Sermon25-31 Heb10 Guide

Heb 10:1-18 theme verse Heb 10:14

The praise and honor and glory be to our heavenly Father who seeks true worshipers who worship Him with the Spirit and truth.

In this twenty sixth Sunday of 2025, on Pentecost Sunday, I pray that His grace of the application of all the benefits which Jesus earned for our salvation and also the glorious ministry of the proclamation of His kingdom by the power of the Holy Spirit may be full in our life. Last three weeks, we looked at the meaning of the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, yet this week, we would like to look at how Jesus Christ fulfilled the laws of the Old Testament together.

1)    First, to summarize the content of today's text, the author of the Hebrews says that the law given by God through grace was only a shadow of good things to come, not the very image of them. So although sacrifices were offered every year, they were imperfect and could not make the person offering them perfect. Yet, he says that the sacrifice offered by Christ was a once-for-all eternal sacrifice that fulfilled the redemption of His people, and not only made them holy, but also made those who were made holy perfect forever. And then he continues that the Holy Spirit testifies to this, quoting Jeremiah 31:33-34, saying that God now put His law in their hearts and wrote it on their minds and also God would never remember their sins or lawlessness so that they could live according to His will.

2)    Regarding this grace, to understand through the covenantal perspective, after God created the heavens and the earth, when He created humans in his own image, He told them not to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and that if they did, they would surely die. This was the covenant of deed. But Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, so that death, curses, and suffering came to us. However, the Triune God, who already knew all these already before the creation, They made a covenant of redemption among Them, and then based on that eternal redemptive counsel, when Adam and Even sinned, God immediately initiated the covenant of grace, giving the prototype gospel to Adam, and making the covenant with Noah, He gave the commandment not to kill, after increasing common grace to the humanity, And then He called Abraham, to raise up the Israel, his chosen people, and finally after redeeming from the slavery at Egypt, He made the Mosaic covenant, then told them to live as His holy people in the promised land, while giving them the Ten Commandments, as a moral law and the ceremonies of forgiveness of sin at the Day of Atonement. But this ceremonial law of forgiveness of sin through the animal sacrifice was not perfect and was a shadow so that it could not make the offerers perfect and had to be repeated yearly. Yet finally, Christ, came and became the eternal high priest and also the spotless sacrificial lamb, and by his blood, once for all, He fulfilled the whole law so that we may receive eternal redemption.

3)    In this new covenant, in today’s text, verse 10 says, “For this purpose, according to the will of God, we have been made holy through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once for all,” and then verse 14 says, “For by one sacrifice he has made completely perfect those who are being made holy.” Here, to be made holy through the grace of Christ means that through his atonement work, we not only receive forgiveness of sins and are justified, but also are cleansed from the pollution of our inner sinfulness. Also, to be made perfect means that on the last day, our bodies will be resurrected in the resurrected body that is holy, strong, incorruptible and spiritual, to be consummated into perfection. And it is said that all these graces came to us through the once-for-all eternal sacrifice of Christ, so we do not need to keep various sacrificial laws of the Old Testament, and also we do not need to keep the law for our salvation again.

4)    And regarding this fact that Christ fulfilled all the ceremonies and symbols, Belgic confession article 25 confesses that “We believe that the ceremonies and symbols of the law have ended with the coming of Christ, and that all foreshadowings have come to an end, so that the use of them ought to be abolished among Christians. Yet the truth and substance of these things remain for us in Jesus Christ, in whom they have been fulfilled. Nevertheless, we continue to use the witnesses drawn from the law and prophets to confirm us in the gospel and to regulate our lives with full integrity for the glory of God, according to the will of God.” To elaborate it, it is said that Christ has fulfilled all the rites and symbols of the Old Testament once and for all through His one eternal sacrifice on the cross. Yet we still use the testimonies of the law and the prophets to strengthen us in the gospel and to perfect our lives according to God’s will and for the glory of God. I mean, even though we no longer keep the ceremonial laws of the Old Testament, such as the sacrifices, and also we do not need to keep the Ten Commandments for our salvation, but after salvation given freely in grace, we are gratefully living according to God’s moral law, in other words, in God’s will, as our expression of gratitude and for the glory of God.

5)    But, some people say that we do not even need to live according to the Ten Commandments which is known as antinomianism. In this belief, they believe that there is no longer a moral law that God wants Christians to obey and live by, and that when Christ fulfilled the law, He  even abolished not only the ceremonial law such as the sacrificial law, but also the moral law, I mean, the Ten Commandments, so they believe that there is no need to obey the Old Testament law at all. However, this is their misunderstanding of some parts of the biblical teaching. Of course, as they say, the Bible clearly teaches that we are saved only by grace, and that Christians do not need to obey the Old Testament law as a means of obtaining salvation. However, it is unbiblical to say that there is no moral law that God wants Christians to live. As for this antinomianism, the apostle Paul already dealt with it in Romans 6, saying, “What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin so that grace may abound? Certainly not! How shall we, who died to sin, live any longer in it?”, Paul said that as we received the Holy Spirit, became born-again Christians, and saved through faith and converted by the grace of God, we have desire to live in God’s will and please Him, in other words, in response to God’s free salvation, we start to live a life of gratitude, that is, a life of loving and worshipping God and also loving our neighbors. This life of love is explained in the Ten Commandments. In addition, the New Testament clearly teaches us that we Christians have to live in this moral law as it is said in 1 John 5:3, “For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments,” and our Lord summarized it in Matthew 22:37-40, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” So even though we are not under the law of the Old Testament anymore, we are clearly under the law of Christ, that is, the law of love, which is summarized in the Ten Commandments, as living by the law of love was the biblical image of man from the creation.

6)    In this perspective, the law and grace have discontinuity, but we have to know that they have continuity too. I mean, the Mosaic Covenant, especially the Ten Commandments, representing the Old Testament, is related with grace too. First, the Ten Commandments, which are God’s moral laws that was given to the Israelites through Moses, are not under the covenant of deeds, rather was give under the covenant of grace, as we already looked at. In other words, we have to know that this law of Moses was given in God’s grace. I mean, if we look at the context in which the Ten Commandments were given, God did not give them saying that if they kept His ten commandments, then He would save them, rather in Exodus 20:2, which we know as the introduction to the Ten Commandments, God said, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery,” and then gave them the Ten Commandments and told them to keep them. In other words, the Ten Commandments were not given to be kept in order to be saved. Rather, they were given after God saved them from the land of Egypt, from slavery so that God instructed them now to live holy before God by loving God and loving their neighbors. And even when we could not keep them because of our weakness, God sent us His Holy Spirit, and regenerated us, and made us live in God’s will by the Holy Spirit, as Ezekiel 36:27 says that the reason He gave us His Spirit was so that we could live according to His statutes and ordinances, that is, according to His will. That’s why Jesus summarized the entire law into two commandments, to love God and to love our neighbors, and told us to keep them. Even He gave us the new commandment, “Love one another,” as the law of Christ’s love. And also that’s why 1 John 2:3-6 says that “By this we know that we know him, if we keep his commandments. He who says, ‘I know him,’ and does not keep his commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him. But whoever keeps his word, in him truly is the love of God made perfect. By this we know that we are in him. He who says he abides in him ought himself also to walk just as he walked.” And also that’s why Romans 8:3-4 says that “For what the law could not do in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh, that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.” As such, we are made and remade to live according to the law of love, which is God's will and law toward us, through the Holy Spirit. That’s why Jesus said that He did not come to abolish the law, but rather to fulfill the law, so that we are practicing to fulfill the law of love, which is God's will for us, through the power of the Holy Spirit.

7)    So that verse 16 says that the Holy Spirit has testified to us, quoting Jer 31:33 "I will put my laws in their hearts and write them on their minds; I will be their God." As such, we were given the Holy Spirit to make us live according to God's good will, after receiving the grace of Christ's atonement.

8)    To summarize, as God created in His image and intended for us to live as His people who have fellowship with the Trinity and live in harmony with God’s will, which is God’s law, and also as we received the Holy Spirit after receiving salvation through the grace of Christ in God’s love, and also because God gave us the Ten Commandments as the moral law that we Christians or human beings have to live before God, and also He gave us Christians the Holy Spirit, through whom we can live according to God’s will and fulfill the requirement of the law, therefore I pray that we, as our expression of the salvation God gave us freely may live the life of holiness which should be reflected as the life of love for His glory from now on.

Key Questions as Small Group Activity

Q1 Through today’s text, we became to know that through His once-for-all eternal sacrifice and His life-long obedience to the law, He fulfilled all the promises and prophesies in the Old Testament. So, meditating the grace of our Lord and thinking how we have to live from now on, I hope we could share our thought and experience with our team members together to learn from each other.

Q2 And, also we became to know that His grace made us forgiven and live in His pleasing by the Holy Spirit as our life of gratitude. So after meditating on the Holy Spirit who dwells in us, and how we can live to follow His leading, I hope we could share our thought and experience with our team members together to learn from each other.

Love you. Thank you. God bless you.

Prayer Note

Dear ( God’s attribute which you found Today ) God!

Thanks for ( something you received through the sermon or  even during the week )

Praise, gratitude and glory be to You, Lord!

Today, I realized my sin (pains) that ( the sin God reminded through the sermon ),

please forgive (or heal) me and help me not to repeat ( the sins you recognized   ).

I learned that ( something you learned through the sermon                                    )

Please help me to live in that (  learned way of life                                                )

I pray in ( Jesus’ attribute you find ) Jesus’ name. Amen.