, there is a fountain filled with blood drawn from Emmanuel’s veins,
and sinners plunged beneath that flood lose all their guilty stains.
My favorite verse is the last one.
Dear dying lamb, your precious blood shall never lose its power
until all the ransomed Church of God are saved to sin no more. Amen.
Let’s pray.
Father in Heaven, we thank you for inaugurating covenant,
for establishing the covenant of grace built upon the merits of Christ,
that you graciously give the benefits of His bloodshed to those that by faith embrace Him.
We thank you for that cleansing blood.
We thank you that we no longer need to be close to such physical blood,
because you have cleansed our souls.
You have shed that blood once and for all, and now welcome us into your covenant of grace.
We thank you for this, in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Let’s turn now in response to sing hymn number 340.
Let’s stand as we sing hymn 340. There is a fountain filled with blood.