Salvation by death from death

Key verse
Hebrews 9:26 - "But now he [Christ] has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to do away with sin by the sacrifice of himself."

Isaiah
"Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have summoned you by name; you are mine.  When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you.  When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned; the flames will not set you ablaze.  For I am the Lord, your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior." (43:1-3)

When I first read this passage, I was encouraged by God's salvation.  Then I read it again, and realized that God's salvation comes when we need saving.  Ultimately, we need saving from sin, which he has done for us.  Beyond that, we need saving when we are walking through those trials of life.  We will see terrible times in our day - that's the reality of sin's effect on our world.  Even amidst the suffering, however, God will give us the strength to withstand the evil and be saved.

Proverbs

Verses 4 and 5 of chapter 26 require some thinking in order to make sense of them.  After reading a few things from Clarke's commentary, I have discovered that you have to look at each verse a little differently.  In the first case, you don't want to answer a fool according to his folly in the sense that you don't want to stoop to his level of not making sense, because then you won't make any sense yourself.  However, you do want to use his folly (v. 5) to point out his illogical thinking so that he will hopefully see that he doesn't make any sense.

Hebrews

How did blood and death come to be the means by which we are saved?  What was it about the tree of good and evil that made death the only means to overcome death?  That is, in the Old Testament, other animals had to die to save the Jews from an eternal death, and now Christ had to die in the place of those animals to save all of humankind.  Is this an answerable question, or is it just the way things are?