owledged that his own life was forfeited. In continuing to
live he acknowledged the continued life as belonging to God. He was to
live as belonging to another. He made, in effect, the statement made long
after by Paul: "I am offering up my life on this altar for my sin;
nevertheless I am living: yet the life I live is no longer mine, but
another's. Mine has been taken away by sin." There was no malice or evil
feeling in the man's act, but only penitence, and an earnest, noble
purpose.

The act revealed the man's inner spirit. It acknowledged his sin, that
life is forfeited by sin, his desire to have the sin difficulty
straightened out, and to be at one again with God. He expressed his hatred
of sin and his earnest desire to be free of it. I am not saying at all
that this was true of every Hebrew coming with his sacrifice. I may not
say it of all who approach God to day through Jesus. But clearly enough,
all of this is in the old Hebrew _plan_ devised by God. It was the new
choice that brought the man back to God, even as the first choice had
separated him from God. And the explicit statement made over and over is
this, "and it shall make atonement."

Clearly Jesus' dying does not in any way fit into the old Hebrew _form_ of
sacrifice, nor into the spirit of the man who caused the death of the
sacrifice, though in spirit, in requirement it far more than fills it out.
The Old Testament scheme is Jewish. The manner of Jesus' death is not
Jewish, but Roman. As a priest He was not of the Jewish order, but of an
order non-Jewish and antedating the other by hundreds of years. In no
feature does He fit into the old custom. But every truth taught by the old
is brilliantly exemplified and embodied in Him.

The epistle to the Hebrews was written to Jews who had become Christians,
but through persecution and great suffering were sorely tempted to go back
to the old Jewish faith. They seemed to be saying that Jesus filled out
neither the kingdom plan, nor the Mosaic scheme of sacrifice. The writer
of the epistle is showing with a masterly sweep and detail the immense
superiority of what Jesus did over the old Mosaic plan. Read backward,
these provisions are seen to be vivid illustrations of what Jesus did do,
not in form, not actually, but in fact, in spirit, in a way vastly ahead
of the Hebrew ritual. The truth underneath the old was fully fulfilled in
Jesus, though the form was not.

One needs always to keep sharply in mind the