The Risen High Priest Who Opens the Way
“Since we have confidence to enter the holy place by the blood of Yeshua, by a new and living way which He inaugurated for us through the veil—that is, His flesh—and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith.” (Hebrews 10:19-22)
There is one book people turn to when they want to argue that everything we have explored in this series is completely wacky and cannot be possible. That book is Hebrews. The common reading goes something like this: Jesus is the sacrifice. He took His blood into the Holy of Holies to satisfy God and buy your access. Case closed.
But Hebrews does not allow us to stop there. The author himself warns his readers that this is going to be hard to understand. He says, “You have become sluggish in hearing. For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone again to teach you the basics of God’s word. You have come to need milk, not solid food” (Hebrews 5:11-12). That is pretty harsh. And what is he about to ask them to understand all at once? The earthly Tabernacle and its furniture. The heavenly sanctuary that the earthly one copied. A high priest not from the line of Aaron but from the line of Melchizedek. Blood—more than one kind of blood—doing more than one kind of work. The making of a new covenant. The forgiveness of sin. The cleansing of conscience. That is a lot to try to undertake.
Here is what happens when it becomes too much: people take the one piece that sounds very familiar—the blood and the death—pull it out by itself, hold it up, and say, “There, that is what it is all about. Jesus died, blood was shed, sin was paid for—finished. That is the book of Hebrews.” You cannot do that with Hebrews, because the author told you yourself: you have to use your brain. You have to look at this like it is solid food. So that is what we are going to do—one piece at a time: sanctuary, priest, blood, covenant, conscience.
We are prepared for this. Over the past several weeks, we have seen that the sin offering is a purification offering. We have seen that blood is all about life, not death. We have seen that sin does not only stain the sinner—it sends out an impurity that settles on the sanctuary itself, on the very place where God meets His people, so that the meeting place has to be kept clean. We have seen that forgiveness flows from the mercy of God while blood purifies and restores access. We saw Messiah as the mercy seat, the place where God made a way for His people to meet Him. Every one of those ideas goes into Hebrews with us—a book focused completely from the perspective of Yom Kippur.
The Sanctuary: Earthly and Heavenly
The author of Hebrews presents two sanctuaries: the earthly copy and the heavenly reality. He writes: “Therefore it was necessary for the replicas of these heavenly things to be purified with these sacrifices, but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these” (Hebrews 9:23).
But how does the heavenly sanctuary become impure? The heavenly sanctuary is not corrupt the way we are. What could possibly need cleaning up there?
Remember how impurity worked. Sin sends something out that travels. It drifts into the sanctuary and settles on the holy place—the meeting place. We use the term aerial miasma. That is why the sanctuary had to be purged—not because the building did anything wrong, but because the weight of human impurity came to rest on the place where God meets His people. The earthly sanctuary was only ever a copy. The true meeting place has to be clean even more radically. The impurity that sin creates does not politely stop at the earth’s atmosphere. It reaches the real sanctuary—the highest place—the one place where God and humanity are supposed to come together.
So the heavenly things really were purified, exactly as the author says—not cleansed of any guilt of their own, but cleansed of the separation that we pressed into the meeting place. This is what impurity is: the force of death, pushing God and humanity apart. Same thing on earth, same thing above.
This would take a high priest of a special order to be able to go in—a mediator, someone who can enter the place, clear what stands between God and us, and make the meeting possible again. The blood of bulls and goats could not do this. It could do it on the copy down here, time after time, but the life of Yeshua does it at the source—once.
The High Priest of a Different Order
The author of Hebrews emphasizes that Yeshua is a high priest of a different order—not from the line of Aaron, but from the line of Melchizedek. And what qualifies Him for this priesthood? Not His bloodline, but the fact that death could not hold Him. Hebrews 7:16 says He holds His priesthood “by the power of an indestructible life.”
His blood is life—and not just any life. It is an indestructible life. He walked into death, and death could not hold Him. A life like that—indestructible—and blood like that is the most potent force in all of creation: the strongest purifying and consecrating power there is. And that is the key to the book of Hebrews. His blood is the one life-giving act that can do what no other can do. It can clear the heavenly sanctuary and reach places no animal blood could ever go.
The Blood That Cleanses, Consecrates, and Reaches the Conscience
One of the most famous verses in Hebrews is 9:22: “Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.” But this is not because death is the price—it is not about death. As we have learned repeatedly, blood is about life. Life is the agent, and His is the most important life there is. This verse is a statement about purification, not a demand for death.
Side note: if anyone ever tells you there is no forgiveness without the shedding of blood, that is not strictly true. The author himself qualifies it, saying, “one may almost say, all things are cleansed with blood” (Hebrews 9:22). He knows his Torah. Flour could be used for the poor worshiper. Water, fire, and the census of silver could also provide atonement without a drop of blood. There are at least seven different forms of atonement in Scripture.
But there is something else blood does—something a sin offering could never do: it consecrates. The blood sealed the covenant at Mount Sinai. It made a covenant; it consecrated. That was not a sin offering. The blood that ordained the priests and set them apart for service was not a sin offering either—it was a different kind of blood: the blood of covenant and consecration. That is the kind of work that Hebrews lays onto Yeshua in His high priesthood. His life-giving blood inaugurates a new covenant—the one the prophets promised, tied to forgiveness and to writing His Torah on our hearts. And it does not only bring forgiveness; it also consecrates. It takes ordinary people and sets them apart as priests.
The third and most powerful thing Hebrews wants you to understand is that Yeshua’s blood does something unbelievable: it reaches the conscience. The sacrificial system could never reach inside a person and cleanse the conscience itself—there was no offering written for that. The author says it outright: the blood of bulls and goats could never perfect the worshiper from the inside out. But the blood of the Messiah, offered through the eternal Spirit, purifies our conscience from dead works to serve the living God. The same power that clears the sanctuary also clears the person.
A New and Living Way
The author concludes this argument with one of the most beautiful invitations in all of Scripture:
“Since we have confidence to enter the holy place by the blood of Yeshua, by a new and living way which He inaugurated for us through the veil—that is, His flesh—and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.”
A new and living way. He opened it and left it open. Blood, heart sprinkled clean, bodies washed with water—the conqueror of death, blood that is life, washing that moves a person from death to life. The people are not only forgiven but consecrated, made into a royal priesthood who can draw near. All of this change of status occurs through the blood of the Messiah. He has not merely improved our standing; He has changed us. The holy place is open, and we have been made to walk into it.
Putting It All Together
Penal substitution looks at Hebrews and sees one thing: death paid the wrath of God, the sacrificial system torn down, blood as death payment, the end of the old. For some readers, that is the whole book. But that is only one piece—one piece of a story so much larger. The author warned us: this is a big story. Solid food is deeper; it is better than death.
The heart of Hebrews is the risen Messiah, alive by life that death could not hold. He entered the sanctuary, not with the blood of goats and calves, but with His own blood—representing an indestructible life. And what did He accomplish?
- Cleansing — we know blood can do that.
- Covenant inauguration — blood was used for that purpose at the Mosaic covenant.
- Metaphysical transformation — Israel became the people of God at that covenant inauguration, and the priest experienced this transformation. So have we.
The sacrificial system could never remove a sense of conscience, but He brings an internal, metaphysical transformation for us. The system was never broken; it always pointed somewhere.
What About the Cross?
Some might say, “You have taken the cross out of the story.” But Hebrews does speak about death. It says He appeared to put away sins by the sacrifice of Himself. It says He was offered once to bear the sins of many. It says we are made holy through the offering of His body. We are not stepping around those things. The question is: what is death?
Death is the doorway. It was never the payment. It is faithful obedience, carried all the way down to the grave—the place where life was poured out so that life could then be carried in. Think of Isaiah 53: bearing the sins of many, meeting God so that we could walk together—the Servant who meets the people and intercedes for them, never a victim absorbing wrath to calm God down. The death is important—so important—but it is simply not a transaction that buys off God. It cannot be.
The whole argument of Hebrews fits into these few lines. A new and living way—He opened it and left it open. The holy place is open, and we have been made to walk into it. The author says, “Come close.”
So draw near with confidence. The veil is torn. The High Priest has entered. The blood has been applied. The conscience is cleansed. And the way is open.
“Let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.” (Hebrews 10:22)
May you draw near with confidence, for the way has been opened.
Light In Torah 
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