Next Assignment

Teachers plan their lessons with the assumption that their students will take a certain amount of time to finish the assignments. This frequently leads to a conflict between the teacher and a student who finishes the work early. Confused, the teacher will start to reprimand the student for not working. Only after the teacher checks the student’s work do they realize that the student genuinely finished the work and was rightfully waiting for the rest of the class to catch up. Hebrews 10:11–12 compares Jesus’s finished work to the ongoing work of the temple priests. Unlike the hypothetical student, however, Jesus’s work is finished once and for all. There is no “next assignment.”