Hebrews 9 retells this tale from Exodus:
After Moses had received the Law, he made a sacrifice. After this, he took the blood, mixed it with water, and (using hyssop and scarlet wool) sprinkled it on the scroll and the people as a mark of the covenant they had made with God. After all, blood is a symbol of life to the ancient Hebrew culture, and as the book of Hebrews explains, “Without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness.”
The author of Hebrews treats this sacrifice with reverence, but just like the other “earthly imitations” from the previous chapter, the author is quick to point out that Jesus’s sacrifice is very different:
Jesus doesn’t offer an animal; he offers himself willingly.
Jesus doesn’t make the sacrifice again and again; he only has to do it once.
Jesus doesn’t need to enter the manmade Temple; Heaven becomes his altar.
And as the author reminds us, Jesus’s atonement knows no limits, covering all of time.
He has appeared once for all at the culmination of the ages to do away with sin by the sacrifice of himself. (Hebrews 9:26b)
Hebrews 9 explains Jesus’s actions in terms readers of that day would understand. Jesus made one sacrifice of himself, and just like the blood from Moses’s sacrifice, Jesus’s sacrifice seals a new covenant— a new kind of relationship with God. Through coming to earth, Jesus reached out to us in a new way, and this sacrifice seals the deal, erasing sin at the culmination of the ages. As Archbishop John Chrysostom describes it, this sort of relationship with God is itself Heaven, and we’re all being invited into it. That is very good news.
On the other hand, as people who no longer engage in animal sacrifice, how should we understand this whole scene? In recent years, a handful of theologians have pushed back on the language of sacrifice to describe Jesus’s actions on the cross:
“It’s barbaric.”
“We don’t have a modern frame of reference for it.”
“It makes God into something bloodthirsty.”
These claims have some validity to them; when taken in the wrong light, the language of sacrifice can be destructive. Properly interpreting these words from Hebrews requires extreme care and research into how and why the Hebrew sacrifices occurred. Still, there’s value in these words. While we may struggle to understand ritual animal sacrifice, sacrifices of time and money and attention are as prominent as ever in our culture. Though this language may not hit us the same way it did the early readers of Hebrews, the meaning is still clear:
forgiveness —real forgiveness— is always costly,
but God is willing to pay any cost on our behalf,
and Jesus’s willing self-sacrifice covers it all.
This does require reference back to Hosea 6, not only for the “I desire mercy not sacrifice and acknowledgment of God instead of burnt offerings” of verse 6 but also in the context of vs 1-3 in reference to the resurrection of Jesus.
Yes, the OT practices of sacrifice and covenant making seems quite brutal and bloodthirsty with the shedding of blood for forgiveness, the division of animals for “making” (cutting is the direct translation) a covenant…but that serves to underscore the severity of sin.
Even going back to the garden, when Adam and Eve were told that they would die if they transgressed by eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge, death is the penalty for sin therefore only by the shedding of blood can one’s relationship with God be restored. This is the crux of substitutionary atonement as found in the Torah and why Jesus could give Himself as the atonement sacrifice and pay that penalty in our place.