"what Hope Might A Sinner Possess?"

“What Hope Might A Sinner Possess?”

Hebrews 10:5-10

Have you ever tried to fix yourself, on you own—with no help?

Ever have an addiction or a bad habit that you wanted so badly to rid yourself of, but you just couldn’t pull it off…

…you just couldn’t kick it?

I think we all have things in our lives that we have tried to fix on our own, but to no avail.

Perhaps it is a bad temper.

Maybe it is an addiction to food or something else.

Perhaps it is a judgmental attitude or a prejudice toward someone of a different race or culture that we just can’t seem to get over.

Maybe we have a hard time loving certain people.

Perhaps we are stingy, greedy, fearful of losing your money—always worrying no matter how much we have.

Perhaps we have hurt someone so bad, done something so horrible that we don’t think we can ever be saved.

These kinds of things make us miserable.

These kinds of things make us human.

These kinds of things also make us sinners in need of a Savior—in need of forgiveness, a clean slate, a clear conscious, a feeling of peace and joy which transcends all understanding and anything this world has to offer.

Let’s face it; we are all in the same boat: we are all broken, we are all lost.

We all have things about us that we would change if we could…we would fix if we could.

(pause)

This is the 4th Sunday of Advent and it might seem strange that we are talking about sin and the need for a Savior rather than Mary, Joseph, Shepherds, Angels.

After-all Christmas is this Saturday.

But, when you think about it, this is actually a very fitting passage of Scripture to be talking about a few days before we celebrate the Savior’s birth.

Not only is this passage about Christ’s birth, but it also gives us a profound perspective on the reason He came.

I mean, why did God become a human being?

Here in Hebrews 10 we get the answer straight from the lips of Jesus Himself: “When Christ came into this world he said sacrifice and offerings you did not desire, but a body you prepared for me; with burnt offerings and sin offerings you were not pleased.

Then I said, ‘Here I am—it is written about me in the scroll—I have come to do your will, my God.”

Jesus came into this world to do His Father’s will.

God prepared for Him a body—a human body just like yours and mine.

And in this body, Jesus experienced pain, grief and the temptation to sin—the temptation to take things into His own hands.

The temptation to take the easy way out…

…the temptation to follow the prince of this world…

…to give-in to evil.

But He never did.

Jesus was the only human being who has ever and will ever do this.

And that is because He is God-Made-Flesh—the perfect Sacrifice for our sins.

But why do we need a sacrifice for our sins?

To understand this, we must start at the beginning.

Genesis Chapter tells the story of the fall of humanity, when Adam and Eve disobeyed God, bringing sin into the world.

Genesis 3:21 then tells us about the first death in the Bible, when God made clothes for Adam and Eve out of animal skin.

This would have been shocking and horrifying to the first couple.

It was a graphic demonstration of the nature of their sin.

Because they sinned, they now had to be clothed, or covered.

That covering could only be accomplished by the shedding of blood, a metaphor for their spiritual death and a foreshadowing of things to come.

And things only went downhill from there.

By the second generation of people, Cain killed his brother Abel in jealousy, which was the first murder.

And it goes on and on and on.

But God never gave up on us.

When God called Israel to be God’s people, He gave them a long list of laws to live by, laws against murder and stealing and laws about taking care of widows and the poor.

But, the people couldn’t live up to these laws.

They still sinned and fell short.

They needed a covering.

Therefore, God instituted animal sacrifice.

This was a deeply symbolic ritual.

Blood, representing life, had to be drained from the animal, reminding the people of death.

The way animals were prepared for different types of offerings was also deeply symbolic, as in the case of the “scapegoat,” in which one goat was slaughtered and another released into the wild, metaphorically carrying away the sins of Israel.

The sprinkling of blood around the Tabernacle (and later the temple) represented life cleansing the death of sin, since blood was a symbol of life.