We ended our last session on Hebrews talking about how the New Covenant takes God’s external law and writes it on our hearts. That, plus the presence of the Holy Spirit and a new heart, enables us to obey the law wholeheartedly.
Those new covenant provisions are found in Hebrews 10:15-18, a quote from Jeremiah 31:33.
15 And the Holy Spirit also bears witness to us; for after saying, 16 “This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my laws on their hearts, and write them on their minds,” 17 then he adds, “I will remember their sins and their lawless deeds no more.” 18 Where there is forgiveness of these, there is no longer any offering for sin.”
It is the provisions of the New Covenant, spelled out in more detail in Ezekiel 36:25-27, that enables us to obey the law out of a sense of delight rather than duty.
25 I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. 26 And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. 27 And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.
God graciously gives us a “new heart, and a new spirit,” a “heart of flesh” that is responsive to God. He puts His “Spirit within [us]” and these provisions “cause [us] to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.” This new, Spirit-driven life within us, enables us to do what we could not do before—obey God from the heart (Rom. 6:17).
Shortly after the armistice of World War I, Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse visited the battlefields of Belgium. In the first year of the war the area around the city of Mons was the scene of the great British retreat. In the last year of the war it was the scene of the greater enemy retreat. For miles west of the city the roads were lined with artillery, tanks, trucks, and other materials of war that the enemy had abandoned in their hasty flight.
It was a lovely spring day. The sun was shining, and not a breath of wind was blowing. As he walked along, examining the war remains, he noticed leaves were falling from the great trees that arched along the road. He brushed at a leaf that had fallen against his chest. As he grasped at it, he pressed it in his fingers, and it disintegrated. He looked up curiously and saw several other leaves falling from the trees. Remember, it was spring, not autumn, nor was there enough wind to blow off the leaves. These leaves had outlived the winds of autumn and the frosts of winter. Yet they were falling that day, seemingly without cause.
Then Dr. Barnhouse realized why. The most potent force of all was causing them to fall. It was spring—the sap was beginning to run, and the buds were beginning to push from within. From down beneath the dark earth, roots were sending life along trunk, branch, and twig until it expelled every bit of deadness that remained from the previous year. It was, as a great Scottish preacher termed it, “the expulsive power of a new affection.”
This is what happens when God writes his will on our hearts. The new life within pushes the deadness from our lives. Our renewed hearts pump fresh blood through us. The life of Christ in us—the same life that said “Behold, I have come to do your will, O God”—animates us!
The life that is inside—the empowering life of the Holy Spirit and Jesus Christ—now motivates us to will what Jesus willed, the will of God!
But how did we get to that position? How is it that the law came to be written within us? That is the second aspect—the eternal aspect of God’s forgiveness.
First, the sacrifice of Christ made the New Covenant possible. The Lord said through Jeremiah, more completely quoted in Hebrews 8, that this internal empowering of life could come about For I will be merciful toward their iniquities, and I will remember their sins no more” (Hebrews 8:12)
It is a tremendous feeling to know that our sins have been totally forgiven. We do not have to continue to feel guilty because of the sins of our past. This verses say God “will remember [our] sins no more.” The same is true of any sin I commit either today or tomorrow. God will not remember it.
Clara Barton, organizer of the American Red Cross was known not to harbor resentments. She was asked by a friend regarding an incident that had happened earlier to Clara, “Don’t you remember the wrong that was done you?” Clara answered calmly, “No, I distinctly remember forgetting that!”
Clara Barton willed to forgive and forget. But God does even better. He really does forgive and forget—“I will remember their sins and their lawless deeds no more.”
That that is exactly what God does; He chooses to remember it no more. Do you believe you believe it? Or do you truly believe it? Believe it!
Sam Storms explains:
It’s important for us to remember that God does in fact “remember” many things and we should be grateful for it. Frequently in the OT we are assured that God remembers his people, the promises he has given them, and especially the covenant that he has made with them (see Pss. 74:2; 105:8, 42; 106:45; 111:5). But when it comes to our sins, well, that’s another matter!
You and I certainly remember our sins and evil deeds, all too often! We can’t shake free from them. They nag at our hearts and haunt us and torment us and oppress our souls. There is a constant piercing of the conscience. And the only way to break free from that remembrance is to remind ourselves that God does not remember!
God doesn’t gain knowledge. God doesn’t lose knowledge. He neither learns nor forgets. He knows all things instantly and eternally, now and forever. So, when he says he won’t remember our sins he means: “I’ll never bring it up and use it against you. I’ll never take your sins into consideration when it comes to determining who is granted entrance into my eternal kingdom. I’ll never appeal to your sins as grounds for condemning you.”
There is obviously a difference between “forgetting” and “choosing not to remember.” Forgetting is unavoidable. It happens by nature, not by choice. You can’t choose to forget. It just happens. It doesn’t require any effort to “forget” something. You get busy, distracted, tired, and things slip from your mind.
This is not what happens to God. God cannot forget in the literal sense of the term and certainly not in the same way you and I do. God doesn’t suffer from mental lapses. His mind is infinitely perfect and powerful. Rather, God willingly chooses “not to remember.” Thus, it isn’t so much that the knowledge of our sins and lawless deeds has been erased from God’s mind. Rather, God promises to us that he will “not remember” our shortcomings and sin. He will not remind himself of our failures. And he will not remind us of them. They play no part in determining or shaping our relationship with him. He will never throw them in our face or subtly drop hints about the ways we’ve failed. (https://www.samstorms.org/all-articles/post/when-god-chooses-not-to-remember-hebrews-101-18)
Because of the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ, God exercised His judgment against my sins against His Son, thereby making it possible for God to forgive me of my sins. My sin record was wiped clean because Someone else paid for it. That paved the way for God to give us His Spirit to dwell within His people, who then writes the laws of God upon our hearts (cf. Ezekiel 36:26-27; 2 Corinthians 3:3; Galatians 4:6).
Thus, because Christ did God’s will, doing what God wanted Him to do with the body that had been prepared for Him—living a perfectly obedient life, dying in our place on the cross—now we, having been forgiven, are enabled now to do God’s will, and to do it because we love God and love to obey Him.
Whereas Chapter 8 showed that the forgiveness preceded the internal aspect of the covenant, Chapter 10 shows that the forgiveness continues. Christ not only makes the New Covenant possible; He also makes it eternal.
Our author further clarifies that not only our sins, but our “lawless deeds” are no longer remembered, showing that everything from sins to lawless deeds do not nullify His covenant towards us. It is probably his way of saying that no kind of sin causes God to abandon His people once they belong to Him.
Literally, God says here that He will “no, not” remember their sins. A double negative is poor English, but wonderful Greek! It emphasizes this in such a way as to say, “there is no possible way that God will remember this or hold it to your account.” It is impossible. The sacrificial system stood there as a constant “reminder” of sins for people (Heb. 10:3), but the sacrifice of Jesus Christ causes God to “remember” them no more. If God has forgotten our sins, then we can put them out of our minds.
Charles Spurgeon reminds us: “The Christ who died on Calvary’s cross, will not have to die again for my new sins, or to offer a fresh atonement for any transgressions that I may yet commit. No; but, once for all, gathering up the whole mass of his people’s sins into one colossal burden, he took it upon his shoulders, and flung the whole of it into the sepulcher wherein Once he slept, and there it is buried, never to be raised again to bear witness against the redeemed any more for ever.”
Finally, the writer says, “Where there is forgiveness of these, there is no longer any offering for sin.” Note the air of finality here—a completed sacrifice and complete forgiveness. Where there is forgiveness of “sins and lawless deeds,” the summation of all our offenses against a holy God, then there is no longer any need for further offerings for sin because what those offerings pointed to—full and final forgiveness through the Lamb of God—has already been granted by the one offering of Jesus Christ on the cross.
The Old Testament sacrifices, in other words, are rendered worthless and obsolete. What they pointed forward to has been fulfilled by Jesus Christ. Through the cross, believers under the New Covenant receive God’s total forgiveness! If you have total forgiveness in Christ, why go back to a system that could never provide that?
This text once again eliminates the unbiblical doctrines of purgatory and penance, because there is no longer any need for sacrificial actions that would merit forgiveness from God. All of these unbiblical practices detract from the merit of what Christ did on the cross, devaluing His sacrificial death for us.
His death obtained total forgiveness for every believer. His death perfected us for all time. His death sanctifies us once for all. His death completely takes away the guilt of our sins.
To believe in purgatory, a place in the afterlife in which we are “purged” of our impurities and sins, and to practice penance and indulgences is very much like going back to the old Jewish sacrificial system!
The work of Jesus for atonement is finished. If it is not enough for us, then nothing will be. “God has set forth Christ for you as guilty sinners to rest on; and if that is not enough for you, what more would you have? Christ has offered himself, and died and suffered in our stead, and gone into his glory; and, if you cannot depend upon him, what more would you have him do? Shall he come and die again? You have rejected him once; you would reject him though he died twice.” (Spurgeon)
I’ve used this illustration before, but imagine a young man who falls in love, but he and his lover are separated by distance for a while. He, however, has a beautiful photograph of her that he gazes at every day. Finally, the two of them get married. He still has the photo, but now he has something much better—her physical presence, a living, breathing, loving person.
But imagine one day, he starts behaving rather strangely. He stands before his wife clutching that old photo to his chest. He tells her, “I appreciate you but I’ve really missed your photo, so I’m going back to it.” He passionately kisses the picture and goes out the door mumbling, “Oh, how I love you, dear photo. You’re everything to me” (adapted from Kent Hughes, Hebrews: An Anchor for the Soul [Crossway], 2:19). We would rightly conclude that this guys dipstick reads a quart low!
What folly to leave one’s living spouse for her lifeless portrait. On the one hand, you “possess” a living person of so many inches, of a definite weight, with her own aroma, brimming with thought and action. But you leave her for her lifeless photograph with its fixed and sealed expression. What an absurd thought!
The fact that God will remember our sins no more, then, not only enables the New Covenant, it is a vital component of life in the New Covenant. If we are to live as New Covenant followers of Jesus Christ, trusting, loving and obeying God, then we must grow in our understanding and appreciation of that fact that God forgives all sins all the time forevermore. It is one of the things that the Holy Spirit, given to us as part of the New Covenant, communicates to our hearts.
Romans 5:5 tells us that one of the benefits of being justified by faith, rather than being justified by our own efforts, is that “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.”
God wants us to enjoy Him and enjoy doing His will, and He provides everything we need in order to do that. Joy is what the Old Covenant, working from the outside in, could never motivate. But the Holy Spirit now lives inside us, showing us God’s full and forever forgiveness, God’s amazing grace towards us and God’s lavish love towards us, showing us God as He truly is, showing us His laws to be what they truly are (for our good, for our flourishing), leading us away from resentment into joyful gratitude.
If He truly is this kind of God, then doing His will becomes not a chore but a true delight. His will can be trusted and enjoyed as we live in it. If we know Him well, we will want to obey Him. And if we know Him well, we will trust Him more.
An 85-year-old woman, looking back on her life, wished that it had been different. In her words, it is evident that she longed for a New Covenant kind of life. She wrote, in a note titled, “If I had my life to live over again”: “I’d like to make more mistakes next time. I’d relax. I would limber up. I would be sillier than I’ve been this trip. I would take fewer things seriously. I would take more chances. I would climb more mountains and swim more rivers. I would eat more ice cream and less beans. I would perhaps have more actual troubles, but I’d have fewer imaginary ones. You see, I’m one of those people who live sensibly and sanely hour after hour, day after day. Oh, I’ve had my moments, and if I had to do it over again, I’d have more of them. In fact, I’d try to have nothing else. Just moments, one after another, instead of living so many years ahead of each day. I’ve been one of those persons who never goes anywhere without a thermometer, a hot water bottle, a raincoat and a parachute. If I had to do it again, I would travel lighter.”
Because Christ did God’s will, culminating in the offering of His body on the cross as an effective and complete sacrifice for our sins, we ourselves may do God’s will, and enjoy doing it. As the truth of God’s love for us settles in our hearts, communicated to us by the Holy Spirit, we too, like David, like Jesus, come to God, eagerly and willingly, and say, “Behold, I have come to do your will O God…”
“In the words, No more offering for sin, we reach the conclusion of the doctrinal part of this great epistle to the Hebrews.” (Philip Newell) What follows after is mainly exhortation.
The long section on the high priestly ministry of Jesus ends here (7:1—10:18). Priestly ministry was such an important part of old Israelite worship that the writer has given it lengthy attention. The writer showed that Jesus is a superior priest compared with the Levitical priests and that His priesthood supersedes (has replaced) the Levitical priesthood. He also pointed out that Jesus serves under the New Covenant that is superior to the Old Covenant. Furthermore, His sacrifice is superior to the animal sacrifices of the Old Covenant. Finally, Jesus’ priesthood brings the believer into full acceptance with God, something that the former priesthood could not do. It could not make us “perfect.” Therefore, the readers would be foolish to abandon Christianity to return to Judaism. Likewise, contemporary believers are also foolish to turn away from Christ and the gospel.
A young boy decided to read a book from the family library while his Christian mother was away. While reading the book, he came across the phrase “the finished work of Christ.” It struck him with unusual power. “The finished work of Christ”…If the whole work was finished and the whole debt paid, what is there left for me to do?” He knew that answer and fell to his knees to receive the Savior and full forgiveness of sins. That is how J. Hudson Taylor, founder of the China Inland Mission (now Overseas Missionary Fellowship International), was saved.
Grace Still Amazes 