THIS is a very short passage, and some of it we looked at last week, but the teaching it gives is so important that it is good to dwell on it more closely.

We are learning how Jesus is our High Priest and how he is the only priest we need to mediate before God for us. We are learning the greatness of his achievements as our priest.

In verse 11 we are told that Jesus is a high priest of good things. This means that what Jesus achieved for us as our priest are wonderful blessings which far surpass anything the old Jewish priests achieved, and far greater than any earthly priest could ever achieve. These good things are already here, that is available for us, because Jesus has completed his sacrifice for sin, and carried the evidence of it in his body into heaven to present it before God for us who believe in him. The sum of these good things is that Jesus has won complete salvation for us, with all that this means in the gift of eternal life.

Next we are told in verse 11 that he has entered a greater and more perfect tabernacle, that is not man-made. The man-made one was the tabernacle in the Sinai desert, and in the temple when that was built. The real tabernacle which this man-made one typified is the throne room of God in heaven.

Jesus entered this real tabernacle with blood which signified death had been offered for the atonement for sin. He entered to present this blood before God, the judge of all the earth, in order to gain remission of sins for the people he represented. This blood was not the blood of animals, but his own precious blood and of infinite worth.

Jesus took his blood into the real most holy place, the very presence of the God on the throne in heaven.

Because of this action as our High Priest he obtained, from God, eternal redemption for his people. He obtains the cancelling of all the debt of our sins so there is no debt for us to pay, and this is for ever. Our sins, past, present and future are all included, and are never remembered any more.

So that the Jews could understand how wonderful the action of Jesus as our High Priest is, Paul points out in verse 12 that the sacrifices of animals only had an outward and ceremonial action of cleansing. They never cleansed sin within, and so never saved the people from the punishment for sin they deserved.

On the other hand the blood of Jesus, his sacrifice of himself, offered to God through the Spirit on the cross, and because he was without sin, that is an unblemished sacrifice, cleanses our conscience from acts that lead to death, and so allows us to come to God, be accepted, and so serve God.

The meaning of the phrase "works that lead to death" or more literally "dead works" can have two meanings. The phrase probably encompasses both meanings. The first is that the "works that lead to death" mean sins we commit. These lead to death, the punishment for sin. The second meaning refers to the works of human effort whereby we try to gain our own acceptance and forgiveness. These lead to death and are dead works because nothing we can do can atone for our sin, and so are useless and dead works and lead to our death. Jesus does for us what we are unable to do ourselves.

Through Christ and his work as our High Priest we can be reconciled to God and serve him. We serve the living God through Christ. Everybody else only serve one form of idol or another.

Because of this great work of Jesus as our High Priest, Christ (v.15) is the mediator of a new covenant. God made a covenant with Israel at Mount Sinai in the desert. This was made through Moses as the mediator. Paul has been showing how defective this covenant was. It could only provide an acceptance before God on a temporary basis, and only give people outward cleansing. God always had in mind this new covenant with Christ as mediator.

The previous covenant only brought about temporary blessings. The new covenant in Christ obtains eternal blessings, that is an eternal inheritance.

This new covenant was promised in the Old Testament, and Paul shows this in the previous chapter from the quotation from Jeremiah. The basis of the new covenant is life. God puts his life, the life that Adam lost for the human race, back into us. This is a new creation, and a new birth, and we become new people, and in this new person we reside in the heavenly realm, and although we don't live in this heavenly country now physically, we do live in it spiritually, because as Paul says in Ephesians 2, we are made to sit in heavenly places with Christ. We experience this new life because we find we love the things of God, and are able to hear God through his Spirit interpreting the Bible to us, and because we now reach God in prayer and want to talk to God in prayer. This the experience of life and much more.

Because in Christ we have an eternal inheritance it can not be lost. We can't fall away from God's grace and return to being unsaved and under death. The reason for this is that it is the work of Jesus as our High Priest that has won this blessing for us, and his work is perfect and always avails for us. Our being kept in eternal life and in this eternal inheritance is by Christ, and not dependent on our efforts or works in any way.

Verse 15 ends with this reason why we are secure in our eternal inheritance. We are secure because our eternal inheritance is on the grounds of the fact that Jesus has died as a ransom to set us free from all our sins, which the first covenant given at Sinai did not and could not do. Christ's death was sufficient to pay the debt we have incurred on account of sins in total, so that no sin remains to accuse us. As Jesus was dying before we were born, he must have known of all the sins we would commit in our life from birth to death, and God laid them all on Jesus and made him responsible for them all when he died on the cross.