Christ Our Pure High Priest

And I am preaching, so I'll try to finish up Hebrews 7 this evening. But let us ask the Lord's blessing upon our time before we begin. Once again, our gracious Heavenly Father, we desire, we need the presence of the Holy Spirit with us.

And so we ask that You would bless us with that great gift, that You would lift up our hearts and our minds, protect us from distraction. Let us once again delve into this tremendous text that speaks of what You have done.

What You have done in the councils of eternity past, what You've accomplished in time, what You've brought to fruition in our lives. All to Your honor and glory, we pray in Christ's name. Amen. So we have been looking at the seventh chapter of the book of Hebrews, and we have sort of camped for a little while now at Hebrews 7 .25.

So I want to make some concluding remarks on the text and then move forward from there. And so once again, therefore, He is able also to save forever those who draw near to God through Him since He always lives to make intercession for them.

For it was fitting for us to have such a high priest, holy, innocent, undefiled, separated from sinners, and exalted above the heavens, who does not need daily like those high priests to offer up sacrifices, first for his own sins and then for the sins of the people.

Because this He did once for all when He offered up Himself. For the law appoints men as high priests who are weak, but the word of the oath which came after the law appoints a son made perfect forever.

Amen. So right before the writer is going to provide us a summary statement in the beginning of chapter 8 and then launch into the new covenant, we have the drawing together of the argumentation that has been presented about the supremacy of Christ, specifically in this case, concerning the Melchizedek priesthood.

It is a priesthood that is given to Christ on the basis of His own indestructible life. His own indestructible life. And He, unlike Melchizedek, that we don't know anything more about, we have all this revelation concerning who He is and what He has accomplished.

And then we have that closing statement. Therefore, He is able also to save forever those who draw near to God through Him since He always lives to make intercession for them. We looked at this last week.

I just want to make the concluding statement to once again emphasize the fact that we have here one of the clearest, most obvious statements of Christ's capacity as Savior in all of the New Testament.

We are impoverished if we do not look to the book of Hebrews. If we only look elsewhere, if we miss these texts in Hebrews, then we indeed miss something extremely important. He is able. I know that I emphasized this before, but I want to emphasize it again.

So much of the difference between true biblical gospel preaching and that which is sub-biblical can all be boiled down to one question. Do you believe Jesus is able to save? That truly is the dividing line between human religion and divine religion.

Do we have a God who is capable of saving? Do we have a Savior who is worthy of the name Savior? Savior doesn't mean someone who attempts to save. Savior means someone who truly does save. And so we are told He is able to save not just temporarily, not just initially, but forever to the uttermost of specific people, those who draw near to God through Him, the people of God.

And why is He able to do so? Because He always lives to make intercession for them. He has entered into the holy place having obtained eternal redemption. There is nothing to be added to the work of Christ.

And so truly, as you dialogue with people, maybe you're having a conversation with someone and you're struggling to sort of get a real fix on where they're coming from, you might cut to the chase and just ask directly, Do you believe that Jesus is able to save to the uttermost?

Forever? Do you believe that He is able to do so solely because of what He has done? Or does Jesus simply make a way of salvation available that then becomes dependent upon my faithfulness or my actions?

You will find very quickly that such a question will get you past a lot of wandering through the theological woods shall we say, and get you right to the key issues in speaking with others. So having made this grand assertion, the writer then says that it was fitting for us to have such a high priest.

Literally, it means it's the proper situation. It's not just one of those arguments that we hear all the time. Well, I think it's my opinion is this, it seems fitting that we do something like this. It's not that kind of a weak statement.

Instead, it is recognizing our own incapacity, our own sinfulness, our own inability to approach to a holy God. Then what kind of a high priest do we need to complete the pictures of the Old Testament sacrifices?

What kind of a high priest is Jesus Christ? It was fitting for us to have such a high priest. And how is he described? Well, he is described as holy, innocent, undefiled, separated from sinners, and exalted above the heavens.

Now, it is amazing that people can look at statements like this and dismiss what they obviously mean. I've heard people actually say that, well, you know, we don't really have any New Testament straightforward statements that Jesus Christ is sinless.

Really? Holy, innocent, undefiled, separated from sinners, and exalted above the heavens? Now, obviously, as we look at that series, we could probably camp on each and every term and expand upon each one.

It's interesting that the first one is holy because this roots us firmly in the Old Testament revelation. Who is God? When Isaiah saw Jehovah sitting upon his throne lofty and lifted up, what were the cherubim saying as they bring worship before the throne?

Holy, holy, holy, thrice holy, repeated three times. Holy, holy, holy. That is a term that refers not just to what we see afterwards. Innocent, undefiled, without sin, without spot, but holy other. Completely different than the creation itself.

Separated. In essence, unique. God is holy and the high priest who represents us is likewise holy. He has no defilement upon himself as the text says, but he has also been set apart by the Father and by his own will and through the power of the Holy Spirit for the ministry that is his.

Remember, the old covenant high priest had to offer sacrifices to bring about his own holiness before the offering of the sacrifice of the people. Jesus does not have to do this, as we will see in just a moment.

He is holy in and of his own nature and he has been set aside by the will of God for this work. Now, if you're taking notes, and I'm certain that there are some people who are, you might want to make note of this because this is going to come back and going to become very important at one of the key texts in chapter 10.

Specifically, chapter 10 verse 29 where there is great controversy about the interpretation of who it is that is sanctified or made holy, whether it is Jesus there or whether it is an apostate. And that has big implications.

It's had big implications for a long, long time, and even in our own day has tremendous implications as to how you understand the new covenant. I believe that consistently we will be able to see what the answer to that is, but I think it's important that here Jesus is described as holy.

He is set apart. He is sanctified as the high priest. He's also innocent. No charge was brought against Him. He is undefiled even though even the altar had to be cleansed because of its dwelling amongst a sinful people, but Jesus is undefiled.

There is no defilement that has come upon Him in any way, shape, or form. Even though He walked with sinful men and He was surrounded by crowds of sinful people, yet He receives no spot upon Himself. He is separated from sinners.

Now this raises the question, is this whole line describing Jesus in generic terms or is it describing Him only now as the high priest having entered in? Because some see separated from sinners as having a spatial concept that He's now separated from the realm of sinners.

Well, it's possible. It does say exalted above the heavens, but that last phrase exalted above the heavens would become somewhat of an unnecessary repetition if the only way we're to understand this is that He is now up there holy, innocent, undefiled, separated from sinners and exalted above the heavens which would sort of be a pathology, a repetition of the same thought.

I think the idea is that while Jesus partook of flesh and blood, and that's already been the assertion of the book of Hebrews, He partook of flesh and blood, He truly was a man. There is no question here about the incarnation, but there was something so holy about Him, so special about Him, that He is separated from sinners not in the sense of an inability to understand their life and inability to understand their speech or anything else, but when sinners respond to anything, they tend to respond in very similar ways.

Yet, Jesus, when faced with temptation, when faced with the injustice of men, yes, He experiences wrath, but it's always a perfectly pure wrath. And yes, He responds to the temptations offered to Him by men, but He does so in a way that is always perfectly pleasing to the Father.

There is a separation that exists with one who is undefiled, with one who does not have that consciousness of sin that we have. And so He is finally described as exalted above the heavens. He has entered into that holy place.

And because of His perfection, because as we saw this morning, His death, His burial, His resurrection demonstrates God's acceptance of His sacrifice, then He is now exalted above the heavens. And as a result, we are told that He does not need daily like those high priests to offer up sacrifices first for His own sins and then for the sins of the people because this He did once for all when He offered up Himself.

And so He is exalted above the heavens and He is exalted above the people. Now, you might immediately, and I actually hope that you would, catch something in that text that makes you wonder. It wouldn't necessarily catch most folks.

And if we hadn't gone back and emphasized the Old Testament backgrounds and looked at these things, you might not even notice it. But I want you to think for just a few moments about what's being said.

What do I refer to? Who does not need what? Daily. Ed. Leviticus chapter 16. And we know that on the day of Yom Kippur or Kippurim, the offering of atonements, we know that the high priest does offer up sacrifice first for his own sins, but daily?

There isn't anything in the Old Testament that demands that the high priest offers sin offerings for himself daily. And so to what do we refer? Well, as you can imagine, the commentaries are filled with various and sundry possibilities.

You can sort of actually tell where the commentaries come from because some basically say, well, the writer just is unaware of the Old Testament laws being primarily Greek. And you read those and use them as doorstops.

And then there are others that point to the fact that there were daily offerings that all the priests had to make. And but they were not necessarily sin offerings. But I think that probably the best way to understand it is if you're talking about the high priest and if he's functioning truly as the high priest with an attitude and understanding of God's law, that the high priest, like all the believing Jews, recognized that each and every day they broke God's law and that each and every day they needed to make sacrifice, if not so much the offering of the ram, the sacrifice of what?

Well, what does the Old Cabinet Scriptures say? The sacrifice of contrition, repentance, a broken heart. This is what God finds acceptable. In other words, the old high priest understood their sinfulness.

That is, if they were a true high priest. Now, we know historically, and I haven't really gone into this and don't have time this evening really to do so, but we know that at this period of time, the high priesthood was very corrupt.

It was corrupt for a number of reasons. Politics always ends up corrupting, well, everything. But especially in this context, the Romans had discovered that they could control the high priesthood. In fact, they would depose and assign high priests.

This was not the way it was supposed to be. This is why some of the groups outside of mainstream Jerusalem-centered Judaism rejected the priesthood there in Jerusalem because in essence they said, you have capitulated to the Romans on the very matter of the high priesthood itself.

How can we believe that the sacrifices offered by that high priest are even relevant to us? And so there were some who had in essence given up on that priesthood and did not believe it to be valid any longer because we even see in the Gospels, you have Annas and you have Caiaphas.

You have two high priests. You're only supposed to have one high priest at a time. He's only replaced by death. But there is more than one high priest because the Romans had become involved on a political level.

And so there was clearly a degradation of the high priesthood at that particular point in time. But the high priest who understood who he was as a sinner, and I don't know how you could avoid that given that the first sacrifices you had to offer on the Day of Atonement were for yourself before you could even begin to represent the others.

Then he is one who is aware and hence saddled by his sin. And so he is seen on the Day of Atonement doing exactly this. But even on a daily basis, he would know his own sin. So notice what he has to do.

He has to offer up sacrifices first for his own sin and then for the sins of the people. Before he can function as high priest as we saw in Leviticus 16, he himself has to be sanctified. He has to be made holy.

Jesus doesn't have to do this because, notice what it says, this he did once for all when he offered up himself. Now, let me set aside an immediate misunderstanding that some people might have. Jesus is not offering a sin sacrifice for himself.

He is only offering a sacrifice for the people. It has been said that he is holy, innocent, undefiled, separated from sinners, etc., etc. So he's not offering a sacrifice for himself on the basis of any felt sin.

Now, at the same time, even when he was born, the sacrifices were offered, were told in the book of Luke according to the law. But that would not be because Jesus himself needed purification. But Jesus does, in John 17, sanctify himself.

He sets himself apart and he even goes to John the Baptist, not as a sinner, but to fulfill all righteousness and is baptized. And so Jesus identifies with his people in accordance with God's law, but without ever giving evidence of any sin on his own part.

But the next thing you need to understand, if you've sort of zoned out, zoned back in here for a moment, the phrase at the end of verse 27 needs to be understood because this he did once for all when he offered up himself.

Once for all when he offered up himself. Now, that's extremely important. The English is somewhat ambiguous at that point. We can utilize the phrase once for all in two different ways, can we not? You can talk about once for all.

That is, let's say we all decide to go to the Diamondbacks game as a congregation. I'm not sure that that would ever happen, but let's say we did. Let's say Brother Flock all of a sudden came into a large amount of money and in that particular year, the Diamondbacks were actually winning, so we'd want to go.

And so we all go. And so Brother Flock pays once for all. He pays one price for all of us to go into the Diamondbacks game. That's one way that the English phrase once for all can be used. Or that can be used as a temporal phrase, that is a phrase referring to time.

And that is, I paid the price once for all. I will never pay the price again. It's not extensive, as in for all people. It is once for all, as in one time never to be repeated. Now, thankfully, in the Greek language, those terms cannot be confused with one another.

Once for all people would be one form of the language. Here we have the term ephaphax, which means once for all, and it's a temporal term. Temporal in time. So the once for all is emphasizing the singularity, the finishedness, the once for allness of the sacrifice of Christ.

So there are those who not knowing the original language is not making themselves available to the information that is available on these things. We'll look at this and say, see, because this he did once for every person, and that is not even a possibility.

In English, it is. It's not in the original language. And so make a note for that. I have had that misused in my presence before. And in reality, what it is emphasizing is something we're going to see emphasized repeatedly to a crescendo at the beginning of chapter 10.

And that is the fact that this offering is once for all in contrast to the repetitive sacrifices of the old covenant. And that will become extremely important as we press forward as well. But then notice something else.

It does not say because this he did once for all when he was offered up. Look carefully at the language. When he offered himself. He offered up himself. Now that's a little bit odd. That should catch us off guard just a little bit.

Because we have in one single phrase the joining together of two of these beautiful pictures of Christ's work. We have on the one hand the high priest who offers up sacrifices. And here he is holy, undefiled, separated from sinners, without blemish, exalted above.

We have a perfect high priest. And he's doing what high priests do. He's offering up sacrifice. But the sacrifice is himself. He's not entering into the holy place in heaven with the blood of bulls and goats, the ashes of a heifer.

His act of high priesthood is offering himself. A finished, perfect, one-time sacrifice. As he enters into the holy of holies, the offering is himself. The sacrifice is completed out there. He enters in to the presence of God.

And as we emphasized this morning, what is that act of intercession? It is the presentation of that lamb as if slain. The scars upon his hands as we sang again. And so here you have the high priest who offers himself.

What an amazing thing. To ponder. Especially when you remember that this book began in discussion of this one who is the high priest as the one who created all things. The eternal, unchanging Creator.

The one who flung the universe into existence. And he offers up himself as a sacrifice, the redemption of his own people. His creatures. What an amazing thing to ponder. So the writer concludes by saying, for the law appoints men as high priests who are weak.

That's all the law has to work with. But the word of the oath, that's Psalm 110, verse 4, the word of the oath which came after the law appoints a son. A son made perfect forever. Now what I love about that description there, at the end, is you have the contrast between the weak men and then you have a son of a different nature.

I wonder if somewhere in the back of the mind of the author is that son who is given to us. Isaiah 9. A child will be born to us. Yes, a son will be given to us. The oath of Psalm 110, verse 4 appoints a son, and that son has been made perfect forever.

Forever. And then the Greek term that is used here, this morning I used it. It's one that I think a lot of us probably know. What does Jesus say from the cross concerning his work? Tetelestai. It is finished.

It is finished. It is completed. And here you have the same root being used of the son who has been made perfect forever. Made perfect. Remember back in chapter 5? The sufferings that were his? The obedience that was his?

Jesus doesn't just come down from heaven and appear in glory and say, here I am. I'm the great Savior. I'm going to redeem you. He demonstrates through a life of perfect obedience the reality of his incarnation and the reality of the substitutionary nature of the atonement.

He is truly the God-man. And the perfection of the righteousness that is imputed to us is demonstrated by the fact that he lived a holy, spotless, undefiled, separated from sinner's life. And so, while the old high priests, keep in mind, even as we get deep into the forest, we need to keep an eye on the forest itself.

Remember what this all is an argument for? There's nothing to go back to. What if you had had this explained to you? What if you really understood who the son was? How could you ever once again join those people standing outside in the court on the day of atonement and see that man in his robe knowing he's a sinner, knowing he's going to die, knowing that the offerings of those, that blood from the sacrifice is never going to take away your sin?

How could you ever go back to that? Knowing what you know now. The entire book, remember, exhortation. Not to go back. To stand firm. And so, the law, the old way, appoints men as high priests who are weak.

But the word of the oath which came after the law appoints a son made perfect forever. Sometimes the evening service, especially since we're normally in the Old Testament and going through Hebrews in morning and evening, we're going to be in the Old Testament one way or the other, so it actually fits rather well.

But sometimes there's a difficulty in making the evening service sort of fit with the Lord's Supper. Not with the book of Hebrews and not with this text. We are about to obey the Lord's command. We are going to partake of the Lord's Supper.

I hope that as over the past, I guess almost two years now, we have been working through the book of Hebrews, I hope that your understanding of what we do in the Lord's Supper has increased. This is not the offering of a sacrifice to God.

And what would be one of the main reasons why, if you look at the London Baptist Confession of Faith, it specifically denies that there is any kind of propitiatory or sacrificial nature to what we do.

What would be one of the reasons that we would place that within our confession of faith? Very simple. We just read it. This He did once for all. There is no sacrifice to be added. There is no representation of the sacrifice.

What we do in the Lord's Supper is a remembrance. And we do this remembrance individually and corporately. As the body gathered here, and this is one of the reasons we guard the table, we ask certain questions of you before you partake of the Lord's Supper.

Do you make confession of faith in Christ? Have you been baptized? Are you under the discipline of a like-minded church? Well, the reasons we do that is because this is one of the ordinances of the church, just as we protect and guard the baptistry and baptism, so we do the Lord's Table, is because this can only be meaningful if we are doing remembrance of Christ.

And you don't make remembrance of Christ if you've never made confession of faith in Him. You're not being obedient to Him if you haven't been baptized. And you, of course, if you're under the discipline of a sister church, a like-minded church, then you're in rebellion against Christ's body in the first place, and we don't want to add to your guilt in so doing.

But you see, when we gather to do this, we gather as believers, and we make a profession of faith. We believe that what Jesus Christ has done is the only way that we have salvation. But as we read those texts in 1 Corinthians 11, as we think about what we've seen here in Hebrews, what we're doing is by participating in the Lord's Supper, we are saying to the whole world, Jesus Christ's death, His giving of His body, His giving of His blood, His sacrificing of His life was God's intention.

It was not an accident. It was purposeful. And its purpose was to bring about the glorification of the triune God and the redemption of His people. And by partaking, we are saying, I believe. Here is where I find my life.

Here is where I find my spiritual sustenance in Jesus Christ and Him alone. And so you are active. We as the people of God are active in doing remembrance of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. That sacrifice which was once for all when He offered up Himself.

I hope and pray that as we partake this evening, that you will consider ever more deeply the great truths of the atonement of Christ that we are seeing in God's Word and that as a result, you yourselves will find this to be an extremely important time.

With that, let us turn to hymn number 542. Hymn number 542. And as is our custom, as we sing, if those who are on my right can move over to the left, it sort of looks like everything's been left right there open for you to go.

It'll be very easy for you to move over to the left so the men can serve us. Hymn number 542. Let's stand together.