Philip Schaff's Popular Commentary (4 vols)

Hebrews 9:14

Hebrews 9:14. How much more shall the blood of Christ... cleanse your conscience from that impurity which shows the inward man to be as a dead corpse, producing only such works as have no pulse, no power or feeling of true and higher life. The context gives to ‘dead works' in this passage a slightly different meaning from that in chap. Hebrews 6:1. And the purpose of this process is to secure not the common service of the Jewish worshipper the service of an outward life; but the inward spiritual service of the living God of God not as veiled and in symbols, but of God in His reality and holiness. Such is the work of Him who, through the eternal Spirit, offered himself without spot (1 Peter 1:19) unto God. ‘Through the eternal Spirit' has been variously explained. Through the Holy Spirit say some which was given to Him ‘without measure,' or by which He was quickened and raised from the dead, and so entered into the holy place. Others, however, regard the expression as describing all in Christ that was not human His higher nature, His Divine personality. This view is favoured by the double fact that it is the writer's purpose to describe the intrinsic excellence of His offering, and that elsewhere ‘the Spirit' is used in this sense when applied to our Lord. As to His flesh His human nature He was son of David; as to the Spirit, what in Him was not human nature, He was the Son of God (Romans 1:3-4; 1 Peter 3:18; 1 Timothy 3:16). The victims of the Law gave up an animal life all unconsciously. Christ gave Himself, His own will and heart consenting not the man only, but all that was Divine in Him: His higher nature which, before time, acquiesced in the purpose of the Father, and that same nature now a conscious agent in effecting it.

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Philip Schaff's Popular Commentary (4 vols)

Hebrews 9:14

Old Testament

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