Hebrews 8

Today’s Passage: Hebrews 8

After the long, close argument of chapter seven, the writer stops and gathers it all into one sentence. The point of everything we are saying, he tells us, is this: we do have such a high priest. Not we hope to, not we may one day. We have Him, and He is seated at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in heaven, and He ministers in a sanctuary that no human hands put up. From there the chapter opens outward in two movements. The first looks at the place where He serves. Every priest needs somewhere to stand and something to offer, and this Priest could not have served at the altar in Jerusalem even if He had wanted to, because that post was already filled by men appointed under the law. The sanctuary where they served, the writer says, is a copy and a shadow of the heavenly one, and he proves it from Moses himself, who was told on the mountain to build everything according to a pattern he had been shown. A copy implies an original. A shadow implies a body casting it. The second movement follows from the first: a better ministry, in a better sanctuary, must belong to a better covenant, and so the writer turns to the prophet Jeremiah and quotes him at length, the longest quotation of the Old Testament anywhere in the New. It is a promise of laws written on hearts, of a God who says I will be their God, of a people who all know Him from the least to the greatest, and of sins remembered no more. Read the chapter watching for that ending, because everything else is built toward it.

As you read, hold this: We have a High Priest who is seated in the true sanctuary and who mediates a better covenant, the very covenant God promised long ago through a Hebrew prophet, in which He writes His law on hearts and remembers our sins no more.

Hebrews 8:1–5 (BSB)

¹ The point of what we are saying is this: We do have such a high priest, who sat down at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in heaven, ² and who ministers in the sanctuary and true tabernacle set up by the Lord, not by man. ³ And since every high priest is appointed to offer both gifts and sacrifices, it was necessary for this One also to have something to offer. ⁴ Now if He were on earth, He would not be a priest, since there are already priests who offer gifts according to the law. ⁵ The place where they serve is a copy and shadow of what is in heaven. This is why Moses was warned when he was about to build the tabernacle: “See to it that you make everything according to the pattern shown you on the mountain.”

Notice first the tone of the opening. The writer has been reasoning hard for a chapter and a half, and now he sums up like a man setting a heavy thing down on the table so everyone can see it. We do have such a high priest. The emphasis falls on the having. Whatever these believers had lost, and they had lost a good deal, they had not lost their access to God, because the Priest of chapter seven is not a theory. He is theirs, and He is yours if you are in Christ this morning.

And He sat down. Do not pass over that quickly. No priest in Israel ever sat down in the sanctuary. There was no chair in the tabernacle, no seat anywhere among all that furniture, because a priest’s work was never finished and a man does not sit while the altar is still burning. They stood to minister, every day, year after year. This Priest sat down, and He sat down at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in heaven, which is the place of finished work and of authority. The posture is the doctrine. If He is seated, the sacrifice is over.

Where does He serve, then? In the sanctuary and true tabernacle set up by the Lord, not by man. The word for true here does not mean the earthly one was false. It means this one is the genuine article, the substance rather than the representation, the way we might say of a photograph of a mountain that the mountain is the real thing without calling the photograph a lie. Then the writer makes a plain, almost startling observation in verse four: if Jesus were on earth, He would not be a priest at all. There is no vacancy for Him in Jerusalem. The law had that altar staffed, by men of the right family, doing what God had told them to do. His ministry is not a rival franchise set up down the street from the temple. It is in another sanctuary altogether, the one the temple was patterned after.

And here is the proof, out of Moses. The place where the sons of Aaron serve is a copy and a shadow (σκιά) skia, pronounced skee-AH. Strong's G4639, a shadow, the outline cast by a real body. Skia is the ordinary word for a shadow, the dark shape a body throws when light falls on it. The writer will use it again in chapter ten, where he says the law has only a shadow of the good things to come and not the form of the realities themselves. Understand what a shadow is and you will understand this whole letter. A shadow is not a lie. It is not a rival to the object, and it is not nothing. It is genuine evidence, cast by something real, and it can tell you a surprising amount: the height of a man, the shape of his shoulders, whether he is carrying something, which way he is walking. What a shadow cannot do is warm you, or speak to you, or take your hand. And when the person himself comes around the corner, no one stands looking at the shadow. The old sanctuary and its sacrifices were a true silhouette of Christ, thrown backward across fifteen centuries, and the people who worshiped there in faith were not deceived. They were being taught, in the only way they could yet be taught, what the coming High Priest would look like when He arrived. That is why we still read Exodus and Leviticus and love them. We are not looking at a discarded system. We are looking at the outline of our Lord. of what is in heaven, and we know that because of what God said to Moses when the tabernacle was still only a plan:

"See to it that you make everything according to the pattern shown you on the mountain." Exodus 25:40 (BSB)

Think about how much that one sentence carries. Moses did not design the tabernacle. He was shown something and told to copy it, and warned to copy it exactly, because a copy that drifts from its pattern stops telling the truth about the original. Every ring and curtain and bowl in that tent was accurate to something real. So when a believing Jew watched the high priest disappear behind the veil on the Day of Atonement with blood in his hands, he was not watching a piece of theater. He was watching a faithful scale model of what the Son of God would actually do. That is the dignity of the old sanctuary, and the writer insists on it. It was a copy made by God’s own command, and copies are not despicable. They are simply not the thing itself.

Hebrews 8:6–9 (BSB)

⁶ Now, however, Jesus has received a much more excellent ministry, just as the covenant He mediates is better and is founded on better promises. ⁷ For if that first covenant had been without fault, no place would have been sought for a second. ⁸ But God found fault with the people and said: “Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. ⁹ It will not be like the covenant I made with their fathers when I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt, because they did not abide by My covenant, and I disregarded them, declares the Lord.

Everything now turns on one word, and it is the word this letter has been circling since chapter one. A better sanctuary implies a better ministry, and a better ministry implies a better covenant (διαθήκη) diathēkē, pronounced dee-ah-THAY-kay. Strong's G1242, covenant, a settled arrangement laid down by one party. Diathēkē is one of the great words of the Bible, and it does not mean quite what our English word contract means. In ordinary Greek it was most often the word for a will, the arrangement a man makes to dispose of what is his, and the writer will play on exactly that sense in chapter nine. What it never means is a bargain struck between equals. That would be synthēkē, a treaty negotiated by two parties of comparable standing, and the translators of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek deliberately avoided it. When God makes a diathēkē He is not sitting down at a table to see what terms can be agreed. He is sovereignly laying down an arrangement and calling a people into it, setting the terms Himself and binding Himself by them. That is why the promises in this chapter are all first person and all future: I will make, I will put, I will be, I will forgive. Grasp that and the argument of Hebrews opens up. A covenant of that kind stands or falls on the character of the One who established it, and the reason this second covenant is better is not that its members are an improvement on the first. It is that its terms rest entirely on what God undertakes to do. . That is the writer’s whole logic in verse six, and he adds the ground of it: the new covenant is founded on better promises. Not on better people. Read the promises when we come to them and see whether a single one of them depends on human performance.

Then verse seven puts the question as plainly as it can be put: if the first covenant had been without fault, no place would have been sought for a second. And immediately, before anyone can draw the wrong conclusion, verse eight tells us where the fault lay. God found fault with the people. That is a careful and important sentence, and the writer did not have to include it. The law was holy, the commandment holy and righteous and good. The tabernacle was built to a heavenly pattern. The priesthood was appointed by God Himself. What failed was not the arrangement but the party who could not keep it, and that party is not only ancient Israel. It is us. Anyone tempted to look down the centuries at the people of Sinai should ask honestly how he would have done with a mountain smoking in front of him and a law that missed nothing. The old covenant did not fail because God gave a poor covenant. It exposed what human beings are, which is one of the things He gave it to do.

And look at the tenderness in verse nine even while the failure is being named. God says He took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt. That is how a father moves a small child through a crowd, and it is how God describes His own conduct toward a nation of slaves He had just rescued. The covenant at Sinai was not a cold transaction. It was the LORD binding Himself to a people He had carried out of a house of slavery on eagles’ wings. When He then says they did not abide by it, He is telling the truth about a marriage that one party broke, and the sorrow in it is real. There is no contempt anywhere in this paragraph, and there must be none in ours. This letter has been used across the centuries to justify contempt for the Jewish people, and every such use is a betrayal of the man who wrote it. He is a Jew, writing to Jews, arguing out of the Hebrew Scriptures, and the promise he is about to quote was given to the house of Israel and the house of Judah by name.

That brings us to the office at the heart of verse six. Jesus mediates (μεσίτης) mesitēs, pronounced mes-EE-tace. Strong's G3316, mediator, the one who stands between two parties. Mesitēs comes from mesos, the word for the middle, and it named the man who stood in the middle: the arbitrator between two parties, the trusted go-between who guaranteed an agreement, sometimes the one who held the deposit until both sides had performed. It was a real office in the ancient world with real weight behind it, and the letter uses it three times of Jesus, always of the better covenant. Paul makes the sharp observation that a mediator implies more than one party, and that is exactly the situation this word addresses. There is God, holy and righteous, and there is a race of covenant-breakers, and between them a distance no amount of good will can close from our side. A mediator does not shout across that gap. He occupies it. And here is what makes this Mediator unlike every other: the usual go-between is a third party with no stake in either side, but this One belongs fully to both. He is God, so He can speak for God with perfect authority. He is man, tempted in every way as we are, so He can stand for us with perfect sympathy. And He did not simply negotiate the terms of peace, He paid for them with Himself. When you pray, you are not sending a message into an empty sky and hoping it is received. There is a Man in the middle, and the middle is exactly where He chose to be. this covenant. Moses had stood between God and the people at Sinai, going up and coming down, carrying words in both directions, and the people begged him to keep doing it because the voice from the mountain terrified them. That mediation was real and it was necessary, and it was also limited, because Moses was one of the guilty party himself and he died on a mountain outside the land. The Mediator of the new covenant is on both sides of it by nature, God and man in one Person, and He did not merely carry the terms. He met them.

Hebrews 8:10–13 (BSB)

¹⁰ For this is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord. I will put My laws in their minds and inscribe them on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they will be My people. ¹¹ No longer will each one teach his neighbor or his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ because they will all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest. ¹² For I will forgive their iniquities and will remember their sins no more.” ¹³ By speaking of a new covenant, He has made the first one obsolete; and what is obsolete and aging will soon disappear.

Now read the promises slowly, one at a time, and notice that every single one of them begins with God saying what He will do.

I will put My laws in their minds and inscribe them on their hearts. Under the first covenant the law was cut into stone and carried in a box, holy and true and entirely outside the people who were meant to keep it. It stood over them and told them what righteousness looks like, and it had no power whatever to put that righteousness inside them. Here God says He will move the law from the tablet to the mind and from the mind to the heart, which in Hebrew thought is not the seat of feelings but the center of a person, the place where the will lives and decisions are made. This is not the abolition of God’s law. Look at it again. It is the same law, relocated. The commandment that once stood outside a man accusing him now sits inside him, wanted. That is what God undertakes to do to a human being, and no one has ever done it to himself.

And I will be their God, and they will be My people. That sentence runs like a thread through the whole Bible, from Abraham to the last chapters of Revelation, and it is the shortest summary of everything God is after. Not merely forgiveness, not merely a system of worship that works, but belonging. He does not say He will be their benefactor or their lawgiver, though He is both. He says He will be theirs.

They will all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest. Under the old arrangement, knowledge of God was mediated through an order of men. You went to a priest. You waited for a prophet. The high priest went where you could not go, and most Israelites lived and died without ever setting foot behind the veil. Jeremiah promises a covenant in which every last member knows the Lord personally, and God deliberately says from the least to the greatest, which puts the child and the servant and the unlettered in the same clause as the scholar and the king. This is not a promise that teaching ends, for the Lord Himself gave teachers to His church. It is a promise that no believer is a second-hand acquaintance of God, living off someone else’s access. The newest and quietest believer in the room has the same Priest and the same welcome as the oldest.

For I will forgive their iniquities and will remember their sins no more. Here is the foundation under all the others, and the little word for at the front of it tells you so. The law on the heart, the belonging, the universal knowledge of God, all of it rests on sins forgiven. And then the last clause, which is one of the sweetest sentences God ever spoke about Himself: He will remember (μιμνῄσκομαι) mimnēskomai, pronounced mim-NACE-kom-ahee. Strong's G3403, to remember, to act on what is recalled. The verb is mimnēskomai, and its background in the Hebrew Scriptures is what unlocks it. To remember, in the Bible, is rarely a matter of information. When God remembered Noah in the ark, or remembered His covenant with Abraham, or remembered Hannah, the word does not mean a fact returned to His mind after slipping out of it. It means He acted on the relationship, He moved toward the person, He did something. So the negative works the same way. For God to remember sin is for Him to deal with the sinner according to it. For God to remember sin no more is a solemn undertaking that He will never again act toward His people on the basis of what they have done. This is not divine forgetfulness, which would be no comfort at all and would not be true of an omniscient God. It is something far better and far more costly: a deliberate, sworn refusal to hold it against them, purchased at the cross and promised centuries before the cross was raised. Conscience will bring your old sins up. Others may. The accuser certainly will. But when he does, he is bringing a charge God Himself has undertaken never to bring, and the answer is not that the sin was small. The answer is that the Priest who is seated at the right hand of the Majesty has already offered for it, once for all. their sins no more. Take it as it stands. Not that He fails to notice them, and not that they were never serious, for the whole letter is about the price of taking them away. But that He will never again bring them up against His people. The account is not merely paid, it is closed.

Then comes the conclusion in verse thirteen, and it must be handled with great care because it has been so badly handled by others. By speaking of a new covenant, God has made the first one obsolete, and what is obsolete and aging will soon disappear. Hear the logic before you hear anything else. The writer is not delivering a verdict of his own. He is drawing an inference from what God said through Jeremiah six hundred years earlier, while the first covenant was still in full operation and the temple was still standing. The word new did the work. The moment God promised a new covenant, He announced that the first was not permanent, and He announced it to Israel through an Israelite prophet, in a book Israel has always treasured. That is the writer’s entire argument, and it is the strongest possible answer to anyone who would read this chapter as scorn. The verdict on the first covenant was given inside the Scriptures of the first covenant, by the God who gave it.

And notice what the word obsolete does and does not say. It is a word about age, about something growing old and near to passing, the way a garment wears thin. It is not a word about worthlessness. A first covenant that God Himself instituted, honored, filled with glory, and used to carry His people for fifteen centuries does not become despicable when its work is done. It becomes fulfilled. When the substance arrives, the shadow has nothing left to do, and that is not a humiliation for the shadow. It is the reason the shadow was there. Let no reader of this letter ever slide from fulfilled into rejected, and above all let no one slide from a statement about a covenant into contempt for a people. The Scriptures do not permit it:

"For God’s gifts and His call are irrevocable." Romans 11:29 (BSB)

The writer very likely put down his pen while the smoke was still rising over the altar in Jerusalem, and he says the aging thing will soon disappear. Within a few years the temple was gone. But his concern is not to predict a date. It is to tell wavering believers that going back is going back to something God has already declared finished, when they are being offered the covenant every prophet longed for.