We come this Lord's Day to consider again our subject, the God of all comforts, about how God has comforted us by His oath to Christ to make Him a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek. Because Christ has obtained a better priesthood, He's the mediator of a better covenant established upon better promises. Christ does His priestly work in the heavenly tabernacle before the very throne of God. Christ does not offer up to God the blood of animals as Aaron did in the earthly tabernacle, but rather Christ presents His own blood once for all in the holiest place. His is a better sacrifice. His is a far richer blood than that of the animals. Only one death of our Savior is required. Only one entrance before the heavenly mercy seat is needed. Hebrews exclaims that by His one sacrifice, Christ has obtained eternal redemption for us. Our redemption by Christ's blood is forever. The sacrifice of Jesus is the great price paid to set us free from the curse of the law. It is the horrible cost borne by Christ to rescue us. Jesus offered up himself, completely perfect and righteous, unto God by the eternal Holy Spirit. God never dies, but Christ as God and man did die for us. His blood is that of the human nature, taken on by God the Son, and thus its value is inestimable. Because He is God the Son, because He is incarnate in our flesh, because of the power of the eternal Holy Spirit within Christ in His humanity, because of His human moral and spiritual perfection and obedience to His Father, His sacrifice presented in glory has a transforming and liberating power for His people. First, the Scripture tells us it cleanses our consciences from dead works. Animal sacrifices could never cleanse the guilty conscience from sin, but the blood of Christ does. Our dead works are rotten, corrupt works, no matter how we view them. Our consciences are condemned by our sin and by our corrupt deeds. But Christ's blood cleanses our consciences from those filthy works. The blood of Jesus sacrificed for us takes away the pollution of our guilt by satisfying God's justice in our place, therefore our consciences are at peace with a holy God. Not only does it take away our guilt and shame, but it also purges us from relying upon our works to make us right with God. The constant fear and prodigious efforts to provide our own righteousness to God enslaves our minds and consciences because we know we can never be good enough. The blood of Jesus purges the believer's conscience from both guilt and the vain reliance upon works righteousness. It sets the whole of our hope upon Jesus and his sacrifice as God's lamb and removes all hope from ourselves. But note well the transformation that follows. Our consciences are purged from dead works to serve the living God. We're no longer trying to vindicate ourselves to God, but rather to love and fear Him for saving us by the blood of His dear Son. Believers will serve the living God when Christ has purged our consciences from dead works. Our works do not save us, but we work for God because He has saved us. Thus Hebrews 9, 11 through 14 tracks very closely the promises of the new covenant. God would make us to know Him and to know His law and to keep it, because He shows mercy to our unrighteousness and forgives us our sins. As we have seen before, those new covenant promises were executed by Christ's blood of the new covenant, shed for many for the remission of sin. In all this, He is our great high priest, my solemn oath of God. At the Lord's table, we rejoice over the priestly work of our Redeemer, for He told us to remember how His body was broken at Calvary for us, and His blood of the new covenant was shed for the remission of our sin. Think of how foreboding and alarming and tragic those words must have been to the disciples of Jesus that night. They couldn't grasp how a dying Messiah could save anyone. As two of them said unknowingly to Christ afterwards, we had thought that it would be Messiah who would redeem Israel. All the while, our blessed Jesus was redeeming all his people whom he loves for all eternity. And we come finally to verse 15 of Hebrews chapter nine. and for this cause he's the mediator of the New Testament, that by means of death, for the redemption of the transgressions that were under the First Testament, they which are called might receive the promise of eternal inheritance." Notice it says, for this cause, he is the mediator of the New Testament. What is the cause? The cause is the purging of the consciences of the Lord's people from dead works unto obedience to the Holy God. That's the cause, that's the purpose, or that's the reason why He is made the mediator of the new covenant, to bring us this salvation, to bring us this salvation. Now notice that the writer here makes a little switch because he's going to draw out another point about this new covenant that depends upon a linguistic technicality, if you will. That is, that it can be considered, in the case of the New Covenant, as a last will and testament of the Lord Jesus. That is, a will. In the legal terms, I believe they call a will to be the last will and testament of the deceased. That is, that it's what He announced was His purpose and his desire as to the way in which his property and assets should be distributed upon his death. And these, of course, are very solemn documents and they are cosseted about with centuries of law and custom, tradition about witnesses, about holographic wills, about all the legal ramifications of the way the will is written. And the most astounding one I ever saw was when Sam Fonda, the attorney, died. He left a one-page holographic will with no witnesses because it was in his own handwriting. And it basically said, this is my will. I leave all of my property to my wife. I make her my executor. I require that she post no bond and make no accounting. And that was pretty much it. Him being a lawyer, I figure we ought to take a copy of that and use it as a model in case we have to dash off a holographic will. The holographic will is one written in your own handwriting and it doesn't require any witnesses. Of course, it may require that some people show up to say, yeah, that's his handwriting, I recognize it. But other than that, my great uncle, who was a banker out at the Bank of America in California, he left his will in holographic form with no witnesses. The writer of Hebrews begins to treat the new covenant as a will of the Lord Jesus, as His last will and testament, as it were. And this is fine because it is the promise of God and Christ is fully God. He is the second person of the Godhead. No doubt the new covenant is the purpose and will and statement and covenant of the Godhead in all of its persons, each and every one. They all agree to it, unified in their deity. Even though they are three persons, we have only one being in our God. But the writer of Hebrews is going to stress why Christ's death was necessary to execute the New Covenant. We've been saying this for weeks and weeks now, that Christ's death executed the New Covenant. He's the mediator of the New Covenant as our great high priest. He carries it out. He makes sure that it's terms are accomplished, that its promises are carried out. But there is a way in which you can look at the New Covenant as a last will in Testament, and that sharply underlines why it is that Christ had to die in order for the promises of the will to be distributed to the beneficiaries, which are the Lord's people. So this is what the writer is doing to underscore Why it is that the new covenant depended upon the death of Christ for its power, whereas the old covenant, though it was sealed by the blood of sacrifices, really didn't depend upon the death of anybody. What it did was promise the death of the beneficiaries, if you will, upon their disobedience to the law. So in the Old Covenant, there was a death implicit, but it was the death of the sinner. In the New Covenant, there's a death required to carry out its promises, but it's the death of the spotless Lamb of God. It's the death of the Lord Jesus. And so it's convenient to treat the New Covenant for the writer's purposes here, as if it should be treated as a last will and testament of the Lord Jesus. The text says here that for this cause, he's the mediator of the New Testament. That is the one that brings it about, that assures its effectiveness, the executor, if you will, the one who applies it to us, the one who goes between the parties that is God making the promises and God's people receiving the promises. And that's, of course, the position of a priest. So that is Christ's position. And remember, this is for the cause that He might, by His dying, purge us from dead works to serve the living God. That He might bring upon us that transformation of our hearts to know God, to love God, to know His law, to be obedient to Him, to treat Him as our God, and He treat us as His people. that God would have mercy on our transgressions and forgive us of our sins. So then in two verses 16 and 17, the writer makes a little statement about the way wills work. For where a testament is, there must also of necessity be the death of the testator. The testator is the one who executes the will, the one who writes it down, the one whose will it is. For a testament is of force after men are dead. Otherwise, it is of no strength at all while the testator liveth. So this is the way we know wills work, isn't it? That in order to execute the will, somebody has to read it, usually. And one of the things you have to show is that the person who wrote the will is dead. You can't go around executing people's wills while they're still alive somewhere. Of course, this becomes a problem if they just disappear. First, you have to get a court to declare them to be dead. But usually, overwhelming number of cases, you just present a death certificate. And usually still, almost all the people involved already know that the testator is dead. The beneficiaries can only come into their inheritance when the death of the person who made the will is proven. No benefits or property flow before his death. If he wants to benefit someone before his death, he has to use a different legal instrument, doesn't he? Like a deed or just a gift. He can just write checks to people, can't he? But if you want to enter into the benefits of the will, it only can begin to be carried out after the person who wrote the will has died. And so we see under the new covenant, we can treat it as the will of Christ, the last will and testament of Christ. And the writer is clearly making the point, it's of no force until the death of the testator. You see how the writer is using the mechanism of wills, which are well-known and well-common even back 2,000 years ago and way back before then, of course, to tie the death of Christ to the force, to the power, to the carrying out of the promises of the new covenant. And the writer of Hebrews is emphatic. The New Covenant could not have force or power until Christ in His humanity was slain to execute it. That's His point. That's His point. Before that, it was a promise yet to be fulfilled, but not yet carried out. It was not because Christ kept all of his property and possessions until he died and didn't need them anymore. That's usually the purpose of wills that we make, isn't it? We want to hold on to our stuff until we can't make any use of it, and then we want to distribute it to the ones we love. Well, Christ had very few possessions. You remember they tore his garments and they cast lots for his vesture, and that was pretty much all he had, wasn't it? He wasn't trying to distribute his earthly possessions, but he was trying to distribute something, wasn't he? He was trying to distribute the benefit of his dying as a sacrifice for the sake of his people. But because his sacrifice was necessary to wash our sins away, that is why. He made a will, if you will, or he had a last testament, if you will. That is why he had to die in order for it to take place, not so that we could get all of his stuff or his friends could get all of his stuff, but rather because his death was necessary to take our sins away as our sacrifice. Until that's done, we're all under the curse of the law and judgment for our sins. So the death of Christ to execute the new covenant is very precious to us, not because we're greedy, but because it is the means by which God can carry out the promises that He made in the new covenant, take away our sin and not remember them against us anymore. This was the promised judgment under the old law, under the old covenant. There was a promise made under the old covenant. It was, if you obey all this, you'll live. And if you disobey, you will die. So we had heaped plenty promises that were pending for us. The problem was they were all our doom and our judgment because no man can be justified by keeping the law. Only thing we learned from the law is our sin. and the judgment and the wrath and the curse that fall upon us. So there were lots of promises that we were subject to inherit. They just weren't any good ones lined up for us because of our sin, because of our disobedience, because of our rebellion against God. Now, there are heretics about, false teachers who have kooky, strange, false doctrines about salvation, about Christ's death, about the atonement, about imputation of righteousness. They claim that God can just forgive us whenever He wants to because He's a loving God, don't they? But God's promised otherwise. He would have to break His promises under the Old Covenant. He made those promises to people. He requires His creatures to be obedient and subject to Him. That's the whole point of Romans 1. We all know He requires that, but we sin anyway and therefore we're condemned. Whether we are technically under the Mosaic law or not, plenty of law that God's revealed that's enough to condemn us and for us to all be judged guilty before God. So we got a lot of promises. We got a lot of inheritance, if you will. but it's all pending doom and judgment and wrath. And if God could just forgive us whenever He wanted to, without any provision for the keeping of His promises under the law, then He would be an unholy and unjust God, wouldn't He? God's love is not to be at cross purposes with His holiness and justice and righteousness. So there must be a way that God can be just and declare righteous those who in their actions were unrighteous and unjust. Otherwise, there's no hope for the promises of the new covenant, is there? But by dying in our place, our Lord Jesus stepped into our place under the old covenant law and the judgment for sin. He assumed the promises that we dread, the judgment that we ought to receive. He assumed those by substituting Himself. That's the whole point of the substitutionary atonement of Christ. He kept all the law for us and He paid all the promised judgment by His death in our place and for us. and therefore His death literally executes the new covenant blessings for us, for thereby God can obey His promises to pour down wrath upon sin, and at the same time, He can have mercy on our unrighteousness, mercy on our sin, forgive us our sin, and it all hinges upon the death of Christ empower the promises of the new covenant. He stood between us and a holy God, being God himself, but also being man himself, and brokered, if you will, the exchange of new covenant blessings and salvation with the old covenant disobedience and wrath. And he did this by dying for us at Calvary as our high priest. He offered up himself the perfect sacrifice to carry out this great exchange. And thereby, you see, His death literally executes the new covenant promises. They become empowered when the one who made the promises, which may be seen as Christ, because He is God, that He made promises to have mercy on our sin. And he kept the promises and carried out the promises by dying in our place. And at that dying, his testament was brought into effect and the benefits are distributed to the people who are the inheritors of the promises. And with that understanding of the new covenant as a special promise, like a will whose power comes into effect, only when the promisor or the testator dies, we can return to verse 15. What does it say? For this cause, that is, to execute the promise of purging the consciences from sin, from dead works, unto service of the living God. For this cause, he's the mediator of the New Testament, that by means of death, for the redemption of the transgressions that were under the First Testament, they which are called might receive the promise of eternal inheritance, that by means of death for the redemption of the transgressions that were under the first Testament, they which are called might receive the promise of eternal inheritance. So it was his death that executed that Testament of his, whereby the blessings of the new covenant of the Testament are available and distributed to those who receive the promise of the eternal inheritance. Now, we're gonna stop at this point and point out that in the text we read this morning, John chapter six, Christ is explaining to his people that by trusting in him, they will have eternal life. He is the bread of life. And he doubles down when they object. But I wonder if you ever noticed this particular point which the Lord Jesus makes. In John 6, at verse 41, we read, The Jews then murmured at him, because he said, I am the bread that came down from heaven. They said, Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How is it then that he saith, I came down from heaven? Jesus therefore answered and said to them, Murmur not among yourselves. No man can come to me except the Father who hath sent me draw him. and I will raise him up at the last day." Now, we mentioned in Hebrews 9 verse 15, it said, "...they which are called might receive the promise of eternal inheritance." You know that one of the things about a will is that it has beneficiaries. It's not just for the whole world. except for some people who say, I leave my body to science, or I leave my vast wealth to bring peace on earth. People like that. We're talking about normal everyday people who have a group of people in mind they wish to benefit by their last will and testament. And here, the writer of Hebrews describes those people as, they which are called might receive the promise of eternal inheritance. So you see, there is a group of people that are called to be the beneficiaries of the new covenant, of the last will and testament of Christ. The beneficiaries which will have their sins forgiven, upon whom God will have mercy for their sins, and who will be made to know the Lord, will be made to know His law, where He will be their God and they will be His people. This is a unilateral promise. You see, they don't really have to do anything to receive this promise other than to receive what the promise wants, to take hold of it, take possession of it, to trust in the Lord Jesus. And here, Jesus is describing to people how that all that the Father gives me will come to me, and him that cometh to me I'll in no wise cast out. It's the will of the Father that all that He has given me I should lose nothing but raise it up at the last day. So there are a people who are the called, as the word is used in Hebrews 9.15, they are called to receive the promise of eternal inheritance. So there is a specific people that are a benefit from Christ's last will and testament upon His dying. And Jesus, of course, integrates this concept in a very beautiful way in the remainder of John 6 when He talks about His death, His body, and His blood. And how all the people who are to benefit from it by believing on Him, they will be as if they had eaten His body and drunk His blood. that their whole hope and promise and inheritance depends upon His dying body on the tree. And that it's not just a promise, you see, it's carried out by the blood, by the dying of Jesus to execute the promise, to empower the promise, to make it a promise that God is well pleased with. But he says, murmur not, no man can come to me except the father who had sent me draw him, and I will raise him up at the last day. So there is this drawing by the father unto Christ that the writer of Hebrews is referring to when he says, they which are called will receive the promise of eternal inheritance by the dying of the Lord Jesus for the redemption of the transgressions that were under the first covenant. So this implies that Christ did not die for all the sins under the first covenant. The people who broke God's law and were not called by Him and did not trust in Him and did not call upon Him for mercy, their sins will be carried out against them just like the old covenant promised. They don't benefit from the promises of the new covenant because they haven't believed and they haven't been called. And notice that the Lord Jesus then says that no one can come to Christ except the Father who hath sent me draw him, and I will raise him up at the last day. And then I noticed this at verse 45, it is written in the prophets, and they shall all be taught of God. Every man therefore that hath heard and hath learned of the Father cometh unto me. So here is a reference back to the promises of the New Covenant. They shall all know Me. They shall not say into any of their brethren, Know the Lord. The teaching by the Lord to His people and the calling of the Lord's people is by the Father, drawing them unto Christ. So here is Jesus appropriating some of the promises of the New Covenant to explain why it is that some people come to Christ and some don't. The ones that come to Christ are the ones who have already begun to receive the blessings of the New Covenant. They're being taught of God. They're knowing the Lord. He is their God and they are His people. And so therefore, they will be the ones that trust in the Lord Jesus. And therefore they will be the ones that will receive the benefits of the new covenant upon the death of Christ, that their sins will be forgiven, that God will have mercy upon their unrighteousness. It is a glorious thing that our Lord Jesus was able to die in our place to carry out, to execute, to empower these promises of the New Covenant and that God has drawn His people unto His Son. You know, we go around and we think that we can make people trust in Jesus. We can just preach louder. We can just try to be more convincing. And we should try to be more convincing because God does use the testimony of His people as a means. But ultimately, it's all up to God and the Holy Ghost to draw men unto Christ. Whether He uses us or not, one way or another, His people whom He's given to Christ will come to Him and they will know the Lord and they will be taught of God. And therefore, they will be the called when the time comes to distribute the glorious benefits of Christ's last will and testament. the recipients of those benefits we have trusted in Jesus, the great benefits of the will of Jesus, in which He promised to distribute this great salvation, this great knowledge of God, this communion with God through the Lord Jesus, this mercy upon poor sinners, all brought to pass by the death of Christ, by which the Scripture tells us there was the redemption of the transgressions that were under the first Testament, the old covenant. So at the Lord's table, we meditate upon the means by which Christ gave to us the promises of the new covenant. As our high priest, he sacrificed of himself in our place presented that offering before the throne of God and satisfied divine justice, satisfied the old covenant, canceled and satisfied as for His people so that we might be redeemed from the curse of the law and enter into the blessings of Christ's Testament. And that's why we say at the Lord's table, we repeat what Jesus said. He said, this is my blood of the New Testament. shed for many for the remission of sin. How can anyone say that Christ's bloodshedding on the cross was not for the forgiveness of our sin? And yet there are people that go around teaching that. The scriptures are clear that by His bloodshedding, He executed the promised. New Testament of forgiveness, mercy, cleansing, and transformation for all who are called to benefit from that will. Let's give thanks for the Lord's table and think about the sacrifice that Jesus made, the cost of it, the awful cost that Jesus bore for me when bearing my sins heavy load, He died on Calvary's tree. I'd like to ask Brother Whitney if he'd give thanks for the bread that pictures the body of Christ broken for us. And the Scriptures tell us that on the night our Lord was betrayed, He took the bread and He blessed it, and He broke it, and He said, Take and eat. This is My body which is broken for you. Do this in remembrance of Me. Let's give thanks for the cup that pictures the blood of the Lord Jesus shed to make atonement for us. O God, our Father, we rejoice that your dear Son, you withheld Him not from us, but delivered Him up for our offenses. We thank you that He came into this world in human flesh, that He might execute that New Testament, those promises that required His bloodshedding. And He preached the truth of it, and then He carried it out. He didn't turn His face away. even though it was repugnant to him in his humanity to be charged with our crimes and treated as guilty and numbered with the transgressors, yet he did it all save his loved ones. We give you the praise for it and we thank you he left us this cup to picture that blood that was poured out by him on the cross to make an atonement for our sin, to appease your righteous wrath, to satisfy your divine justice, and to fulfill the promises you made to judge sin, but you judged it in Jesus for us instead of in ourselves. And we thank you that he left us this cup, help us to comprehend the meaning of it all, and to know that all our life and hope and joy rest in the body and blood of Jesus, delivered up for us on the cross, we pray in Jesus' name, amen. The Scriptures tell us after they had supped that He took the cup and He blessed it. And He said, Drink ye all of it, this cup is the new covenant in My blood for the remission of sin. Do it as often as ye do it in remembrance of Me. And the Scriptures tell us that as often as we eat this bread and drink this cup, we do preach the Lord's death until He comes. Let's turn in our big blue books, sing a song we haven't sung in decades. Number 252. 252. Come every soul by sin oppressed. There's mercy with the Lord, and He will surely give you rest by trusting in His word. Only trust Him. Only trust Him. Only trust Him now. He will save you now. Number 252.