OUR GREAT MELCHIZEDEK
HEB. vii.
There is a symmetrical dignity all its own in the seventh chapter of the
Hebrews. I recollect listening, now many years ago, to a characteristic
exposition of it by the late beloved and venerated Edward Hoare, in a
well-known drawing-room at Cromer--a "Bible Reading" full alike of
mental stimulus and spiritual force. He remarked, among many other
things, that the chapter might be described as a sermon, divided under
three headings, on the text of Psalm cx. 4. This division and its
significance he proceeded to develope. The chapter opens with a
preamble, a statement of the unique phenomena which surround, in the
narrative of Genesis, the name and person of Melchizedek. Then, starting
from the presupposition, to whose truth the Lord Himself is so
abundantly a witness, that the Old Testament is alive everywhere with
intimations of the Christ, and remembering that in the Psalm in
question a mysterious import is explicitly assigned to Melchizedek, the
Writer proceeds to his discourse. Its theme is the primacy of the
priesthood embodied in Melchizedek over that represented by Aaron, and
the bearing of this on the glory of Him who is proclaimed a priest for
ever after Melchizedek's order. This theme is presented under headings,
somewhat as follows. _First_ (verses 4-14), the one priesthood is
greater than the other _in order_. Abraham, bearing the whole Aaronic
hierarchy potentially within him, defers to Melchizedek as to his
greater. Hence, among other inferences, the sacred Personage who is a
priest for ever after Melchizedek's order, wholly independent of
Levitical limits, must dominate and must supersede the order of the sons
of Aaron with their inferior status and with their transitory lives.
_Secondly_ (verses 15-19), the one priesthood is greater than the other
in respect of _the finality_, the permanence, the everlastingness, of
the greater Priest and of His office. He is what He is "for ever, on the
scale of the power of indissoluble life."[D] As such, He is the Priest
not of an introductory and transient "commandment" but of that "better
hope" which (ver. 19) has at last "made perfect" the purpose and the
promise, fulfilled the intention of eternal mercy, and brought us, the
people of this great covenant, absolutely nigh to God. _Thirdly_ (verses
20, 21), this second aspect of the supremacy of the greater Priesthood
is emphasized and solemnized by one further reference to Psalm cx. 4.
There the Eternal, looking upon the mysterious Partner of His throne, is
heard not to promise only but to _vow_, with an oath unalterable as
Himself, that the Priesthood of "His Fellow" shall be everlasting. No
such solemnity of affirmation attended Aaron's investiture. There is
something greater here, and more immediately Divine. The "covenant"
(ver. 22) committed to the administration of One thus sealed with the
oath of Heaven must indeed be "better," and cannot but be final; the
goal of the eternal purpose.
[D] [Greek: kata dunamin zoes akatalytou].
_Then_ (verses 23-28) the discourse passes into what we may call its
epilogue. The thought recurs to the sublime contrast between the
pathetic numerousness of the successors of Aaron, "not suffered to
continue by reason of death," and the singleness, the "unsuccessional"
identity for ever, of the true Melchizedek, who abides eternally. And
then, moving to its end, the argument glows and brightens into an
"application" to the human heart. We have in JESUS (the Name has now
already been pronounced, ver. 22) a Friend, an Intercessor, infinitely
and for ever competent to save us, His true Israel. We have in Him a
High Priest supreme in every attribute of holiness and power, and
qualified for His work of intercession by that sacrifice of Himself
which is at once solitary and all-sufficient. Behold then the contrast
and the conclusion. To a great Dispensation, the preparatory, succeeds a
greater, the greatest, the other's end and crown. To the "weak" mortal
priesthood of the law, never warranted by the vow of God to abide always
in possession, succeeds One who is Priest, and King, and SON, sealed for
His office by the irrevocable vow, "consecrated for evermore."
Such on the whole, as I recall it, was the exposition of my venerable
friend, in 1887. Each new reading of the chapter seems to me to bear out
the substantial accuracy of it; indeed the symmetry and order of the
chapter make it almost inevitable that some such line should be taken by
the explanation. Thus then it lies before us. It is filled in all its
parts with Jesus Christ, in His character of the true Melchizedek, our
final, everlasting, perfect, supreme, Divine High Priest.
This simple treatise is not the place for critical discussions. I do not
attempt a formal vindication of the mystical and Messianic reference of
Psalm cx. All I can do here, and perhaps all I should do, is to affirm
solemnly my belief in it, at the feet of Christ. I am perfectly aware
that now, within the Church, and by men unquestionably Christian as well
as learned, our Lord's own interpretation of that Psalm,[E] involving as
it does His assertion of its Davidic authorship, is treated as quite
open to criticism and disproof. One such scholar does not hesitate to
say that, if the majority of modern experts are right as to the
non-Davidic authorship, and he seems to think that they are, "our Lord's
argument breaks down." All I would remark upon such utterances, coming
from men who all the while sincerely adore Christ as their Lord and God,
is that they must surely open the way towards conceptions of His whole
teaching which make for the ruin of faith. For the question is not at
all whether our Redeemer consented to submit to limits in His conscious
human knowledge; I for one hold that He assuredly did so. It is whether
He consented to that sort of limitation which alone, in respect of
imperfection of knowledge, is the real peril of a teacher, and which is
his fatal peril--the ignorance of his own ignorance, and a consequent
claim to teach where he does not know. In human schools the betrayal of
_that_ sort of ignorance is a deathblow to confidence, not only in some
special utterance, but in the teacher, for it strikes at his claim not
to knowledge so much as to wisdom, to balance and insight of thought. I
venture to say that recent drifts of speculation shew how rapidly the
conception of a fallible Christ developes towards that of a wholly
imperfect and untrustworthy Christ. And, looking again at the vast
phenomenon of the Portrait in the Gospels, I hold that the line of
thought which offers by very far the least difficulty, not to faith only
but to reason, is that which relies absolutely on His affirmations
wherever He is pleased actually to affirm.
[E] Matt. xxii. 44; Luke xx. 42. Cp. Acts ii. 34.
So thinking, I take His exposition of Psalm cx. as for me final. And
that exposition guarantees at once a typical mystery latent in Gen. xiv.
and the rightness of its development in the passage here before us.
But now, what "message" has our chapter for us, in view of the needs of
our own time?
First, as to its sacerdotal doctrine. It throws a broad illumination on
the grand finality and uniqueness of the mediatorial priesthood of our
Lord, the Son of God. It puts into the most vivid possible contrast the
age of "the law" and that of Christ as to the priestly conception and
institution. Somehow, under the law, there was a need for priests who
were "men, having infirmity." For certain grave purposes (not for all,
by any means, even in that legal period) it was the will of God that
they should stand between His Israel and Him. But the argument of this
chapter, unless it elaborately veils its true self in clouds, goes
directly to shew that such properly mediatorial functions, in the age of
Christ, are for ever withdrawn from "men, having infirmity." Where they
stood of old, one after another, sacrificing, interceding, going in
behind the veil, permitted to draw nearer to God, in an official
sanctity, than their brethren, there now stands Another, sublime,
supreme, alone. He is Man indeed, but He is not "man having infirmity."
He is higher than the heavens, while He is one with us. And now our one
secret for a complete approach to God is to come to God "through HIM."
And this, unless the chapter is an elaborate semblance of what it is
not, means nothing if it does not mean that between the Church, and
between the soul, and the Lord Jesus Christ, there is to come
_absolutely nothing mediatorial_. As little as the Jew, for ceremonial
purposes, needed an intermediary in dealing with his mortal priest so
little do we, for the whole needs of our being, need an intermediary in
dealing with our eternal Priest.
In the age of Christ, no office can for one moment put one "man having
infirmity" nearer to God than another, if this chapter means what it
says. Mediatorial priesthood, a very different thing from commissioned
pastorate, has no place in apostolic Christianity, with the vast
exception of its sublime and solitary place in the Person of our most
blessed Lord.
Then further, the chapter, far from giving us merely the cold gift (as
it would be if this were all) of a negative certainty against unlawful
human claims, gives us, as its true, its inmost message, a glorious
positive. It gives us the certainty that, for every human heart which
asks for God, this wonderful Christ, personal, eternal, human, Divine,
is quite immediately accessible. The hands of need and trust have but to
be lifted, and they hold HIM. And He is the SON. In Him we have the
FATHER. We do indeed "_draw nigh_ to God through Him."
Therefore we will do it. The thousand confusions of our time shall only
make this Divine simplicity the more precious to us. We will at once and
continually take Jesus Christ for granted in all the fulness and
splendour of His High-priesthood after the order of Melchizedek. That
Priesthood is for ever what it is; it is as new and young to-day in its
virtue as if the oath had but to-day been spoken, and He had but to-day
sat down at the right hand.
Happy we if we use Him thus. He blesses those who do so with blessings
which they cannot analyse, but which they know. Many years ago a
Christian lady, daughter of a saintly Non-conformist pastor in the west
of Dorset, told me how, in a then distant time, her father had striven
to teach a sick man, a young gipsy in a wandering camp, to read, and to
come to Christ. The camp moved after a while, and the young man, dying
of consumption, took a Bible with him. Time rolled on, and one day a
gray-haired gipsy came to the minister's door; it was the youth's
father, with the news of his son's happy death, and with his Bible.
"Sir, I cannot read a word; but _he_ was always reading it, and he
marked what he liked with a stick from the fire. And he said you would
find one place marked with two lines; it was everything to my poor lad."
The leaves were turned, and the stick was found to have scored two lines
at the side of Heb. vii. 25: "He is able also to save them to the
uttermost that come unto God by Him, seeing that He ever liveth to make
intercession for them."