Hebrews 9:11
New Catholic Bible
11 Christ Has Come.[a] But now Christ has arrived as the high priest of the good things that have come. He has passed through the greater and more perfect tabernacle not made by human hands, that is, not a part of this creation,
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- Hebrews 9:11 The whole of Jewish hope, which was revived on the Day of Atonement, now finds its definitive fulfillment in the Passover of Christ. His is the true sacrifice. This time, a human being sheds his own blood, i.e., willingly gives his life to God for the benefit of his brothers and sisters; this time, a human being purifies the human conscience from within by his obedience; this time, a human being has access to God. The risen Christ remains in this relationship of giving and presence, once and for all, definitively and eternally. There is no longer any other sacrifice to perform. This is the future, filled with “the good things that have come” (v. 11).
Hebrews 9:11-15
The Message
Pointing to the Realities of Heaven
11-15 But when the Messiah arrived, high priest of the superior things of this new covenant, he bypassed the old tent and its trappings in this created world and went straight into heaven’s “tent”—the true Holy Place—once and for all. He also bypassed the sacrifices consisting of goat and calf blood, instead using his own blood as the price to set us free once and for all. If that animal blood and the other rituals of purification were effective in cleaning up certain matters of our religion and behavior, think how much more the blood of Christ cleans up our whole lives, inside and out. Through the Spirit, Christ offered himself as an unblemished sacrifice, freeing us from all those dead-end efforts to make ourselves respectable, so that we can live all out for God.
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Copyright © 1993, 2002, 2018 by Eugene H. Peterson