The Holiest of All By Andrew Murray

328 Ebe Ibolfest of BU
disposition, the inner essential nature of that mediation that
secured His acceptance as our High Priest. The answer to be
given in the first eighteen verses of this chapter will form the
conclusion of the doctrinal half of the Epistle, and especially of
the higher teaching
it has for the perfect.
To prepare the way for the answer, the chapter begins with
once again reminding us of the impotence of the law. The law
having a shadow of the good things to come, not the very
image of the things. The law had only the shadow, not the
substance. The gospel gives us the very image. The image
of God in which man was created was an actual spiritual reality.
The Son Himself, as the image of the Father, was His true
likeness ever in possession of His Father s life and glory.
When man makes an image,
it is but a dead thing. When
God gives an image it is a living reality, sharing in the life and
the attributes of the original. And so the gospel brings us not
a shadow, a picture, a mental conception, but the very image of
the heavenly things, so that we know and have them, really
taste and possess them. A shadow is first of all a picture, an
external figure, giving a dim apprehension of good things to
come. Then, as the external passes away, and sight
is
changed
into faith, there comes a clearer conception of divine and heavenly
blessings. And then faith is
changed into possession and
experience, and the Holy Spirit makes the power of Christ s
redemption and the heavenly life a reality within us. Some
Christians never get beyond the figures and shadows ;
some
advance to faith in the spiritual good set forth ; blessed they
who go on to full possession of what faith had embraced.
In expounding what the law is not able to do, the writer
uses four remarkable expressions which, while they speak of the
weakness of the law with its shadows, indicate at the same time