Biblion Bible Commentary
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Where a Will Is, There Must Be a Death
Hebrews 9:15-22
15 For this reason he is the mediator of a new covenant, since a death has occurred for the redemption of the transgressions that were under the first covenant, that those who have been called may receive the promise of the eternal inheritance. · WEB
One Greek word means both covenant and testament, and the argument uses both senses to show why a death had to occur.
For this reason he is the mediator of a new covenant, since a death has occurred for the redemption of the transgressions that were under the first covenant.
One clause in that sentence reaches backward and should not be passed over: the death redeems transgressions under the first covenant. The sins of the centuries before the cross were genuinely covered — the old system's sacrifices had deferred what this death settled. Nobody who trusted God under the former arrangement was holding a worthless receipt; the payment their offerings pointed to has now been made, retroactively good.
Then the writer turns on a fact of vocabulary. The Greek word for covenant is also the ordinary word for a last will and testament, and verses 16 and 17 run the second sense: where a last will and testament is, there must of necessity be the death of him who made it. For a will is in force where there has been death, for it is never in force while he who made it lives.
The point of the wordplay is necessity. Ask why the new covenant required anyone to die, and the testament sense answers: an inheritance is promised — the eternal inheritance, verse 15 — and an inheritance is released only by the death of the one who wrote the will. The mediator of this covenant is also its testator, and the beneficiaries collect because he died.
Verses 18 to 21 then return to the covenant sense and show that blood was there from the beginning: the first covenant was not... dedicated without blood. Moses sprinkled the book itself and all the people, saying this is the blood of the covenant which God has commanded you — words Jesus reached for at the table on his last night. Even the tent and every vessel of the ministry were sprinkled. The arrangement was blood-sealed at every point, so a covenant sealed by better blood is not an innovation but the pattern kept.
And verse 22 states the principle the whole system taught: according to the law, nearly everything is cleansed with blood, and apart from shedding of blood there is no remission.
The nearly is the writer's precision — the law did allow flour for the poorest Leviticus 5:11 — and the second clause is the rule the exceptions prove. Forgiveness in this system is never free-floating; it costs a life, and the whole apparatus of basin and altar existed to keep that fact in front of everyone who came near.
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