hebrews 10

Here is the lesson plan for Sunday night. If you can use it, feel free. Just remember where you got it.

Hebrews: A New Day Coming
Hebrews 10: The Perfect Sacrifice

Have you ever tried your best to find the absolutely perfect gift for someone, the gift that would be perfect, that would make everybody smile, that would send the universe singing? When you find it, all other gifts you give at the time seem almost second best. You have looked for it, searched it out, found it for a good price, gotten it, hid it maybe for a couple of months then wrapped it and gave it. The one to whom you gave it loved it. It was perfect. It summed up all that you and they had in common, all that you felt for them. It may not have been expensive or it may have cost a lot. But it was perfect.

Jesus did that. He brought the one thing that no one else could give: a perfect life lived in sacrificial service to both God and humanity. A sinless and perfect life.

When humanity sinned, God had to remove them from the Tree of Life or they would live forever in their sins. That would be too bad for people to do or for God to allow the people he loved to go through. So, as Romans 5 says, people die because Adam sinned. We sin because we are built that way, but Adam was the one who brought that sin first into the world. Luke 3 says that he is the son of God, made, Genesis 2 tells us, from the dust of the earth. That son brought sin and by bringing sin, brought death. We die because of sin.

Yet Jesus didn’t sin. But he died anyway because he was human. As the last chapter said: man is destined to die once, and after that to face judgment (9:27). As a human and subject to the same physical laws as humans are, he had to, sooner or later, die. Only two people in the history of the world didn’t die – Elijah and Enoch. But for Jesus to be that perfect sacrifice, he had to die. A sacrifice was not a sacrifice until it had been killed and its blood shed on the altar.

But Jesus died, even though he had not sinned and, once dead, came back to life, breaking the hold that the devil had on humanity. He then became the perfect sacrifice, and took his own sacrifice into the Great Holy of Holies where the Almighty God dwelt and offered himself. And when he did this, he told us that our sins were forgiven and we can, ourselves, be sinless by his power.

That gives us confidence that we too can go before God. His is a new and living way, brand new, never before brought and never again needed. It was once given and once received. It was the perfect gift.

Our responsibility? Verse 26 – don’t deliberately keep on sinning. If we reject this gift, there are no more offers, no special one time only offers. The writer says, don’t throw away your confidence. Persevere. Keep on living as you should. Be strong. Don’t shrink back. He loves you.

Questions:

1. the old law was a constant reminder that you had sinned and you could do nothing about it. Wasn’t that kind of an unfair way to make people live?

2. If God was not pleased with burnt offerings and sacrifices (v5), why did he keep asking for them?

3. He set aside the first to establish the second (v9). What was the first and the second that he is talking about?

4. What do you think it means, he sat down at the right hand of God (v12)?

5. And how is it he waits for his enemies to be made his footstool (14)? That sounds kind of rough.

6. V17 – If God remembers our sins and lawless acts no more, what do you think that means? And also v18: where these have been forgiven, there is no longer any sacrifice for sin. Are there no sacrifices today?

7. V26 – Does this mean that we are dead if we keep on doing things wrong? Everybody sins.

How do you throw away your confidence (35)?