Thursday, June 16, 2011

The Great High Priest

Seeing then that we have a great High Priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. For we do not have a High Priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin. (Hebrews 04:14-15, NKJV).
From a religious perspective, the role of priest can be seen as that of a representative intermediary; one who represents man before God, and mediates between God and man. For Christians there is no longer  a need for such a mediator. Christ fulfills that role forever, as our great High Priest, and, through His finished work on the cross, has provided for us direct and immediate access to the Father. In Him, we are now exhorted to go boldly to the throne of grace ourselves.

This is affirmed by Jesus Himself in the Gospel of John:

“In that day you will ask in My name, and I do not say to you that I shall pray the Father for you; “for the Father Himself loves you, because you have loved Me, and have believed that I came forth from God. (John 16:26, 27, NKJV).

The book of Hebrews will make this same point repeatedly in its brilliant presentation of Christ's superiority to everything, arguing irrefutably that the wall of separation between fallen man and holy God has been torn down in Christ, enabling perfect access for His people to draw near to God.

In Jesus' day, this put a lot of people out of business, especially those in ancient Judaism, a religion which relied upon the God-ordained office of priest to perform the required sacrifices, and officiate at the altar and in the Temple. It is not surprising that the rise of early Christianity met with intense resistance from its Jewish origins, as it involved the demolishing of a venerable, 1400 year-old cultural and religious institution that was an integral part of what it meant to be a Jew.

With the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 A.D., all remnants of the official priesthood and animal sacrifices were rendered obsolete; a painful, but prophesied end to the Old Covenant predicted by Jesus just before His execution.

The verses above, then, begin the comparison between Christ's priesthood, and the Levitical priesthood of Judaism by contrasting the origin and qualifications of Christ with that of the priestly descendants of Aaron, Moses' brother.

First, unlike all human priests before and since, Christ passed through the heavens. This is true in at least two ways: Jesus came down from Heaven through the Incarnation as a human infant, and then returned there, literally ascending into the clouds of glory after His resurrection. No merely mortal priest approaches such a distinction.

Secondly, Jesus is the Son of God, not a son of Aaron. His divinity is inextricably related to His role as our High Priest. For what better intermediary could there be between God and man than the God-Man Himself? Again, the human priesthood cannot begin to approach His level of qualification.

Thirdly, as a Man, Christ was clearly able to sympathize with our weaknesses. He knows in ways we can barely comprehend what it means to be tempted as we are, yet without sin. I suspect that, given His purity and holiness, even the slightest temptation to sin was excruciating. We have not yet resisted to bloodshed striving against sin, but He did, most notably in the Garden of Gethsemane when, as God, He could have obliterated all who came to torture and kill Him, but humbly submitted as Man to the terrible and loving will of the Father. 

For these reasons and more, the writer of Hebrews exhorts us to hold fast our confession of faith, against all and every impulse to forsake it in the face of opposition and trials in this life; to remain steadfast in clinging to the truth of the gospel at all costs, no matter what temptation to do otherwise confronts us.

The logic behind this exhortation is flawless. To the Jew, the argument is couched as a pointed question. Why go back to a faith and practice that was a mere shadow of what has now come? Why settle for a flawed and imperfect priesthood, when Christ, the Son of God Himself, has become our great High Priest? Why return to limited and constrained access to God, when we now have unlimited and personal access through faith in Christ?

To the Gentile, the argument was even more direct. Without Christ, all that is left is to die in sin and suffer the consequences of eternal separation from all that is good. With Him, comes an immeasurable inheritance of blessing and life in the heavenly places. What does it make the most sense to choose? What seems more reasonable to hold onto? The old way of death or the new way into life everlasting?

Clearly, Hebrews' author desired to provide more than ample reasoning to make the steadfast Christian walk the most sensible course of action. To choose anything else is to forsake freely offered deliverance for guaranteed condemnation.

The choice is obvious.