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HOLY HELP FOR THE HOPELESSFROM THE PROPHESIED KING AND PRIESTHebrews 7:1-10INTRODUCTION How do you live by faith in Jesus Christ when you live in a world like the one in which we live? We live in a world where a rage filled young man walks into a dormitory and a classroom building and randomly kills 32 other students and professors, where hate filled men set off a car bomb that kills 120 men, women and children simply going about their lives in Baghdad, where a man in our own state, embittered at his ex-wife, kills his two young children and then himself and where three Christian missionaries were tortured and killed in Turkey, leaving widows and now fatherless children. All these things happened in the last seven days. How do we have confidence that there is a God who is working to bring this world to a great and glorious end when things like these take place on a weekly basis? I think that is a hard question for we who are merely observers of these great acts of wickedness. However, I think it is an almost insurmountable question for the mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and grandmothers and grandfathers and fiancés of those who were killed. How do you keep trusting Christ when you and your family are the recipients of such evil? When your child is murdered or your parent is taken in an act of random violence, how do you keep trusting in a sovereign and loving God? The letter to the Hebrews is written to people who are the targets of such evil acts. These men and women have lost their property, their freedom and their family members as a result of the hatred of others. They are hated because they are Christians and they are being persecuted in just these sorts of violent ways. The author of this letter is out to show them and us why continuing to trust Christ in the face of such violent hatred is not only reasonable but the only reliable reality available to them. This letter, indeed the entire Bible is not written to people who live in the fantasy reality of Disney World, but in a world that groans under the weight of weakness and suffering and sickness and violence and death. This book is written both to explain what is going on but more importantly to give those with eyes to see the help we need to persist in trusting in Christ in the face of such traumatic brutality. I know that on the face of it that the passage we are considering today appears to have little help for people confronted with such cruelty. How can a discussion of such an obscure person as Melchizedek, who lived more than 5000 years ago and about whom we know so little be of any help when your child has just been murdered? The simple answer to that question is this: these ten verses are helpful because they are not about Melchizedek but about the Son of God. God’s answer to the wickedness and the trauma of this world is a person, the eternal Son of God who took on human flesh as the man Jesus. He and only he is able to give confidence for the future and hope in the midst of such despair. It is the Bible’s conviction which is shared by this letter to the Hebrews that it is only in the life, death, resurrection, ascension and future return of Jesus Christ, Son of God and Son of Man that we humans can find any reason to keep living now and to look forward with hope to future. Therefore, this passage is enormously helpful for us as we live in this kind of world because it is about the Son of God. MAIN POINT Christians can be confident of the future and not dismayed by evil because…I. God the Son has always been at the center of God the Father’s plan for the world (vv. 1-3) In v. 1 the author begins by naming this strange character Melchizedek. We need to remember why he is talking about this person. If you look back to 4:14 we were told that Jesus, the Son of God is our high priest who has gone through the heavens and the one to whom we are to cling by faith. He is our representative in the presence of God. It is through him that we may approach God without fear that he will destroy us because of our sin. Then in 5:1-10 the author began to reflect upon how Jesus became our high priest and what that means for us. Part of his argument to show us how great Jesus is as our priest involved his quoting Psalm 110:4 which says in reference to God’s Son, “You are a priest forever, in the order of Melchizedek.” In 5:11 the author told these Christians that he had much more he wanted to say about Jesus being a priest in the order of Melchizedek but he wasn’t sure they were able to understand it because they had become sluggish of hearing. They were not that interested in Jesus anymore and so he just wasn’t sure they would be able to get it. Therefore he spent most of chapter 6 giving them reasons as to why they should pay attention to what he had to say. Now he returns to what he wanted to say before because he feels as though he has gotten their attention through what he said in chapter six. The key to this entire passage and even to what follows is that little phrase in the middle of verse 4 that says, “like the Son of God.” It literally says, “having been made like the Son of God.” The foundation of this passage is that God made Melchizedek to represent the eternal Son of God. Melchizedek existed as a real flesh and blood person and a brief event in his life is reported in the Bible because God made him to stand as a sign or symbol or representation of his eternal Son. The event from the life of Melchizedek that God wanted recorded appears in three verses in Genesis 14. As we just had read for us he appears in the midst of a story regarding Abraham. Abraham’s nephew Lot was taken captive by an alliance of four kings who went to war against an alliance of five kings, one of which was the king of Sodom in whose city Lot lived. When Abraham was informed that his nephew was being taken away into a life of slavery he rounded up his male servants and the servants of a friend of his and went after the army of the four kings. He attacked them, routed them and rescued Lot. It was on his way home from that victory that he met Melchizedek, the king of Salem and priest of God Most High. In a moment we’re going to look at what we learn about the Son of God by what Genesis 14 tells us about Melchizedek but the first thing I want you to be captured by is how amazing it is that God the Father was describing and revealing and thus glorifying God the Son through this event and its written record. God the Father is the one who made sure that Melchizedek and Abraham met in this fashion. He is also the one who made sure that Moses recorded the event exactly as he did when he wrote Genesis. Think about the particular, real human decisions that God ruled over to make Melchizedek like the Son of God. God is not frustrated with how the world is going. He is not sitting in heaven wringing his hands and wondering what is going to happen. Evil humans do not run the world, God does. The Bible repeatedly tells us that it was before the world began that God the Father and God the Son planned that the Son would be the centerpiece of all human history by becoming a man and dying in the place of his people. One of the chief evidences of God’s eternal plan, of the fact that he is in control of what is going on is that through the long hall of human history God has been talking about his Son. God’s revealing of his Son began at creation itself as he created man in his own image and entered into an agreement with Adam as the representative head of the whole human race. Thus he established the fact that only by the obedience of a man could the blessings of God’s perfect creation be enjoyed by men. Where Adam failed, the second Adam, Jesus succeeded. God’s resting on the seventh day, his making of marriage in Genesis 2:24, his telling the serpent when cursing him for his part in human rebellion that a male descendant of the woman would destroy him are just a few of the ways that God began talking about his Son from the beginning. We have in this brief encounter recorded in Genesis 14:18-20 another occasion from the earliest days of human history where God himself revealed the nature and ministry and character of his Son. God is not like you and I. This last February I planned on taking a small group of guys up to our family's cabin in Minong to do some cross country skiing. I had to cancel our plans because the temperature forecast was for minus 15 degrees with wind-chill of minus 30-40. I cannot control the weather and so I had to alter my plans. There is no way I can guarantee that what I plan to have happen is actually going to happen. There are way too many things that are outside of my control. You are not able to guarantee any of your plans either. Twenty-five years ago, in 1982, if you would have asked me what I would be doing today, in April of 2007, I couldn’t have told you. If you had told me I would be the pastor of a church in Janesville, WI, I wouldn’t have believed you. I have no idea what the next 10 years hold for me and I certainly am not able to guarantee that anything I plan will actually happen. But God has been talking about Jesus and his salvation since the beginning of time. He revealed Jesus to Abraham and then to the entire nation of Israel when Moses wrote down this incident thousands of years before Jesus was born. God has never been confused about what was going to happen next. He is always acting and never reacting. The fact that God made Melchizedek like the Son of God some 5000 years ago ought to give you confidence that this world is not out of control. Things are going according to plan. God is working to save a people for himself out of this sinful mass of humanity by the life, death and resurrection of his Son. He is going to one day destroy this world of sin through his Son and make a new heavens and a new earth where he will dwell with his people in the person of this Son. What did Abraham and then Moses and then anyone who read this text who had eyes to see discover about the Son of God? Verse 1 summarizes the key points of the encounter between Abraham and Melchizedek. The points the author picks out of the story as significant are his name, his title, the fact that when he met Abraham he blessed him and Abraham gave him 10% of plunder he had taken from the kings. Then v. 2 tells us two things we learn about Jesus from Melchizedek’s name and his title. His name is a compound Hebrew word which means “king of righteousness.” The Son of God is the king of righteousness. What does this mean? It means first of all that the Son of God is righteous; he is right and always does right. The Son of God always treats everyone with perfect justice. He doesn’t play favorites. He can’t be bribed. He never lies. He always tells it the way it really is. 1 John 2:1 says, “Dear friends I am writing this to you so that you will not sin but if anyone does sin we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous one.” How cool is it that the one who represents us to the righteous God is himself righteous? In addition, not only is he righteous but he also is our righteousness. He gives us his righteousness. In Romans 3:10 we are told that no human being is righteous. In 3:20 we are told that no human being will be declared righteous in God’s eyes by keeping the law. In other words, I'm not righteous and there is nothing I can do to become righteous. Then in Romans 3:22 we discover that righteousness comes from God “through faith in Jesus Christ to everyone who believes.” 2 Corinthians 5:20 says, “God made him who knew no sin to be sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God in him.” God credits to the account of everyone who trusts in Christ, the righteousness of Jesus Christ. The fact that the Son of God is the king of righteousness is the best news you could ever hear. His title is King of Salem. Salem is the Hebrew word for peace, therefore the Son of God is the king of peace. This means that the Son of God gives peace and has a kingdom of peace. Peace in the Bible is not merely the absence of conflict or a calm state of mind but it refers to living in a community of people who are first of all reconciled to God and second of all are reconciled to one another and to God’s world. Romans 5:1 says, “Therefore, having been justified by faith we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” In Ephesians 2 we are told that Jesus by his death destroyed all that separates us from one another. He made peace with God for us and with one another through the cross. Right now the king of peace has placed us in his kingdom of peace, the church where we are beginning to experience the joy of being at peace with God and one another. There is, however, another day coming when we will live in perfect and unbroken peace and harmony with God, one another and God’s perfect creation. Because Jesus is the king of peace we will one day live in a place where there will be no more hatred, no murders, no abuse, no sickness, no natural or human disasters and no alienation of any kind. Verse three is a description of the Son of God based on what is not said in Genesis 14 about Melchizedek. What the author to the Hebrews notes about the record of Melchizedek in Genesis is how unique it is. For every other person mentioned in the book of Genesis we are told about their birth, their parentage, their descendants and their death. In fact, the entire book of Genesis is organized around the birth, death and genealogy of the characters whose lives are reported in the book. However, in the case of Melchizedek we are told none of that. We are not told who are his mother and father, who are his descendants, when and how he was born and when and how he died. He simply appears on the pages of Scripture accepting a tithe from Abraham and blessing him and then he disappears. He appears as if an eternal being, one who has no beginning and no end. God described Melchizedek in this way so that all would know that the human savior of the world is fully God, indeed the eternal Son of God. His priesthood, his representation of his people before God is therefore an eternal representation. As this author is going to say in a few verses, he always lives to intercede for us. God announced thousands of years before the birth of Jesus that the coming Savior, the one who would act as priest on behalf of his people, was the eternal Son of God. God’s plan is right on track because the eternal Son of God who is the king of righteousness and the king of peace is the one who guarantees that plan. Indeed he is the plan. It can only fail if he can fail and he cannot fail because he is the Son of God who has no beginning and no end. Christians can be confident of the future and not dismayed by evil because…
II. Jesus Christ is more reliable than the greatest of human beings (vv. 4-7) The main point of vv. 4-7 is the superiority of Melchizedek to Abraham and thus the infinitely greater superiority of the Son of God of whom Melchizedek is merely the type. The first thing I want to do is help you see how Melchizedek and thus Jesus are shown to be superior to Abraham. Then and more importantly I want to think with you about why it matters that Jesus is superior to Abraham. The first step in demonstrating the superiority of Melchizedek and thus Christ is by first showing how great Abraham is. He is called the “patriarch.” This is a compound word in the Greek and means “first or beginning father”. Last week MLB celebrated the 60 th anniversary of the first African-American to play major league baseball in the U.S., Jackie Robinson. Being the first one was very difficult. There were members of his own team, the Brooklyn Dodgers who wouldn’t talk to him or acknowledge him at first. He was regularly mocked and taunted by fans and he and his family received numerous death threats. Yet he succeeded and was Rookie of the Year in 1947 and MVP of all of baseball in 1949. His number has been retired not just from the Dodgers but from every major league team. There is no player in baseball that can ever wear number 42. Last Sunday was Jackie Robinson Day throughout MLB and every player wore #42 on that day in honor of him. While he was a good baseball player, there have been many African American players better than he. However, there is no question that he is viewed as the greatest black baseball player because he was the first one. In a similar way Abraham was the first father of the Jewish nation. As the first he is the greatest. The greatness of Melchizedek is then described. This great patriarch Abraham gave to Melchizedek one tenth of all the plunder he had taken from the kings who had captured Lot and whom he had defeated. What does that prove? Why does Abraham giving Melchizedek one tenth of the plunder show how great he is? Verse 5 summarizes a portion of the OT law which many of you probably are unaware of. Abraham had a son named Isaac who had a son named Jacob. Jacob had 12 sons. His third born son was named Levi. God changed Jacob’s name to Israel and thus his sons and their descendants became the people or nation of Israel. After Israel left Egypt the nation was divided up into 13 tribes. The reason there are thirteen and not twelve is because Jacob, prior to his death adopted Joseph’s two sons as his own. So Joseph’s sons, Ephraim and Manasseh were considered sons of Israel and thus their descendants were two of the tribes of Israel. In Exodus God said that he chose the tribe of Levi to be set apart to himself in order to take care of the tabernacle and to teach the people his word. Within the Levite tribe those who were the descendants of Aaron were to serve as the priests. Only the Levite priests could offer sacrifices and perform the other functions within the tabernacle. In Numbers 18 God says that every tribe of Israel is to be given a portion of the land of Canaan for their own except for the tribe of Levi. He commands that the rest of the nation of Israel support the Levites by giving to them every year one tenth of all that they produce; whether grain or fruit or wine or sheep or cattle. Thus God commanded one of the descendants of Abraham, the sons of Levi to receive from the rest of the sons of Abraham their physical support so that they could take care of God’s business. What’s remarkable about Abraham giving one tenth to Melchizedek is that there was no command from God to do so. Melchizedek is not a descendant of Abraham, he is not a Levite, thus there was no command for Abraham to give him one tenth. Why did Abraham do it? Because Abraham knew, apart from the law, apart from God’s command that Melchizedek deserved the tithe. Melchizedek’s relationship to God is vastly different from that of the Levites who were chosen by God to receive the tithe. They are merely human, the descendants of Abraham. This Melchizedek relates to God in some more direct way and thus requires of Abraham direct payment. Abraham automatically knew it. He didn’t need a law from God but intuitively knew that he must pay the tithe to this Melchizedek. He responded to the greatness of the person, not to a command from God. The Son of God is the only one who by virtue of who he is in himself deserves the tenth part. He immediately deserves our thanksgiving and gratitude. He is greater than Abraham the great patriarch. At the end of v. 6, not only did Abraham pay the tenth to Melchizedek but Melchizedek also blessed Abraham. This act of blessing was again reserved for the descendants of Levi in the law. The priests were commanded to announce upon the people of Israel God’s favor. But here is someone who is again, not a descendant of Levi and thus who was not commanded by God to bless and yet he blesses. Notice that the one whom he blesses is the one who has received the promises. God chose Abraham out of the entire human race and promised him alone that God was going to make him a great nation, his descendants would be as numerous as the stars in the heavens, and through him all the nations of the world would be blessed. God did not make these promises to anyone else, only to Abraham. Part of the promise was that God was going to bless him. But here Melchizedek is doing the blessing. As verse 7 says, it is always true that the lesser is blessed by the greater. The only one greater than Abraham who has the right to bless Abraham is God himself. So Melchizedek stands as the symbol of the Son of God in his act of blessing Abraham. So what do we care that Melchizedek is greater than Abraham? How does that help us to trust Jesus? The Jewish people based much of their confidence that they are safe and secure in the fact that they are the descendants of Abraham, the patriarch, the one who received the promises. When John the Baptist was baptizing descendants of Abraham in the Jordan River and the Jewish religious leaders came out to where he was baptizing he said this, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? Produce fruit in keeping with repentance. And do not think you can say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham for our father.’ I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham.” A couple of years later in one of Jesus’ controversies with these same leaders they said to him, “Are you greater than our father Abraham? Who do you think you are?” The Jewish people felt that "we don’t have to be afraid of the future because Abraham is our father. We know that God is for us, that he is on our side because he gave the promises to Abraham and his children." The fact that Abraham offered a tithe to Melchizedek and was blessed by him is meant to shake their confidence in Abraham. Abraham is a mere man. He is not able to save. Being physically related to him will not make you secure as he himself demonstrates by his own submission to Melchizedek, the king of righteousness and peace who is a priest forever. If Abraham needs to be blessed by Melchizedek in order to receive God’s blessing than how can a descendant of Abraham expect to receive God’s blessing without being blessed by the one of whom Melchizedek is but a type? You are not blessed by God based on your ethnicity. You must be blessed by the Son of God to be in God's favor There is no human being who is able to save you. There is no human being who can promise you a secure future and overcome all the evil that is aimed at you, not even Abraham. Every person in this room is depending upon someone to keep him or her safe: your employer or your insurance company or yourself or your spouse or your parents or your children. Are you going to depend on some mere human or will you depend upon the Son of God? If Abraham the one who received the promises needs to be blessed by one who is greater, the Son of God, then how in the world can you expect to be safe and secure by trusting in some mere human? The forces that are loose in this world cannot be resisted by mere humans. Only the Son of God has the power to protect you from all harm, so trust him alone. Christians can be confident of the future and not dismayed by evil because…
III. Jesus is the only eternally living, sovereign Savior (vv. 8-10) In vv. 8-10 the contrast is no longer with Abraham but with the Levitical priests that he brought up in v. vv.5-6. This is the beginning of an extended comparison between the Levitical priesthood and the system of salvation they represent under the Old Covenant and Jesus who establishes a New Covenant, which is the fulfillment of the Old Covenant. There are two ways that Melchizedek and thus the Son of God is shown to be superior to the Levitical priesthood. In v. 8 the Levites are men who die whereas the Son is alive. In vv. 9-10 the superiority of the Son is shown in that the Levites who collect the tenth from the people of Israel are actually paying the tithe through Abraham because they are present in his person when he pays the tithe to Melchizedek. Any system of salvation that depends upon men who die is by its very nature an untrustworthy system of salvation. How can men who cannot save themselves save you? How can men who can be murdered overcome the evil of murder? Here is the fatal flaw to all human religion. All human religion is, in one way or another, dependent upon men who die, whether you are depending upon yourself or your own performance as in Islam or Judaism or depending upon the intercession of some human priest as in much of Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy and Buddhism and Hinduism and most animism. What sets biblical Christianity apart from all other man-made religions is that Jesus is living. He rose from the dead and he is our priest forever. Just like Melchizedek appears in the Scriptures as an eternal person, without beginning or end, so the Son of God is eternal. Our safety and security is not tied to a person who is not even able to save himself or herself but our salvation is dependent upon a person who is alive by his own power, by the nature of his very own being. He is right now living and by his Spirit, present with his people and waiting for that day when he will return to destroy all evil and all who do evil and give to his people eternal bodies like his own and take us to live with him eternally in the new heavens and the new earth. Not only is he alive but also he is sovereign. Verses 9-10 make no sense if you do not realize that the Levitical priests were the most important people in the Jewish religious system. The entire system of salvation depended upon them. They were the only ones who could enter the presence of God and offer the sacrifices necessary to keep God's wrath from burning up the entire nation. Thus, for the Levitical priests to be paying the tithe to Melchizedek through their representative head, Abraham is huge. The Son of God does not owe Abraham and thus Levi in the body of Abraham anything. Rather Abraham and his descendant Levi owe him everything. Levi, the one whom God commands to receive the tithe from the nation Israel pays the tithe in his representative head, Abraham. When Abraham pays it is as though the Levitical priests are paying. They owe it to the Son of God to pay him tribute and they do so when Abraham pays tribute to Melchizedek. Thus we see in this act that the entire system of which the Levites are the head is deficient and inadequate and temporary. Before the law was given and the priesthood established God was showing it was not the solution but the one to whom the law points is the solution to our problem of sin. The submission of the Levites to the Son of God which is revealed in Abraham paying the tithe proves that their ministry is temporary and inadequate. There is only one living and sovereign Savior and his name is Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Do not be a fool. Do not depend upon any human being, whether yourself or some other to save you and to keep you safe. Depend upon Jesus Christ alone. Christians can be confident of the future and not dismayed by evil because…
© Copyright 2007 John Swanson.
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