Once for All

Once a year, on the Day of Atonement, one man disappeared. In the tabernacle Hebrews is describing — the tent with its lampstand and its bread, its heavy curtain, its gold-covered ark — the high priest passed alone into the Most Holy Place carrying blood, and the people waited outside until he came out again alive. It was the holiest hour in Israel's calendar, and it was also, by design, a repetition: the same day returned every year, the same curtain, the same blood. Those sacrifices truly forgave; God appointed them, and a sign that points forward does real work. But a sacrifice that has to be made again next year is one that has not yet taken the sin away. The returning was not a verdict against them. It was the thing they were saying — that they were pointing past themselves to something still to come.

The letter to the Hebrews sets that annual scene against a single arrival. "But when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things that have come," it says, he "entered once for all into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves but by means of his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption" (Hebrews 9:11–12). Hebrews earns that phrase rather than asserting it: the one who offers "through the eternal Spirit" (9:14) offers something of such worth that there is nothing left to add the following year. The old priest carried an animal's blood into a room made with hands; this priest carried his own into the true sanctuary, heaven itself, which the earthly room had only ever copied, and never needed to go back.

Those yearly sacrifices could do something real but shallow. They could "sanctify for the purification of the flesh" (Hebrews 9:13) — make a person ceremonially clean enough to stand in the courts. What they could never reach was the conscience: first the standing, the verdict that bars us from drawing near at all, and then the inner accusation that keeps a forgiven person feeling unforgiven. We would rather manage guilt than have it atoned for — talk ourselves down, make it up somewhere else, wait for time to dull it. But guilt we manage ourselves is guilt we must keep managing, year after year. The blood of Christ, offered "without blemish" to God, does what no animal's blood could: it can "purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God" (Hebrews 9:14). Keller, preaching on this chapter, presses that word conscience: only a sacrifice that is finished can stop us managing our guilt.¹

Back in that tent, the man who carried the blood was never the one who bled. The priest and the victim were two. Here they are one. The scapegoat driven into the wilderness with the sins of the people, and the goat whose blood was carried inside, both find their meaning in a single person who is at once the priest who offers and the offering itself. He did not bring a substitute into the holy place. He brought himself.

And when it was done, the curtain that had kept everyone out tore from top to bottom (Matthew 27:51). The room one man entered once a year, in dread, now stands open. The dread was real, and it has been borne to the end. We no longer wait outside while someone braver goes in on our behalf. The blood has been carried in, once, and we may draw near.