Clough Hebrews Lesson 37
Messianic Fulfillment of Melchizedek’s Priesthood – 7:10-20
We’re on the overall section in Hebrews is
from 3:1 to
So those are the three parts to Christ’s character. All three of those parts of Christ’s character are designed to peck away at the natural tendency of believers to give up. All three are designed to focus the believer from his problems and from himself back onto the person of Christ. Notice particularly this tendency in this epistle; when a man in the first century went to exhort another believer he did not encourage subjective experience, he encouraged observation and preoccupation with Christ in heaven and Christ’s ministry there. You will not find in the pages of the New Testament what you so often find all over Christendom today, emphasis on feeling, emphasis on some ecstatic experience, emphasis on something else. That simply is not part of the logic of the New Testament.
Now in Hebrews 7 we come to the last chapter which emphasizes this everlasting nature. Remember we dealt with Christ as being faithful, then there was a warning passage; then Christ was sympathetic, then there was a warning passage. Now we come to the third characteristic in chapter 7, Jesus Christ is the everlasting priest. Then in chapter 7 we broke it down further, verses 1-3 gave you the rules of the ballgame. And those three verses of chapter 7 teach us how he interpreted Scripture, that is how the author of this epistle interpreted Scripture. Very important because this author, more than any other one, is the one to go to to find out how to read the Old Testament for yourself. You ought to learn how he interprets the Old Testament, then when you see how he interprets then you can train yourself to look at the Old Testament through his glasses.
Now the thing that we learned about this, his method of interpreting the Old Testament was mainly that he put great stress on the selectivity of the Holy Spirit. In other words, out of all possible things that the Holy Spirit could have picked up, all possible facts in past ancient history, the Holy Spirit, as a matter of fact, only picked up, maybe one here and one over here and one over here, left all the rest of it to go by the board. Now this author studies why the Holy Spirit picked certain fact and left other facts, and then he devises the only time, and this is the only time you’ll ever see this, and those of you who have studied logic will kind of put your brakes on when you first hear it, there is a legitimate argument from silence. Usually in logic that is wrong and the reason the argument from silence is wrong is because you’re arguing over an infinite array of data. From that reason an argument from silence is wrong, but when you have an array of material that has been considered by one mind, in this case the omniscient mind of the Holy Spirit, and out of all the data He deliberately selects some and discards most, then positively every fact recorded in the Old Testament becomes a source of information. And negatively every fact left out of the Old Testament becomes a source of information.
So in this once case, which is an exception to the rule and this author builds an entire doctrine of Christ’s everlasting priesthood upon the argument from silence, that is, the Holy Spirit, in verse 3, the Holy Spirit did not see fit to record Melchizedek’s real father, his real mother, and his genealogy. It doesn’t mean Melchizedek in history didn’t have a mother, father, or genealogy. It just meant the Holy Spirit didn’t see fit to record it. It was in the pile of discarded material, and therefore, because the Holy Spirit so selected His material, verses 1-3 teach us and introduce us to the theme of the chapter and that is that Melchizedek is an everlasting priest.
Does anyone recall what Old Testament passage he keeps referring to over and over and over in this passage? The most famous psalm, it is the only psalm in the whole Psalter that is unique, all the other psalms fit together in classification except this one. Psalm 110, that psalm occurs on the lips of Jesus Christ and on the lips of the New Testament authors because in Jesus day, as at Qumran, as at other places, Psalm 110 was considered the Messianic Psalm. And it’s very, very… it was written originally by David but it has a lot and this Psalm has been quoted or will be quoted when we finish tonight, we will have seen this psalm, particularly one verse of it, verse 4, we will see Psalm 110:4 quoted and commented on six times, so obviously he thinks a lot of Psalm 110:4. And because he has studied Psalm 110 can anyone remember the passage in Genesis that describes Melchizedek’s meeting of Abraham, which now this author is interpreting through the eyes of David in Psalm 110? Genesis 14. Learn to kind of know you way around, you should be able to think your way through the Bible, backwards and forwards so you can pick out these things.
Okay, that’s Genesis 14; now notice the progression that we have in Scripture, God is a God who progressively teaches. He taught something in Genesis 14, He later expanded it in Psalm 110. By the way, what’s the date of Genesis 14, not the date of its writing but the date of the event that’s written about, roughly? When did Abraham live? 2000 BC. When did David live, roughly? 1000 BC. And now we have Hebrews 7 that develops it and this author is plus, say 70 AD. So it shows that in increments of a thousand years God has seen fit to expand the revelation. But you notice how infrequent the expansion is. God does not reveal Himself in every generation, He only picks certain times, certain places to do it.
That’s been the first three verses; then we dealt with the second part of chapter 7 having dealt with the first three verses we finished last time dealing with verses 4-10 and could summarize what we found there. What is the general truth that could be summarized. [someone answers] Okay, the argument of verses 4-7 is that Melchizedek is greater or better than the Levitical priest. The peculiar thing, though, about this is how did the man prove it? The proof takes your breath away. What was his underlying assumption that he kept working on. [someone answers] Okay, the deal was that you have Abraham here at 2000 BC meeting Melchizedek. In 1400 BC, later than that… well, all right, that’s when you have the Levitical priesthood begin to function under the Mosaic Law, so you have a 600 year lag time. Levi was born about 1800, because he was the son of Jacob and there’s a 200 year gap. This author claims that Levi was inside Abraham when Abraham made his choice. And we generalize that, remember we wound up the class last week by showing that this is true of Jacob and Esau in Romans 9, it is true of ourselves in Adam. Why it is true we do not know all the reasons why it is true, God hasn’t seen fit to tell us why it is true. He just simply tells us that all of us in some way participated with Adam. How we did it is beyond me and beyond the theologians of the Church. There are a few theories about it, one is called the federal headship theory that was promoted by the Dutch Reformed Church and the other is the Participation theory of Augustine. Those are two theories that were put forward in church history but they’re just attempts to try to account for this strange thing but it’s all through Scripture. It had something also to do with the 3rd and 4th generation thing, how as you as parents, you’re making decisions that affect your children. So why this is so, again we don’t know. We just know that it is so.
All right, now we go this evening to Hebrews 7:11-19 and this continues the argument one step further. Verses 4-10 showed the superiority of the Melchizedekian priesthood to the Aaronic priesthood. Verses 11-19 build upon that and simply equate Jesus Christ with the Melchizedek priesthood which is greater than the Aaronic priesthood. Then since Jesus Christ is equal to the Melchizedekian priesthood that makes Jesus Christ greater than the Aaronic priesthood. Since the Aaronic priesthood is under the Old Testament, that makes Jesus Christ than the Law. So that’s the argument, that’s logic of the argument that he’s going to use. The reason why this should be of interest to you as a Christian is that you’ve heard this before, that the Law is obsolete, but you’ve always heard it from Paul’s perspective. You’ve always heard it argued the way Paul argues it in Romans, that the Law couldn’t, the moral part of the Law just couldn’t produce in the sinner, in the fallen creature, the moral part of the Law couldn’t produce morality, or the righteous part of the Law couldn’t produce righteousness, and through that, in Romans Paul deduced that the Law is finished. Christ is the end of the Law to them that believe, or Christ the righteousness of the Law.
Now that was one way, but this author comes to the same conclusion Paul does but he’s taking a different route. Instead or arguing the way Paul does on the basis of the moral side of the Law, this man in these verses argues on the ceremonial part of the Law. Paul said the moral standards of the Law couldn’t be fulfilled by the flesh, the Law was powerless, therefore the Law can’t be the final say and so the Law is to be junked. Now this next author comes along and he points out that the ceremonial Law couldn’t solve the problem either because the ceremonial Law couldn’t take away sin and a number of other reasons, therefore that too has to be put away.
Now the only reason we make a big point of this is because some of you have been brought up to think that parts of the Mosaic Law still apply. And when you go to mix these two together you come up with a mismatch. Let me just say at this point that no part of the Mosaic Law is in operation today; none of the Ten Commandments in their original form operate today; the entire Law as a system is done away with. Now it’s the usual thing, people say well, but the Ten Commandments still operate today. But if you look in the New Testament it’s precisely the Ten Commandments that Paul says he’s not under. In Romans 7, if the Law said thou shalt not covet, so it’s precisely the Ten Commandments part of the Law that Paul denies operate.
All right, on the one hand we’ve got this thing that says boom, the Law is over with, no Law, no Mosaic Law, yet on the other hand we have the obvious paradox that we are under a law, we’re not lawless, we’re not antinomian. So then where do the laws of the New Testament come from? It comes in under a new covenant. This is the old covenant, this is the new covenant. Don’t anyone ever let you say there’s no law in the New Testament, there is, there’s the law of Christ and the law of Christ is a total system. Now that’s where people get off; visualize the law as a jigsaw puzzle, where all the pieces interlock. You know what happens, sometimes when you’re lucky you can pick up a jigsaw puzzle by the edge and it won’t fall apart. Imagine what would happen if one piece gets loose as you start to pick the jigsaw puzzle up? It all falls apart.
Now, in the Old Testament visualize the Law as a system, with all the individual commandments as pieces of the jigsaw puzzle and you lift it up like this; when you life it up as a unit it picks all the pieces up. All right, when God says that the Law is made of none effect, null and void, He means the whole system. If it were not replaced by the New Testament epistles we would be antinomian, that is, without law. But the New Testament comes along and gives us new directions under the new covenant arrangement with the body of Christ. And it turns out, for example, out of the Ten Commandments in the Old Testament nine are rephrased in New Testament in part of the Law. So basically yeah, we have as our will what the Ten Commandments say with one exception, that’s the Sabbath. The reason for the Sabbath not being repeated is because the Sabbath wasn’t a commandment in the Old Testament, the Sabbath keeping was basically a sign of the covenant, if the covenant is gone, the sign’s gone and therefore that commandment is not carried over to the New Testament. But all the other commandments are moral commandments, not sign commandments and so they’re carried over to the New Testament. Plus the fact that you have 613+ commandments in the Old Testament, many of these carried over as principles.
The problem becomes, can we use these 613 commands in the Old Testament. Sunday morning I showed you at least some ways you could do it and that is that we have over hygienic laws, quarantine laws, sanitation laws, economic laws, banking laws, laws of personal property, laws of criminal justice and so on. There are many laws back here that God isn’t requiring believers to follow, they’re not an issue today as far as God are concerned, but since these laws represent the administration in one point in history of a perfectly righteous ruler and we want to rule ourselves, since the millennium hasn’t come yet we don’t have a perfectly righteousness ruler and we don’t have revelation going on today because the canon is closed, and the revelation isn’t going to begin until the middle of the tribulation and when the revelation starts again and you have living prophets walking around, their words become the inerrant additions to the book of Revelation. Then at that point, then we have a new law code promulgated which will deal with the details of banking, property and so on, and if you don’t follow it then you’re going to get clobbered.
But in this period of time God hasn’t laid
forth absolute laws in all those areas; He only laid out principles. So how do we use these laws back here? We use them as general wisdom
principles. In other words, it’s the
idea, look, in a participating democracy we all make political decisions, to
use one illustration. That means that
you, as a voter, operate in part as a leader.
Now if you’re going to exercise your citizenship responsibility wisely
the obvious thing to do is to go back and find out how God, when He was a
leader, ran His affair. So that’s how
you use the Mosaic Law, you go back there as an example of how God did it, at
one place, at one time in history. Then
you try to convert those principles of wisdom over to here, but it’s not law.
[someone says something] No because the death penalty wasn’t part of
the old covenant, it pre-dated it.
Capital punishment is not part of the Mosaic Law, it’s part of the
Noahic Covenant. Remember to get your covenants in line here; we have creation,
we have the fall, the flood, and we have the Noahic Covenant. The Noahic
Covenant established divine institution number four which is the government and
capital punishment. The sentence on
Then after that, to some men, Israel, He made the old covenant, and Gentiles are not responsible to keep the old covenant, it was never made with Gentiles, but the principle of the old covenant, that’s where you pick up the [can’t understand word], that’s all, for operating. If God did reign obviously, say in the millennial kingdom when He reigns over all the nations, many of the law codes in the future will be very much… will remind believers very much of the Mosaic Law Code. There will be capital punishment in the millennium, you don’t have to worry about all the left wing sociologists taking over. There will be definite capital punishment because that’s the way God rules, and there will be a military in the millennium but it will be run by God, men won’t have to go through the war-making machine, the swords into plow shears. But Jesus Christ will still rule, just because there’s no military under man’s command there still will be a military, that’s how Christ enforces the law.
Let’s look at Hebrews 7:11, now a little point for everyone, particularly those of you who are taking Greek, when you see an “if” in the Bible you ought get used to writing a little note out in the margin and the note consists of either 1, 2 or 3, that’s all you have to do because there are three kinds of “if” in the Greek, actually 4 but 3 for our purposes is fine, and when you get to the “if” just ask yourself, is it the number one kind of if, the number two kind of if or the number three kind of if. You say I never heard of 1, 2, 3 kind of ifs. You’ve used them yourself but you’ve never distinguished them. The first kind of if, number one kind is if and I presuppose it’s so. Now this can be real or just hypothetical, if and it’s clearly so, that it’s cloudy, dot, dot, dot, dot. Now if the sun was shining tonight, then dot, dot, dot, dot. Both are first class because both, one is an actual one, one is hypothetical but the force of the “if” is to establish a real condition in your mind. If this is so; that’s the first class condition; most ifs are first class in the New Testament.
The second kind of if is if and it isn’t so. Now we, in English, don’t make this distinction but they did in the Greek, fortunately. And if it’s a second class if they clearly are presupposing if, and I know it’s not true but … boom. That’s a second class if, it’s a presupposed negative, if and it’s not so, but let me go on.
The third class is if, maybe it’s so and maybe it isn’t so. This is a pure condition; the first class and third class are your most common, you have some second classes. The first class again, if and it’s so. Second class, if and it isn’t so. Third class, if and it may be so or it may not be so. It’s very simple. Now the second class “if” is used in verse 11.
“If,” and it isn’t so, so you can mark a little 2 down by your “if.” “If and it isn’t so, perfection were by the Levitical priesthood,” in other words, the author is saying I don’t even want you to entertain the possibility, but let’s just see what would happen, “if perfection were by the Levitical priesthood.” Now the little word “perfection” is important, teleiosis, when you see this ending on the ending of a Greek word, this is sis, when sis ends a noun in the Greek it’s a clue to something. If it ends in ma, m-a, it’s a clue to something else, and here’s the difference. When a noun ends in ma it means the content of the action, for example, somebody speaks a message, ma would be what he speaks, but if you had the word to speak with sis on the end, it would be the act of speaking, so that little ending tells you a lot about the force of the passage. If it ends in ma, it’s the content of the action; if it ends in sis it is the action.
Now this one, and this is why it’s critical, in this case perfection is teleiosis. Now knowing what we do about that distinction, can someone guess why or what is under consideration here when he says the act of perfection not the content of perfection. Distinguish what it would be. I want you to kind of engage here with the text. [someone answers] Okay, and it would be action of being perfect. Now just using common sense here for a minute, backing off and not worrying about getting all fogged up and getting all tense and tight and figure out what are we doing, just back off a minute and ask yourself a simple question. When do you normally think of perfection, in the present or the future? Future, okay; I hope nobody thinks of it in the present, if you do ask your husband or your wife. All right, so it’s an act that’s in the future.
Now his argument is very simple, even though in the King James particularly it looks very, very involved the logic of this argument is very, very simple. He’s saying now look, if it is true that somewhere along the line the fourth quarter is going to end and the Levites are going to ring the buzzer, then there isn’t any more game, right? If the last act in sanctification… here’s the various acts of sanctification, say, and in this case it’s national sanctification, but you can think of it as individual, it won’t take you out; here are all the acts of sanctification and here is eternity. Now some place along the line in your life is the last act, in the sanctification process. The last act for Christ was when He died on the cross. Sanctification is finished there, it’s not going on now, Christ is not being sanctified today. We are, He’s not. So somewhere along the semi incident set of points there’s one last point. Now that’s the fifth, that’s that final act and he’s saying that’s what we’re interested in. We’re interested in tracing this thing all the way to its logical conclusion. Now if the Levites are going to be the ones to make that last act then certain things should follow.
Now why does this verse prove, like we said
months ago, why does it prove this epistle could never have been written to
Gentiles. It’s kind of obvious. [someone answers] All right, what is he
apparently getting at, apparently some people thought the Levitical priesthood
could give perfection. Would there be much danger of the Gentiles thinking that
the Levitical priesthood was going to give perfection, they probably wouldn’t
even know what a Levitical priesthood was.
You know, what’s that. So
obviously this epistle isn’t written to Gentiles, even though some modern
scholars think so.
“If
therefore perfection” or “the last act of perfection were through the Levitical
priesthood,” skip the parenthesis for a moment, and watch the rest of the
logic, “what further need was there that there another priest should rise after
the order of Melchizedek, and not be called after the order of Aaron.” Now how
does the apostle know that there has to be another priest after the order of
Melchizedek? How does he know that? Here’s where he’s pulling in Psalm
110:4. See how much he meditated on the
Psalm; 110:4 teaches what? Psalm 110:4 is teaching… let’s just turn
there, Psalm 110:4, written by David, of all people who was of what tribe?
Then in verse 4 David is talking about himself as a priest, “The LORD has sworn, and will not repent, thou art a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.” Now but he’s not of Levi, so he’s talking… since Psalm 110:4 can’t be fulfilled in David… why can’t it be fulfilled in David? [someone answers] What are you going to do about Jesus here, it’s the order, but look, what is happening in Psalm 110 wasn’t literally fulfilled in David; David came part way to that but you can’t argue that Psalm 110 was ever fulfilled in David, it’d be totally exaggerated. [someone says something] No. Psalm 110 can’t be fulfilled in David because its content is too glorious. David never fulfilled this role. So Psalm 110 is one of those quirk Psalms that doesn’t appear to have any contemporary applications. That’s why it’s such an unusual Psalm.
All the other Psalms you can place them, at least they have
pertinence to David personally; this one really doesn’t. Only one way that this
has pertinence to David. What city in
the world was Melchizedek’s city?
Apparently
But this is future, “you are a priest forever,” going on and on and on and on and on, “after the order of Melchizedek. Well, if the King of the Jews is going to be a priest after the order of Melchizedek then obviously you’ve got a problem because this introduces a new priesthood. Remember, new, the Levites are considered the old. So the author of Hebrews says aha, Psalm 110 proves what about the Levitical priesthood, that’s there’s a permanence associated with it or not? It’s scheduled for replacement. To paraphrase [can’t understand word] it’s a planned obsolescence, God has planned obsolescence under the Law, that the Levitical priesthood is going to become obsolete.
Now let’s turn back to Hebrews 7, that’s the reason he’s arguing, if the last act of perfection would come through the Levites, then why would it be necessary to prophecy about a new priesthood, because when will the need for a priesthood basically be... it’ll be culminated any way in the last act, the last act of sanctification. Apparently the priesthood is needed beyond that point, we don’t know why. At least we know the function of the priest, up to that point, is needed.
Then in that little parenthesis, and here’s the little hidden deal that he puts in his argument that comes squirting out the end and you don’t notice it until it gets down to the end if you fail to look carefully at what’s in between those parenthesis. This is the thing that kind of sneaks into the argument, and then you wonder why all of a sudden he comes out with [can’t understand phrase] “(for under it the people received the law,)” how did the people receive the Law under the priesthood. Anybody know what the priests did in the Old Testament, what most of the Levites did. Don’t say the served in the tabernacle, most of them didn’t. The priests were the Bible teachers of the time. One-third of the national budget went into Bible teaching, at least that was the theory nobody ever followed it, but one-third of the national budget went into the Levites and the Levites taught Scripture. That’s one thing they did, the taught the Word. What else did they do? Can anybody think back to the Deuteronomy series. We’ll obviously put served in the tabernacle because everyone thinks of that one. What else did the do? [someone answers] They apparently did sacrifices at other places than the tabernacle sometimes but another major area. [someone answers] They sung, I forgot about that one, the Levitical choir, they were the musicians of the time. Another one? [someone answers] They read the Law. One other area? [someone answers] All right, the high priest had the ephod so there you had the yes/no type revelation, which is a picture of conscience today, relatively speaking, not absolute. Another area? [someone answers] They were a go between.
But what I was thinking was a whole other area and that was they administered the Law. Every time there was a trial the civil officials would do the trying but the Levite would always be standing there as a representative of Jehovah. Remember the trials of the unsolved crime, they always would go out in the field, there’d be an unsolved crime and something had to be done. Well, who would do the “something that had to be done?” The Levites. Can anybody think why was the presence, just the presence, he didn’t enter into the legal semantics of the trial, the Levite would just quietly stand there and he’d have to be present during a trial. [someone answers] All right, and why was it so critical that God be represented during a trial? God’s Law.
Now we have, fortunately an extra-Biblical illustration of this so
this is not somebody reading something into the Old Testament. The Hittite Empire operated the same way.
When they had the suzerainty vassal treaties and there would be trials going on
in the vassal country, every one of the court areas had to have a soldier from
the nearest garrison, and the soldier from the Hittite garrison would not do
the trying, he wouldn’t be the judge, he wouldn’t be the prosecutor, he wouldn’t
be the defense attorney, he wouldn’t have anything to do with the trial except
he’d just sit there. And the point was that he was the representative of the
Hittite king because in his domain his word was law. And thus, in Yahweh’s domain His Word is law
and it must have a representative there, so that’s the Levites function, we’ll
say as a court witness, not a witness in the crime but a witness of the trial
itself. And by the way, that’s why it
all got screwed up in the New Testament when Jesus Christ was tried by what it
amounted to, the latter day Levites.
It goes on, Hebrews 7:13, “For he of whom these things are being spoken,” now where are the
“things being spoken,” where in the Bible is he talking about? Psalm 110:4, so in verse 13, “he of whom
these things are spoken” in Psalm 110, “pertains to another tribe, of which no
man gave attendance at the altar. [14, “For it is evident that our Lord sprang out of
[13] “For he of whom these things are being spoken” has “pertain to another tribe partake,” that’s that word we went round and round that one night on, partake, he has partaken of another tribe and obviously it’s not a priestly tribe, verse 14. And also verse 14, another little point that comes out that is of interest, should be to you. Some of you have been around long enough or had a good thorough training in your BC days to know who supposedly wrote the Pentateuch as taught by most religious professors. I don’t mean professors who are religious, I mean professors of religion. [someone answers] JEDP, that’s why I had to name my fourth son something other than beginning with “P”. It would be unfitting for a fundamentalist to have the initials of his sons JEDP. But JEDP represents schools, nobody really knows who these people were, nobody has ever found a manuscript sewed together where “J” wrote his deal and glued it on to “E,” there’s no manuscript, that’s the first thing you can always be confident of in a debate or a discussion, no one is ever going to come to you with manuscript evidence for this theory. There is no manuscript evidence. JEDP are people who wrote from different theological perspectives. “J” & “E” assembled their materials between 900 and 800 BC. They just took the Psalms and so on and put them together. “D is the [can’t understand phrase], the Reformation under Josiah when they found the book of the Law, according to this theory they didn’t find the book of the Law, there was a conspiracy by the temple priests and they made up the book of the Law and then came to Josiah and said hey, look, we found this. And it was just a simple deception. And then “P” were the priests, probably Ezekiel among them, operating during the exile. Now when did the exile end; let’s get some dates here and I want to show you something. It’s easy to remember, it began in 586 and lasted 70 years it’s got to end in 516.
Okay, so 500 BC is when the thing all came together. Only one big problem with this, Genesis 1 and 2 were written by “P,” particularly Genesis 1 rather, Genesis 1 was written by “P,” so Genesis 1 wasn’t put in its final form until 500 BC, according to this school. When did Moses live? 1400. Does anyone see a little discrepancy. Obviously Moses couldn’t have written the Pentateuch, but if you look at this verse, does it occur to you what the author has just said in verse 14. He’s simply affirmed the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, and particularly is this important because in the liberal view the last part of the Bible written was the “P” group, the priestly group. All the passages that had to do with the Levites were the last things written, according to the liberals. Now this guy is talking about those “P” sections of the Bible, in particular he’s talking about them, and so he says immediately, “Moses said.” Now either this guy is wrong in which case we can just simply… we’ve started to unravel a sweater and like the yarn is going to keep on raveling on you and you can’t stop it, or you’re going to have to tighten up and reject, even the first tendency to pull off a piece of the yarn, which means you can’t allow any part of the Bible to become errant or it all becomes errant before you can turn around. So this is another evidence in verse 14, one of these side points but important points to show that these men clearly affirmed the Mosaic authorship. And since they were 2000 years closer to their subjects than the professors that teach in the classroom, I dare say that they were probably a little bit better informed.
That’s what’s wrong with the charismatic movement. The charismatic movement is making a very dangerous tenancy of denying the Trinity and you can’t deny any more fundamental doctrine than that, by making the Holy Spirit the center of attention, and that is contrary to orthodoxy. For 500 years the Church fought about this problem, fought against it the Docetics, fought against the Sabellians, fought against the Arians, and yet we have people today bound to repeat this same old argument that we’ve gone through for 500 years. It’s the Son who is the center, not the Father and not the Holy Spirit.
That’s why in 1 Peter 1:11, “Searching what, or what manner of time the Spirit of” whom? “of Christ which was in them did signify, when it” or “He testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ and the glory that should follow.” And here you have God the Son functioning, obviously through the Holy Spirit, we’re not denying the Father and the Holy Spirit working, but the emphasis here is on the Son. Jesus Christ was patiently revealing Himself century after century after century and now you get the background for when in the Gospels Christ walked up to the Pharisees and He confronts them, and the lay people who are standing around, maybe 10-15 feet away as Jesus Christ talks to these Pharisees, they walk away, and over and over in the Gospel narratives what is the words that these people walk away with? We never heard anyone teach with such authority. Well of course He could teach with such authority, He’s the one that wrote the Old Testament. And this is what dawned on these people, suddenly there’s something about the way Jesus Christ taught the Word; it sounded like it somehow came from Him, and the whole Gospels are the story, well of course it came from Him. He’s the author.
All right, so here is another one of those little remarkable things that if you read fast you miss it. This is the advantage of reading the Bible slowly. [someone says something] The Holy Spirit did set forth the Scriptures, I’ll point that out Sunday morning, but when the Holy Spirit was functioning, even when the Holy Spirit functioned what was He always doing? Glorifying Christ and the doctrine of the Trinity says when you have person of the Godhead working you’ve got the other two there. I’m not trying to teach that the Father and the Holy Spirit weren’t there when they were doing it, it’s just the point, this author is emphasizing of the three persons that were there working, look at the Son. That’s the point.
“For he testifies,” and then he quotes what? Psalm 110:4, that’s only the 6th time that thing has been quoted, “Thou art a priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek.” Verse 18, “For there is verily a disannulling of the commandment going before for the weakness and unprofitableness thereof.” Now the commandment should be “the going before” should be, you can translate “previous” I don’t know why they put that there, just “the previous commandment, a disannulling,” now here’s something interesting, the word “disannul,” let me just comment on the power of this word. “Disannul” is a word that means a total termination of authority, it’s a very, very strong word. To get an idea of the strength of this word turn to Hebrews 9:26, it’s used there and you can see how forceful it is when it occurs in 9:26, “For then must He often have suffered since the foundation of the world. But now once, in the end of the world, He has appeared to disannul sin by the sacrifice of Himself.” So you see, it’s quite obviously powerful.
Now here’s a quotation from an author who has done an extensive word stud of this word disannul, and I just cite this for you, this would be more of a way of visualizing something, maybe picture it more crisply in your mind what’s being disannulled. By the way, what is being disannulled here? The whole what? The whole Old Testament Law or the old covenant, that’s being disannulled, and make sure that you’re not one of these people that says well, yeah but I’ll just kind of keep the Ten Commandments around. Huh-un you don’t take parts of the Law and hold them and then discard the rest. The Law is like that jigsaw puzzle, it’s all interlocking. You can’t pull one piece without the whole thing falling apart. If you’re going to get one commandment of the Law you’ve got to chuck the whole thing. So if the ceremonial law went down the drain, the moral law went down the drain, and of course it was immediately replaced by another set but the set itself and everything about it was disannulled.
Now to show you the force of this, Dr. F. F. Bruce, who is one of
the great New Testament scholars today, has commented on this. He says: E. K. Simpson points out in that in
the Hellenistic sense of an act of super session or setting aside it appears in
its technical use by the Alexandrian grammarian to signify the [sounds like: oh
bal eye zing] of a suspected passage that’s counted spurious and therefore to
be expunged from the author’s text.” Now
what he’s talking about is that the Alexandrian, by the way, anybody know where
the city of
By the way, did they have typewriters? No, they had long hand copying which means they made mistakes. And so they would go on and they would have some manuscript like this and maybe this is the 40th copy of something and they’d come across, maybe a passage there that was questionable, and if they doubted that it was part of the original they would excise it, meaning they would rewrite the text, they’d stop writing the manuscript and they’d start again, put the three lines on here, then they’d stop, they’d put a blank, put it in, and they’d pull the whole thing out in the margin and they’d put this sign, it looked like this, if you do textual criticism you’ll see it, and then they put this sign out on the side, and when they did that they’d use this word, disannul the passage, in other words, we’ve removed the passage and put if off to the side. Now that’s the word that’s used here for the Law. So you obviously see the force in it, in other words, just get it off the page completely out, it’s just annulled.
Let’s finish with Hebrews 7:19, and that’ll be the end of the section. “For the law made nothing perfect,” it means it could not perfect anything, “but the bringing in of a better hope did; by the which we now” present tense, “are drawing near unto God.” Now is this to say that Old Testament saints couldn’t draw near to God. No. Let’s look at this again. Under the Old Testament economy, when someone accepted Christ, he was put… this becomes the top circle, here’s the Abrahamic Covenant, which gave him what? Seed, part of the eternal seed, land, worldwide blessing. That’s promissory. Is that his depending on how well he keeps the Law? Old Testament saint. No, no matter how bad he is, if he’s been promised that and he’s an elect one, that is his, by grace. Now the Law, down here, said if you obey Me, then you will have the land. It promised that land too but on a different basis, conditional basis. If you’ll be a good boy you can receive the blessing. Now obviously nobody was a good boy and so obviously on the basis of the Law nobody received the blessing and that’s the point of verse 19. “The Law made nothing perfect, but it did bring in a hope and the hope, of course, is the work of the Lord Jesus Christ and he’ll explain this “drawing near” again.
Now I want to conclude by showing you why this is important. Some of you as we’ve gone through these
verses tonight may wonder, well, this is very interesting, but what’s this got
to do with the Christian life. If you
turn to Hebrews
So the whole point of the Old Testament law, basically all along the big theme song was you can’t draw near to God, you can’t draw to near to God, you can’t draw near to God, you have to stay away from God, stay out of His way because it was teaching the holiness of God. Now the “throne” of grace in verse 16 says that curtain has been breeched and when you pray as a believer today you can come directly to the presence of God. Not on your own merit but on the merit of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Now this has had and has two powerful influences. What are the influences of this doctrine? What have been the influences of this doctrine practically? It has had two major areas down through history. The first major application of this doctrine is unfolding, that is, the high priesthood of Christ, the Melchizedekian of Christ, that doctrine has been the life blood of Christian stability. Where Christians crack up mentally and have tremendous psychological problems you are watching a person that still has not understood the doctrine of the high priesthood of Christ. I don’t care how much of the Word they can quote, and they can tell you, and they read the Bible every day, they have never grasped that they have a high priest in the presence of God the Father pleading for them.
So the first effect of this doctrine throughout history in the Church has been it has always put backbone of confidence in individual believers when they know that before God their hands are clean, regardless of what they have done in their life. No matter how society may judge them, no matter how many gross things they may have done, the point is that they have a high priest and to deny that a person’s guilt has been solved by Christ’s work is to completely throw it right in His face; it is essentially saying that Jesus Christ is not doing His job.
So, doctrine of the priesthood of Christ is the basis for the removal of personal guilt. See, human viewpoint psychotherapy today does not deal with guilt as guilt but merely as a kind of feeling against social pressure or something like that. Psychotherapy can’t remove guilt. It can only mask it or change it, so long-range programs in psychotherapy are a waste of your money and a waste of your family’s money. You do not need and no one needs long-range psychotherapy. The only time you need something like that, if you’ve got an organic difficult and you need some chemicals to restore the chemical balance of your brain or you don’t get exercise and your brain is all screwed up because you don’t take of your body, then you need… but you need a doctor and a doctor can that but you do not need psychotherapy. What you do need to do is learn about Jesus Christ’s priesthood and everything about that priesthood that you can and then you can walk around and you don’t have to worry about somebody saying oh [can’t understand words]. Tough. So and so is under the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ and Christ pleads his case and that’s all he needs; that’s it.
[someone says something] Yes, and that’s the second point I’m coming
to and that point is that the second place this doctrine has had profound
influences of history is in the Reformation.
The collision between Protestants and Catholics is whether the Pope has
had the priesthood conveyed to him. Or
whether the priesthood was conveyed into the hands of Christ alone. Here is again a commentary by John Calvin on
this particular verse and in it he has this paragraph. Remember, the John Calvin commentary to the
Hebrews historically was directed to the most mighty and most serene prince,
Sigmund Augustus, by the grace of God, the King of Poland, the Grand Duke of
Lithuania,
Calvin writes this: “Moreover, the impiety of the Pope is extremely arrogant, who has inserted this article in his credentials that he himself is now invested with the same authority as Aaron formerly had, because the Law and also the high priest has been transferred to him.” Notice that, the claim of the Pope that the Aaronic priesthood, the Aaronic, not the Melchizedekian, the Aaronic priesthood has been transferred to him. That makes him the vicar of Jesus Christ. But the whole point of Hebrews is that that priesthood has not been transferred, it’s been terminated. “We see what the apostle says; he maintains that ceremonies have cease since the time when Christ came forth with a command to proclaim the New Covenant.
It is, then, absurd, hence to conclude that anything has been transferred to the ministers of Christ, for Christ Himself is alone contrasted here with Moses and Aaron. Under what pretext, then, can the antichrist arrogate to himself any such authority.” He didn’t take a course in PR relationships. “If I do not, indeed, speak now for the sake of disproving so gross an arrogant, but it is worthwhile to remind readers of this sacrilegious audacity that they may know that this notorious servant of the servant of Christ wholly disregards the honor of his master and boldly mangles the Scriptures that he may have some cloak for his own tyranny.”
Now those are the words of John Calvin and you can obviously see why all Europe got in an immediate uproar but please notice the uproar… in order to be in the uproar, by the way, it’s a testimony, to be in an uproar over the Reformation at least requires intelligence, you had to know what the issue was, see, most people don’t even know what the issue was. So you couldn’t have an uproar today, and everybody thinks oh, isn’t it great, we can’t have uproars today over a silly religious question. What it means is we’re too stupid to know what the religious questions were, that’s why we’re not having an uproar, we’re just having uproars over other things. But we are so degenerate that we couldn’t understand the whole issue of the papacy versus Hebrews. But the Melchizedekian priesthood is your source of freedom, you just remember that; all freedom goes when you have your right to God interfered with. Father, we thank you.