Chapter 10

Somehow this chapter (which has long been fairly familiar to me) always made really logical sense.

By this I mean that the idea of animal sacrifice actually dealing with sin always seemed faintly absurd to me. Now, this is coming from a point of view of a committed Christian, not a Jew, and with the realization that Jesus’ sacrificial death paid for my sin. But even so, I always wondered how in the time before Christ, sacrificial bulls/lambs/pigeons could “cover over” our sin.

In this chapter we read that it didn’t.

The law was only ever (and only ever intended to be) a taste of the reality in Christ, and its stipulations as to how sin should be dealt with are a picture only.

Christ’s sacrifice, by contrast, was once and for all. Once that had happened, the old order of animal sacrifice came to its end.

But Mick isn’t finished yet. He’s bringing out the consequences of this to us today.

He talks about the Holy Place, where previously only priests could enter – when sin had been atoned for. But in Christ, all sin, past, present and future, is atoned for, so logically one doesn’t have to be a priest to come directly to God.

Or perhaps, rather, someone who is in Christ is by default a priest already!

Mick finishes up the chapter by tying the whole thing neatly with peoples’ present circumstances – “Don’t lose heart, keep at it.”

It’s the whole concept of us coming directly to God that I want to briefly chat about. That’s unimaginable! Think about this. Recently my kids and I got to meet the boys from the band Petra. It was incredibly exciting. And I’m not ashamed to say that I was a dead set fanboy around them!

These are just humans. How much more excited should we be to be allowed free access to the God who made the heavens and the Earth? We should be jumping out of our skin to do it!

Instead we sit glumly and say “I’ll pray when I get time.” It’s my belief that this attitude springs from not truly understanding the magnitude of what God is offering us.

So let’s try to understand God. Let’s be just as excited to approach His throne as we are when we shake hands with a rock star or movie actor. Not everyone can do this – we are some of the privileged ones. So let’s understand what we have in our hands, and appreciate it!