A real-time blog: The Letter to the Hebrews - 6
Premiership football teams in trouble look for a new manager. Each one, José Mourinho, Ferguson, and now Pep Guardiola, Arteta and others transform their team…often backed up with a few dollars!
The writer to the Hebrews, searching a round for a suitable new manager for his flat-lining believers – ‘by this time you should be teachers, but I can only give you milk not solid food’ – lands on Melchizedek.
Melchizedek? Who? Chapter 7 explains all, I’ll summarise key points below:
‘Jesus has become High Priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek’ Heb 6 v 20
Melchizedek (King of Righteousness) was King of Salem (Salem means ‘peace’) without genealogy, having neither beginning nor end, like the Son of God, he remains as a priest forever.
So, Jesus, King of Righteousness and King of Peace, the Alpha and Omega, Beginning and End, is the true High Priest.
In the Old Testament, the High Priest entered the Most Holy Place, known as the Holy of Holies, in the temple once a year, which was only an earthly copy of the heavenly original (Heb 8 v5)
But Jesus, the true High Priest, carried his own blood as the Lamb of God into the true holiest place in Heaven to secure our salvation:
‘By one offering He has perfected forever those who are being sanctified’ 10 v 12
Being ‘in Christ’ we have become like Him, united with Christ and we have become, as Peter wrote, ‘partakers of the divine nature’ or, as my friend Chris Welch puts it, ‘Melchizedek particles’, caught up as we are in the High Priest according to the eternal order of Melchizedek.
‘…having boldness to enter the Holiest by the blood of Jesus…having a High Priest over the house of God let us draw near with faith’ Heb 10 v19f
Unlike the previous ‘orders’, the Aaronic and Levitical priests, who only visited the Holiest, it has become where we abide. It is here that we ‘move on to maturity’ dependent entirely, as was our initial salvation, on Jesus’ High Priestly ministry, and not our effort or ‘dead works’.
The rest of Hebrews is written assuming that the recipients of the letter have woken up and realised that falling back under the old Levitical priesthood, temple worship, the Law of Moses will not make us like Christ.
The illustrations the writer employs from this point on in the letter all describe forward motion and the future:
Faith to run the race
Brotherly love to continue
Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever
For here we have no enduring city but we seek the one to come
As ‘Melchizedek particles’ we are moving on. Like Jesus said, ‘The wind blows where it wishes…you cannot tell where it comes from or where it goes…so it is with those who are born of the Spirit’.