Hebrews 9:14

Hebrews 9:14

These words refer to, perhaps, the most remarkable of all the typical ordinances of the Old Testament. One of the chief defilements contracted under the law was that caused by contact with a dead body. So rigid was the law that the priests were forbidden to take part in funeral rites, except for the nearest relations, lest they should, by possible contact with the dead, be incapacitated for the ministerial office. It was a perpetual testimony to the truth that God made not death that death is the strange thing superinduced by sin upon the rational creation. As Christ's one death cleanses all sin even to the end, so the ashes of a single heifer served to the purifying of many generations. Now to this remarkable ordinance St. Paul alludes: If the sprinkling of the water containing a portion of the ashes of this slaughtered bull avail to remove the ceremonial defilement of death, and that not for one but for many generations, how much more shall the blood of Christ, shed once for all, purge the innermost conscience!

I. What are the dead works which, like the touch of a corpse, pollute the conscience of man, and disqualify him from standing up as a servant of the living God? They are twofold. First, you are to understand by the term all acts of false worship, the homage paid by the heathen to their idols; secondly, all acts of low or unsound morality, all acts are themselves vicious, or of semi-virtue. These are comprehended in the phrase "dead works." They are works having, you see, a semblance of life, just as the soulless flesh will preserve awhile the hues of health, misleading some even as to the fact of death, and being nevertheless to the more experienced eye wholly devoid of the breath of existence. The conscience of the old world before Christ was defiled and weakened. Wherever the Christian Church was implanted, and the name of Christ adored, the conscience was, as it were, awakened from the dead.

II. There are two or three short lessons which grow out of the subject. (1) The first concerns the true character of the work which the Church of Christ has to do in a nation. Now, there are two ways of dealing with men in spiritual things. The one is that of accustoming them to lean entirely upon others; the second is that of teaching them with God's help to walk by themselves. The surest sign of vigorous Church life is in the quickened and enlightened conscience of the people. (2) The whole argument brings out in undissoluble union the connection that exists between the doctrines of the gospel and the morality of the gospel. That which this modern world of ours wants is the public honesty, the domestic purity of Christian life, without mystery, and God manifest in the flesh. It may not be. The conscience of mankind has not been purged by a system of morals, but by the life and death of the incarnate God. (3) What a warning there is here against allowing ourselves in anything which has the least tendency to pollute the conscience.

J. R. Woodford, Penny Pulpit,new series, No. 496.

References: Hebrews 9:15. Expositor,1st series, vol. vii., p. 73.Hebrews 9:15. Homiletic Quarterly,vol. ii., p. 470. Hebrews 9:16; Hebrews 9:17. Homilist,2nd series, vol. i., p. 489. Hebrews 9:20. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xxvi., No. 1567. Hebrews 9:22. Ibid.,vol. iii., No. 118; Ibid., Morning by Morning,p. 33; H. J. Wilmot Buxton, Sunday Sermonettes for a Year,p. 134; E. Cooper, Practical Sermons,vol. ii., p. 16; Bishop Crowther, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xi., p. 385; Homiletic Quarterly,vol. iv., p. 527.