When our Lord Jesus Christ died, the veil of the temple was rent in two. The record of this event is given in three of the Gospels (Mt. 27:50-51; Mk. 15:37-38; Lk. 23:45). The veil was rent while hanging between heaven and earth. Like that veil, the Son of God was hung up between heaven and earth on a Roman cross. It was to the cross He referred when He said: “And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto Me. This He said, signifying what death He should die” (Jn. 12:32-33).
The veil was rent from top to bottom. It was so woven together that two pairs of oxen attached to either edge and driven in opposite directions could not tear it asunder. It was not stretched, drawn tight and fixed–it hung in a loose fold. Therefore it could not be cut nor torn by a direct stroke; it was too soft and yielding for that.
It was rent not from the bottom to the top, but from the top downward to the bottom. Such rending could not come from a man since Josephus tells us the veil was sixty feet in height. This was an act of God.
In this you have the immense truth concerning the death of the cross. It did not come from below, from the hand of man. Our Lord openly affirmed no man could take His life from Him (Jn. 10:18). The death of Christ was as much an act of God as His Incarnation.
It was God and not man who smote Him. Speaking anticipatively in the Spirit through the mouth of David, He Himself says: “Thou (the Almighty) hast brought Me into the dust of death” (Ps. 22:15). Again, “Thine arrows stick fast in Me, and Thy hand presseth Me sore” (Ps. 38:2). Or again, “All Thy waves and Thy billows are gone over Me” (Ps. 42:7; see also Ps. 88:7, 16).
This is His own delineation. Just as the billows of the sea lifted up by wind and storm ascend up and up like mountains, then fall with their crashing, crushing weight on the quivering, trembling ship, overwhelm it, burying it in the blackening depths, so the wrath of God fell on Him–the hand of the Almighty cut Him off. “It pleased the Lord to bruise Him; He hath put Him to grief: thou shalt make His soul an offering for sin” (Isa. 53:10)
Our Lord applied Zechariah 13:7 to Himself: “All ye shall be offended because of Me this night: for it is written, I will smite the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock shall be scattered abroad” (Mt. 26:31).
The veil was rent in two at the hour of the evening sacrifice, three o’clock in the afternoon (Mt. 27:46). At that hour the evening lamb was on the altar in the temple. At the same hour the lamb of the passover was being sacrificed in the court of the temple. It was precisely then that our Lord became the antitypical and true passover: “Christ our passover is sacrificed for us” (1 Cor. 5:7).
The veil was rent at the moment when He cried, “It is finished” (Mt. 27:50). The word, “yielded” is, literally, “commanded.” He commanded His spirit to go. As He hung on the cross, He could see the smoke from the altar, and He knew He was Himself the true Passover of God; He knew all things foretold of Him on the cross were now fulfilled, and lifting up His voice with the accent of triumph, knowing He had met every condition agreed upon in the everlasting covenant, He cried as a conqueror cries, His voice ringing up to the very throne of God: “It is finished.”
So triumphant was that cry, so full of authority, so full of command, it appealed to the centurion in command of the soldiers. Instantly his soldier sense of authority responded: “When the centurion which stood over against Him, saw that He so cried out…he said: Truly, this Man was the Son of God” (Mk. 15:39).
When the veil was rent in two, it was changed at once from a barrier to an opening into the Holy of Holies. When on earth, His perfect life was itself a barrier between God and man. His holiness was a witness of the sinfulness of the natural man, a demonstration of his unholiness and unfitness for God.
Previous to His arrest, Jesus said to those about Him: “The hour is come, that the Son of man should be glorified. Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit” (Jn. 12:23-24).
It must die in the earth if it is to germinate, come forth, multiply, reduplicate itself, bring forth many grains in its own likeness. This teaches that life comes out of death: “That which thou sowest is not quickened, [made alive] except it die” (1 Cor. 15:36).
As our Lord walked the earth, there was none like Him. There has never been one since. If He had not died, if He had gone back to heaven, He would have been the one and only man of His kind. He would, like the grain of corn, abide–but alone. There never could be another like Him, primarily because the nature of man never could produce a humanity like His and, ultimately, because the sentence of death is against him here and hereafter. Not until that penalty was paid could there be any hope of a new life for sin-begotten men.
The natural man never could get beyond that penalty. Our Lord Jesus Christ came into the world to meet this desperate issue between a holy God and sinful man. He came to put aside the penalty, to abolish death. This He did by His sacrificial and substitutionary death: “Once in the end of the age hath He appeared to put away sin [that is, the penalty of sin] by the sacrifice of Himself” (Heb. 9:26).
He “hath abolished death” (2 Tim. 1:10). That is, for those who offer Him by faith as sacrifice and substitute, the death of such is no longer penal, punitive, it is providential).
When He arose from the dead and ascended to heaven He took His place as the Second Man, the Last Adam, as the Eternal Life Giver; and on the basis of the complete satisfaction rendered by His death, obtained the right to impart His life and nature to all who should acknowledge that sacrifice. By virtue of His death and out of His death, He gives life, multiplying this life and character of it in men, and brings many sons to God.
Thus it is true that life–eternal life–is out of death, out of His death, and is being wrought in those who accept His sacrificial death.
Because He died and rose again, we have this age of grace in which it is possible for all who believe to say: “Christ liveth in me” and of whom it may be said: “Christ in you, the hope of glory.”
Today the way into heaven is open for all who, like the high priest, will come with the blood of the divine atonement.
In the old time the priest who entered within the veil on the Day of Atonement could not sit down; he must stand and remain but a moment within the veil. All this was witness that the sacrifice must be repeated, it was not complete. It could never “make the comers there-unto perfect.”
But when our Lord Jesus Christ, as the true high priest, entered heaven by virtue of the value of His own sacrificial blood, He sat down at the right hand of God. It was a witness that His sacrifice had been accepted, was once for all and all-sufficient. “We are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all…This man [our Lord] after He had offered one sacrifice for sins forever, sat down at the right hand of God…By one offering He hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified” (Heb. 10:10, 12, 14)
His presence in Heaven at the right hand of God proclaims a finished sacrifice. Any system that attempts to offer Him afresh denies the perfection and efficacy of His death on the cross and throws it back to the level of the oft-repeated and insufficient sacrifices in Israel.
When He entered heaven into the Holiest of all He did so not for Himself, but as the representative of every believer. That is the standing and character of every believer today. In God’s sight we too have risen and ascended into heaven and are seated there before Him at His right hand in Christ.
“But God, who is rich in mercy, for His great love wherewith He hath loved us, even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ, (by grace are ye saved) and hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (Eph. 2:4-6).
What a marvellous “together” relationship it is. What a co-partnership: co-crucified with Him; co-quickened; co-raised from the dead; co-ascended with Him; co-seated with Him. And all because, like the veil of the temple, He was rent for us.
Read again that splendid scripture: “Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way, which He hath consecrated for us, through the veil, that is to say, His flesh; and having an high priest over the house of God; let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith” (Heb. 10:19-22).
Then “Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need” (Heb. 4:16).
Such is the grace and glory of the rent veil.