Do you remember dial-up internet access? It was loud. It was slow. We had to reconnect each time. Free trails were given to us on CDs at Walmart for some reason. It was good enough, even though we weren’t able to use our landline phones while we were checking our email. If you don’t remember dial-up, I’m sure you can look it up online. Dial-up, with all of its flaws and limitations, connected us to the internet and was the best we had until the 2000s when something better came along.
13 For if the blood of goats and bulls, and the sprinkling of defiled persons with the ashes of a heifer, sanctify for the purification of the flesh, 14 how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God.
Hebrews 9:13-14, ESV
Before Jesus, our sins could only be paid through sacrificial blood. In fact, death is still the only acceptable payment for sin. In Hebrews 8 and 9 we see a description of the way priests used to enter holy places and offer the blood of animals to sanctify the people. It was a slow, complicated process that had to be repeated over and over. It was all we had until the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. Not only is the new covenant in Christ something better, it’s the best we could ever hope to get. He paid our debt once and for all, giving us a way to restore our connection to God forever. We were on dial-up, and the salvation we now have in Jesus is so much better that the same metaphor doesn’t event seem fitting.
VC Devotionals 