They could never, therefore, satisfy the conscience; as you read, Heb; x. 1, 2:—“For the law, having a shadow of good things to come, and not the very image of the things, can never with those sacrifices which they offered year by year continually make the comers thereunto perfect. For then would they not have ceased to be offered? because that the worshippers once purged shall have had no more conscience of sins.” A man might bring any number of lambs, goats, and bullocks, and lay them all on the altar; but, unless by the eye of faith he looked to Christ, he would, after all, carry guilt with him in his conscience; and the still small voice within would bring him in guilty before God. The sense of guilt demanded repetition; but unless the heart looked forward, through that sacrifice, to the coming Christ, no offering, however often repeated, was sufficient: the conscience remained uneasy still, and the sense of guilt clung to the soul. How gloriously different is the one sacrifice of the Son of God! It, and it alone, was sufficient for all the sins of the whole world. The substitution of the Son of God for the sinner satisfied the whole law, and cleared away the whole curse. It not only in God’s counsels removed the guilt, but it reaches the very depths of the human heart, and gives peace to the conscience wounded for sin. Observe the words in ix. 13, 14, as contrasted with those in x. 2. In x. 2 we are taught, that if those sacrifices could have purged the conscience, they would have ceased. But in ix. 14 we read, that through the sacrifice of our blessed Lord, this very thing is done; for the Apostle says:—“How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the Eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?” The one sacrifice was effective to purge the conscience; while all the whole multitude of often-repeated offerings left the conscience just where it was; without rest, without peace, without any real satisfaction, under the painful pressure of a deeply-felt sin. Let us never forget this great result; for it shows that we have that which the Jew, in his sacrifices taken alone, could never have—a conscience at rest, a conscience set free, because all sin is blotted out for ever; a conscience released from its burden, because the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, was a divinely-appointed substitute for guilt.