It is not easy for us to realize the feelings with which the Israelite, in the yet palmy days of the Levitical worship, would hear of an abrogation of the Law;—the anger and contempt with which the mere bigot would repudiate the suggestion;—the terror with which the new convert would make trial of his freedom;—the blank and infidel feeling with which he would look round, and find himself drifted away from his anchorage of ceremony; the sinking heart, with which he would hear the reproaches of his countrymen against his apostacy. Every authoritative ritual draws towards itself an attachment too strong for reason and the sense of right; and transfers the feeling of obligation from realities to symbols. Among the Hebrews, this effect was the more marked and the more pernicious, because their ceremonies were, in many instances, only remotely connected with any important truth or excellent end; they were separated by several removes from any spiritual utility. Rites were enacted to sustain other rites; institution lay beneath institution, through so many successive steps, that the crowning principle at the summit easily passed out of sight. To keep alive the grand truth of the Divine Unity, there was a gorgeous temple worship: to perform this worship there was a priesthood: to support the priesthood, there were (among other sources of income) dues paid in the form of sacrifice: to provide against the non-payment of dues there were penalties: to prevent an injurious pressure of these penalties, there were exemptions, as in cases of sickness: and to put a check on trivial claims of exemption, it must be purchased by submission to a fee, under name of an atonement. Wherever such a system is received as divine, and based on the same authority with the great law of duty, it will always, by its definiteness and precision, attract attention from graver moral obligations. Its materiality renders it calculable: its account with the conscience can be exactly ascertained: as it has little obvious utility to men, it appears the more directly paid to God; it is regarded as the special means of pleasing him, of placating his anger, and purchasing his promises. Hence it may often happen, that the more the offences against the spirit of duty, the more are rites multiplied in propitiation; and the harvest of ceremonies and that of crimes ripen together.
At a state not far from this, had the Jews arrived, when Christianity was preached. Their moral sentiments were so far perverted, that they valued nothing in themselves, in comparison with their legal exactitude, and hated all beyond themselves for the want of this. They were eagerly expecting the Deliverer’s kingdom, nursing up their ambition for his triumphs: curling the lip, as the lash of oppression fell upon them, in suppressed anticipation of vengeance; satiating a temper, at once fierce and servile, with dreams of Messiah’s coming judgment, when the blood of the Patriarchs should be the title of the world’s nobles, and the everlasting reign should begin in Jerusalem. Why was the hour delayed, they impatiently asked themselves? Was it that they had offended Jehovah, and secretly sinned against some requirement of his law? And then they set themselves to a renewed precision, a more slavish punctiliousness than before. Ascribing their continued depression to their imperfect legal obedience, they strained their ceremonialism tighter than ever: and hoped to be soon justified from their past sins, and ready for the mighty prince and the latter days.
What then must have been the feeling of the Hebrew, when told that all his punctualities had been thrown away; that at the advent, faith in Jesus, not obedience to the law, was to be the title to admission; and that the redeemed at that day would be, not the scrupulous Pharisee,—whose dead works would be of no avail; but all who, with the heart, have worthily confessed the name of the Lord Jesus? What doctrine could be more unwelcome to the haughty Israelite? it dashed his pride of ancestry to the ground. It brought to the same level with himself the polluted Gentile, whose presence would alone render all unclean in the Messiah’s kingdom. It proved his past ritual anxieties to have been all wasted. It cast aside for the future the venerated law; left it in neglect to die; and made all the apparatus of Providence for its maintenance end in absolutely nothing. Was then the Messiah to supersede, and not to vindicate the law? How different this from the picture which prophets had drawn of his golden age, when Jerusalem was to be the pride of the earth, and her temple the praise of nations, sought by the feet of countless pilgrims, and decked with the splendour of their gifts! How could a true Hebrew be justified in a life without law? How think himself safe in a profession, which was without temple, without priest, without altar, without victim?
Not unnaturally, then, did the Hebrews regard with reluctance two of the leading features of Christianity; the death of the Messiah, and the freedom from the law. The epistle addressed to them was designed to soothe their uneasiness, and to show, that if the Mosaic institutions were superseded, it was in conformity with principles and analogies contained within themselves. With great address, the writer links the two difficulties together, and makes the one explain the other. He finds a ready means of effecting this, in the sacrificial ideas familiar to every Hebrew; for by representing the death of Jesus as commutation for legal observances, he is only ascribing to it an operation, acknowledged to have place in the death of every lamb slain as a sin-offering at the altar. These offerings were a distinct recognition on the part of the Levitical code, of a principle of equivalents for its ordinances; a proof that, under certain conditions, they might yield: nothing more, therefore, was necessary, than to show that the death of Christ established those conditions. And such a method of argument was attended by this advantage, that while the practical end would be obtained of terminating all ceremonial observance, the Law was yet treated as in theory perpetual; not as ignominiously abrogated, but as legitimately commuted. Just as the Israelite, in paying his offering at the altar to compensate for ritual omissions, recognized thereby the claims of the law, while he obtained impunity for its neglect; so, if Providence could be shown to have provided a legal substitute for the system, its authority was acknowledged, at the moment that its abolition was secured.
Let us advert then to the functions of the Mosaic sin-offerings, to which the writer has recourse to illustrate his main position. They were of the nature of a mulct or acknowledgment rendered, for unconscious or inevitable disregard of ceremonial liabilities, and contraction of ceremonial uncleanness. Such uncleanness might be incurred from various causes; and while unremoved by the appointed methods of purification, disqualified from attendance at the sanctuary, and “cut off” “the guilty” “from among the congregation.” To touch a dead body, to enter a tent where a corpse lay, rendered a person “unclean for seven days;” to come in contact with a forbidden animal, a bone, a grave; to be next to any one struck with sudden death; to be afflicted with certain kinds of bodily disease and infirmity; unwittingly to lay a finger on a person unclean, occasioned defilement, and necessitated a purification or an atonement.[[370]] Independently of these offences, enforced upon the Israelite by the accidents of life, it was not easy for even the most cautious worshipper to keep pace with the complicated series of petty debts which the law of ordinances was always running up against him. If his offering had an invisible blemish; if he omitted a tithe, because “he wist it not;” or inadvertently fell into arrear, by a single day, with respect to a known liability; if absent from disease, he was compelled to let his ritual account accumulate; “though it be hidden from him,” he must “be guilty, and bear his iniquity,” and bring his victim.[[371]] On the birth of a child, the mother, after the lapse of a prescribed period, made her pilgrimage to the temple, presented her sin-offering, and “the priest made atonement for her.”[[372]] The poor leper, long banished from the face of men, and unclean by the nature of his disease, became a debtor to the sanctuary, and on return from his tedious quarantine, brought his lamb of atonement, and departed thence, clear from neglected obligations to his law.[[373]] It was impossible, however, to provide by specific enactment for every case of ritual transgression and impurity, arising from inadvertency or necessity. Scarcely could it be expected that the courts of worship themselves would escape defilement, from imperfections in the offerings, or unconscious disqualification in people or in priest. To clear off the whole invisible residue of such sins, an annual “day of atonement” was appointed; the people thronged the avenues and approaches of the tabernacle; in their presence a kid was slain for their own transgressions, and for the high-priest the more dignified expiation of a heifer: charged with the blood of each successively, he sprinkled not only the exterior altar open to the sky, but, passing through the first and Holy chamber into the Holy of Holies, (never entered else), he touched, with finger dipped in blood, the sacred lid (the Mercy-seat) and foreground of the Ark.[[374]] At that moment, while he yet lingers behind the veil, the purification is complete; on no worshipper of Israel does any legal unholiness rest; and were it possible for the high-priest to remain in that interior retreat of Jehovah, still protracting the expiatory act, so long would this national purity continue, and the debt of ordinances be effaced as it arose. But he must return; the sanctifying rite must end; the people be dismissed; the priests resume the daily ministrations; the law open its stern account afresh; and in the mixture of national exactitude and neglects, defilements multiply again till the recurring anniversary lifts off the burden once more. Every year, then, the necessity comes round of “making atonement for the Holy sanctuary,” “for the tabernacle,” “for the altar,” “for the priests, and for all the people of the congregation.” Yet, though requiring periodical renewal, the rite, so far as it went, had an efficacy which no Hebrew could deny; for ceremonial sins, unconscious or inevitable (to which all atonement was limited[[375]]), it was accepted as an indemnity; and put it beyond doubt that Mosaic obedience was commutable.
Such was the system of ideas, by availing himself of which the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews would persuade his correspondents to forsake their legal observances. “You can look without uneasiness,” he suggests, “on your ritual omissions, when the blood of some victim has been presented instead, and the penetralia of your sanctuary have been sprinkled with the offering: well, on no other terms would I soothe your anxiety; precisely such equivalent sacrifice does Christianity exhibit, only of so peculiar a nature, that for all ceremonial neglects, intentional no less than inadvertent, you may rely upon indemnity.” The Jews entertained a belief respecting their temple, which enabled the writer to give a singular force and precision to his analogy. They conceived, that the tabernacle of their worship was but the copy of a divine structure, devised by God himself, made by no created hand, and preserved eternally in heaven: this was “the true tabernacle, which the Lord pitched, and not man;” which no mortal had beheld, except Moses in the mount that he might “make all things according to that pattern;”[[376]] within whose Holy of Holies dwelt no emblem or emanation of God’s presence, but his own immediate Spirit; and the celestial furniture of which required, in proportion to its dignity, the purification of a nobler sacrifice, and the ministrations of a diviner priest, than befitted the “worldly sanctuary”[[377]] below. And who then can mistake the meaning of Christ’s departure from this world, or doubt what office he conducts above? He is called by his ascension to the Pontificate of heaven; consecrated, “not after the law of any carnal commandment, but after the power of an endless life;”[[378]] he drew aside the veil of his mortality, and passed into the inmost court of God: and as he must needs “have somewhat to offer,”[[379]] he takes the only blood he had ever shed,—which was his own,—and like the high-priest before the Mercy-seat, sanctifies therewith the people that stand without, “redeeming the transgressions” which “the first covenant” of rites entailed.[[380]] And he has not returned; still is he hid within that holiest place; and still the multitude he serves turn thither a silent and expectant gaze; he prolongs the purification still; and while he appears not, no other rites can be resumed, nor any legal defilement be contracted. Thus, meanwhile, ordinances cease their obligation, and the sin against them has lost its power. How different this from the offerings of Jerusalem, whose temple was but the “symbol and shadow” of that sanctuary above.[[381]] In the Hebrew “sacrifices there was a remembrance again made of sins every year;”[[382]] “the high-priest annually entered the holy place;”[[383]] being but a mortal, he could not go in with his own blood and remain but must take that of other creatures and return; and hence it became “not possible that the blood of bulls and of goats should take away sins,”[[384]] for instantly they began to accumulate again. But to the very nature of Christ’s offering, a perpetuity of efficacy belongs; bearing no other than his own blood,” he was immortal when his ministration began, and “ever liveth to make his intercession;[[385]] he could “not offer himself often, for then must he often have suffered since the foundation of the world,”—and “it is appointed unto men only once to die:” so that “once for all he entered into the holy place, and obtained a redemption that is perpetual;” “once in the end of the world hath he appeared, and by sacrificing himself hath absolutely put away sin;” “this man, after he had offered one sacrifice for sins, for ever sat down on the right hand of God,” “for by one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified,”[[386]] The ceremonial then, with its periodical transgressions, and atonements, is suspended; the services of the outer tabernacle cease, for the holiest of all is made manifest;[[387]] one who is “priest for ever” dwells therein: one “consecrated for evermore,” “holy, harmless, undefiled, in his celestial dwelling quite separate from sinners;[[388]] who needeth not daily, as those high priests, to offer up sacrifice, first for his own sins, and then for the people’s; for this he did once for all when he offered up himself.”[[389]]
Nor is it in its perpetuity alone, that the efficacy of the Christian sacrifice transcends the atonements of the law; it removes a higher order of ritual transgressions. It cannot be supposed, indeed, that Messiah’s life is no nobler offering than that of a creature from the herd or flock, and will confer no more immunity. Accordingly, it goes beyond those “sins of ignorance,” those ceremonial inadvertences, for which alone there was remission in Israel; and reaches to voluntary neglects of the sacerdotal ordinances; ensuring indemnity for legal omissions, when incurred not simply by the accidents of the flesh, but even by intention of the conscience. This is no greater boon than the dignity of the sacrifice requires; and does but give to his people below that living relation of soul to God, which he himself sustains above. “If the blood of bulls and of goats ... sanctifieth to the purifying of the flesh: how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purify (even) your conscience from dead works (ritual observances) to serve the living God!”[[390]] Let then the ordinances go, and the Lord “put his laws into the mind and write them in the heart;” and let all have “boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus, by this new and living way which he hath consecrated for us;” “provoking each other to love and to good works.”[[391]]
See, then, in brief, the objection of the Hebrews to the gospel; and the reply of their instructor. They said; “What a blank is this; you have no temple, no priest, no ritual! How is it that, in his ancient covenant, God is so strict about ceremonial service, and permits no neglect, however incidental, without atonement; yet in this new economy, throws the whole system away; letting us run up an everlasting debt to a law confessedly unrepealed, without redemption of it, or atonement for it?”
“Not without redemption and atonement,” replies their evangelical teacher; “temple, sacrifice, priest, remain to us also, only glorified into proportions worthy of a heavenly dispensation; our temple, in the skies; our sacrifice, Messiah’s mortal person; our priest, his ever-living spirit. How poor the efficacy of your former offerings! year after year, your ritual debt began again: for the blood dried and vanished from the tabernacle which it purified; the priest returned from the inner shrine; and when there, he stood, with the interceding blood, before the emblem, not the reality of God. But Christ, not at the end of a year, but at the end of the great world-era of the Lord, has come to offer up himself,—no lamb so unblemished as he; his voluntary and immortal spirit, than which was nothing ever more divinely consecrate, becomes officiating priest, and strikes his own person with immolating blow; it falls and bleeds on earth, as on the outer altar, standing on the threshold of the sanctuary of heaven: thither he ascends with the memorials of his death, vanishes into the Holy of Holies of the skies, presents himself before the very living God, and sanctifies the temple there and worshippers here: saying to us, ‘drop now for ever the legal burdens that weigh you down; doubt not that you are free, as my glorified spirit here, from the defilements you are wont to dread; I stay behind this veil of visible things to clear you of all such taint, and put away such sin eternally. Trust then in me, and take up the freedom of your souls: burst the dead works, that cling round your conscience like cerements of the grave; and rise to me, by the living power of duty, and loving allegiance to God.’”
So far then, as the death of Christ is treated in scripture dogmatically, rather than historically, its effects are viewed in contrast with the different order of things which must have been expected, had he, as Messiah, not died. And thus regarded, it presented itself to the minds of the Apostles in three relations;