Verse 9
Love in the Ordinance of Sacrifice.
I. In order to be acceptable to God, self-sacrifice must be unreserved and complete. It must be the perfect rendering up of the will to His will, of the being to His disposal, of the energies to His obedience. No reserve can be for an instant thought of. Accordingly, all that was dedicated to Him under the law was fully and unreservedly His; not to be recalled for ordinary cases, not to be divided from His service.
II. Now it must be obvious to us that such full and entire rendering up to God is impossible on the part of a man whose will is corrupted by sin. Every victim was to be without blemish. If each man would not for himself fulfil the spiritual meaning of the sacrifice, the sacrifice itself taught him something of a substitute for himself who in his stead might be offered to God. And the law working on this continually familiarised the people to the idea of one such substitute for all.
III. Again, in the substitution indicated by the sacrifice there must be represented a transference of guilt from the offerer to the substitute. For this the law also took special care (the scapegoat).
IV. The next point which we require is, that some method of communication of the virtue of the sacrifice and its acceptableness to the offerer must be indicated. The offerers partook of the sacrifice. The law was not only a negative preparation for Christ in pulling down the stronghold of human pride and bringing men in guilty before God, but it was a positive preparation for Him, in indicating, as it did, His complete atoning sacrifice, and in announcing Him by repeated prophetic intimations. They who as yet knew not Him could not then perceive the full significance of them; but we, looking back from the foot of the cross and the light of God's Spirit, can gather strong confirmation for our most holy faith from all this preparation and typical foreshadowing of Christ.
H. Alford, Quebec Chapel Sermons, vol. iv., p. 115.
References: Hebrews 9:10 . Preacher's Monthly, vol. ii., p. 421.Hebrews 9:11-12 . Homilist, vol. i., p. 184.
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