Awakening Your 5 Spiritual Senses to God’s GraceSample

SEE the Finished Work of Jesus!

Priests in the Old Testament couldn’t sit down on the job. A chair was not even permitted in the tabernacle or temple. God wanted the people to know that, when it came to their forgiveness, it was always unfinished business:

Day after day, every priest stands and performs his religious duties; again and again he offers the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins. (Heb. 10:11)

Notice that the priests were always standing, never seated. And those animal sacrifices could never take away sins. They only covered sins, year by year. But what we have in Jesus is a much greater forgiveness!

But when this priest [Jesus] had offered for all time one sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God. (Heb. 10:11-12)

When Jesus had accomplished an all-encompassing takeaway of sins, He did what no priest could do in the Old Testament. He sat down, because all the work– for all time– was finished. 

Our past, present, and future sins were all taken away at the cross. Yes, even our next sin—the one we haven’t even contemplated doing yet—was included in the work of the cross! God looked down the timeline of human history and, seeing all our sins, took them away through the blood of Jesus. 

Just think about it. How many of your sins were in the future when Christ died? All of them. Is there any verse that says sins before salvation and sins after salvation are treated differently by the cross? Of course not! By that flawed logic, the gospel gets worse after salvation, with the cross having a weaker effect on sins after conversion. Ridiculous! By that thinking, we’d be better off becoming Christians on our deathbeds so that we don’t build up too many sins as saved people. 

The finished work of Jesus is simpler than all of that. The fact is that our entire lifetime of sins was taken away two thousand years ago. We are not people who can be forgiven or might be forgiven or will be forgiven. We are forgiven people, forever.

 

Jesus, my one and only High Priest, I see clearly now that You are not up in heaven dying over and over again. Instead, You are seated at the Father’s right hand. I accept Your invitation to sit down with You and rest in the sufficiency of Your one-time sacrifice. I agree with You, confessing that I am a forgiven person. Never again will I equate Your blood with that of Old Testament animal sacrifices. My forgiveness is not ongoing, day after day. It is finished, once for all. I thank You for showing me the finality of the cross so that I can enjoy the reality of Your resurrection life in me! 

[from “Heaven is Now” by Andrew Farley]