For the law, having a shadow of the good things to come, and not the very image of the things, can never with these same sacrifices, which they offer continually year by year, make those who approach perfect. For then would they not have ceased to be offered? For the worshipers, once purified, would have had no more consciousness of sins. But in those sacrifices there is a reminder of sins every year. For it is not possible that the blood of bulls and goats could take away sins. (Hebrews 10:01-04, NKJV).
No matter what we call it, no matter how we try to sweep it under our mental rug, no matter how we strive for self-justification or excuses, you and I both suffer from the knowledge that we fail at living up to even our own standards, let alone a holy and righteous God's.
Whether we believe in a Supreme Being or not, we know, we just know deep down inside, that we are guilty. That is why we become so defensive at the slightest hint of baseless accusations, because underneath that indignation is the sure and certain knowledge that there are plenty of accusations we are rightly guilty of, and we daren't give an inch lest we lose the whole battlefield of reputation and self-esteem in one onslaught.
That consciousness of sins is His mercy. It is indisputable evidence of His grace, for unless a sick man has symptoms he will not seek a cure.
Ancient Israel was given the rites of animal sacrifices for precisely this purpose - a reminder of sins.
The substitutionary death of innocent animals could never take away sins, but all that red, flowing blood was an indisputable and graphic picture of the penalty of sin.
The greatest, and often most overlooked gift of Christ is a clean conscience - a lifting of that burden and ghastly weight of guilt that plagues every man, woman and child capable of even minimal self-examination. Ritual cannot do it. Hypocritical self-righteousness cannot do it. Concluding that you are certainly not as bad as that guy around the block, and considerably better than that woman over there, cannot lift the stain of our own iniquity.
That is why most are so eager to find egregious examples of wrong-doing so that our own evil looks relatively benign in comparison. Yet, such pitiable attempts at assuaging our battered consciences will always ultimately fail. That too is God's mercy.
I have been with more people than I care to recall as they breathed their last on this earth. Of those individuals, the passing of each indelibly etched in my memory, there was an undeniable difference between the man or woman who believed they were cleansed from all unrighteousness, and those who, even as the rattle of collapsing lungs echoed uncannily from their death bed, struggled with the paramount, but typically unspoken issue of human existence: forgiveness.
It is that consciousness of sins that drives some to suicide, some to bitterness and resentment, some to an inexplicable sense of victimhood… and some to Christ.
It is the last group, and only the last group, that finds relief from this ancient and necessary human compulsion to be forgiven.
If ever we become so anesthetized to that ubiquitous sense of failure that we think we are "ok", we are then, in fact, the most hopeless.
Better a miserable perfectionist than an apathetic decent citizen.
The one can never be content, and will search exhaustively for that ultimate goal of acceptance. The other won't even try.
And it is in the striving for forgiveness, for acceptance by Someone greater than ourselves, whether we know His name or not, that can lead us to life everlasting.
Self-satisfaction, complacency, a sense of decency, or worse, superiority, is deadly; eternally fatal.
The writer of Hebrews does not want his intended audience to stop at those reminders of sin, but to go forward to Christ, crossing the threshold of unbelief on our hands and knees, looking for that which we know we need.
Forgiveness.
