Better Than Anything Else

Read: Hebrews7:25-8:13

The author of Hebrews draws a contrast between the real, true, lasting and what is better with mere copies and fleeting shadows.  He compares and contrasts Christ with every other means of coming to God.

How does one come to God? 

One might think of ancient paganism with its sacrifices, libations, rites and ceremonies, but without any moral or ethical requirements.  One might be expected to pour out a libation to Baal to ensure a good harvest, but not to change one’s life for Baal. Or one might think of popular religion today which is kind of the opposite; in that sacrifice is generally not required since it is maintained that one only needs to be a “good person” (however that is defined).  Even modern Judaism posits good works as a substitute for sacrifice.  And so, in this line of thinking, we appease God by being nice. One could also think of Islam with its five pillars or Hinduism with its karma

In all of these, a transaction is taking place (“I offer my best goat, Baal gives me a good harvest”; “I’m a ‘good person’ so God lets me into heaven”; “I’ve done this list of good things; I haven’t done this list of bad things; I’ve performed this herculean task and so I’ve earned enough points to please God.”).  We’re very much like the ancient Egyptians who, according to their Book of the Dead, believed that one’s life was put on the scale and weighed against ma’at (truth) and if the scale tipped in your direction, you’re in.

However, the God of the Bible is different.  He requires love because he offers love because He is love.  And we love God because God first loved us.  And so, the only real transaction in Christianity is one defined by grace – it is what God has done for us through Christ. Jesus has made the way to God, and His way is better than all the other attempts at getting to God. He is the Way. 

Jesus is the better way, the only way.  He is the real, the true, the lasting.  The way to God presented in the OT was the way only because it looked forward to Christ.  And the way of the OT was good, but Jesus is better.  Jesus is superior, to the priests who served in the Temple, to the sacrifices offered in the Temple, to the Temple itself and to the entire Mosaic covenant that called the Temple into being.

Jesus is better than earthly priests.  We read, “Unlike the other high priests, he does not need to offer sacrifices day after day, first for his own sins, and then for the sins of the people. He sacrificed for their sins once for all when he offered himself. For the law appoints as high priests men who are weak; but the oath, which came after the law, appointed the Son, who has been made perfect forever.”  Jesus was perfect in and of Himself and His coming to earth to suffer on our behalf made Him the perfect Mediator – the perfect Way of salvation.

And unlike earthly priests who offered sacrifices of animals, Jesus offered Himself.  He is not only our High Priest but also our sacrifice.  And so Jesus is better than the sacrifices. He sacrificed for their sins once for all when he offered himself. We don’t need to offer anymore sacrifices of sheep or goats or birds or bulls because Jesus was the ultimate Sacrifice – “once for all”.  We read in 8:1, “The point of what we are saying is this: We do have such a high priest.”  We don’t have a high priest that has to offer sacrifice after sacrifice, over and over.  Jesus paid it all.  We have a Savior who paid it all for us and thereby opened the way to God.  We have a Savior who has gone before us as our forerunner.  We do have such a high priest, who sat down at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in heaven, and who serves in the sanctuary, the true tabernacle set up by the Lord, not by man.

And Jesus serves in a better Temple.  He serves in the true, heavenly tabernacle which was set up by the Lord Himself and not constructed by human beings.  We read in vv. 3-5, “They serve at a sanctuary that is a copy and shadow of what is in heaven. This is why Moses was warned when he was about to build the tabernacle: "See to it that you make everything according to the pattern shown you on the mountain."  When Moses was on Mt. Sinai, he was not only instructed on what the tabernacle should look like and how it should be built, he was shown.  The Tabernacle that the Israelites built was a model of the heavenly dwelling of God.  And it is in that heavenly sanctuary, in the very presence of God the Father, that Jesus stands on our behalf – as our Mediator (as our advocate, our go-between) and where He, as we learned last week, holds the anchor of our hope.

And because of that, Jesus has brought about a better covenant – the new covenant.  We read (8:6), “But the ministry Jesus has received is as superior to theirs as the covenant of which he is mediator is superior to the old one, and it is founded on better promises. For if there had been nothing wrong with that first covenant, no place would have been sought for another. But God found fault with the people and said…”  And then the author quotes Jeremiah 31:

The time is coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their forefathers when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, because they did not remain faithful to my covenant, and I turned away from them, declares the Lord. This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after that time, declares the Lord. I will put my laws in their minds and write them on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. No longer will a man teach his neighbor, or a man his brother, saying, 'Know the Lord,' because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest. For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.

Jesus has brought about the New Covenant.  The old one was not bad, it’s just the new one is better.  For we are told that God found fault, not with the old covenant, but with the people who failed to obey it.  For the LORD said this about Israel to the prophet Jeremiah, “they did not listen or pay attention; instead, they followed the stubborn inclinations of their evil hearts. They went backward and not forward. From the time your forefathers left Egypt until now, day after day, again and again I sent you my servants the prophets. But they did not listen to me or pay attention. They were stiff-necked and did more evil than their forefathers.”

And so, as the apostle Paul wrote in Romans, “what the law was powerless to do in that it was weakened by the sinful nature, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful man to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in sinful man, in order that the righteous requirements of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the sinful nature but according to the Spirit.”  What the law (the old covevant) could not do; what we could not pull off, God did through Christ.  That’s why we read in the NC the Lord saying not “you shall, you shall…” but “I will … I will …”

The New Covenant is something God has done.  Jesus referred to it during the Last Supper as “the new covenant in my blood”.  It was established in Christ’s death and resurrection and it is carried out through Christ’s intercession for us in heaven and by the presence of the Holy Spirit here on earth, in us, as our guarantee that the LORD is our God and we are His people.

The writer ends by stating, “By calling this covenant "new," he has made the first one obsolete; and what is obsolete and aging will soon disappear.”  And so, he encourages his audience to put their trust in Jesus and the New Covenant established in Him, rather than clinging to the old covenant and the old ways which are fading away because they’ve been completed in Christ.  As NT Wright says, “the whole letter [of Hebrews] is written in order to say: the ‘something more’ the ‘whole truth’ the ‘better thing’ has now arrived in Jesus; so whatever you do, don’t go back to the old things.  However good and true they were, they are now taken up in the new and better” (87).

And as NT Wright again states, “If [Jesus] was ‘better’ even than the Temple and its priesthood, how much more is he ‘better’ than the many things which so easily distract us from single-minded devotion to him.”  The priests, the sacrifices, the tabernacle, the covenant were all ways to get to God.  But they were ways to God because they looked to Jesus – the Way.  Apart from Christ, those things cannot save.

Because like the priests, people can’t save you.  The ‘heroes’ of our day who we look to; all the politicians, all the celebrities, the sports stars and rock stars, they can’t save you.  Even the people around us – one’s spouse, children, family, friends – they cannot save you.  They cannot give lasting and complete and ultimate meaning and purpose and joy to you.  They can never be all you need, cannot be everything.  Only Christ can.

Like the Temple, religious institutions can’t save you.  You can be a member of a congregation and come to worship regularly and go through the motions and still be far from God.  You can have grown up in the church and been confirmed and simply be inoculated to real Christianity.

Like with the covenant, legalistic obedience cannot save you.  Your list of rules that you do and your list of sins that you don’t do isn’t enough to save you.  Try as we might, we can’t measure up to the standard of God on our own.  We may follow a set of rules, but our hearts are far from God.

And as with the sacrifices, good works can’t save you.  The prophet Isaiah tells us that “all our righteous acts are like filthy rags” when we use them to try to earn our way to God.  How much is enough?  How good do we have to be?  We read in Ephesians 2, “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith - and this not from ourselves, it is the gift of God - not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.”

Only Jesus can save you.  He is the only way to the Father.  Is there wisdom in some other religions?  Of course.  Are there elements of truth in them?  Yes.  But they are all incomplete.  They are all insufficient.  Jesus is better.  He is the best.  We are only able to come to God completely, truthfully and eternally through Him.  He is better than anything else.

And He is what we want.  He came to earth to save us.  He lives always to intercede for us.  He is with us and that is what we need and want.  When times are hard and painful and frightening, you want a person, not a sentiment or a platitude or a feeling or an ideal or an impersonal force.  You want someone who is real and tangible and there with you.

That is why I thought the opening prayer at the memorial service for the victims of the shooting in Arizona left you feeling kind of empty.  Not because it was a Native American prayer (of sorts) and I’m a Christian, but because the divine being it addressed seemed so remote and so vague that it could not help.  In the midst of pain and grief and suffering; in the face of evil we need more than the ‘masculine energy of father sky’ and the ‘feminine energy of mother earth’ to somehow flow around us a little, we need Love – the powerful, personal, loving presence of a God who comes alongside of us; who really hears us; who understands us; who has faced our pain and grief and sorrow and suffering and has carried it for us; who has faced brokenness, death and hell and has conquered – a God who is able to love us.  THAT is the God we need and want!  And THAT is the God described in this passage!  The God who sent Himself in Jesus the Messiah.

Among the gods there is none like you, O Lord.  Jesus is better than anything else!