Hebrews 10:10-14 – “By the which will we are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all. And every priest standeth daily ministering and offering oftentimes the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins: But this man, after he had offered one sacrifice for sins for ever, sat down on the right hand of God; From henceforth expecting till his enemies be made his footstool. For by one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified.”
First, we find in this text that the work of the Lord Jesus Christ was the will of his Father. Paul references Psalm 40:7-8 as the words of the Messiah: the Savior came to do the will of God. This is what he himself said throughout his earthly ministry. In Luke 4:43, after the people of Capernaum asked him to stay there healing the sick and casting out demons, it is written, “And he said unto them, I must preach the kingdom of God to other cities also: for therefore am I sent.” And in John 4:34, when his disciples brought him food, it says, “Jesus saith unto them, My meat is to do the will of him that sent me, and to finish his work.” There are some who imagine that the Lord Jesus Christ and the Lord God were opposed to one another. As though God was some grumpy old man who had no desire to redeem people, and Jesus Christ persuaded him to do so. This is an ancient heresy, taught by a man named Saturninus, whom Irenaeus mentions in the 2nd century.1 But we see here, and in other places in the Bible, that the work of Jesus Christ the Lord, including his death, was the will of God. For instance, Isaiah 53:10 is clear: “Yet it pleased the LORD to bruise him.”
Second, the result of the accomplishment of his will is that we are sanctified, or made holy. To be sanctified, in a creaturely sense, means to be set apart from what is common and devoted to divine service. Think of the golden utensils of the temple. The thing that distinguished the golden instrument of the temple from the golden instruments of, say King Croesus, was the fact that the one in the temple was devoted to service to God. The offering of the Lord Jesus Christ, his death and his endurance of the wrath of God, has set us apart and devoted us who believe unto divine service. In Revelation 5:9-10, we see that we have been redeemed by the blood of the Lamb, and that by his blood he has made us kings and priests to God. Who is the “we” in the text? It is the apostle and his audience; that is, Paul and those who are later described as having been cleansed (v.22) and who have a valid profession of faith (v.23-25). In short, it is the saints of God in Christ Jesus, those who believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. Here we find an important truth: the death of the Lord Jesus was effectual for his people, not for every individual indiscriminately. Every person for whom Christ died will experience the result of his death, that is, to be sanctified.
Third, what was the offering? Paul says, “through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.” He goes on to say, “after he had offered one sacrifice for sins for ever.” We must be very clear and very precise on this point: the death of Jesus Christ was the sin-offering. It was not a sin-offering, but the great Sacrifice which was typified in all the Old Covenant shadows. A sin-offering must be made to God. Leviticus 6:25, “Speak unto Aaron and to his sons, saying, This is the law of the sin offering: In the place where the burnt offering is killed shall the sin offering be killed before the LORD: it is most holy.” The offerings made to false gods, by both Israel and the Gentiles, were vain, useless, and absurd: they accomplished nothing except to compound the guilt of those who offered them. But the sin offering of the Old Covenant was type and shadow: Leviticus 9:7, “And Moses said unto Aaron, Go unto the altar, and offer thy sin offering, and thy burnt offering, and make an atonement for thyself, and for the people: and offer the offering of the people, and make an atonement for them; as the LORD commanded.” The blood of bulls and goats, of course, could not take away sin; they could not make an effectual atonement or reconciliation. But the Lord Jesus Christ offered himself, his body, to be the death that was the true sin offering which accomplished a complete redemption and atonement. This corrects another error, which teaches that the death of the Lord Jesus Christ was a ransom paid to Satan. If, however, the death of Christ was the sin offering for his people, and if a sin offering can only be offered to God to make atonement, then clearly the death of the Lord Jesus Christ was rendered to the Father, not to Satan. This is explicitly spelled out in Hebrews 9:14, “How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?”
Fourth, this leads us to understand that the death of Jesus Christ the Lord was the propitiation for our sin. The word “propitiation” means to appease the divine wrath, and to secure favor from the divine.2 In other words, the Lord Jesus Christ died on the cross to suffer under the wrath of God against the sin of his people, to satisfy God’s justice (i.e., the justice of the Father, Son, and Spirit), and to secure favor and eternal life for his people. He told Nicodemus: “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life” (John 3:14-15). The apostle John tells us, “In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him. Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:9-10). The wrath of God is appeased, and eternal life, which is the relational knowledge of God and his Son Jesus Christ (John 17:3), is bestowed to us because of the death of the Savior upon the cross.
There have been many wrong and wicked heresies brought forward over the years concerning this point. And we would do well to not be ignorant of them, because they are still influential today. So, we will discuss some of the more prevalent ones.3
- Schleiermacher (1768-1834) put forward an idea that came to be known as the Mystical Theory: Berkhof describes it thus, “His voluntary sufferings and death served to reveal his love to mankind and his devotion to his task, and to intensify the influence which he brings to bear on souls that were previously alienated from God.”4 We see versions of this popular today: Jesus died because he loved you so much and wanted you to go back to God.
- Grotius (1583-1645) developed what would be called the Governmental Theory. In this view, the death of the Lord Jesus Christ was not an atonement, or a propitiation. Grotius took the idea of grace and transformed it to mean that God forgives freely, and that he is free to change the demands of his justice. So in this view, the Lord Jesus died to be an example of how much God hates sin, and to warn men that they should not sin.5
- Perhaps the most common heresy is that which is called the Moral Influence Theory. There are many variations of this idea, but the basic form of it is similar to what Schleiermacher taught. The essential idea is that the death of Christ served to increase his influence over men to win them back to God. So Berkhof describes the theology of Peter Abelard (c.1079-1142): “This newly awakened love [in the sinner to God in response to Christ’s love as shown on the cross] redeems us by liberating us from the power of sin and by leading us into the liberty of the sons of God, so that we obey God freely from the motive of love. Thus the forgiveness of sins is the direct result of the love kindled in our hearts, and only indirectly the fruit of the death of Christ.”6 In other words, the thing that brings us forgiveness is not what Christ did, but our response to what he did.
There are a couple of things that all of these heretical views have in common. First, they deny the plain teaching of Scripture. They twist the Word of God to suit their own theories, subjecting the revelation of God in his Word to their own logic and their own sense of right and wrong. Here the ancient words of Irenaeus ring true: “But when he [the Christian] has restored every one of the expressions quoted to its proper position, and has fitted it to the body of the truth, he will lay bare, and prove to be without any foundation, the figment of these heretics.”7 Second, each of the views described above make the death of the Lord Jesus Christ to be primarily about us. It is about our love, our behavior, and so forth.
But the question we need to ask is this: what saith the Scripture? What did the Lord Jesus himself say was the purpose of his earthly ministry, including his death on the cross? John 17:4, “I have glorified thee on the earth: I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do.” This is not about us: it is about the glory of God in the Person and Work of his only-begotten Son Jesus Christ. If we lose sight of that, we will inevitably end up thinking wrongly. In our text, we see the result of Christ offering up himself once for sin was his exaltation. Because he humbled himself, because he suffered the just for the unjust, he has been exalted above all power and principality. To him has been given that name which is above every name: that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow and every tongue confess that he is Lord. Why? To the glory of God the Father. He has sat down, his work is finished, and one day he will return to judge the quick and the dead.
Dear saints, let us never lose sight of the last words of this text: “For by one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified.” One offering, not many offerings repeated for thousands of years in some absurd ritual. He is the One who has perfected us who are being sanctified. He has secured what we shall be, and he ensures that we shall be what we will be. In the midst of doubt, in the midst of struggling with sin and temptation, in the midst of trial and affliction, remember that Jesus Christ the Lord has died for all who believe on him. He gave himself as the sin offering for the sin of those who believe on him: the past, present, and future actual sin, and the seminal sin we inherit from Adam. Rest on Jesus Christ the Lord, and trust that what God has promised, he is able also to perform.
1Philip Schaff, ed., The Apostolic Fathers with Justin Martyr and Irenaeus, PDF, vol. 1, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, Ante-Nicene Fathers (Grand Rapids, MI: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, 1885), 916. Saturninus taught that the “God of the Jews” (as he called him) was an angel who sought dominion over other angels, and Christ came to destroy his rule and set the people free from him.
2Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, ed. Sir Henry Stuart Jones (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1996), s.v. ἰλασία.
3Louis Berkhof, The History of Christian Doctrines (London: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1937), pp. 165-199.
4ibid., 194.
5ibid., 186-8.
6ibid., 174.
7Philip Schaff, ed., The Apostolic Fathers with Justin Martyr and Irenaeus, PDF, vol. 1, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, Ante-Nicene Fathers (Grand Rapids, MI: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, 1885), 875.
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