Hebrews 10:1-4
1 For the law having a shadow of good things to come, and not the very image of the things, can never with those sacrifices which they offered year by year continually make the comers thereunto perfect.
2 For then would they not have ceased to be offered? because that the worshippers once purged should have had no more conscience of sins.
3 But in those sacrifices there is a remembrance again made of sins every year.
4 For it is not possible that the blood of bulls and of goats should take away sins.
‘This is pretty pointed language about the insufficiency of Torah—the insufficiency of the law. If you just follow the logic here, the law is just a shadow of the good things to come, instead of the true form of these realities. ‘These realities’ are the stuff he has talked about up to this point about the high priesthood of Christ, about Christ’s sacrifice, about Christ being seated at the right hand of majesty, so on and so forth—the superiority of what Jesus did on the cross, the cross event to the Torah and to its sacrifices and whatnot. [The sacrifices could not remove sin]…But what he’s talking about here is the inadequacy of the sacrifices to actually absolve a person of moral guilt. For those who listened to the Leviticus series that we did, that is not an unfamiliar idea—that the sacrificial laws and the sacrificial system were not about absolving people of moral guilt. It was really about decontaminating sacred space. It was about insulating mere mortals who might be unclean or had become unclean…It was about taking care of an uncleanness problem, in terms of them being allowed to approach sacred space—them being allowed to participate in the system by which their relationship to both the community (people of Israel…) and God could be restored or remedied or sort of just whatever the contamination was… So, if you were an Israelite and you went through the sacrificial system, the rituals, you did things as they were prescribed to be done, God would look at you and say, “We’re okay now. You’re not going to pollute my presence. Let’s try it again. You’re not unclean. You’re not contaminated.” You never get this notion that “I look at you now as though you never sinned.” That is not an Israelite Old Testament idea as it relates to the sacrificial system. There are broader perspectives about sin and relationship with God that sort of transcend the sacrificial system, but what we’re talking about here (what the writer of Hebrews is talking about) is specifically what the Torah describes to do for certain types of violation…if you committed a series crime—you committed adultery or you did X, Y Z—there wasn’t a sacrifice for that. You either had the death penalty or you had to pay restitution—you had to make things right with the person you offended or there were some sins that there just wasn’t a sacrifice for. The sacrificial system itself was about sacred space and decontamination of it—protecting it from contamination and making the participants “clean,” i.e., not morally guiltless…but able, in a contaminative sense, to participate in the system. That’s what it was about. The writer of Hebrews is saying, “Look, that is just inferior to what we have in Jesus. It’s because of the sacrifice of Jesus that we are allowed to enter his presence. And beyond that, we do have the forgiveness of sins. We have been cleansed. We are new creations.” He uses all this New Testament sort of language. And not only that, but even better—still better—it’s permanent. We don’t have to keep doing these things. We don’t have to sacrifice the son of God anew. In fact, that’s an abominable idea—sort of casting what happened at the cross, or filtering what happened at the cross through the filter of the Old Testament ritualistic, repetitive system. To the writer of Hebrews, that’s an abominable thing. So no matter what angle you look at it, he’s saying that what we have is so much better in every way. It’s clear that sacrifices (from what we read) were both temporary and, in terms of the actual removal of moral guilt, they were ineffective. 1https://nakedbiblepodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/NB-196-Transcript.pdf
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