The Impotence of Animal Sacrifices – Hebrews 10:1-4

For God in them and by them did continually represent unto sinners the curse and sentence of the law; namely, that the soul that sinneth must die, or that death was the wages of sin. For although there was allowed in them a commutation, that the sinner himself should not die, but the beast that was sacrificed in his stead,—which belonged unto their second end, of leading unto Christ,—yet they all testified unto that sacred truth, that it is “the judgment of God that they who commit sin are worthy of death.” And this was, as the whole law, an ordinance of God to deter men from sin, and so put bounds unto transgressions. For when God passed by sin with a kind of connivance, winking at the ignorance of men in their iniquities, not giving them continual warnings of their guilt and the consequent thereof in death, the world was filled and covered with a deluge of impieties. Men saw not judgment speedily executed, nor any tokens or indications that so it would be; therefore was their heart wholly set in them to do evil. But God dealt not thus with the church. He let no sin pass without a representation of his displeasure against it, though mixed with mercy, in a direction unto the relief against it in the blood of the sacrifice. And therefore, he did not only appoint these sacrifices on all the especial occasions of such sins and uncleannesses as the consciences of particular sinners were pressed with a sense of, but also once a-year there was gathered up a remembrance of all the sins, iniquities, and transgressions of the whole congregation. – John Owen