READ Hebrews 5–8
This reading has so much in it that my devotional book gave it two days. It goes through a long explanation of how God provided another priest, not according to the way priests normally took office. This is an illustration of how Jesus became our High Priest, even without being in the linage of priests.
Then the author of Hebrews uses this to explain that if God can change the order He established for priests (like He did by sending Melchizedek to Abraham) He can also change His covenant. His OT people were given His promises depending on their obedience to His will, but they were unable to do it. Instead, they illustrate that even if sinners desire to obey God and be godly people, their human efforts always fail. We do not have in us the ability to obey, nor is salvation dependent upon a check list; it was and still is by grace through faith.
The NT uses terms like “dull of hearing” and “unskilled in the word of righteousness” to describe the immaturity of even those who have faith. They are like children. In contrast, mature Christians “have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.” (Hebrews 5:11–14)
This faith is powerful. Those who have it cannot fall away. Once anyone has “tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age to come” falling away would mean a need to repent and believe all over again. This happened under that former covenant with its continual sacrifices for sin, but in the new covenant, Jesus was crucified once for all time. The writer of Hebrews says that unlike the OT sacrifices, we do not crucify Jesus again and again. This attitude does not “belong to salvation” as does the “full assurance of hope” that comes to those who patiently wait on God until they obtain what He promises, just as Abraham did. (6:13–15)
These chapters tell that because God is “unchangeable” in His character, and that “it is impossible for God to lie” — then when He says something, we have good reason to “hold fast to the hope set before us” — a hope in Jesus Christ who is our High Priest, and is like Melchizedek who was “without father or mother or genealogy, having neither beginning of days nor end of life, but . . . continues a priest forever.” (7:2–3)
The question is, if anyone could be perfect under the Levitical priesthood, there would be no need for another priest. But there was, after the order of Melchizedek, a change in the priesthood and a change in the law also. Jesus came “in the likeness of Melchizedek, who has become a priest, not on the basis of a legal requirement concerning bodily descent, but by the power of an indestructible life.” The former commandment was “set aside because of its weakness and uselessness (for the law made nothing perfect)” and “a better hope is introduced, through which we draw near to God.”
This better hope is Jesus, the “guarantor of a better covenant” for He does not die “but holds his priesthood permanently, because he continues forever.”
Consequently, he is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them. For it was indeed fitting that we should have such a high priest, holy, innocent, unstained, separated from sinners, and exalted above the heavens. He has no need, like those high priests, to offer sacrifices daily, first for his own sins and then for those of the people, since he did this once for all when he offered up himself. For the law appoints men in their weakness as high priests, but the word of the oath, which came later than the law, appoints a Son who has been made perfect forever. (7:11–28)
And this is the new covenant that God made:
I will put my laws into their minds, and write them on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And they shall not teach, each one his neighbor and each one his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest. For I will be merciful toward their iniquities, and I will remember their sins no more.
This new covenant makes the first one obsolete because human effort, even sincere human effort, cannot save our souls. Only Jesus can do that, and He does it by a personal relationship with Him. Because He died for me, I live in Him. Because He lives in me, I know Him and His laws are in my heart. and by the power of the Holy Spirit, I am able to be what God wants me to be.
Sometimes I listen to the rules and try to do things in my own strength, but that is obsolete and will eventually vanish as God works to make me and all His children more and more like Jesus. This is the amazing truth of the Gospel and the reason God gave a new High Priest to intercede for sinners!
Such love! Such wonderful love!
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