It Is Finished

          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 sanctuary made with human hands 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.  Otherwise Christ would have had to suffer many times since the creation of the world. But he has appeared once for all at the culmination of the ages to do away with sin by the sacrifice of himself.  Just as people are destined to die once, and after that to face judgment,  so Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins of many; and he will appear a second time, not to bear sin, but to bring salvation to those who are waiting for him. (Hebrews 9:23-28) 

          Some folks talk about their sins, or sins in general, effectively causing Christ to be crucified over again. They mean well. I think they’re trying to impress upon themselves the consequences of their continued sin. After all, if they love Jesus, how could they want to continue to hurt Him? It’s sort of like Eve telling the serpent that she and Adam were commanded not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, or to touch it. If you don’t touch it, you can’t eat it, right? The problem is that it doesn’t work. Oh, it might work on something we really consider Evil, but does it stop us from this “little” self-indulgences? From our pettiness? The little white lies? The checking of horoscopes? It’s all in fun, isn’t it? Those things don’t matter to God, do they?
          More than three decades ago, someone explained this to me by asking when Jesus died on the cross and was resurrected. It was back around 30 AD. He then asked me when I’d sinned – not specifically, but in general. The answer is, during my lifetime, which has been in the Twentieth and (now) Twenty-First Centuries. All my sins were in the future when Christ died, so if He died for the sins I’d committed to the point of that conversation, He also died for the sins I have committed since, and the sins I will commit yet.
          All that doesn’t mean that our sins don’t matter. They matter because they continue to build a wall between God and us, between other people and us, and even between us, ourselves, and we.
         The sacrifices of animals were, like everything else, shadows of a more effective sacrifice. And when it was made, Jesus said, “It is finished.”