Day of Atonement, Hebrews 9
A small boy was consistently late coming home from school. His parents warned him one day that he must be home on time that
afternoon, but nevertheless he arrived later than ever. His mother met him at the door and said nothing. His father met him in the
living room and said nothing.
At dinner that night, the boy looked at his plate. There was a slice of bread and a glass
of water. He looked at his father’s full plate and then at his father, but his father remained silent. The boy was crushed. The
father waited for the full impact to sink in, then quietly took the boy’s plate and placed it in front of himself. He took his own
plate of meat and potatoes, put it in front of the boy, and smiled at his son.

When that boy grew to be a man, he said, “All my life I’ve known what God is like by
what my father did that night.”

And we also know what God is like by what Christ did on the cross. The cross reveals a
powerful story of the magnitude of God’s love and grace.

In the Old Testament, after a priest went
into the Holy of Holies on the Day of Atonement, he came out with a “good thing” for the nation of Israel. He brought
one year of forgiveness. But when Christ came out of the “greater tabernacle” ( Heb.
9:11-12), He brought a better thing — a lifetime of forgiveness, a one-time sacrifice that would never need to be repeated, a
new relationship with God the Father that was based on reconciliation (Rom. 8:1), and
many more blessings, whose realization is yet to come (cf. Rev. 21-22).

Now on THE (final) Day of Atonement (the day of Jesus death on the cross), Jesus’ sacrifice was made with blood. But the
blood on that day was a better blood than the blood of bulls and goats. The Old Testament sacrifices provided atonement,
but not permanent atonement because they were only shadows of the reality to come.

Those sacrifices were inadequate because they provided a blood of a different kind — they were not appropriate equivalents of
human life. But the blood of Jesus was free from sin’s curse (Rom. 8:22), it was given
voluntarily (Heb. 9:14), which no animal ever did, and it was done one time for all time
(Heb. 9:12).

As significant as the Old Testament sacrifices and Law were, they were inadequate
because they could never clean the conscience of a man. For as pure as an animal might be, even an animal could not be inwardly clean. So the best an animal
sacrifice could do was provide external cleansing. But Christ’s blood dealt with the
ultimate issue — He removed not only the defilement, but the source of the defilement
(Heb. 9:13-14). Because of His blood, believers in Him are free to worship and serve God with a cleared, non-condemning
conscience. And because He was without blemish, we can be made blameless (Eph.
1;4; Col. 1:22).

There is no forgiveness without (perfect) blood. And there is no atonement without (perfect) substitution. Christ Jesus provides both.

Source: https://saviourstep./2015/08/08/a-better-sacrifice/

Christ was the perfect sacrifice for the redemption of mankind