Clough Proverbs Lesson 10

Elimination (Confession) from the Human Spirit – Hebrews 10:1-25

For those of you who have not had a chance to follow our morning series on the introduction to Proverbs, if you are not clear as to why we are spending so much time in dealing with these terms of the soul, the reason is two fold. Number one, the book of Proverbs must be understood in the light of the terms in which it was written. It’s very easy if you’re not prepared to read into the words that you will see in the pages of your Bible, ideas that you have, for example, ideas about the soul, ideas that you have picked up in a classroom somewhere or ideas that you have picked up in your reading. And you must understand that the words that you will read in the book of Proverbs, when they deal with the soul, heart, mind and so on, are set in an ancient near eastern context. This ancient context was completely different from our world and the way we think in many respects.

And one of these respects is that all the parts of man, so to speak, or all the terms used to describe man’s character, these terms are all related to something you can see, something you can hear, something you can feel something you can touch. When the people in the Bible spoke of the soul they weren’t talking in terms of some Greek philosophy of the soul, some innate thing. This was furthest from their mind. When they spoke of soul they meant something you could see. The same with the human spirit, and this is why we have said that the human spirit is not some ethereal philosophical abstraction some place, but the ancient people, when they spoke of the human spirit, were talking about something you could see. What was it you could see? Breath; and so the presence or absence of the human spirit was correlated to a physical, physically observable thing breath, human breath. And so therefore these things are not abstractions and so what I am attempting to do as we move through these terms, probably by the end of September we’ll begin Proverbs. When we finish these terms you will have behind each word the idea of the physical, observable, phenomenon that was meant by these words.

We have dealt with several things but first I want to answer a question that came in last Sunday. The question that was asked is: If language separates man from the animals, which has been our contention that that is the difference between man and animal, only creatures made in God’s image can speak, animals cannot, if language separates man from the animals how do you explain the [quote] “language” scientists and biologists say they have found among such animals as the porpoise and others. This goes back to that particular Sunday that we spent on this subject and you recall that I distinguished between languages and signals. And if you are careful in your definitions there is no confusion. Language is not the same as signals; signals all animals and man have; signals are simply memory pattern or pattern recognition. And all animals have signal systems of communications. Information can be conveyed, those of you who have been at the Bible science school, in the film on the bees, you certainly saw a very good example of communication of information from one insect to another. That is not language. Those are signals, because language we have defined as the communication of meaning and concepts. And these are not transferred by any form of signals. No sense of the universal, no sense of high categories and so on; that is something solely concerned with language.

I would say that the very reason why we have confusion in this area and some of you have read about this problem of the porpoise and so forth, is simply because the scientists themselves that work with these questions are not philosophically trained and this is one of the tragedies of our own generation. We have a lot of people that are very competent in their individual sciences but they are incompetent when it comes to the overall issues. And they cannot think in terms of philosophical categories and definitions and so therefore these scientists think what they’re looking at is language when in fact what they are looking is not language, it is signals. But because they do not have finesse in the area of philosophy, they are unable to distinguish between the two. And so therefore even in their scientific papers, when you read them, they are using the word “language” very ambiguously. In some ways you look at it and they’re using it in terms of signals, other times they use the word “language” they’re using it in terms of language. So we have a very sloppy use of the word.

And it’s primarily because thanks to our educational system we do not ever learn at any point in the school system how to think in terms of overall categories, presuppositions and so on. All you learn in school is a bunch of facts, from this field, that field and another field and never during any point of your schooling do you ever receive a framework to tie it all together. This is why a lot of students drop out; I’d drop out; if it wasn’t for the Word of God education would be a waste of time. And this is why, of course, some of the older people who have as one of their idols the degree; they want their little child to go to college and get a degree, maybe simply because they never had a chance to get a degree or they are under the illusion that a degree gives you a better job opportunity or something else; this is just idolatry. Your education comes from the Word of God and secondarily from all the rest of it. So don’t worry about getting this degree thing; you learn the categories from the Word and then you will have something to glue together all the facts. If you don’t learn the Word of God you’re just wasting your time trying to get a [quote] “education,” [end quote], because you’re not going to get one.

We have dealt with parts of the soul, spirit, heart and so on. Today we’re going to finish up the human spirit. Remember God makes the body first; the body is received from the point of conception. During the nine months of pregnancy the woman is carrying a body but not a person. She’s carrying a body that’s being developed, a body that is being activated by the spirit of the mother but the body which does not have its own spirit and therefore is not a living thing. At the point of physical birth God gives breath. At the time the baby takes the first breath this is the time it becomes a living thing. And this is the time when by acquisition of a human spirit in its body it now is a living soul.

We have said there are certain needs that your spirit has. These needs include nutrition, which we have said comes from feeding on the Word of God. “Man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God,” and you have to eat spiritually as you eat physically. This is why we have such a generation of morons in this country, is because we have a generation that has neglected spiritual food. They’ve laughed and ridiculed the Word of God, they’ve substituted for the word all sorts of religious gimmicks such as legalism and so on; they have replaced the Word with a lot of church programs but always it is the Word that is sacrificed, with the result that people in key leadership positions panic, they can’t make a decision. They have no framework to make a decision because they have no Bible doctrine. Bible doctrine only comes from the teaching of the Word of God and therefore because we have neglected our spiritual food we have a minimum of people who are Christians in the first place, that is people who have really accepted Christ as Savior, and second place, we have few of those who have gone on with the Word and become spiritually strong and self-sustaining individuals. And of course we are reaping the unfortunate results of fifty years of this practice.

So we have the needs, nutrition; the second great need of the human spirit is the need for some sort of exercise, and just as an analogy with the physical body you can eat the most nutritious food, not exercise and be a slob. And so similarly spiritually you can sit around and take in the Word of God, supposedly, and never apply it by faith and be a spiritual slob. And so this explains why we have so many people who have supposedly sat under the teaching of the Word and you don’t see any results. They’re just spiritual slobs because their human spirit has not been exercised by applying the Word of God to situation after situation in their life. So the answer to the problem of nutrition is taking in the Word systematically, taking in the Word through the four means that God has provided, such as (1) the infallible canon of Scripture, (2) the second means that God has provided to give you nutrition is the fallible pastor-teacher in the local church context, not through some subsidiary organization but through the local church. (3) The universal priesthood of the believer meaning that every believer has the right to personal relationship with Jesus Christ apart from the interference of any church organization or clergyman. (4) And the fourth thing, the indwelling Holy Spirit which is the person who does the actual opening of the eyes to the truth that is taught.

So God has provided in His grace our food spiritually; all we have to do is eat and then we have to exercise because exercise is the thing that builds up the human spirit. Exercise is the thing that takes the Word of God and applies it to the situation by faith so that no matter what the crisis situation is, no matter what the worry is, you “cast your cares upon Him for He cares for you,” 1 Peter 5:7. No matter what the area in your life is if you are applying the Word you are exercising; if you reject the Word and say well, this is a nice idea, I’ll keep it in my notes for thirty years from now when someday I might, when I get good and old and sitting by the fireside I can trot out my little notebook and look at it. This is not exercising this human spirit; this is getting a good set of notebooks together. So that’s the second thing.

And now also with the body, the body has a need to eliminate its waste; the body has the need to eliminate HCO2 which obviously is a byproduct of metabolism; the body has solid and liquid wastes that must be eliminated. So the human spirit has a problem and the human spirit must have elimination. In 1 Corinthians 8:7 we have a word that pictures for us this third great need of the human spirit. This third great need is the need for a clean conscience, or an elimination of the defilement that the conscience picks up. In 1 Corinthians 8:7 it says, “However, there is not in every man that knowledge;” this is speaking of a person who is an immature Christian, who feels that he cannot engage in certain activities because he feels guilty about it. “… for some with custom of the idol unto this hour eat it as a thing offered unto an idol, and their conscience, being weak, is defiled.”

This raises the third need that you have spiritually; how do you eliminate the defilement from your conscience. You might think of an analogy in this regard; if you visualize the conscience separated from your mind by a sort of glass petition, and if you think of defilement of your conscience as dirt that’s smeared on the window on the other side, and then think of normal human means of removing that dirt as trying to wipe the glass clean. The trouble is, the dirt’s all on the other side of the glass. And this is a problem; the dirt is put on the glass from the conscience side, not from the soul side. This being the case, then it must be cleaned from the conscience and not from the soul side. And so therefore you cannot clean your own conscience, I cannot clean my conscience. Once the conscience is defiled there is no human means available to solve the problem.

Now to show you the subjective result of this, because I want you to understand and get a sense of feeling for you inside your own head as to your own conscience; now when your conscience is bothering you, you are in a subjective state, similar to Psalm 51:3. Let’s turn to Psalm 51, this is how David felt when his conscience was defiled. That is, he was out of fellowship; whenever you are out of fellowship your conscience is defiled. In Psalm 51:3 David says, in your King James it reads: “For I acknowledge my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me.” Now the word acknowledge is a word that means know; it sounds when you first read verse 3 as though David is talking about acknowledge it at the point of confession; that’s not what he’s doing in verse 3. What verse 3 says is that his sin is always on his mind; that’s the teaching of verse 3. “For I know my transgression,” and then notice the parallel, “my sin is ever before me.”

Now that is the sign of a defiled conscience. The conscience has a certain operation that it sets up with the mind. We’re going to study the mind when we get into the soul but when the conscience is defiled you can visualize it as picking up dirt on its side of the boundary, so to speak, and as a result of that certain things have to happen. You have no control over this; no matter who you are, I don’t care who you are, you have absolutely no control over this, any more than you can sit there and try to stop breathing. You can’t do it, nor do you have any control over this. You only have two things that you can do; you can react to this thing biblically and take care of it by 1 John 1:9 as we’re going to see in a minute, or you can leave it there, but if you leave it there the pain of Psalm 51:3, this mental anguish that comes from a defiled conscience, is going to start working on your mind. And as a result of this, if we don’t take care of it positively with 1 John 1:9, and instead negatively we react and say we’re going to keep it there, then what happens is things begun to be buried in the unconscious. And so your mind actually contracts, you can visualize it this way, the area of perception contracts.

For example, if you have extreme pain in a certain part of your body, under some conditions that part of the body becomes anesthetized. And so similarly when you do not deal with your conscience your mind doesn’t necessarily dump things into the unconscious, this boundary line between the unconscious and the conscious starts going up, up, up, up, up, and taking in more and more things. So you actually experience a decrease in the ability of your mind to perceive reality. And this is one of the byproducts of failure to deal with a defiled conscience. Your mind can’t stand the pressure that the conscience applies to it so the mind begins to contract and you have no choice in this thing. The only choice you have is whether you’re going to deal with your sin, at the point at which your conscience bothers you on the basis of the Word, or leave it there and after a certain time interval you will find the mind begins to react, it begins to contract and contract and contract and contract its sphere of perception. So after a while you become totally unconscious of this thing that your conscience is bothering you with. And it’s not that the conscience has stopped, because remember, one of the principles of conscience is that it never stops. Proverbs 20:27 says the conscience is the candle of the Lord that searches the inward parts and it constantly searches the inward parts. So the conscience never, never, stops. So if something stops it’s going to have to be something other than the conscience and what it is is your mind. We’ll get into that a little bit later but the mind actually is destroyed when we don’t deal with the conscience properly.

Now people have tried gimmicks; people have tried all sorts of gimmicks to handle this problem. And certain forms of psychotherapy are one of these human gimmicks that man has devised to try to deal with this problem of conscience and as a matter of fact, he doesn’t. This problem can only be dealt with by God’s grace. Psychotherapy in certain forms is an attempt to bypass grace. It is an attempt to deal with the mental anguish of personal sin by ignoring it. And of course, what always will happen is that the rule of the contraction of the mind takes over and you have the mind just back off.

One of these systems is so useful that many, many people engage in it and that is the idea that if I have a problem and so on, and I feel guilty about it, I have to make my own atonement for my personal sin; self-atonement. Christ has atoned for our sins on the cross but some people do not like that; they want to atone for their own sins and so therefore they will go to all sorts of mental anguish, all sorts of religious practices and so on, that are nothing more than self-atonement. You will frequently find this among the wealthy. People with a lot of money frequently carry some sort of a great guilt complex. This is why many of the richest people in the United States today are prominent socialists; I didn’t say socialites, I said socialists. And the reason they are is because through socialism they kind of whip themselves by supposedly robbing the rich because of their great guilty feeling over their own wealth.

Now the proper and biblical way for a wealthy person to respond to their wealth is simply use it as unto the Lord according the norms and standards of the Word. And if they would use their wealth according to the norms and standards of the Word they wouldn’t have a guilty conscience. But because they refuse to apportion their wealth according to the Word they have guilt. And so they get involved in all these human schemes of self-atonement. Some of you people have various schemes that you have personally devised for your own self-atonement. When you can’t stand your conscience you devise certain things over the years that you’ve grown up, certain of you have become very skilful in trying systems of self-atonement.

One of the prominent ways of self-atonement today was suggested by Dr. O. Hobart Mowrer in his book, Crisis in Psychiatry and Religion. And he’s talking about this very thing about the conscience. Now please do not misunderstand this quotation. My quotation of Dr. Mowrer does not mean that Dr. Mowrer holds to the biblical position, but Dr. Mowrer is one of the few men today that are competent psychiatrists that recognize that conscience is one of the key factors in all treatment of mentally ill people. And Mowrer makes this interesting statement: [quote] “Does conscience have less rectitude than a court?” In other words he’s saying if you violate the court, the law of the land, you’re hauled into court, aren’t you? Even if you do a crime six years ago and you’re guilty of that crime, the court still prosecutes (well they used to). And so we have the court doing something about crime.

Now Mowrer says, “The conscience in the person’s being is much like the court and it insists upon prosecution.” So he says, “Does conscience have less rectitude than a court. Unless we can answer this question affirmatively it follows that in the moral realm, no less than in the law, confession is not enough.” Now notice what he’s doing; you can confess to a crime, does that stop you from being prosecuted. No, Mowrer says. So he says, “confession is not enough, either in the legal or the moral realm. It must be accompanied by restitution.” And then he goes on to add a rhetorical question and I think this is the most interesting question that I’ve ever run across in this area. “So can it be that lacking formal recognition of the need for atonement following sin, modern men and women, commonly make use, quite unconsciously, of the stigma, the disgrace and the suffering connected with being [quote] ‘crazy’ [end quote] and hospitalized.”

What he’s saying is that many of the people that become ill, mentally supposedly, and get shipped off to the funny farm actually want to; they actually deep down want to because in so doing they can thereby quell their conscience, they think. This is going through suffering, a social suffering, people look down on them and so on. And it’s a system of self-atonement, but it doesn’t work for the principle that is given to us in Hebrews 9:9. Here’s the principle why only the Word of God gives the solution to guilt. Hebrews 9:9; if you pay attention to this and you have some friends that are suffering in this area I can save you about $3,000 or $4,000 by looking at one verse. You don’t have to pay somebody $50 an hour to sit there listening to the ball game while you are trying to put out your problems. The author of Hebrews draws the line and here’s the difference between self-atonement and true atonement and he goes back, not to psychotherapy, because in the present form it wasn’t known then, but there was a certain parallel to modern psychotherapy and it was religious practices, as distinguished from receiving grace and Christianity. Christian is not a religion; it has spawned religion but Christianity is a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Now it is true you have a religious fallout; too bad, but primarily Christianity is not a religion. All other religions would fall in this category.

Verse 9, “Which was a figure for the time then present,” he is speaking here of the Old Testament religious practices, “in which were offered both gifts and sacrifices,” why? To relieve guilt, that’s why. Here you have operation self-atonement, gifts and sacrifices are given. This is why you will have frequently have people come to you and say here, he’s a check for a thousand dollars, take it and do what you want to with it. Since coming here I’ve already had a chance to refuse one of those; the person wasn’t a believer. I said are you interested in spiritual things; are you interested in receiving Christ. No, I just want to help out. Fine, help someone else out, we don’t accept gifts on a works basis here and you never saw such a shocked look on somebody’s face but it was because this is the point, we receive, we don’t accept money to assuage someone’s guilt complex.

“…gifts and sacrifices that could not make him that did the service perfect,” notice this statement, the gifts and the sacrifices, analogous today to psychotherapy and a lot of its approaches, doesn’t solve the guilt problem. Why? Because they can’t deal with guilt, it’s working from the wrong side; you’ve got to work from the conscience side, not the mind side. So therefore the writer says these were unable, “could” means able, they “were not able to make him that did the service perfect,” and the word “perfect,” teleion, which means clean, wholesome. In fact that’s where we get the word “holy.” Do you realize that? The word holy, related to the word whole, wholesome, clean, healthy. And so this could not solve their guilt problem, “as pertaining to the conscience,” notice the last phrase in verse 9. Obviously the conscience is involved and if conscience is involved you cannot solve it by self-atonement systems.

So the greet, therefore, is for a clean conscience. The clean conscience is said to be clean in many passages of Scripture, and the interesting word that is used in the word for clean looks like this, katharos, from which we have the catharsis, that’s where that word came from in the English language, catharsis, a purging, and so katharos is the Greek word which refers to a conscience that is totally cleansed, a clean or katharos conscience, a purged conscience.

Now we are going to deal with the central passage on the elimination from the spirit, the problem in this third area of need of how the conscience’s need, the human spirit’s need, can be resolved in the area of cleaning itself. Hebrews 10:1-25, here’s the passage we’re going to work with the rest of the time, a very central passage on how the conscience is cleansed. This passage is divided into two parts. Hebrews 10:1-18 and Hebrews 10:19-25. Here you have the two parts of the solution to the conscience. Verses 1-18 deals with the historic provision; verses 1-18 deals with the historic objective provision for cleansing of the conscience. Verses 19-25 deals with the subjective application. In other words, appropriate it personally. So verses 1-18 is the finished work of Christ, if you want to put it that way; verses 19-25 is the subjective appropriation of the finished work of Christ for the conscience.

Hebrews 10:1, “For the law, having become a shadow of good things, not the very image of the things, can never with those sacrifices which they offered year by year continually make the comers thereunto perfect.” Now notice something; they had a certain amount of the Word of God, did they not, in the Old Testament. Wasn’t the whole system really ordained, the Law of Moses? Weren’t they following part of the Word of God; they sure were. Why then do you have this: “it can never, with those sacrifices make the comers thereunto perfect.” Why can’t the Law do it? Isn’t the Law ordained by God? Yes. And here you have a tremendous principle: God’s Word apart from the historic work of Christ can accomplish zero in this area. If you do not have a literal Jesus Christ literally dying on the cross and literally rising from the dead on the third day, you have no basis for proceeding any further. Now why is that?

Why isn’t some form of auto-hypnosis, where you just say my conscience is clean, my conscience is clean, my conscience is clean, and if you repeat that 1,000 times an hour after 3 days if you don’t drop dead this will cleanse your conscience. Why is it that some form of self-hypnosis won’t work? One reason: you and I are made in the image of God and the problem of the conscience is the problem of our severed relationship with that personal God in whose image we are made. And nothing we say, nothing we think can ever change the way we are built. So therefore we are built in such a way that no system can solve guilt apart from the finished work of Jesus Christ. I don’t care what it is, I don’t care what Sigmund Freud says. The human is structured so that it is impossible, repeat, impossible to solve the guilt problem apart from this historic work of Jesus Christ. If Christ had not died on the cross there still to this day, in spite of all the promises, would be zero solution for sin. So apart from the work of Christ there’s no solution. This is why verse 1 can say even the law was unable because Christ had not yet died.

Now, you say but certainly the people during the Old Testament era didn’t go around with guilty consciences all the time. How did they solve the problem? They solved the problem on the basis of grace. They solved the problem on the basis of anticipating God’s grace. In other words, they went back to the Abrahamic Covenant promise of a worldwide blessing and the worldwide blessing included the blessing of deliverance from guilt and so therefore they looked forward by way of anticipation to the finished work of Christ. Now they didn’t know all the details of what Jesus would do but they certainly based their forgiveness, as David makes it very clear in Psalm 51, they did not base their forgiveness on the sacrifices. That was a ceremony and the true believer in the Old Testament distinguished carefully between the efficacy of what he was doing by way of a sacrifice and the personal relationship he had with Jehovah through the finished work of Christ anticipated.

Now in Hebrews 10:2, “For then,” if it was true that the Law would cleanse, in modern day analogy, if it were true that for $50 an hour lying on somebody’s couch you could solve the problem, “would they not have ceased to be offered?” Or, would you not cease going to psychotherapy if it worked. “Because that the worshipers once purged should have no more conscience of sin.” Why do they keep going back, he says. The reason why they went back is because they never solved the problem. They never received freedom from their sins and the guilt.

Hebrews 10:3, “But in those sacrifices there is a remembrance again, made of sins every year.” In other words, you have a drawing back again and again, you are guilty, you are guilty, you are guilty, you are guilty, you are guilty and it’s most interesting that as, in verse 3 the sacrifices or participation in the Old Testament religious practices would do nothing really more than continually remind the person of their guilt. Isn’t it interesting that psychotherapy often does the same thing. Have you ever talked to somebody that’s been going to a psychologist or psychiatrist for an extended period of time? Did you ever notice something interesting; they always talk about themselves, they dwell on themselves, they dwell on their problems, they can’t talk about somebody else, they can’t respond to somebody else, they’re so introverted, they’re always talking about themselves and their problem. This is characteristic; take a person that’s been going for treatment for any length of time you’ll always see this characteristic, they're always wrapped up with themselves and their problem. Why? Same reason in verse 3, all it has done is cause a remembrance that they are in trouble over and over and over and over again.

Hebrews 10:4, here’s the reason. “It is not possible that the blood of bulls and of goats should take away sin.” And we could add it is not possible for shock treatments, drugs, or group therapy to take away sin. Now these may be fine as diagnostic tools to pinpoint the area but they are of zero use in removing the key problem if that problem is true guilt before a holy God. So that’s the point, verse 4, whether you know it or not spells the death knoll to any effective psychotherapy in this area. That verse doesn’t look like it but by way of principle verse 4 puts the death sentence upon any system that would try to solve guilt; it’s impossible. Why? Let’s go on further in chapter 10.

Hebrews 10:5, “Therefore, when He comes into the world he says, Sacrifice and offering thou wouldest not, but a body Thou hast prepared for me, [6] In burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin Thou has had no pleasure.” Who is doing the speaking in verse 5? Verse 5 is Jesus Christ as God the Son coming into history, and please notice that when He comes into history, verse 5, for those of you who still think that the fetus is a living thing, how do you explain verse 5? The incarnation doesn’t even occur until physical birth; look at that, “Sacrifice and offering thou preferred not, but a body Thou hast prepared,” that means a body has been prepared before the infusion of the human spirit and therefore incarnation, not that the incarnation is parallel to the human spirit. So therefore we have this area of teaching that Jesus Christ, when He comes into the world, says God has provided a body for me.

[6] “In burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin Thou has no pleasure,” why is it? Because on God’s side there must be a solution and that solution cannot come forth, we it says here, for “burnt offerings and sacrifices.” These are but religious practices that are useful for teaching but that’s all. I’ll give you a quick analogy; before you you see the communion table this morning; some people have used the communion table the same way that people were using the Old Testament. They were saying if I’d just take communion this Sunday, if I just eat that bread and drink of that cup, all my sins ill be washed away. In other words, it’s the act of participating in communion that removes the guilt. But if that’s correct it clashes with this because we could also say, “for neither bread nor wine have You pleasure O Lord.” These were instituted as teaching devices but not was devices of grace; they were not means of applying grace to the problem of the conscience. These are only teaching mechanisms, not mechanisms of blessing in the sense of forgiveness of sin. So if you have this idea about communion and it’s some sort of system where if you take of the cup and the bread therefore your sins are forgiven, you’re doing the same thing that a person who goes to see a psychotherapist for extended treatment is doing, trying to solve a problem that can only be solved through Jesus Christ. Now this is not to say there aren’t legitimate areas when the psychiatrist is needed. However, we’re talking about the problem when the problem centers on guilt.

“In burnt offerings and sacrifices You never had any pleasure,” God never had pleasure, pleasure means that God says thou art forgiven. That pleasure refers to the fact that God pronounced the sentence of forgiveness upon the participants and that has never happened.

[7], “Then he said, I come (in the volume of the book it is written of me), I have come to do Thy will O God.” Those are the words spoken by the Second Personality of the Trinity to the First as he incarnated Himself in history. [8] “Above all, when He said, Sacrifice and offering, and burnt offerings, and offering for sin Thou wouldest not, neither had pleasure in them, [which are offered by the Law,] [9] Then He said, Lo, I come to do thy will, O God.” What is the will that Christ came to do? He died for the sins of the world, that is the will that He came to do. Notice the connection. If Jesus Christ did not have to come into the world to cleanse guilt, that is, all the religious practices solved the problem, doesn’t that make God the Father a murderer? Doesn’t it make the cross of Jesus Christ unnecessary? If there’s some other way of dealing with man’s guilt, whether he’s a Hottentot or a heathen in South Africa some place it doesn’t make any difference. If there’s just one other way to solve the guilt problem you have just tubed the whole cross of Jesus Christ. If there’s one other way for man to be forgiven the cross of Christ is unnecessary and therefore becomes the Father murdering His Son. That’s the implication if you want to teach that there’s some other way to come to God; you automatically render the cross of Christ unnecessary and God the Father the murderer.

Hebrews 10:9, when He said, “Lo, I come to do Thy will, O God, He takes away the first, that He may establish the second,” now what is this, the first and the second. The theme of Hebrews is the old covenant versus the New Covenant. What is the old covenant? The old covenant is the Mosaic Covenant, which was the constitution of the nation. This was the constitution of the nation and that nation included believers plus unbelievers and notice, plus unbelievers. The Mosaic Law was directed to a nation that was mixed, not pure; mixed. Only in the church dispensation do you have an elect object that is made of all believers. So you have believers and unbelievers under the old covenant. The result was that the old covenant couldn’t ask the unbeliever to do something the unbeliever couldn’t do, namely the old covenant would not be providing grace through the Holy Spirit to live up to itself. This is why Paul says the Law was weak through the flesh.

Now the New Covenant is another parallel constitution of the nation. In fact the New Covenant becomes the constitution of the world government. It’s interesting, the New Covenant is going to replace the U.N. charter, thank God; and we have the New Covenant which is going to be based on the finished work of Jesus Christ. There won’t be any communists in charge of the United Nations armies any more, like there is now. So we have the constitution of the world, and of Israel, now directed toward believers only. And so in the New Covenant we have not only the law but we have plus enablement, both together. And so this is why he says in verse 9, “the first” refers to the Mosaic Covenant which would be analogous to all religions, “He takes away the first,” gets rid of the old constitution of the nations, and He “establishes the second,” which is the new constitution.

Hebrews 10:10, “By the which will we are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once and for all.” Now look at this carefully, first of all, “are sanctified” is perfect tense and refers to a point in time with results that continue forever. That means that there is a point time when we become sanctified. That, of course, is when we become Christians, but here it’s referring to the object of the finished work of Christ, by way of emphasis. “By which will we are sanctified” or “have been sanctified.” We “have been sanctified” in the past with results that continue to the present. That’s what that means. “We have been sanctified,” or set apart and notice this, “through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ.” Now that’s what we’re going to celebrate here in the communion, “the offering of the body of Christ.”

Now we have a lot of scandal sheets floating around fundamentalism today that are accusing R. B. Thieme of a heresy when he says the blood of Jesus Christ was not taken to heaven, that Jesus did not bleed on the cross and so on. I don’t know where these nitwits that love to criticize ever come up with this kind of stuff; they should have the brains to read Scripture. In this verse do you see anything about the blood of Christ? Do you know why you don’t? Christ didn’t take the blood to heaven after He died, in fact Jesus never even bled to death on the cross. Thieme is absolutely correct; Christ didn’t bleed to death on the cross. Do you know why? Because after He died what did the soldier do? He took a spear and He puts it in His side, His blood was still in His body; Christ did not bleed to death on the cross. And He didn’t take it in a little bowl to heaven with him either; that’s Roman Catholicism, by the way, that’s the justification for high mass. So it’s very interesting, some of the fundamentalists that love to criticize, they don’t realize it but they’ve just bought a Roman Catholic dogma, and that’s of course when you say that Christ took the blood to heaven what you are saying is that the work on the cross is not finished; that’s what you’re saying, He had to do something else. Christ didn’t have to do anything else. When it was finished on the cross it was finished! He didn’t take it in a little bowl and trot it on to heaven. Blood never got to heaven! By way of jurisdiction it did but it’s false to accuse a man of teaching that it’s a heresy because Christ didn’t take His blood to heaven. I know of no reputable fundamentalist theologian that has ever taught Christ took the blood to heaven. This is just a case of a lot of ministers that are jealous of a man’s ministry and they want to pick on him and so that’s why they’re doing it; it’s one motive only, it’s just sheer professional jealousy. Christ never took blood to heaven.

And notice here, He did it with “the offering of His body,” now if you want to understand really what the blood talks about, if you’ll turn to Romans 5:9-10, here you see what the expression “His blood” means. I’ll tell you, another reason why this thing has come up, it’s because so many ministers do not understand the Old Testament. If you had read the Old Testament, if a man ad read the Old Testament he’s understand immediately what the blood is talking about. The expression, “shed His blood” is an idiom for murder; it’s an idiomatic expression for murder, that’s what it means, “shed His blood.” And it’s an expression meaning shed His life because the soul or nephesh is linked with the blood in the Old Testament and so when you say I shed his blood, it doesn’t mean you cut him off and let him bleed and you squeezed all the blood out of him in a couple of buckets. That isn’t what it means to shed someone’s blood. You might kill a person and they might not even be a mark on their body; suppose you hit them over the head real hard, what blood have you spilled? Have you spilled any blood from the person? None, so you don’t shed their blood literally, it’s an idiomatic expression for physical death or the removal of the soul from the body.

In Romans 5:9 you see this, verse 9 is parallel with verse 10, “Much more then, being now justified by His blood,” there’s the expression, “we shall be saved from wrath through Him.” Now notice parallel, verse 10, “For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son,” then etc. etc. etc. So “by His blood” and “by His death” are equivalent expressions. And the expression “by His blood” draws emphasis to the value of the nephesh that’s removed there, termination of the nephesh. That’s what it is, so I hope none of you are sucked into this thing that’s going around that Jesus took His blood in a couple of buckets up to heaven to show the Father; it’s ridiculous.

Hebrews 10:10, “we are sanctified by the offering of the body of Jesus Christ,” notice this, “once for all,” you don’t repeat it. This communion which we are to celebrate has nothing to do with the repetition of the work of Christ; this is not some high mass here where I’m re-crucifying Christ. We are participating and pointing back to one and only one moment of history, the finished work of Christ.

Hebrews 10:11, “And every high priest standing daily ministering and offering often the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins, [12] But this man,” notice the emphasis on His humanity, deity cannot die, only man, “But this man, after He had offered one sacrifice for sins forever,” look at that; you have a problem with guilt in your conscience, look at that again, that’s good news for you. Jesus Christ has done it and it is forever and eternally valid, “sat down on the right hand of God,” that means it’s finished. [13] “Henceforth expecting” or “waiting till His enemies be made his footstool,” this is during the angelic conflict, [14] For by one offering He has perfected forever them that are sanctified.” Here sanctified is not perfect, it’s present tense, “who are being sanctified.” Notice that, verse 14, “He has perfected,” that is the same word that is used in Hebrews 9:9 for “perfect. Remember we started off Hebrews 9:9 and we said those gifts and sacrifices could not make him perfect? Here’s your word, here in verse 14, same word, “perfect.” [14] “For by one offering” Jesus Christ has made totally cleansed, absolutely perfect. There is the objective work.

Hebrews 10:15, “Whereof the Holy Spirit also is a witness to us; for after He had said before,” verse 16 and he quotes the reference. The Holy Spirit bears witness to us, present tense, verse 15. Do you know what this means? This solves the problem, oh but Jesus died 20 centuries ago, that’s so far off, that’s so far distant from where I live; I live 20 centuries later. What does verse 15 say? The Holy Spirit, the Third Personality of the Trinity is talking to you right now and bearing witness that this historic act is for you.

If you’re here without Christ the Holy Spirit right now wants to open your eyes to this truth. Don’t expect Him to write a neon sign on the ceiling, or in your head. The Holy Spirit is in the eye-opening business, that is, He is opening your eyes and directing your attention right now to the content of the text. And you may be an individual who’s trusted in all sorts of things; you may have trusted in your business, your life insurance or something else, security of the United States government (God help you), or something else that’s gone on that you’ve substituted as sort of an idol of security. Right now maybe some of you are doing that, you don’t care about confessing your sins, you don’t care about the problem of guilt. That’s because your eyes haven’t been opened to what the problem is in your life. And you’re going to be miserable in your life, let me just give you a friendly prediction, it’s free of charge, you’re going to be miserable in your life until you solve the problem and see that your basic problem is not lack of money, lack of the right woman, lack of the right man, lack of education, lack of a job, lack of something else, your problem is the problem of guilt before a holy God and this problem can only be solved by appropriating this work.

So therefore we come to the second part, beginning in verse 19, the application of Christ’s finished work to our conscience. Hebrews 10:19, here are some results. When this historic work is applied through the medium of the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit opens your eyes so you can say it’s really true, if you can’t say this is true then you can’t believe, but if the Holy Spirit’s opened your eyes you will be in a position where you honestly can say to me, to anybody else, to yourself, that I know this is true forever. “Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus.” Notice the word “boldness,” this is the opposite of a guilty conscience. This means you have confidence and it’s not confidence before men; it’s confidence before God.

See, you can have a pseudo confidence in front of men; you can impress a lot of people. All you have to do is go to some of these courses they offer around town and you can gear up some sort of a façade that impresses your customers, that impresses your associates and so on, and you can really make them think you’re Mr. Hotshot, you can really do a wonderful job impressing and all you have to do is apply a few principles. It’s quite easy, actually; anybody in six or seven weeks can basically learn how to impress people. All you have to do is say the right things at the right time and so forth. And when you get done you still don’t have this kind of confidence. The kind of confidence that is given here in verse 19 is the kind of confidence that would be seen, for example, if you walked out of here and saw a car coming at 60 mph toward you and you froze in the street and you know that within 1.5 seconds you would be in eternity; would you then have the confidence to stare death in the face, knowing that on the other side of the grave you would be face to face with the living Lord Jesus Christ. If you have that confidence, that’s the same as this in verse 19.

“Having boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus,” in other words, the only way we can have that confidence is to have the conscience clean and it must be done by the blood of Jesus Christ. And here’s something else about verse 19, do you realize that if this is your conscience, this circle, and it’s all covered with guilt, there’s always one hole in your conscience where you have confidence to come to God. That’s a trick question; you’re a believer and you can violate every norm and every standard of the Word of God and you still have one point in your conscience that you can use because you’re a believer. Why do you have this? First of all, before I tell you what it is let me tell you why you have to have it. If it were the case that you had no spot in your conscience that was clean, if that were really the case, how could you ever recover in the Christian life by faith, because remember, conscience is a faith switch and if it’s a faith switch it can’t okay faith until it’s clean but it can’t get clean until you do something about it and you can’t do something about it because you can’t operate by faith. So you’d be completely cut off from the Father.

But He has made provision so that no matter how raunchy you may be spiritually, no matter how many sins you may have committed, mental attitude/overt, there is always one spot that remains clean on your conscience and that spot, 1 John 1:9. You always have access to confess your sins to the Father, no matter how many sins you may have committed, no matter how bad a reputation you may have among other believers… listen, if someone is here today and has a guilty conscience because other believers don’t like you, just forget it. Just chalk it up to the little people, they are usually the little people that go spreading gossip and maligning, we have a few of them in the congregation; gradually I’m isolating who they are because it always seems to emanate from certain quarters. So gradually we’re finding out who the little people are. But we have a lot of little people and every group has this, there’s nothing wrong with because every Christian group you’ll ever be in has a lot of these little people, and they’ll pass some snotty remark about you behind your back to somebody over the phone or something like this, just relax, because no matter how much crud they generate that’s their problem, God’s going to handle them. But as far as you’re concerned, all of the gossip and maligning could be true double and you’d still have this area of clean conscience that God has offered to you so that you can come back to Him by confessing your sin, if you’re a child of God in the first place.

Now that should be good news; that should be good news for you if you’re a believer; there’s no excuse for your staying out of fellowship; you can’t say well, I’ve got a guilty conscience, I can’t believe. Fine, clear it up. God has provided a means by which you can clear it up. If this were ever closed off, and there may come a time when even that is closed off, that’d be the sin unto death. And if God sees that that can’t stay open He’ll just check you out, you’ll go face to face with Him before that happens. So there’s always a point in your conscience and that’s what it means here, no matter what happens verse 19 holds, over some area; some point, somewhere, you will have “boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus Christ,” that’s why we say confession doesn’t secure salvation; confession is only possible because you are already saved. It’s salvation that keeps that little hole open. So confession never re-accomplishes salvation in your life. It’s wrong the idea of eternal security being dropped; people who attack eternal security have no answer to this problem.

Hebrews 10:20, “By a new and living way, which He has consecrated for us, through the veil, that is to say, His flesh.” Notice, please, the parallelism in verse 19 and 20, for those who might be swayed by the scandal sheet, saying that is a heresy to teach that the blood of Jesus was not taken in a bucket to heaven, look at verses 19-20 again; what is the parallel? The parallel is “by the blood of Jesus,” “by His flesh,” see the parallel again. Verse 21, “Having a high priest over the house of God,” then in verse 22 -25 are some of the results of a cleansed conscience. When your human spirit has had it’s third great need solved, when your human spirit has had elimination solved, and the problem has been taken care of in God’s grace, these results follow. If these results are not true in your life, to put it in blunt terms you’ve got a constipated spirit.

Hebrews 10:22, “Let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, and our bodies washed with pure water.” Now that drawing near is a drawing near first vertically to the Lord. That means that you are capable of a moment by moment relationship. If a moment by moment relationship is not true in your life and does not characterize it, there’s something wrong somewhere, there’s a clog. [23] “Let us hold fast the confession of our faith without wavering (for he is faithful that promised,)” verse 23 speaks of the faith technique, namely that you are able to withstands the assaults in life of all sorts of crises, gossip, maligning, whatever it is, you can withstand it, you “hold fast the confession of your faith” because God is faithful and you have that assurance in your heart.

Then finally, Hebrews 10:24-25 on the horizontal plain, whereas verses 22-23 were on the vertical plain, on the horizontal plain, “Let us consider one another to provoke unto love and to good works, [25] Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is, but exhorting one another, and so much the more, as you see the day drawing near.” He’s talking about Christian fellowship together, and you see, that follows. People who are out of fellowship with the Lord can’t have fellowship with one another. Believers who have problems with guilt don’t want to associate with other believers. It’s very obvious, if you have a guilt complex, if you’re out of fellowship the last people you want to be around are believers. Please, God, deliver me from believers, and that would be the attitude because you can’t stand to be around them, you’re out of fellowship. So verses 24 and 25 must be seen in the context in which they were written.

So much for the human spirit; next week we’ll begin with the soul and how the soul applies. We’ll have some brief introduction on the body, the flesh and the sin nature, and then we will go to the soul.