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DO YOU pray? You have no right
to! Do you worship God? You have no access to his presence. Do
you give gifts or make sacrifices? They are an offence to him.
That is, they all are, apart from Jesus.
A fortnight ago, we looked at
Jesus as our Prophet, who speaks the words of God to us and declares
his whole counsel.
Today we look at Jesus as our Priest, who speaks to God on our
behalf, the one true Mediator between God and mankind.
There were many tensions in the early Church. Persecution constantly
welled up against them. It was particularly hard for completed
Jews, for Jewish men and women who had come to a personal faith
in Jesus. Put yourself in their shoes. As Jews, no one ever challenged
them, no one cared all that much whether they were Pharisees
or Sadducees or members of any of the smaller sects that flourished
in Israel. Of course, they sniped at each other, called each
other names, but that was as far as it went.
But believers in Jesus were never safe. the Pharisees and the
Saduccees basically argued about how seriously to take certain
parts of the Bible and certain traditions. The Christians argued
with all of Judaism because they said that God had fulfilled
all the promises. They said that Jesus is the answer to all the
questions that Judaism couldn’t answer.
There was no room for compromise.
There was no room for reaching an understanding. Either you accept
Jesus or you reject him. "Neutral you cannot be" —
as the old hymn says.
So Christian believers were persecuted
when they spoke up for Jesus and neglected when they didn’t.
Life got very tough. People didn’t like trading with them.
People were afraid that friendship with a Christian might mean
that they, too, would be persecuted. Life was never easy in the
church.
Hebrews was written to a Jewish congregation, perhaps
in a city like Alexandria in Egypt, where there was a large Jewish
population. That would fit with the idea that perhaps Apollos
wrote Hebrews. These Jewish Christians were on the verge
of going back to being ordinary Jews, going back to the easy
life. The writer is working hard to persuade them not to give
up.
Maybe you are on the verge of
giving up. I think every Christian feels like that at some time
or other. In mediaeval times they called it the sin of sloth,
the sin of doing nothing because you have given in.
Hebrews is good for people
like us. It's about how God has provided for us through Jesus.
Things might be getting difficult. Things might be weighing in
on top of you. Sometimes it can feel as though you are being
attacked and persecuted, and the best thing is to back away.
There are times when we all need a prophetic word to tell us,
“This is what God wants you to do — now go and do it!”
But there are times when we need someone else, someone to hold
us up above the water, someone to lift us onto the safe rock.
There are times when we need a priest.
Hebrews tells us how to find the priest we need, a priest
whose ministry really works.
Hebrews tells us how to find a priest who satisfies our
greatest and deepest needs.
Back in the early days of Israel, God made it very clear what
he wanted of the Israelites. They were to be his own, special
people. He had chosen them to represent himself to the world.
When the world saw Israel, when the surrounding nations saw Jacob,
they were to see the God of Israel, the Redeemer of Jacob.
But that image was marred —repeatedly blemished — by
the failure of God’s people to be God’s people.
What can you do about that? Followers of the Absolute, followers
of the Holy One of Israel; yet they themselves were unholy —
far, far from absolutely just, far from absolutely loving, far
from absolutely merciful.
They needed atonement. They needed a life for their own life,
a life to buy their own life back from destruction. They needed
a sacrifice, and they needed a priest to bear that sacrifice
into the presence of God.
That’s what I meant when I said, “You have no right
to pray, no access to God’s presence, no gifts or sacrifices
not offensive to him.”
Apart from Jesus, you have nothing which gains you intimacy with
the Father.
Every reconciliation has a cost.
A couple of years ago, I was teaching a course on the English
language at an evening college. At one point we were discussing
the prefix, “for–”. You find it in “forsake”,
“forlorn”, “forgive”, “forget”
and so on. I explained that it often has a meaning of losing
or giving away something. Technically, it’s called a “privative”
particle.
One chap in the class — you could see it dawning on him,
a kind of a glow. Something he’d never seen before was staring
him in the face. “So when you forgive, it means that you
give away the right to hold a grudge or to get vengeance. I’d
never seen that before!” He was so right. When I forgive,
I pay a price. You can’t have forgiveness if no price is
paid.
And the person forgiving me has to pay in the first place, even
if I pay that debt back.
Let’s take this a step further.
I am very tempted at this point to rush in and talk about how
Jesus is the great Payment that God the Father made on my behalf.
It would all be true, but it wouldn’t really help us to
see the stark reality of the situation we are in.
You and I aredebtors to God.
If God has to pay to forgive me, that means that there is an
imbalance, that I owe God something and that, by forgiving, he
releases me from that obligation.
But that is only one side of the whole equation.
Forgiveness is where you release me from a debt.
But there is also another aspect, the aspect of satisfaction.
This is not something we think about very much, though it is
part of the way we do business.
Perhaps I might go into business
and take out a half–million dollar loan from you to finance
my business.
At the time when I had agreed to repay you, I haven’t got
the money. What can I do?
If I have a half-million dollar semi in Newtown, I can sign it
over to you, and that pays my debt. It’s one–for–one.
Very simple.
But what if I have a $400 000 house in Bilgola, overlooking the
ocean? Maybe I can offer that to you. It isn’t worth as
much on paper as the debt I owe you. But you might say, “Well,
it’s only $400 000 today, but, with that wonderful view,
it should be worth well over half a million by June. I’ll
take it.”
Whether I give you the half million in cash, or in kind, or in
a notional sense, it still satisfies the debt. You can give me
10 000 crisp $50 notes, you can sign over your half million dollar
semi, or you can give me something I deem equivalent to the debt.
Each time, it is satisfaction, it pays my debt out.
So my separation from God, my
rebelliousness against him, needs satisfaction on my part and
forgiveness on God’s part. Otherwise I stay exactly where
I was, a rebel, cut off from God, without hope in this word or
the next.
So where do the priests come
in?
In ancient Israel, by God’s decree, Aaron, Moses’ brother,
and his descendants, became priests to God on behalf of the people.
It was their job to stand before God on behalf of the people
and plead their cause before God. Their job was to say to God,
“We have sinned, and we ask for your forgiveness and for
a fresh start with you.” Every day, this was their task.
Whenever anyone asked them to, they had to carry out this work
on behalf of that person.
In Hebrews 5: 1, we read,
Every high priest
is selected from among men and is appointed to represent them
in matters related to God, to offer gifts and sacrifices for
sins.
We also read,
He has to offer
sacrifices for his own sins, as well as for the sins of the people.
(5: 3)
So we have a very imperfect earthly
high priest, who carries an inadequate sacrifice before God,
constantly praying that God, in his grace, will accept these
imperfect and incomplete gifts as though they were perfect and
complete.
Now here’s the interesting part. There is no way that God’s
justice is satisfied by offering bulls or lambs or whatever.
The Old Testament tells us that over and over. In Micah 6, the
prophet poses the question,
With what shall
I come before the LORD
and bow down before the exalted God?
Shall I come before him with burnt offerings,
with calves a year old?
6:7 Will the LORD be pleased
with thousands of rams,
with ten thousand rivers of oil?
Shall I offer my firstborn for my transgression,
the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?
And he replies,
6:8 He has showed you, O
man, what is good.
And what does the LORD require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God.
Or you can look in the Psalms:
PS 51:16 You do not delight in sacrifice, or
I would bring it;
you do not take pleasure in burnt offerings.
17 The sacrifices of God
are a broken spirit;
a broken and contrite heart,
O God, you will not despise.
Throughout the Bible you see
the picture, you hear the words, “God does not really require
these sacrifices. They point to something greater.”
The fact is that the old sacrifices
could never satisfy God, the priests of the old Covenant could
never really present acceptable sacrifices on behalf of the people,
because the sacrifices did not make satisfaction and the priests
themselves were sinful.
This meant that the priests had
to offer a sacrifice for themselves in order to enter the holy
place. And then, it was an act of special grace on God’s
part to accept what they offered.
Here’s the question: if the sacrifices of the old days were
so totally unsatisfactory, why did God allow them?
And the answer is, “He accepted them because of his Covenant.
He had bound Israel to himself and himself to Israel. He had
forged a priestly system and a sacrificial system which made
do until God was ready to reveal the perfect priest and the perfect
system. In other words, God was gracious to Israel because of
the Covenant he had with them.”
Now you might see where I am
going. Outside the covenant with Moses, there was no provision
for grace or forgiveness at all.
That doesn’t mean that God was never gracious to Gentiles,
but it does mean that there was no regular provision.
Now we come to Jesus. He is the perfect High Priest, and we read,
Such a high priest
meets our need—one who is holy, blameless, pure, set apart
from sinners, exalted above the heavens. 27 Unlike the other high priests, he does not need
to offer sacrifices day after day, first for his own sins, and
then for the sins of the people. He sacrificed for their sins
once for all when he offered himself. 28 For the law appoints as high priests men who are
weak; but the oath, which came after the law, appointed the Son,
who has been made perfect forever.
HEB 8:1 The point of what we
are saying is this: We do have such a high priest, who sat down
at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in heaven, 2 and who serves in the sanctuary, the
true tabernacle set up by the Lord, not by man.
Jesus is not part of the old
priesthood of Aaron, but part of an entirely different priesthood,
only briefly mentioned in the Old Testament. We get glimpses
of God’s greater plan occasionally throughout the Old Testament.
We see Moses’ father–in–law, who was a Priest
of Midian. We see Melchizedek, who was a travelling priest through
whom Abraham made offerings to God.
And we see that the Messiah was
to be a priest
“...after
the order of Melchizedek.”
So Jesus has come to offer a
greater sacrifice. He gave himself. This is the acceptable sacrifice,
it is a priest who makes perfect satisfaction for our sins. He
is the one who can rightfully enter the holiest place, right
into the presence of our God and Father. He is the one, the only
one, who gives us a right to enter that holy place as cleansed
people.
That is why we sing,
By the blood I may enter your
brightness.
We are saying that Jesus has
made himself to be the perfect sacrifice, and is therefore the
perfect priest, who doesn’t merely crawl with his face averted
as he comes before God on behalf of the people crowded around
outside. He is the perfect priest who has paid the perfect price,
and it is only and solely through him that we come into the presence
of God.
Maybe you can understand it from
this illustration.
When the High Priest entered
the most Holy Place once a year at Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement,
and made offerings for the people, how did the people know their
sacrifces had been accepted? They saw nothing of what went on
in that sacred space. It all happened behind a thick curtain.
They knew, because the priest came out again. If God had struck
him dead in there, it wouldn’t have looked good for the
people. If he came out, the sacrifice had been accepted.
Jesus went in on his day on the cross, and, on the third day,
he emerged. The sacrifice was complete! We, who have faith in
him, are accepted, and we are acceptable!
Without Jesus, there is no access.
Without Jesus, there is no prayer that God is obliged to hear
— except one, and that is, “God, be merciful to me,
a sinner!”
Do you trust Jesus today? Do you truly trust him? Then enter
the presence of the Father with glad and joyful hearts; praise
him forever for his wonderful grace to us.
And may all glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the
Holy Spirit, forever,
AMEN! |
