Hebrews Chapter Four, The High Priest Of Our Confession

 

Hebrews 4:14 Seeing then that we have a great High Priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. [15] For we do not have a High Priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin.

 

As chapters 1 and 2 dealt primarily with contrasting the angelic order to our Lord, chapters 3 and 4 broach the Old Testament patriarch and Lawgiver Moses. Moses can hardly be mentioned without thinking about the Decalogue and the Levitical priesthood. Of course Moses’ cousin Aaron was the first high priest chosen by God of the tribe of Levi. To this tribe the priestly ordination remained throughout united Israel. 

When Jeroboam defected from Rehoboam after Solomon’s decease, he led northern Israel (later Samaria) into religious apostasy by molding the golden calves and turning the people away from God. Because his goal was to deter worshipers from seeking the temple in Jerusalem and the true worship of Yahweh, he ordained a new priesthood and rejected Levi. His objective, of course, was to conserve his polity and military power, fearing that sentiment and religious fervor would cause the people to return to Rehoboam. Forsaking the priesthood was a summary rejection of the God whom the sons of Levi served.

 

The priesthood was intrinsically linked to worship of Yahweh and the temple where His presence (Shekinah) uniquely dwelt during the kingdom years. To name our Lord as High Priest would invoke immediate understanding from the Jewish readership. But unlike Aaron and his successors, who passed through the veil into the Holy of Holies in the Tabernacle and later the Temple, Jesus passed through the heavens to enter into the presence of God. In this aspect of our Lord’s ministry, He would have come with blood to atone for sin. But we are getting ahead of ourselves, and this topic will be dealt with more thoroughly later in the epistle. The writer avers the name of this High Priest that entered Heaven, Jesus the Son of God. The Son, as High Priest and to atone for our sins, entered Heaven’s holiest place to plead the virtue of His cleansing blood. This is the heart of a Christian’s confession.

 

What DO we confess as Christians? “That Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures,” 1 Corinthians 15:3, 4. This is the confession we hold fast. Jesus died for your sins. He died for my sins. He died to put sin away by the sacrifice of Himself. The issue of sin’s curse and our sin nature has been dealt with in Jesus Christ. He died so that we may receive pardon in a judicial sense. The believer that accepts Christ’s death as his own receives pardon for sins committed, since our Lord died to put them away. Jesus did not simply die for our sins; He died to do away with sin itself. The issue is no longer if we have sinned; for we all have (and do) and fall short of God’s glory. The issue is who we believe Jesus Christ to be. He was buried. He lay in the tomb three days: a singular and unmistakable proof of His death on the cross for us. He chose to die this death for humankind. He gave up His spirit when His work was accomplished and His body lay in a tomb. The wages of sin is death, Paul tells us. Our Lord, taking sin’s curse upon Himself became a curse, and so the Father turned from Him, and Jesus suffered separation from God, the like of which all people will suffer in the Lake of Fire who do not believe in Jesus Christ, Mark 16:16, John 3:18, 36.

 

But this belief isn’t some mental assent to accepting that Christ in fact existed. Biblical faith isn’t a fantasy. When a Christian says, “Believe in Jesus Christ,” it is not tantamount to something a child might say, such as, “I believe in faeries!” Our exhortation to believe has nothing to do with whether Jesus exists. Historically it is indisputably documented that He lived and died in Israel as their rejected Messiah. The belief aspect comes from the notion that whatever mistaken concepts we entertain in regard to God’s Son, we must exchange for the truth. Only a right belief of WHY Jesus came, and WHO He is by nature, revealed through accomplished prophecy, will save the soul. Here Peter’s admonition to the Jews living in Jerusalem is most appropriate: “Repent, and let every one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins,” Acts 2:38. To repent essentially means to change your mind. Whatever wrong notions we carry about the Son of God, rid ourselves of these. Because only the genuine Christ, pure and unadulterated as the Scriptures testify of Him, will save. Our faith in this, the only true Christ, saves the soul.

 

He rose from the dead the third day, according to Scripture. These things are told the Jews hundreds (or thousands) of years in advance and accomplished before their very eyes. The risen Christ shows that those whose faith is in Him will attain to the newness of life Jesus manifested as the first fruits from the dead. The apostles were witnesses of the risen Christ. There were hundreds of eyewitnesses while He remained with them for 40 days before bodily ascending into Heaven to sit at the right hand of the Father. His miraculous resurrection and ascension in glory provides a substantial hope to the believer that comes to Him for eternal life. He manifested life, bestows life, and is the originator of life. In this Man is the whole of the Christian confession. Jesus Christ died for us, was buried to evidence His genuine death, and rose from the dead. He was seen for 40 days by hundreds of witnesses that went on for the first 30 years of the church era (recorded in Acts) to testify of His saving power; a power that was found in one name alone: Jesus Christ. One after another these peaceful, rational, sober and intelligent men suffered terrible deaths while proclaiming the truth of the Lord’s resurrection. They were not preaching the gospel in the hope of attaining eternal life. They were preaching because in Jesus they already possessed it. This is our confession as saints. We are encouraged to hold fast to it, the “it” of that statement being synonymous with Jesus, who is the central figure and pillar of our faith.

 

Jesus our Lord sympathizes with us in our manifold weaknesses. Christ took on flesh, in the likeness of sinful men, so He knows from human perspective what suffering is. He went about meeting suffering and alleviating it throughout His ministry, and was moved at least once to tears by its awful effect. Note how the writer candidly records that we have weaknesses, in the plural. He assures us that Jesus was tempted in all points as we are in our daily life, but is without sin. Jesus, being God, cannot sin. There are some things that it is impossible for God to do. To sin or to change would demonstrate a lack of perfection in His character and attributes, something markedly impossible for God. We read in James, “God cannot be tempted by evil,” James 1:13. John expresses this more explicitly when he tells us, “And you know that He was manifested to take away our sins, and in Him there is no sin,” 1 John 3:5. Jesus Himself testified, “the ruler of this world is coming, and he has nothing in Me,” John 14:30. The lamb that was sacrificed on the Day of Atonement needed to be without spot or blemish: a physical characteristic symbolic of the spiritual purity our Lord would offer up to God in payment for our sins. He was the just for the unjust to bring us to God. It is man’s sin nature, inherited from Adam that makes us vulnerable to sin’s enticement. This version of the term “tempt” suggests a desire to perform what we know is morally wrong, but have a compulsion to pursue it regardless. God’s will clashes with our own as we wrestle, not with God, but our own lust in a bid to pursue what we crave, rather than what is good, James 1:14, 15, 4:1-3. Do you believe Jesus was capable of sinning, the Lamb of God, sent to take away the sin of the world? Then heed Peter’s advice: repent.