Friday, August 26, 2011

Perfected Forever


For the law appoints as high priests men who have weakness, but the word of the oath, which came after the law, appoints the Son who has been perfected forever. (Hebrews 07:28, NKJV).

The Book of Hebrews perhaps reveals more about Christ than any other portion of Scripture, and it does so provocatively.

While presenting a soaring and lyrically compelling argument for Christ's unprecedented superiority, it simultaneously shocks us with the Son of God needing to learn, and to be perfected (Heb 5:8,9; 7:28).

How can Deity lack knowledge or perfection?

By raising and answering these questions, the writer illuminates even more of the glories of Jesus and His immeasurable love for the Father and for us.

What experiential knowledge could all-powerful Deity lack? 

Obedience through suffering.

Contemplate the wonder of this for a second. Incomparably authoritative Godhood, for the first and only time in all eternity, and solely for our benefit, learned obedience by the things which He suffered.
He subjected Himself cooperatively, lovingly, to human life and all human temptation, so that He could demonstrate for us the way back to God. I believe the suffering in view encompassed not only the Cross and the misery of life in a fallen world, where hunger and illness, deformity and death ravaged frail existence, but also the endless pain of temptation itself.

And the obedience subsequently learned was in that striving against sin, not as God who cannot be tempted, but as Man, surrendering His will to the Father, and endlessly battling the enemy's enticement to rebel. Only as Man, could God learn such painful surrender. 

This is difficult for us to understand, since, though we may think we battle mightily against sin, in reality we succumb to its subtleties and covert attacks on a daily basis. For we have not yet resisted to bloodshed, striving against sin. (Hebrews 12:4, NKJV). But He has. For us. And, unimaginably, in doing so, He learned to obey. In one sense, this is a mystery as deep as the Triune Godhead itself.

How then was He perfected?

He became for us the complete and perfect remedy for sin by voluntarily offering Himself as the complete and perfect sacrifice required to take away the sin of the world. He was thus perfected as both Offering and Mediator, Man and God in mysterious tandem, Priest and King, Suffering Servant, Savior and Lord.

And one of the final contrasts between merely human priests who have weakness, and the Son who has been perfected forever, is a reminder of both the before, and after, prefigurement of God's redemptive plan, and Christ's absolute and perfect fulfillment of that plan.

Foreshadowed in the person of Melchizedek, typified in the establishment of the ritual sacrifices, and confirmed by the oath recorded by David which came a thousand years after the Mosaic Law, Jesus is the embodiment and the pinnacle of perfected redemption.

He is the only way back to the Father; the Door, the Good Shepherd, the Torn Curtain that flings open for us the way into the Holiest of All and to the Throne of Grace.

He has bridged forever that uncrossable gap between God and Man through His perfect work on the Cross of Our Salvation.

And all this sublimely revealed to us in Hebrews so that we can know for certain that the bridge into eternity during this present age will never fail.

Until one day, there will be a New Heaven and a New Earth. 

“And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away.” (Revelation 21:4, NKJV).