You are a Priest Forever

Hebrews 7:1-17

Well, there was a bunch of head scratching and a few mutterings of "I still don't get it" around the Larson family scripture reading this morning.

So just who is this Melchizadek?!, this kingly-priestly-guy to whom Abraham deferred a cut of his war spoils? And, what of all this pronounced hierarchy of priesthood & tithing & greatness & stuff?!... I'm afraid I did a sorry job trying to explain. Even pastor-dads can have a tough time making Hebrews an understandable blessing to five kids, spouse & self, all within 15 minutes! (Is there some smiling comfort that others from the start must have also complained at the complexity of some of Paul's writing (some think he wrote Hebrews) -- when even Peter admits "some of his comments are hard to understand" (2 Peter 3:16) :^)

But, our reading today IS fascinating! Here is this shadowy priest, Melchizedek, much shrouded in mystery. Scholars have labored to know him, recognizing at least a prefigurement of Christ, if not an outright preincarnate old testament visitation of the second person of the Trinity.

Maybe the reading is meant to be agony! In a way I suppose the vagueness of Melchizedek's personage, the frustration of feeling we need to know more, that our interaction with him is somehow incomplete -- really does underscore the complication & incompleteness of redemption in the old testament! In that time, there were pictures and promise of a far better, simple and wholly complete redemption yet to be realized in the new covenant. But, for the time being, saints of old (and all today who read about them around the breakfast table!) wrestle with the technicalities, the partiality, and the seeming minutiae of a law-based priestly system that just quite simply: never cuts it in making men right with God! The old covenant makes us ACHE, then REJOICE for the simple completeness of the promised One who would be a "priest forever in the order of Melchizedek"!

Oh, this is our Priest Jesus! Ours is a Priest who "achieved the perfection God intended" (v.11)! He is not dead, but lives for us forever! He did not have to first cover his own sins with a string of perpetual sacrifices that never quite covered the rest of us! We have a Priest who is the perfection of all that shadowy Melchizedek hinted at! Yes, it is this great Mediator who truly is in totality "king of justice" & "king of peace" (v.2)! And, He is proven to be such with simple finality at that single intersection of all justice and peace, His cross!

Jesus clears the fog in me.

PPaul