Focal Point

Pastor Mike Fabarez: There had to be in the mind of the Old Testament person, as there should be in our minds—and we have the advantage of looking back on the history of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection—but there ought to be a sense that sin is a real issue. There's a debt that's racked up by our wrong actions and thoughts, and there has to be a payment for that. The real issue between you and God is the need for reconciliation because we are sinful people.

Dave Druey: Welcome to Focal Point with author and pastor Mike Fabarez. I'm Dave Druey. Heads up, today we've arrived at some difficult verses in our current Bible study. In chapter nine of Hebrews, we find multiple references to blood and death and sacrifice. Not necessarily encouraging topics, but as we study this passage today, we'll discover that these somber illustrations serve as important reminders of sin and our need for a Savior. Let's join Pastor Mike as he continues our series on how Christ changed everything.

Pastor Mike Fabarez: As many of you know, when things got tough in society, there were a few in Germany who stood up to the tyranny and the biblical suppression that was taking place. A lot of you know the name Dietrich Bonhoeffer because he was willing to stand with Jesus Christ and not compromise the message of scripture and the tenor of the gospel. He suffered for it for many days in a concentration camp that ended up taking his life in April 1945.

During those days in prison, he wrote quite a bit and reflected in the hard times when he watched many people compromise and renounce Christ. He wrote about the state of the church, and he was right when he said that we, like birds, have gathered around the carcass of cheap grace. There, we have drunk the poison that has killed our passion for following Christ. That was true in the middle of the 20th century, and it unfortunately remains to be true now, perhaps more in peacetime than in times of war, perhaps more in places of prosperity than places of want.

It's important for us to recognize that when we want to mitigate the unpleasant parts of the gospel or the Bible, we in effect render the gospel ineffective. The scripture loses its power when we want to clean up God's message. One of the things we try to do here in our teaching of God's word is move systematically through the Bible, and eventually we run into texts that Polyanna wouldn't be too proud of. These are passages that clearly can't be categorized as happy texts.

I know a lot of people come to church wanting the pastor to say nice things and happy things and uplifting things. Yet, the pastor's job description is to proclaim accurately God's word. Oftentimes, to get to those pleasant places—and God has a lot of pleasant things to say—we've got to traverse the uncomfortable and sometimes unpleasant territory that is found in the text.

Consider the biggest themes of all that are positive and uplifting, themes like God has for us this tremendous gift called eternal life. Never is that presented without context. As a matter of fact, when we see it tersely inscribed in scripture that the gift of God is eternal life, those of you that know your Bibles in Romans 6:23 know it is preceded by the clear and difficult statement that the wages of sin is death. If we don't understand that part of the gospel and we don't understand that part of the message, we will never fully enjoy, appreciate, or even experience the power and the benefit of God's positive news.

The good news is good, as we often say, but it is predicated on some bad news. If we try to sweep it under the carpet or change it or tuck it away so that people don't see it, we eventually end up proclaiming our own word and not God's word. So in our study of the book of Hebrews, we are going to approach in the next few weeks some of the most encouraging and uplifting texts in all of the Bible: the end of chapter 10 of Hebrews and all of chapter 11. If you don't know anything about Hebrews, you've heard chapter 11 quoted to you.

We find ourselves now in chapter nine. Though we love the mountaintop, sometimes it's the twisty road to get there that makes us a little queasy, and this is definitely a text of scripture that's going to make some of us uncomfortable. There are some people that are going to look at this text and they're going to be repulsed by it. They're going to say, "Well, wow, this is not only negative, it's grotesque," because not only does this text refer to death some 24 times in 17 verses, but I think it breaks the world's record for the occurrences of the word "blood" in one passage. I don't think you woke up this morning saying, "I hope I go to church and Pastor preaches a good message on blood." We try to avoid that.

Before you check out on me or give up on this, make sure that we understand why there's so much talk of death and sacrifice and sin. If we rightly understand it, we'll find ourselves at the summit of the greatness of the salvation that God has for us, and we'll never appreciate it until we work through these difficult texts. If you have your Bibles and you haven't opened them yet, please open them to Hebrews chapter nine. We tried to tackle the first half of this text last week, and today I want to deal with the remainder of it.

In this series, in talking about how Christ changed everything, we've seen a number of things that have changed between the Old Covenant experience in worship and the New Covenant experience. The symbols and ceremonies and food regulations of the Old Covenant and this new thing called the New Covenant where Christ has come and changed everything because he was the fulfillment of it all. Last week, if you glance through the first few verses here, you'll remember all the tabernacle setup, the ceremonies, the Ark of the Covenant, the lampstand.

All these things were mere pictures. As a matter of fact, when he sums it up there in verse number 10, he says all this stuff was a matter of food and drink and various ceremonial washings. They were only external regulations applying until the time of the new order. Then when Christ came as the high priest of the good things that are already here, he went through the greater and more perfect tabernacle, that is not man-made, that is to say not a part of this creation.

We've already dealt with that a couple chapters back, but here we've got this statement about how he entered. He didn't enter, verse 12, by the means of the blood of goats and calves, but he entered the most holy place, the real heaven, the real presence of God, once and for all by his own blood, having obtained eternal redemption. Then he begins in verse 13 to talk about the Old Covenant ceremonies. Now, like we have in the rest of this series, what we're going to do this morning is try to take a 30,000-foot view of this and answer some of the basic questions that surface.

We are not in the audience of that first-generation Old Testament coming into New Testament follower of God that had to deal with the fact that everything in our practice was being changed. None of us were tempted this morning to get up and go to the church down the street that offers animal sacrifice. They're hard to find; they're not in the phone book. You weren't tempted to. As a matter of fact, you're glad that archaic thing is gone. But for them, it was different.

Every point in this argument was important for those who stood in the sandals of those first-century Jewish people saying, "Why is it that we don't do this anymore?" For us, it's a bit more academic, and yet it will invoke, I hope, in us a response that will change the way we look at the cross. So let us read this text in its entirety and then let's stand back and ask some basic questions about it, and I trust find the response that God would have us have as 21st-century followers of Christ.

He didn't enter, verse 12, by the means of the blood of goats and calves. He entered once and for all by his own blood, having obtained eternal redemption. Now the blood of goats and bulls, verse 13 says, and the ashes of a heifer sprinkled on those who are ceremonially unclean, it sanctifies them so that they are outwardly clean. How much more, verse 14 says, will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself unblemished to God, cleanse our consciences from acts that lead to death, so that we may serve the living God?

For this reason, Christ is the mediator of a new covenant, that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance, now that he has died as a ransom to set free from the sins committed under the first covenant. In the case of a will, it's necessary to prove the death of the one who made it because a will is in force only when someone has died. It never takes effect while the one who made it is living. That's why even the first covenant was not put into effect without blood.

When Moses had proclaimed every commandment of the law to the people, he took the blood of calves together with water, scarlet wool, and branches of hyssop, and he sprinkled the scroll and all the people. And he said, "This is the blood of the covenant, which God has commanded you to keep." In the same way, he sprinkled the blood both on the tabernacle and everything used in its ceremonies. In fact, the law requires that nearly everything be cleansed with blood, and without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness.

It was necessary then for the copies of the heavenly things to be purified with these sacrifices, but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these. For Christ did not enter a man-made sanctuary that was only a copy of the true one; he entered heaven itself, now to appear for us in God's presence. Nor did he enter heaven to offer himself again and again, the way the high priest enters the most holy place every year with blood that is not his own.

Then Christ would have had to suffer many times since the creation of the world, but now he has appeared once and for all at the end of the ages to do away with sin by the sacrifice of himself. Just as man is destined to die once and after that to face judgment, so Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins of many people. And he will appear a second time, not to bear sin, but to bring salvation to those who are waiting for him. Verse one of chapter 10: The law is only a shadow of the good things that are coming, not the realities themselves.

We've been learning this throughout. The priesthood set aside. The tabernacle, the temple set aside. The restrictions and ceremonies of the Old Covenant set aside. But the New Covenant has the realities. What about these animal sacrifices? That's a tough thing. Here's a situation where we struggle with the concept, and we ought to at least try to answer it from a biblical perspective. Why all the animal sacrifices? Why? What's the point? Why is God doing that? Is he some kind of cruelty to animals captain? Why are we killing animals all the time in the Bible? Let's try and answer that question.

As you answer it, I want you to think back to Genesis and the very beginning. As a matter of fact, it might be worth looking at in Genesis chapter two. I want you to think back to the injection of death into the whole equation. Death was not initially, certainly from a human perspective, intended in the garden. They had this thing called the tree of life, and you keep eating from that thing in this perfect environment, everything was going to go fine. As a matter of fact, after sin came in chapter three, God had to banish them from the garden so they wouldn't eat from that anymore.

Interestingly enough, in Revelation 21 and 22, here the tree shows up again. Apparently, there's some reality in our biological units where God will sustain us in perfect bodies for all of eternity, and that was the plan from the beginning. But the problem here was one little tree that sat in the middle of the garden. Drop down to verse 17. Let's start in verse 15 to get a little context. Genesis 2:15: Yahweh God took the man and he put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. Great place.

And Yahweh God commanded the man, "You are free to eat from any tree in the garden, but," verse 17 says, "you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it, you'll surely die." And that's not just some horticultural warning against eating bougainvillea flowers. This was not a tree that was poisoned. It was a tree that stood there much like this mic stand, and God just simply said, "Don't do it. Let's see who's going to be God in this scenario. I'm going to tell you not to eat from that tree. You got everything else you want, just don't touch that tree."

It was a test of their obedience. And of course, you know the story. By chapter three, they take of the fruit, they eat of the fruit. Adam and Eve, both guilty, sinful. They see their own shame; they want to cover themselves and hide from God, and everything unravels. But here's how God described it: "The day you eat of it," verse 17, "you'll surely die." Now, I know people raise their hand in Sunday school when they hear that and they say, "Now, wait a minute. Chapter three, chapter four, chapter five, Adam and Eve are still kicking around, it seems. They didn't die."

I know you know this, but jot it down just for clarity's sake. Understand there are two phases of death. Let's just make it super clear: relational death and biological death. In Sunday school, we'd call it spiritual death and physical death. But let's just make it really clear. If I am before a holy God a sinful person, I got a relational problem with him. I'm relationally dead to him. And if I live long enough on this planet in a sinful world, even in good health, eventually what I find is my body decays, and as Genesis 3 says, I finally meet the end of this biological capacity and I return to dust and I biologically die.

Phase one immediately happened. They took the tree's fruit and they immediately were in relational damage with God. They were separated from God relationally. They didn't even want to talk to him. When this appearance of God, this theophany in the garden showed up, they hid themselves. They didn't want to be with God. Relational death. And then one day down the road, they would biologically die. The thing about our relationship with God is that he wants us to know that the wages of sin is death, both relationally and biologically.

Biologically is the one we feel so innately. Relationally is the one that really matters. That's why when he talks about our eternal relationship with God, we either have eternal life or this thing called the second death, where we're cast into a place called the lake of fire. The concern that we have is that we understand the problem well enough and graphically enough to say, "I need that fixed." If you want to answer the question in the most basic form as it relates to the death of an animal in a worship service, letter A: Why the animal sacrifices? Here's one reason: to show the wages of sin.

There had to be in the mind of the Old Testament person, as there should be in our minds—and we have the advantage of looking back on history, including the history of Christ's life, death, and resurrection—but there ought to be a sense that sin is a real issue. It's a problem. And he says the wages of sin is death. He says when you sin against me, you will die relationally and eventually biologically. And he says when you come to me in worship, just know you've got a tremendous need.

Maybe you don't see it. It's like something on your forehead you need to look in a mirror to see it. But the problem is you've got an issue of sin that should lead to your own relational and biological demise, and you got to know it. So they would bring animals and they would come with this graphic reminder with the spilling of blood in a worship service to have them graphically reminded that the real issue between you and God is the need for reconciliation because we are sinful people.

But couldn't we have done that some other way? Well, we could have. But there was something very dramatic that God was trying to show us. As a matter of fact, if you look back in Hebrews, let's try and tie a couple of passages in this text together. In Hebrews chapter 10, after we've discussed the animal sacrifices in a summation in verse three, he says, "Those sacrifices, Old Covenant sacrifices, are an annual reminder of sins." But then why the whole issue of bringing this in worship and having this killed by a priest?

Jot this reference down, Leviticus chapter 1 verse 4. When there was a ceremonial death of an animal in a worship service, the worshiper would lay his hand on the head of that animal, which was the best thing they could find in their flock, and that animal would be accepted on their behalf. When I went to worship in the Old Covenant, I would go home alive biologically, and Fluffy would not come home at all. Fluffy's dead. As a matter of fact, the reality of it is that there's a need for my sin to be atoned for, and the animal will be a picture of that atonement so that he will suffer and I won't have to.

Jot this down, point number two. The second reminder in this is not just a reminder of sin, but an experience of substitution. Letter B: It is to experience the concept of substitution. It reminds me of the sin and then I want desperately the solution, and the solution is in a payment of the debt. So symbolically, this animal is taking my place. I get to live, but the animal dies. If you say, "Well, that sounds so cruel," you know, if you ate a hamburger yesterday, you've experienced the sense of substitution.

Now follow me for a second. I know you're all half vegetarians, great. The rest of us, you had your chicken sandwich yesterday. Here's a real animal who gave his life so that you could live. When did that all start? Started back at the beginning of the whole discussion of God flooding the world. There was this big catastrophe that was coming, and God was going to judge the world for its sin. But he said to Noah, "Build a barge, build an ark, and then I want you to bring—not like your preschool border of your kid's nursery looks like—the animals didn't go just two by two."

As a matter of fact, only the unclean animals came in two by two. The good animals, the clean animals that were ceremonially clean, you were to bring in seven of those. Why so many? Because something after the waters receded was going to change forever. In Genesis chapter 10, you might remember, it's the first ceremonial offering of an animal with an altar prescribed by God. I mean, the first clear reference to that.

God then says, "I want you to take one of those clean animals," and the distinction between clean and unclean was not just the sacrifice of it, but whether you could eat it or not. In Genesis 10, he says to Noah, "You now are going to have all these animals that are now going to provide food for you." Now, we can theorize—and it might be good, a little sidebar here—the world was radically different before the deluge, before the flood. People lived to be what, 800 or 900 years? They had all kinds of vegetation all over the planet, which even today they discover.

Wow, it's amazing. The Earth at some point before a big catastrophe was radically different. Then all of a sudden, God floods the world, changes this thing cataclysmically, and now we have a world that has deserts and ice caps and all these other things going on on the planet. Now all of a sudden, you didn't walk down the road and see grapes and fruit trees and apples and just go in any direction full of fruit. You didn't have that anymore.

Now you had deserts for the first time after the flood. So God said, "We're going to have a real problem here with food, and you don't have refrigerators and there's not salad bars with nice little cubed ice around these trays. You got a problem, you got to eat." Now that the world's been radically changed and you don't have food on every corner, here's what I'm going to say: You are allowed to sustain your life to eat meat. He said, "These clean animals now will be your diet."

So God then sanctions and allows people to eat these animals, which is a picture in and of itself. With the first ceremonial offering of an animal on an altar in the scripture, we have the clear substitution of their death will provide you with life. That felt different than tossing a salad. All of a sudden now, unless you grew up on a farm, most of us have lived in a sanitized culture, we don't experience this, but they experienced for the first time, "We kill an animal, we roast it and eat it," which by the way was exactly what was going on throughout the Old Testament.

These weren't animals that were just shot in the head and burned and thrown in a ditch. You do understand that the 11 sections of Israel would come and bring these animals that would provide for people called the Levites that had no property and no herds. They fed the people with that. The Levites and their kids ate off of the offerings of the animals at the altar, which again was a ceremonial picture of what: that dies and I get to live.

Which is exactly the image and the symbolism that God wanted to engrain on the minds of everybody in the Old Testament. You got a real problem, and that's called sin. You don't keep the law. The Old Covenant summed up what was: do right and I'll bless you. Problem is you do wrong and you deserve God's punishment, you deserve death. But instead, God will allow you to live if there's a substitution. Now, the reality of it was it was just a symbol of the substitution, but it was a substitution that allowed them to remember that God wants me to live. He wants me to live. He wants to provide life and grace to those that even who've sinned; he wants to give them that sense of hope. But to do that, he wanted them to remember it's their life for yours, and they die and you live.

Dave Druey: The Old Testament sacrifices provide a rich understanding of our need for Christ. You're listening to Focal Point in a message from Pastor Mike Fabarez called "What's with All These Animal Sacrifices, and Why No More?" We'll continue this important study tomorrow. And let me remind you, it's the generous gifts of listeners like you that allow us to bring relevant and accurate Bible teaching to the radio and the internet throughout the week. Your support, whether it's a one-time gift or a monthly commitment as a Focal Point partner, is what keeps verse-by-verse Bible teaching on the air across the country. To sign up as a Focal Point partner today, call 888-320-5885 or become a partner online at focalpointradio.org. When you give today, we'll say thanks by sending you a book that pairs perfectly with our study titled *The Unfolding Mystery: Discovering Christ in the Old Testament*. It shows how all of scripture was pointing to Jesus and how God's plan for redemption was perfectly plotted from the very beginning. We'll send you a copy when you support Focal Point with a donation today. Just call us at 888-320-5885 or give online at focalpointradio.org. Now let's turn our attention back to Pastor Mike for a special announcement.

Pastor Mike Fabarez: Thanks, Dave. I'd like to invite you to join me September 19th through the 26th, 2026, on a Christian cruise through New England and Canada. We'll sail Holland America's Zuiderdam, known for its elegance and exceptional hospitality, to historic cities like Boston, Halifax, and Quebec City. We'll gather for devotional times in God's word followed by thought-provoking Bible teaching throughout our journey. Grammy-winning musicians Keith and Kristyn Getty will lead us in worship. You'll enjoy the stunning autumn landscapes as we explore charming coastal villages, all while building friendships with like-minded believers. It's a unique opportunity to deepen your faith and see some of the most beautiful scenery on the eastern seaboard. Space is limited, so don't wait to sign up. Secure your cabin today at focalpointradio.org.

Dave Druey: Next time we'll jump back into our study in Hebrews with Mike Fabarez. Join us as we continue to see how Christ changed everything Wednesday on Focal Point.

Pastor Mike Fabarez: Pastor Mike here. Ever wish you could corner your pastor and challenge him with your toughest questions about the Bible, about faith? Well, now you can. Send me your questions. Head on over to focalpointradio.org and click on "Ask Pastor Mike" or send me a note on facebook.com/pastormike or twitter.com/pastormike. I can't wait to hear from you.

Dave Druey: Today's program was produced and sponsored by Focal Point Ministries.