Post 48 of Study: Hebrews 8-10:18

I don't think it's because I'm getting tired of Hebrews--that's not possible, either for anyone because of its riches or for me because of my love for it. However, when I come to this passage, I am not sure I can add much to a reading of it.  

Hebrews shows the superiority of Christ in many ways, but primarily over the Levitical priesthood system of regular animal sacrifices, which were a picture of the need for sacrifice and death due to the power of sin in individual and corporate lives of Jews and people in general. Everything about it is displaced, improved upon, completed, and perfected by the Mediator of the New Covenant, one of the names of Christ we often overlook.  

In doing so the writer interprets the Old Testament for us. I don't believe we can understand the Old Testament without Hebrews; at the same time we can't fully understand what God wants for us in the Church age, or whatever one wants to call the NOW, without it.

9:24-28 summarizes it in a climactic fashion: 

For Christ has not entered the holy places made with hands, which are representations of the true, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God for us; not that He should offer Himself often, as the high priest enters the Most Holy Place every year with blood of another--He then would have had to suffer often since the foundation of the world; but now, once at the end of the ages, He has appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself. And as is its appointed for  men to die once, but after this the judgment, so Christ has offered once to bear the sins of many.  To those who eagerly wait for Him He will appear a second time, apart from sin, for salvation.  

What shall we say? There is no need for us to look for "more salvation;" He will come again; there is a judgment after death (which doesn't mean that everyone is condemned, only that there is a process of evaluation.) What it doesn't say is the specific manner of all these things--do we immediately go to God? what will happen at the second coming? Why do we keep looking for more ways other than Christ for "vindication" of ourselves? These questions have separated the denominations for years, because we are innately tribalistic and partisan and look for ways to distinguish ourselves. That's not always bad except when it causes strife and violence, which it usually does.