Once for All

A word that literally means “to recrucify” is anastauroo, and is only used once in the New Testament. There the apostle Paul says that those Christians who return to the sacrificial system in Jerusalem are those who “crucify to themselves the Son of God afresh.” So “crucify afresh” is the unusual rendering — because in the very nature of the case, crucifixions are not events that are repeated. So those who returned to the Judaic shadows were guilty of returning to the place where no sacrifice remains (because they were all fulfilled in the death of Christ), and at the same time, they were returning to Jerusalem in order to crucify Jesus again. The repeated sacrifices had ceased and so the once-for-all sacrifice was repeated.