Hebrews 10:1 Commentary and Bible Study

There was a deficiency in the ritual of the ceremonial law which should not have surprised anyone who understood it properly. As has been stated (Hebrews 9:25), the high priest was required to go into the holy of holies every year on the Day of Atonement and perform exactly the same ritual all over again, just as he had done the previous year. Human beings naturally have an aversion to redoing the same thing needlessly. In everything they do they ask, ‘What does this accomplish?’ If the answer is, ‘Nothing’, then they are disinclined to act. But the law did accomplish something, otherwise God would not have given it: it taught the people God’s means of redemption, and it foretold the future sacrifice of Christ. What it did not do was to remove the guilt of sin, except in a ceremonial way. It fulfilled the condition of God’s outward blessing on the individual and on the nation, but the record of sin was still there. This left those who were under the law without justification, for they still lacked faith. Of course there were still some who did have faith, even in those Old Testament times, and if they possessed faith they were justified by grace, but they were justified on account of the promises made to Abraham and not on account of the law or any of its ceremonies. As far as the law was concerned, it was weak and ineffectual.We may think of the law as a shadow, says the writer. An illuminated object casts a shadow and from the shadow, viewed in isolation, it is possible to learn certain things about the object. We may know the object’s rough shape and size, and the direction in which it is oriented. We deduce this because of the correspondence between the object and it shadow. But the shadow does not teach us about the object’s colour, its texture, its material, its weight. To learn these things we have to see the object itself. The tabernacle furniture and ritual told the Israelites a great deal. It told them that God is holy, that his wrath against sin can only be appeased by the blood of a sacrifice, that until this has been done he cannot be approached – a vast number of lessons were contained in the law. But it was not until Christ came that his people learned exactly how this would be done, what moral perfection really looks like, and what power and glory belonged to the incarnate Son of God. Not till we heard his words recorded in the gospels did we appreciate his perfect wisdom.The law was a mere outline of good things to come, that is, the riches of Christ and Calvary and the salvation that comes from Christ. The symbolic language of the ceremonial law was God’s guarantee that Christ would come, that he would offer up the ultimate sacrifice and suffer and die, and make a substitutionary atonement in dying for the sins of all his people and leading to life.