Timothy to Hebrews - The Preterist Archive

Hebrews X. 15-18. 527
fied, this forgiveness wrought out, by the sacrifice of Christ (chap,
ix, 15, seq.) ;
but where this forgiveness is, there there is no need of
a repeated sacrifice (chap, ix, 25, seq). The first of these ideas is
repeated in vers. 15-17, and, with it mention is made of the second
; the third is stated in ver. 18. ,Thus does the conclusion of
this fourth principal part unite itself again with the beginning of
chap. viii.
Thus has the writer reached the innermost kernel
of the Christian
doctrine. Immediately from the consciousness of the forgiveness
of sin on account of Christ's sacrifice—the point in which the
subjective consciousness harmonizes with the objective fact of the
restored relation to God—he infers in ver. 18 the superfluousness of
those symbolical sacrifices which had duly a subjective value, and
could awaken only the subjective knowledge of the need of an
atonement (comp. ver. 3). (This is entirely the fundamental idea
of the Pauline system). Let us now look back from this the highest
point in the argumentation, to the way by which we have
been conducted to it. In all the principal parts and particular
sections, the author begins with the most outward and apparently
accidental points of comparison and differences which offer themselves
to view between the Messiah and the angels, the Messiah
and Moses, the Messiah and the high priest (for example, that God
calls none of the angels his son ; that Moses was a servant, the
Messiah the son of the house ; that Melchisedec's descent is left
unknown, etc.) But he everywhere shows how, in these apparently
accidental things, essential relations lying deep beneath them are
expressed ; he follows out these relations, and reaches more universal
points of comparison ; it is as if one were to follow brooks
which lead him to rivers, and in the end to a wide stream. The
Messiah must be the perfect messenger of God to men, because, in
him the holiness of God and not merely his omnipotence are manifest,
because in him the Godhead is to become man, and humanity
is to be raised to union with God. The Messiah must be the perfect
representative of men heforc God, because he is to be the Son
of God himself, not merely a servant, and is truly to conduct man
to his true rest. The Messiah must be a high priest, and indeed
the 2oromised, true eternal high priest after the order of Melchisedec,
who represents man eternally and without change before God. This
discloses itself in the manner of his priestly ministration ; the sacrifice
which he offered is a spiritual, moral, and therefore more than
a symbolical sacrifice ; it is the fulfilment of the typical things of
which the tabernacle consisted, and of the typical actions of which
the service of the tabernacle consisted. Thus the author comes to
the doctrine of tlie atonement, and, with this, to that of the appropriation
of the atonement which he handles in the concluding part,