“For if the blood of bulls and goats and the ashes of a heifer, sprinkling the unclean, sanctifies for the purifying of the flesh, how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?” (Hebrews 9:13-14).
These verses present us with a rhetorical question. A “rhetorical question” is a literary device that uses an obvious answer to emphasize a point or validate an opinion. For instance, Hebrews 9:13 tells us that these Old Covenant offerings provided external cleansing. With that in mind, we can ask a rhetorical question: how much more effective is Jesus’ sacrificial offering than those Old Testament precursors?
The answer to that question is easy: Jesus’ sacrifice is far more effective because it cleanses us internally as well. In a sense, those Old Testament sacrifices were much like the proverbial act of sweeping dirt under a rug. Even though we can no longer see the dirt after it has been swept under a rug, that doesn’t mean the dirt is gone.
On the other hand, Jesus’ sacrificial offering was far different. To continue with our analogy, Jesus did not sweep our sins under the rug, so to speak. Instead, He permanently swept them away through His sacrificial death. To borrow a phrase from Psalm 103:12, “He has removed our sins as far from us as the east is from the west” (NLT).
This means we can approach God with the knowledge that our sins have not merely been covered up but “swept clean” to God’s satisfaction in Christ as we follow the Biblical path outlined in 1 John 1:9…
“If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”
We’ll talk more about the application of 1 John 1:9 in our next study. For now, we can say that this verse is the antidote for those feelings of separation from God that we may experience as a result of our sins. As we’re told in another portion of the Biblical book of 1 John, “…if our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart, and knows all things” (1 John 3:20).
Thus, it is important to remember that God is greater than our hearts or our consciences. If we confess our sins according to 1 John 1:9, then God assures us that we are forgiven, no matter what our feelings may tell us.