24 For Christ has entered, not into holy places made with hands, which are copies of the true things, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf. 25 Nor was it to offer himself repeatedly, as the high priest enters the holy places every year with blood not his own, 26 for then he would have had to suffer repeatedly since the foundation of the world. But as it is, he has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself. 27 And just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment, 28 so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him.
Orson Scott Card wrote a number of novels, but he is most famous for an early work of his called Ender’s Game. It has been made into a movie, but it is not entirely faithful to the book, which I think is much better. In the novel an alien race is threatening humanity’s existence, and a special school is formed to train the next military leaders. Children are identified with certain skills and put through a rigorously competitive series of games which are intended to hone skills and weed out the unfit. It ends with the protagonist and a team of friends who are playing against what they believe to be the computer as part of their final preparation
It is only after their final triumph in the computer game that they are told that it was not a game. While they thought they were controlling virtual ships in a digital environment, in truth they were controlling real ships with real men firing real weapons. They had not merely beaten the game. They had won the war.
The writer to the Hebrews wants us to have a similar sort of jarring realization here. The ancient Jewish folk had reconciled their sacrificial system by thinking it to be the virtual reality which reflected a true reality in heaven. But the author of this letter wants them and us to see something vitally important. The sacrifices of old, the lambs of a thousand years of the Old Testament were connected not to some distant heavenly but to the death of the Lamb of God, Jesus of Nazareth. It is not some other place, but this place, this world in which we live, which is the true reality. It was the real, red, salty, and sticky blood which Jesus shed on Good Friday which paid sin’s price, once and for all time. Look nowhere else.