Hebrews 9

In the first covenant, God regulated how people of Israel should worship, and he told them to make a place to worship him.

The sanctuary that the people of Israel set up was the sacred tent. In its outer room there were the lampstand and the table on which they put the bread on display before God. That room was called the holy place.

Behind the curtain on one side of the holy place, there was another room. That was called the very holy place.

There was an altar in the holy place that was covered with gold. It was used for burning incense. The sacred chest was also there. All of its sides were covered with gold. In the holy place was the golden pot that contained pieces of the food they called manna. Inside the chest there was also Aaron's walking stick that had budded to prove that he was God's true priest. Inside the chest were also the stone tablets on which God had written the Ten Commandments.

On top of the chest were figures of winged creatures that symbolized God's glory. Their wings overshadowed the sacred chest's lid. This sacred chest was where the high priest sprinkled the blood to atone for the sins of the people. I cannot now write about these things in detail.

After they have arranged all these things in this way, the Jewish priests habitually go into the outer room of the tent to do their tasks.

But into the inner room only the high priest goes once a year. He always takes the blood of animals that they have slaughtered. He offers the blood to God for his own sins and for the sins that the people of Israel had committed. This offering of the blood also covered any other sins the people committed when they broke some laws because they didn’t know about them.

By those things the Holy Spirit indicated that God did not reveal the way for ordinary people to enter into the inner room, the very holy place, while the outer room still existed. In a similar way, he did not reveal the way for ordinary people to enter the presence of God while the Jews offered sacrifices in the old way.

This was a symbol for the time in which we are now living. The gifts and sacrifices offered in the sacred tent cannot make people always know right from wrong or always do right from their hearts in a way that pleases God.

Those rules about what to eat and drink and about what to wash—all those rules are no longer any good because God has made a new covenant with us. This new covenant is a much better system.

But when Christ came as our high priest, he brought the good things that we have now. Then he went into God's presence in heaven, which is like the sacred tent, but it is not part of the world that God created. It is better than the tent Moses set up here on earth because it is perfect.

When a high priest goes into the inner room in the tent each year, he takes goats' blood and calves' blood to offer as a sacrifice. But Christ did not do that. It was as though he went into that very holy place only once because he gave his own blood on the cross, just one time. By doing that, he redeemed us forever because his blood flowed from himself.

The priests sprinkle on the people the blood of goats and bulls with the ashes of the calf that was burned in offering. This act of worship, this sprinkling of blood, was the way they were made pure so they could worship God.

Since all this was true, we see now how much more God has accomplished by the blood of Christ! By the power of God's eternal Spirit, Christ offered himself to God as the perfect sacrifice for our sins. Now we can serve the living God and no longer do the things that lead to death.

By dying for us, Christ made for God a new covenant with us. We were trying to please God by means of the first covenant, but we were still guilty of having sinned. When he died, he freed us from having to die for our own sins. As a result, all of us whom God has called to know him will receive what he has promised to give us forever.

A covenant is like a will. In the case of a will, in order to put its provisions into effect, someone must prove that the one who made it has died.

A will goes into effect only when the one who makes the will has died. It is not in effect when the one who made it is still alive.

And so God put the first covenant into effect only by means of animals' blood that flowed when the priests sacrificed them.

After Moses had declared to all the people of Israel everything that God commanded in the laws that God gave him, he took calves' and goats' blood mixed with water. He tied scarlet wool around a sprig of hyssop and dipped it into this blood. Then with some of the blood he sprinkled the scroll itself, the scroll that contained God's laws.

He said to them, "This is the blood that brings into effect the covenant that God commanded that you obey."

Likewise, he sprinkled that blood on the sacred tent and on every object that they used in working there.

It was by sprinkling blood that they cleansed almost everything. That was what was stated in God's laws. If blood does not flow when they sacrifice an animal, God does not forgive the sins of those people.

So by animal sacrifices it was necessary for the priests to cleanse the things that symbolized what Christ does in heaven. But God has to cleanse the things in heaven by means of much better sacrifices than those.

Christ did not enter the very holy place that humans made, which only represented the true very holy place. Instead, he entered heaven itself, in order to now be in God's presence to plead with God for us.

The high priest enters the very holy place once every year, taking blood that is not his own, to offer it as a sacrifice. But when Christ entered heaven, it was not in order to offer himself repeatedly like that.

If that were so, he would have needed to suffer and shed his blood repeatedly since the time when God created the world. But instead, in this final age, Christ has appeared once so that by sacrificing himself, God will forgive all our sins and will not condemn us anymore because we have sinned.

All people must die once, and after that God will judge them for their sins.

Likewise, when Christ died, God offered him once to be a sacrifice, to punish him in the place of the many people who had sinned. He will come to earth a second time, not to sacrifice himself again for those who have sinned but to save us who wait for him and expect him to come.