Once for All

For such a High Priest was fitting for us, who is holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners, and has become higher than the heavens; who does not need daily, as those high priests, to offer up sacrifices, first for His own sins and then for the people’s, for this He did once for all when He offered up Himself. For the law appoints as high priests men who have weakness, but the word of the oath, which came after the law, appoints the Son who has been perfected forever. (Hebrews 07:26-28, NKJV).

In regard to Christ's propitiatory sacrifice for sin, the phrase once for all appears 4 times in the New Testament (Ro 6:10; Heb 7:27; 9:12; 10:10), and 3 of those 4 are in Hebrews.

It is a phrase which contrasts the repeated ceremonial animal sacrifices with the sublime, ultimate sacrifice of the Son of God. It is a phrase that speaks to the complete efficacy of that sacrifice in taking away the sin of the world. It is a phrase that again points us to the ineffable superiority of Christ to any and all  that came before.

The priests of old officiated at the altar of blood. Their role can be likened to a ritualistic butcher, killing the offered animal, carving up the anatomy in accord with the proscribed regulations handed down by God through Moses.

It was an intricate and detailed job description, that encompassed not only desired results but required attitude and apparel. It spoke of God's micromanagement of the entirety of Judaism, and it was for one ultimate purpose: to sanctify the LORD God in the hearts of the priests and the people.

It's graphic dismemberment represented the heinousness of sin, and the holiness of God and repeatedly emphasized the necessary shedding of blood to atone for rebellion against God's goodness and graciousness.

In Western culture today, the majority of people have nothing to do with this bloody aspect of either religion or nourishment. For the most part, our meat is pre-butchered, pre-packaged and sanitized. We are far removed from the lowing of the livestock, the pouring out of the blood, or the thud of the expiring beast gasping its last, and collapsing under its own dead weight.

Not so the ancient Israelites. They saw the death, heard the rasping expiration of air, and smelled daily the offal and the coppery aroma of blood. And for centuries, in and around the focal point of their worship - first the Tabernacle, and then the Temple - these indelible sensory perceptions were purposely associated with the wages of sin.

It was blatant and overt conditioning, planned and executed by God Himself, for the sole purpose of revealing in as graphic and as effective manner as possible, the seriousness of sin.

We are removed from this, as well, in our Western prefabricated way of life. So much so that in our world, the word sin itself is in disfavor, fallen out of use, and diluted in its original catastrophic meaning.

And in losing this, we lose also the inherent level of awed appreciation for what our once for all High Priest has done on our behalf.

He not only officiated over the attenuated altar of blood, the Cross, speaking forsakenness and forgiveness while Himself impaled on the blood-blackened wooden beams, but He, as both Priest and sacrifice paid the incurred and future sin debt, once for all when He offered up Himself.

Don't overlook the blood-soaked magnificence of this one act, nor its epoch-shattering ramifications. It was a completing of the Father's long-awaited resolution for sin. It was a shutting of the door on further sacrifices, not unlike God Himself shutting the door of the Ark as the Flood of Judgment descended upon a God-hating world.

Yet, unlike the millions, perhaps billions, of human casualties from the flood, this time there was only One - the Son of God Himself.

What is a human soul worth?

Popular and cynical wisdom would declare that life is cheap.

Popular wisdom is worthless and inaccurate in this and so many other areas of knowledge.

The truth is that eight human souls were worth a planet to their Creator and Judge.

And now we know that your soul, and my soul, and each and every one of us, is worth far more than we can conceive - the death of God Himself as our substitute, individually and collectively.

Christ put Himself in our place and voluntarily took upon Himself the sin of the world, to wipe the slate clean, to cancel the debt which each one of us owe by paying it Himself.

Once for all.

And forever.

Fitting for Us

For such a High Priest was fitting for us, who is holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners, and has become higher than the heavens; who does not need daily, as those high priests, to offer up sacrifices, first for His own sins and then for the people’s, for this He did once for all when He offered up Himself. For the law appoints as high priests men who have weakness, but the word of the oath, which came after the law, appoints the Son who has been perfected forever. (Hebrews 07:26-28, NKJV).

For sinners like you and me, it is necessary in the economy of God's redemption to have as our Great High Priest a Man whose essential humanity is of a superlative quality so that in every way He satisfies our desperate need. He must be fitting for us.

As a contrast between what we are and who Christ is, and what He did to save, this passage should fill our hearts with humble gratitude and overwhelming joy. To counteract before the Father our fundamental sinfulness, our Mediator had to be holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners.

He had to be holy, which in this context means free from all wickedness. This is a quality which we can think about but not fully understand, since we are by nature, and inclination, steeped in wickedness. It is the brew from which our fetid aroma arises before Heaven. Everything about our fallen nature, our unregenerate selves, obscures from our view what it means to be wholly free from that which is debased and evil.

The stuff and atmosphere which is our natural sinful habitat, like water to a fish, can only be seen for what it is when we are lifted out from the midst of it. Until then, it is impossible for us to conceive of life lived without our inherent depravity. Unregenerate man is blind to true goodness. In fact, as Paul writes in Romans 3, we are so debased that without the Law handed down from Mount Sinai we would have no conception of what sin is. 

This is a perverse twisting of how we were made, a perversion of our nature brought about by the heinous rebellion of our forefather Adam in the garden. So bent are we in this regard that most of us look upon the first human sin as a moral and ethical failure, rather than the holocaust that it really was. In our depthless and specious view, we see Cain's murder of his brother as the first recognizably criminal act, but we could not be further from the truth.

Murder and murderous intent were the natural offspring of Adam's action, less in that they are derivative evil, and not the corruption of human nature itself. It was Adam who was capable of not sinning. It was Adam who, with the potential for wisdom beyond any except for Christ Himself, chose to willfully misuse those incalculable gifts of life and will and intelligence given to Him by God, and who thus destroyed for all his descendants the ability to be good. And the full knowledge of what good is.

So Christ, to free us, had to be our holy High Priest absolutely unsullied from and by wickedness.

Furthermore, as an infinite counterweight to our natural inability to be good, our High Priest also had to be harmless, meaning Jesus must be without guile or fraud, free from guilt, fearing no evil from others, and distrusting no one. Again we can barely imagine such a Person. Whatever shallow picture we might conjure up in our sin-darkened minds can not begin to compare with the radiant fulfillment of these qualities in Christ.

At our natural best, if we are ever any of those things embodied in the word harmless, it is because it serves our own selfish and corrupt purposes, or feeds our malignant and cancerous pride. Even the most apparently innocent among us, young children, are only innocent in regard to their inability to conceive of greater evil due to lack of life experience. In fact, an "innocent" child's true motivation is purely selfish until the mitigating factors of moral instruction and human politics tempers that purity with a kind of ruthless practicality.

Undefiled is the next requirement for our Savior. In order to cleanse us and make us new in Him, Jesus must be unsoiled and free from that by which the nature of a thing is deformed and debased, or by which its force and life-energy are impaired. 

Sin is a fatal ailment, robbing the afflicted of everything and anything beneficial. At its most elementary level, it is entirely negative, consuming the gift of life itself and excreting in its place a fundamental defilement that is more toxic and irremediable than any conceivable man-made substance.

Only something, or more precisely, Someone, who is the antithesis of such defilement can cleanse us from it. There are no halfway solutions. No lesser solvent.

And finally, because of the depths to which we have fallen, only Someone completely separate from us, and from our naturally toxic character, can stand on the firm ground necessary to provide us with the means of escape. No sinner could possibly save us. It would be like a man mired in a pit himself trying to lift another man out. Both would merely sink further down.

All these characteristics point us once more to the superiority of our Savior. He is so much more than we can conceive of; so beyond our current ability to comprehend, that it will take an eternity in close fellowship with Him to glimpse His complete reality.  And it is only through His immeasurable and eternal superiority that we can hope to have life through His once for all cleansing of our sin when He offered up Himself.

For us.

Do you see what all this means?

We can take pride in nothing about ourselves, and can and should boast in every true thing about Him.

Without Him being precisely who He is, in all His magnificent humility and incomparable superiority, we would remain hopelessly doomed to a fate far worse than mere death.

Without Him as our High Priest, without us coming to Him for that cleansing and renewing work that only He can accomplish in us, it would truly be better that we would never have been born.