26 For if we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, 27 but a fearful expectation of judgment, and a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries. 28 Anyone who has set aside the law of Moses dies without mercy on the evidence of two or three witnesses. 29 How much worse punishment, do you think, will be deserved by the one who has trampled underfoot the Son of God, and has profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has outraged the Spirit of grace? 30 For we know him who said, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay.” And again, “The Lord will judge his people.” 31 It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. —Hebrews 10:26-31

I want to focus on the emboldened clause in verse 26. It seems lost on people, Christian people even, that the One who spoke the world into existence, the One who continues to hold the visible and invisible worlds together by His power, this One became human that we might by the grace of adoption become sons and daughters of the living God; just as Jesus Christ is our brother. I enter this brief excursus with the aforementioned attempt to orient our perspectives because everything, all of reality hangs on that reality. The incarnation and atonement, the death, burial, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ has become too domesticated. The sui generis otherworldly / thisworldly nature of the Theanthropos, Godman breaking into this world has become all too common. Because of this people generally fail to grasp the significance of the clause under consideration.

What people, in the main, fail to appreciate is that God become human in Jesus Christ, all the way unto the obedience and death of the cross, means that there no longer is a normal world to which we can return. The world has genuinely and apocalyptically been put to death, and anyone attempting to find their identity therein, and therefrom, are only attempting to breathe life into a corpse incapable of resurrection. ‘There no longer remains a sacrifice for sins’ entails that there was only One person, God in Christ, who had the resource and power to penetrate into the dark abyss of the fallen human heart, put it to literal death, and from that start afresh anew and re-create a new heavens and earth, under the foot and dominion of the Son of Man, and all those co-heirs with Him. In other words, this sort of pining away for a recuperation of the world that Christ has already declared dead, and put to death, by His death of all deaths, is the satanic errand that even the Egyptian high priests knew was the fool’s errand; they knew, and so should we, that only the ‘finger of God’ can bring new life ex nihilo. 

Robert Dale Dawson sums up what I am after as he comments on a doctrine of the resurrection in the theology of Karl Barth: “The event of the resurrection of Jesus is that of the creation of the conditions of the possibility for all other events, and as such it cannot be accounted for in terms considered appropriate for all other events. This is not the expression of an historical skeptic, but of one who is convinced of the primordiality of the resurrection as the singular history-making, yet history-delimiting, act of God.”1 I take this notional reality in Barth’s theology of the resurrection as the ground for allowing the author to the Hebrews to make the astonishing claim that ‘there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins,’ if and fact a person rejects God’s Self-sacrifice for them, for the world, in Jesus Christ. In short, for the Christian, there is no other world to return to, but the Kingdom of God that has been established outwith human hands; the Kingdom, the new creation that has been established and re-created by God alone. It is high time that Christians demythologize the notion that in this world we have a home; we surely, and clearly do not. We are ambassadors of the fact that this world in fact is no more, and that the only world that has concrete perduring reality to it is the one that has come in the dust and blood of Jesus’ body.

1 Robert Dale Dawson, The Resurrection in Karl Barth (UK/USA: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2007), 13