Hey my friends, I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. And I know you're probably doing the quarantine thing right now. And I'm right there with you. We're just sitting at home trying to knock out projects and be productive. And we actually have a lot of projects to knock out because our house got knocked out by a bunch of ice damming. Have you ever heard of this? Ice damming is uh when you get a whole bunch of snow and then it melts and then it freezes and then it melts and then it freezes and it never really goes away. And then gradually it accumulates into this big giant block of ice, and there's nowhere for the water to go. And then apparently the water just uh goes through your roof and into your house, which is what we've been dealing with. It actually wrecked a bunch of stuff, and we had to vacate our house for a few weeks here. We just got back into it. Insurance ripped everything out. We haven't had it put back together yet. So I'm sitting in this room and it's stripped down to studs, and there's you know the places where the insulation used to be. That's all visible, and it's kind of cold, but I strung up some blankets, and so I'm hoping it's not too echoey and we can just have fun with it. Obviously, in the grand scheme of things, my stupid house thing is not that big a deal because I know everyone on this planet right now is dealing with uh very similar pressure as we do this thing that I suppose is probably the first phase of how we respond as a global community to the COVID-19 pandemic, and that is lay low, flatten out the curve. I suppose the economy can sustain that for a while. And so right now, if I'm reading it right, it seems like we're buying ourselves some time through extreme social distancing to put together countermeasures to deal with what we're up against. I guess that's the phase we're in, so that it's possible for people to endure this thing better when they contract it. And then I guess we get to the next phase, which is one everybody's excited about, where some genius comes up with and properly tests a vaccine. And then I guess that's how you end a pandemic. But I don't know. In the meantime, it just feels like a lot of sitting at home with my family, and the news isn't a ton of fun to watch. And so I guess, like we decided to do last week, let's charge ahead and talk about things that are bigger and more transcendent. And again, I think getting into the deep water of this stuff only helps us to put faith in something bigger than ourselves, to put trust in God with eyes wide open all the more. It is one thing to be like, oh, times are tough, and I'm kind of freaked out. And I really, really, really, really, really hope there's some grand plan and some vague notion of a deity somewhere that maybe kind of cares. I guess that's balm for the soul for some people, but not for me. The eyes wide open faith thing is the thing that makes me feel confidence or a degree of hope or trust in the character of the prime mover, the being that made all of this stuff. And that's why I like getting into this business here. So I guess that's my weekly coronavirus meditation as we get back to looking at the text. So before all of this stuff went down, I took my family out to theaters. This is the last one that we went to before social isolation. And we saw Onward, the one with Chris Pratt. And it was a nice show. But what really got to me emotionally were the previews. There was a Mulan preview. There's something, I know I've told you this about a hundred times, but there's something about girls being brave and heroic and their relationship with their dad that just kills me emotionally in an instant. And I balled in the trailer, in a trailer, people, in a trailer. Come on. But I don't feel any shame. Obviously, I don't, I'm telling you. The thing that got me was when her dad is like, Oh, I have to answer the call to go fight a war for my country because they got into some kind of war or something, and I'm gonna go do this. And when the conscription officer shows up at their house, he walks out trying to hide his limp and he's got his old gear ready to go. And he's like, Yeah, I will fight and die if need be as a representative of this family. And then Mulan steps in and she decides that she's gonna be the one who's gonna go and serve, and he's just that idea of standing in the place of somebody who she loves was enough. And then, you know, the soaring music and the fighting and the girls moving fast and everything else. It's the fast, brave girls. I don't know, it just does it to me. But that's a lot like what we're looking at with this whole place where we left off last time around with Jesus as the fulfillment of the law, and specifically the fulfillment of the part of the law about sacrifices. So, again, almost all of the sacrificial stuff in the Bible is laid out in the book of Leviticus, specifically in the first 17 chapters. And this breaks down pretty neatly into five different types of sacrifices that the people were supposed to undertake as a community and in relationship to God. So the first of those is called the burnt offering, and this one is the catch-all for everything about human fallenness. And it's a real pity to read the description because it's a lot of blood and gore and dismemberment of animals, and it's very, very detailed about where you sprinkle the blood and how you massage the blood onto the horn of this altar and how you got to wash the inside of the legs of the dead thing. I mean, it's very stunningly detailed as to what it takes to get this right. Lots of people theorize about what that actually means. And I don't know, I'm not even gonna get into it. We're mostly working on Matthew, so I don't have to solve that one right now. So you get this burnt offering that would involve a bull or a sheep or a goat, or I think there was an exception for poor people, they could maybe do a pigeon or something. And the idea here is that this addresses the imperfection of people before God, but it doesn't ultimately solve it, it just stays God's wrath, it addresses it momentarily. Then you got the grain offering, which is a way to say, thanks, like something worked out. This is a way to show appreciation to God, and this is just what it sounds like flour or grain. Then you have the peace offering, and this one is nothing more than a gesture of saying, God, you are my God, and I like you, and I want to have a good standing, a right relationship with you. And so here's just kind of a bonus voluntary sacrifice to make that clear. Then you've got a description of what's called a sin offering. This is the fourth kind. And a sin offering is stuff you didn't mean to get wrong. You just weren't paying attention or you were trying to get it right, but you just screwed up and you're super sorry. Dang it. Then you would go and do a sin offering for the stuff you know you screwed up or for the stuff that I don't know. I didn't, what did I do? I don't even know that I did anything for like the last six months since I did my last one of these, but I'm sure I did something stupid. So we'll do uh sacrifice of an unblemished bull or a male or female goat. This is weird, right? It's supposed to be weird. I hope that's the effect it's having on you. We're gonna come back to the weirdness. And then the fifth kind of offering described in the book of Leviticus is the guilt offering. And this one is to square things up when you really specifically do something wrong. You go and cheat somebody else, you wrong somebody else, there's a victim, or you blatantly violate what God said to do or not do, then there's usually some sort of compensation and squaring of accounts, as well as an unblemished ram offered and sacrificed to make this stuff right. It's very complicated, it's very weird, it's very gory, it's very something I'm glad we don't do anymore as a matter of religious practice. I don't even know how we would sustain it just in terms of the amount of animals you would have to raise. I mean, literally, that would be a huge problem if we continue to do it that way, with Earth's population being whatever it is, seven billion or whatever. So we got all of that weird sacrificial stuff, and then we come back to Jesus saying this thing, I turned to the wrong page in Matthew 5, 17. Don't think that I've come to abolish the law or the prophets. I haven't come to abolish them, but to fulfill them. I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen will by any means disappear from the law until everything is accomplished. Fulfill. What does it look like to fulfill the gory sacrificial list, except for the grain offering, that we just described? Some of the answer to that question comes into focus when we just picture the most basic stuff we know about Jesus, whether you believe it as I do or not, as I know many of you do not. But the idea that Jesus went to a cross and died there and then rose from the dead three days later, as he predicted, all of that seems to revolve around the idea that Jesus is this atoning sacrifice, that he's resolution for human guilt, intentional guilt, accidental guilt, that he is resolution for the simple way to put it would be to liken it to the Mulan trailer. Somebody needs to go and put themselves in the line of fire. And theoretically, that should be the people who have guilt, me, you, normal people, everybody. But instead, God interrupts that system, that impossible system, by sending his son, who is the pure and spotless Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Remember, that's what John the Baptist said when he saw Jesus walking up in what was that, John 2? I think it's John 2. So at the simplest level, Jesus fulfills the sacrificial system by being the sacrifice for us, by stepping in like Mulan did for her dad. But at the more complicated level, the entire book of Hebrews is dedicated toward breaking down what Jesus meant in Matthew 5, 17, and 18. Honestly, you can just read the whole thing because of the conversation you and I have been having for the last week. That's what all of Hebrews is. I'm not going to read you the whole thing, but I will read you, yeah, good chunk of Hebrews 10, which goes thusly. The law is only a shadow of the good things that are coming, not the realities themselves. For this reason, it can never, by the same sacrifices repeated endlessly, year after year, make perfect those who draw near to worship. If it could, wouldn't they have stopped being offered? For the worshippers would have been cleansed once and for all, and would no longer have felt guilty for their sins. But those sacrifices are an annual reminder of sins, because it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins. Therefore, when Christ came into the world, he said, Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but a body you prepared for me with burnt offerings and sin offerings you weren't pleased. Then he said, Here I am, it's written about me in the scroll. I've come to do your will, O God. First he said, Sacrifices and offerings, burnt offerings and sin offerings you didn't desire, nor were you pleased with them, although the law required them to be made. Then he said, Here I am, I've come to do your will. He sets aside the first to establish the second. And by that will we've been made holy through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus once and for all. 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. But when this priest, that being Jesus, had offered for all time one sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God. Skip ahead a little bit to wrap it up in verse 18, and it says, And where these have been forgiven, there's no longer any sacrifice for sin. So Jesus lobs this incredibly obvious softball question to all of us in Matthew 5, 17 and 18, that being, what would it look like to fulfill the law, especially the sacrificial law? And then Hebrews chapter 10 absolutely knocks that softball out of the park. It looks like, well, exactly what Jesus did. Killing all those animals and all of that blood, if it could fix things, it would have fixed it already, but it can't fix it, and that's why we keep on doing it, right? Unless there was one perfect sacrifice that could knock the whole thing out, and then it would just be done. And guess what? Jesus is that sacrifice. And then he was like, I'm finished, drop the mic, woo! And then he goes and he sits at the right hand of the Father, and that's that. And where these have been forgiven, there's no longer any sacrifice for sin. And that is how you fulfill the sacrificial law.