The Law of Moses, 1898, Robert Roberts

“The Covenant at Sinai”

Paul, commenting on these things, says that” almost all things are by the law purged with blood”, The reason he gives is that no covenant is of force while the covenant-victim liveth. Blood poured out is the symbol of death, and the sprinkling with this blood on altar, book, and people, was an intimation that no covenant of everlasting force, could be made without the death of the men to whom it was offered. If it be asked why, the answer is, that death was due. Death had passed upon all men through Adam, and it reigned over them, although they “had not sinned after the similitude of Adam’s transgression”, on account of “the many offences” from which no man is exempt. The multitude to whom God offered the covenant of His favour by Moses was a multitude in this position. Consequently it was not compatible with the greatness of God that any advance could be made to them without the ritual illustration and enforcement of their true position.

This is the explanation of the fact that the first covenant was “not dedicated without blood”, The Mosaic patterns were all purified thus. Blood proclaimed the infliction of death. It was an infliction of death on animals, and therefore not efficacious for final results, yet, as a shadow, it commanded assent to the principle. Blood, as the symbol of death, typically purged the death defilement. Death is always treated in the Mosaic system as a defiling thing. To touch a dead body, or a grave, or a bone was to contract defilement. The whole congregation, as they stood there before Moses, were in the antitypically defiled state. They had not only touched death through descent from the condemned of Eden; but they were in contact with its defiling power in their own bodies. There was therefore nothing but that which was just and seemly in the shedding of blood being made accessory to the establishment of a covenant of peace between God and them.

Paul notes that without the shedding of blood there is no remission—that is, there is no putting aside of sin with a view to friendship, without the fullest recognition of its nature and its unreserved repudiation. This is the reasonable requirement of the wisdom of God in type and antitype.

The type is before us; the antitype is in Christ. He is the altar, the book of the law, and the other things that come after. The sprinkling of the typical blood on both by Moses prefigured the operation of divine love and wisdom in Christ’s own sacrifice. It was a sacrifice operative on himself first of all: for he is the beginning of the new creation, the firstfruits of the new harvest, the foundation of the new temple. He was the nucleus of a new and healthy life developed among men, for the healing of all who should become incorporate with it. As such, it was needful that he should himself be the subject of the process and the reaper of the results. Hence the testimony that “the God of peace brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, the great shepherd of the sheep, through the blood of the everlasting covenant” (Heb. 13:20), and that by his own blood, entering into the holy place, he obtained (middle, or self-subjective, state of the verb) eternal redemption (” for us” is interpolated) (9:12). The Father saved him from death for his obedience unto death (Heb. 5:7–9; Phil. 2:8–9; Rom. 5:19).

The common view which disconnects Christ from the operation of his own sacrifice would have required that Moses should have left the altar and the book of the law unsprinkled. These were parts of what Paul terms “the patterns of things in the heavens”, concerning which he remarks that it was necessary they should be purified with the sacrifices ordained. The application of this to Christ as the antitype he makes instantly; “but (it was necessary that) the heavenly things themselves (should be purified) with better sacrifices than these” (Heb. 9:23). The phrase “the heavenly things” is an expression covering all the high, holy and exalted things of which the Mosaic pattern was but a foreshadowing. They are all comprehended in Christ, who is the nucleus from which all will be developed, the foundation on which all will be built. The statement is therefore a declaration that it was necessary that Christ should first of all be purified with better sacrifices than the Mosaic: “Neither by the blood of goats and calves, but by his own blood he entered in once into the holy place”; “not into the holy places made with hands, which are the figures of the true; but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God for us” (Heb. 9:12, 23–24).