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“Free of all ties”
More on freedom. This is from Herman Ridderbos’ commentary on John 8:32:
“And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”
The freedom meant is not that of a person to manage his life free of all ties that might hinder him in the development of his own “identity” or “authority.” That, after all, would mean no more that that such a person has within himself a freedom that he merely needs to discover and maintain against everything and against everyone who would hinder him in the excersize of his own personhood. The reference is rather to a freedom that a person does not possess within himself, even if he thinks otherwise and attempts to live by that illusion. It must be granted to him as a reality coming from the outside, in which he participates by “birth from above” and that thus makes him free.
The obvious, the silly, and the true.
On Monday night we discussed the idea of freedom. These discussions remind me of this scene from George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel 1984, where the main character (Winston), mulls over the pressure he was feeling (from the governmental forces known as “the Party”) to disconnect his ideas from reality.
Someone who looks to the bible as their source of truth and knowledge of God wouldn’t end up affirming everything a writer like George Orwell thought or wrote. (Though I guess that’s true for any author.) Nevertheless, this passage seems to reverberate powerfully these days.
He wondered, as he had many times wondered before, whether he himself was a lunatic. Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. At one time it had been a sign of madness to believe that the earth goes round the sun; today, to believe that the past is unalterable. He might be alone in holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic. But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him; the horror was that he might also be wrong.
He picked up the children’s history book and looked at the portrait of Big Brother which formed its frontispiece. The hypnotic eyes gazed into his own. It was a though some huge force were pressing down upon you–something that penetrated inside your skull battering against your brain, frightening you out of your beliefs, persuading you, almost, to deny the evidence of your senses. In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make a claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable–why then?
The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall toward the earth’s center. With the feeling that… he was setting forth an important axiom, he wrote:
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.
If that is granted, all else follows.
Learning to be free
Last night we looked at what, for Americans, is an all-important thing–freedom. Here are the notes:
How do we define Freedom? If you asked the average person on the street, you’d probably get a definition something like, “The right and power to be able to choose to do whatever you want,” or maybe, “Being able to live out your deepest desires, whatever they may be” (and some might add…”as long as it doesn’t hurt anybody”).
So…what is Freedom? First, look at John 8:31-36.
verse 33
The argument here is over the meaning of the word “freedom.” The crowd says freedom is defined by some outward circumstance (“bondage to no one!”) or by their national heritage. (“We’re Abraham’s descendants!”). They took offense when Jesus said that they needed to be free. And they took offense when he said they needed him to be free
verse 31
First, notice: Jesus is all about people being truly free. But he claims the right to define what freedom is and is not.
verse 32 and 34 – What Jesus says about Freedom:
- It comes from being rightly related to him. How you’re oriented towards Jesus, what your stance is towards him, determines if you’re free or not.
- The only status that is considered “free” is that of “disciple” aka “learner.”
- The only way to be related to Jesus as a learner is to “abide in his word.” That means to carefully, whole-heartedly learn and keep his commands for a lifetime. It means to want to have Jesus define everything and evaluate everything in your life. It means you want to be doing the things he wants done, and not doing the things he wants to destroy. This is the only way to actually be free.
- Freedom is not being enjoyed when people commit sin. A human being who commits sin—and that’s their life—is a slave. Jesus says there’s no other way. Human beings weren’t meant to love and do evil. They are in slavery when they commit sin. Two points here:
- Jesus gets to define what sin is. That’s what it means to have him as your lord, your teacher, and your savior. If someone’s not interested in having him define sin for them, then they don’t have to have him as lord, teacher or savior. So we can only be free if we’re willing to learn from Jesus what sin and evil is, and what it’s not.
- What if someone wants to do evil? What if they love it? See John 3:16-21. What we want and love is exactly the question. If we insist on loving what God calls darkness, than we reject Jesus. This means that freedom cannot simply be “getting to do whatever we want” or “getting to live out your deepest feelings, whatever they are.” It must be something more like not being enslaved to sin. Because here we see that even if we are able to choose sin, if we do choose sin, we are not choosing freedom, we are choosing slavery.
So freedom is more than simply the ability to choose to do what we want. Freedom is the freedom to choose against slavery, and to live outside of the power of sin and all its consequences. It must be the freedom to know Jesus and live according to his teachings—which set you truly free.
See also Romans 6:1-23
Notice many of the same themes in this passage as in John 8. To truly follow Christ is to be united to his death in a real living way, so that it becomes your death. Sins sin is not Jesus’ master, it is no longer your master either. Show your master by what you give the parts of your body to obey. (Do your hands obey righteousness or sin? Do your eyes obey God or sin? Does your tongue obey life or sin?)
In verse 18 Paul makes a statement that might strike us as almost contradictory at first: “Having been set free from sin, you became slaves of righteousness.” To many people, this sounds absurd. If you’re a slave than you’re not free. Is this the freedom Jesus is offering? Well, consider what Paul says we become slaves to (“servants of”). “Righteousness” is a huge term in the scriptures. I recommend you do a bible word search on it. Especially as you trace it through the Old Testament, it ends up meaning something like… When justice is done and everyone is taken care of. Or, for a longer definition: It is when God, who is the source of all righteousness, is known and worshiped by everyone, so everywhere you go is full of his life-giving, personal presence, so no one oppresses anyone, everyone has everything they need, children are raised to flourish and everyone is nurtured to health and strength and no one ever conquers or oppresses or invades or steals and everyone is safe and everywhere is safe.
If you are free from sin, you become a slave of that righteousness, God’s righteousness, which fills the earth with holiness and a life that can never be snuffed out.
A Christian learns to hate the slavery to sin which makes everything break and wither and die and instead we start always wanting to serve righteousness—so that we know how to fix things and not just break things. We know how to build things and not just watch things. We know how to nurture things and not just poison them. We serve righteousness and life, and not sin and death.
Any sane human being wants to be free to be able to live in that world where God is fully present to everyone and everyone . Any follower of Christ wants to be able to actively participate in that world. We live our lives now to witness to God’s righteousness and the coming world he’s making. Paul calls this being “slaves to righteousness” and “slaves to God.”
So true freedom is not doing whatever we want, or getting live out all our desires. True freedom is being able to escape the power of sin, to know Jesus, and then to be free to do what we were always meant to do—know God and cultivate a blessed world.
That’s why some people say freedom is not the freedom to do what you want to do, but the freedom to be what you were meant to be.
“The world itself is morally sensitive.”
Here are some great insights from Alec Motyer, on Isaiah 25:4-5, which reads
The earth mourns and fades away, The world languishes and fades away; The haughty people of the earth languish. The earth is also defiled under its inhabitants, Because they have transgressed the laws, Changed the ordinance, Broken the everlasting covenant.
Motyer notes this very unintuitive connection that Isaiah is pointing out–that the status of our planet is directly tied to the status of our relational stance toward God. To put it more another way: our morality affects our environment. We shouldn’t think we can sin with abandon and continue to enjoy the fruits of the earth, “world without end.” Motyer explains:
[In this passage,] defiled is used with a strong meaning, ‘to pollute’.
As God’s creation, the world itself is morally sensitive, and the ‘thorns and thistles’ of Genesis 3:18 illustrate the two side of this sensitivity. On the one hand, they evidence the way in which earth itself fights against sinners. It does not readily yield its bounty with them but turns its productive powers to their disadvantage. On the other hand, the fact that an earth which the Lord pronounced good can produce thorns and thistles is evidence that its nature has been damaged and the garden is in the process of becoming wilderness. The earth has been defiled by its people (that is, ‘under its inhabitants,’ i.e. under their domination, their misuse, under the burden of them).
Yet it was not so in Eden, where Adam ‘served’ the garden. So what has happened?
Three charges are abruptly stated:
- Transgression of revealed truth. Disobeyed is widely used to mean ‘to transgress’. They have transgressed the laws [torah in the Hebrew]. Torah [means]…authoritative instruction. The first charge, therefore, is that they refused to hold to and live by divine revelation.
- Changing what was intended for perpetuity. Changed is ‘they altered’. The verb is used of one thing replacing another. The noun translated statutes means ‘to carve’ or ‘to engrave’ and hence has the idea of perpetuity. The second charge is of introducing an innovative morality.
- Broken is a technical term in covenant vocabulary, deeper than transgressing or disobeying, actually annulling, nullifying or setting aside the whole concept of covenant relationship and life.
A quick reread of the verses above, and a few minutes thinking through Motyer’s observations, may bear some interesting fruit. What really is the source of our environmental woes? How did we misunderstand the world when we decided it was simply a machine for us to work in whatever way we wanted? How much has our science really taught us about larger questions of what the earth is–questions that go beyond chemical examination and explanations of forces?
What if we’ve missed a whole big piece of the picture?
A String to Challenge Us
I read this verse the other day in preparation for a Bible Study:
When He had turned around and looked at His disciples, He rebuked Peter, saying, “Get behind Me, Satan! For you are not mindful of the things of God, but the things of men.” (Mark 8:33 )
In my bible study program, I saw these cross references:
Romans 8:5-8
Those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit, the things of the Spirit.
Philippians 3:19
…whose end is destruction, whose god is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame who set their mind on earthly things.
James 3:15-18
This wisdom does not descend from above, but is earthly, sensual, demonic.
Matthew 6:31-32
Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For after all these things the Gentiles seek…
1 Peter 4:1
Therefore, since Christ suffered for us in the flesh, arm yourselves also with the same mind, for he who has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin…
1 John 2:15
Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.
Thinking through all the connections and implications, I find that to be a pretty challenging string of verses. You?
The Salt and the Meat
I haven’t forgotten this blog! Time has been precious lately. Anyway, this is another excellent video from these guys. Please watch and share and encourage our friends and neighbors, and in the mean time, check out this meditation from John Piper which gives us a great tone and mode for our reaction to the changes in everyone’s thinking all around us…
American culture does not belong to Christians, neither in reality nor in Biblical theology. It never has. The present tailspin toward Sodom is not a fall from Christian ownership……
But Christian exiles are not passive. We do not smirk at the misery or the merrymaking of immoral culture.
We weep.
Or we should.
This is my main point: being exiles does not mean being cynical. It does not mean being indifferent or uninvolved.
The salt of the earth does not mock rotting meat.
Where it can, it saves and seasons. And where it can’t, it weeps. And the light of the world does not withdraw, saying “good riddance” to godless darkness. It labors to illuminate. But not dominate.
Being Christian exiles in American culture does not end our influence; it takes the swagger out of it. We don’t get cranky that our country has been taken away. We don’t whine about the triumphs of evil. We are not hardened with anger. We understand. This is not new. This was the way it was in the beginning –- Antioch, Corinth, Athens, Rome. The Empire was not just degenerate, it was deadly. For three explosive centuries Christians paid for their Christ-exalting joy with blood. Many still do. More will.
It never occurred to those early exiles that they should rant about pervasive debauchery and danger. The Imperial words were still ringing in their ears: “You will be hated by all for my name’s sake. But the one who endures to the end will be saved” (Mark 13:13). This was a time for indomitable joy and unwavering ministries of mercy.
Yes, it was a time for influence–-as it is now. But not with huffing and puffing as if to reclaim our lost laws. Rather with tears and persuasion and perseverance, knowing that the folly of racism, and the exploitation of the poor, and the de-Godding of education, and the horror of abortion, and the collapse of heterosexual marriage, are the tragic death-tremors of joy, not the victory of the left or the right.
The greatness of Christian exiles is not success but service. Whether we win or lose, we witness to the way of truth and beauty and joy. We don’t own culture, and we don’t rule it. We serve it with brokenhearted joy and longsuffering mercy, for the good of man and the glory of Jesus Christ.
What would you say?
Watch, think, pray.
Can you have free will if God knows the future?
This is an important distinction, and doesn’t even take the whole minute and a half to explain.
Something we needed
Last night we continued our study through the Letter to the Hebrews. Below are the notes:
Exploring the theme of “the High Priest” in Hebrews
2:9-10, 2:14-3:1
So you read these verses—and you see something the bible is assuming. It’s assuming that what we all need is a high priest. In other words, what we needed was someone who knew how to deal with God on our behalf, and could be a go between. We needed someone to represent us before God, and to bring God to us. This is what Hebrews means when it says that Jesus—“had”—to become human, or that he was made “perfect” through sufferings. It doesn’t mean that Jesus was lacking, or had a deficiency that had to be fixed, it just means that God was willing to actually do and become the exact thing the human race needed. In other words, when he saw that we needed a human to be something that no human ever had been, he came and did it himself—and that’s who Jesus is. Because of the life he lived, the death he died, and the fact that he rose from the dead, he became that go between.
4:14-16
Since Jesus is a truly human priest, who really lived a real human life in our world, he can actually sympathize with us. So no one needs to let the fact that now he’s in heaven, and he’s not around on earth and you can’t see him, keep you from taking advantage of the fact that you have a priest. He understands your struggle, and he knows how to help. So go to him!
5:1-4
Iin these verses the writer is drawing on the history of the nation of Israel and all of the of religious regulations God set up when he brought them out of Egypt—the people who were originally reading this letter had a whole background knowledge of all this stuff that he could refer to. So here he just mentions that the point of the priest was to take care of doing the religious duties God required from the people. And, since he was only human himself, he could do it with some sympathy for the people who came to him and needed to get right with God.
But then, in verse 4, he mentions someone named Aaron. And if the people listening to this when it was originally read didn’t already have a problem with what they were hearing, Aaron’s name would have been a trigger for them. Because this whole time we’ve been saying that Jesus is the high priest for Christians, but any good Hebrew person back then would have immediately been like, “Wait, not just anyone can be a priest—only people who came from the certain family in Israel, called the Tribe of Levi could be priests. That mean that you had to be descended from a guy named Levi, (who was one of the original twelve fathers of Israel). And everyone knew that Jesus wasn’t from that family—he was descended from Levi’s brother Judah. Kings came from Judah’s tribe, but never priests. So when God gave the laws that said only people from Levi’s tribe could be priests, he established something called an order—it’s called the Order of Levi (or sometimes it’s called the Order of Aaron).
To us this seems like not a big deal, but to them it was a huge deal—and they were right. It seems like not a big deal to us cause we don’t know what we’re talking about. It’s like trying to do your own electrical work on your house, but you have no experience in that area. Sometimes that’s what we’re like with God. We act like, “I got this,” but we have no clue what we’re getting into. We need someone who knows what God’s all about to teach us and help us get reconnected to God. The person writing this and the people hearing this totally got this—which is why they’d have a problem with someone saying Jesus could be a priest. They’d think,“by definition, he can’t be, because he’s not from the right family.” He’s not from the Order of Levi. It’s like saying you’re hiring a plumber to fix your car. Won’t work. Plumbers don’t fix cars. People from the tribe of Judah can’t be priests.
So notice…that’s exactly where the thought of 5:5 comes in.
5:5
See this? Jesus didn’t take this position of priest to himself. God did it! God the father made God the Son priest. Now, are we just supposed to read this like, God can do whatever he wants, so there? Does God break his own rules—was he just saying, “Oh forget that whole order of Levi thing. I don’t care about that anymore.”? The answer’s no! That’s not how God does things. And that’s what makes verse 6 so huge.
5:6
Here he continues quoting Psalm 110—And he just sort of drops this verse in our laps—Psalm 110:4. And the point of this verse is—It’s totally true that Jesus isn’t from the order of Levi. In fact, God took care of this, when he said the one who would come to be King forever would also be a priest, and not a priest from the old system or the old order. (Notice! Psalm 110 is called God speaking.) In the Psalm God says this king would be a priest from a totally different Order—the order of Melchizedek!
What would have been so huge about this for the original audience is that the author takes it to their home turf—he quotes from the Psalms, and that’s bona fide Hebrew scripture. It was written way before Jesus was born, so we know that God had thought up and announced the idea of a different order of priests before Christians ever claimed Jesus was priest. So no one can say Christians broke any rules or made things up—It’s clear from the Hebrew Bible itself this was God’s idea. So…can Jesus be a priest, even though he’s not from the order of Levi? Yes!—because there’s another Order God set up—the order of Melchizedek!
If you’re tempted to check out at this point… you gotta keep reading on to 5:10-11.
5:10-11
The writer of Hebrews totally knows that even if he got some people interested by proving that Jesus could be a priest—there’s a good chance he’s gonna lose them if he goes into like, detail about that. So he’s got a choice here—does he skip this information and get to the really relevant stuff so everyone says—“oh this totally applies to me. This is what I need to hear!” ? Or, does he bite the bullet and get into the difficult stuff? His solution to that question was last week’s study. First he straight up challenges them for the not being able or willing to listen to what they need to hear. That’s the end of chapter five and the beginning of chapter 6. Then he goes at them from another angle with comfort and encouragement, and this brings us to what he says to close out chapter 6.
6:19-20
So right in these verses we get a clue as to what’s going on, and why God would want this in the bible, even though it’s kind of hard to understand right off the bat.
Notice what God really wants for us. In verse 19, he wants us to be people who, deep in our hearts, have a hope that is like an anchor for the deepest part of our being. He wants us to have a kind of hope that nothing can rock, where nothing can bring us down or blow us up or ruin us. Isn’t that what every human wants?
How are you doing in that area? Do you get shaken or scared or freaked out by the world around you? Do you get anxious when you think about the future or when you watch the news? Does your faith feel weak when things get rough? God had Hebrews written to help us with that.
And the point of all this is, sometimes God knows that when we really need to grow, and we really need to get strong, he needs to teach us things that are going to make us grow mentally first—we need some information before we can get stronger and get closer to God and have more faith. Most of us don’t typically think that way, but it’s true, and that’s why, after everything he’s written, the author’s gonna go ahead here and make us think about this obscure figure named Melchizedek.
7:1-3
Now when you read these verses, if you didn’t already know it, you’re probably realizing that there’s some back story here which you need to know to understand what this is all talking about. And you’re right. The back story is in the first book of the bible—the book of Genesis—and it’s in chapter 14. You should read the whole chapter. Abraham—who’s the original patriarch of the Jewish people (they were all related to him)—He’s living in the future land of Israel and he hears that his nephew (who also lived there) has been captured, as a prisoner of war by some kings who just won big battle near where he was living. Abraham’s response to this news is to arm all the men who worked for him (it’s like a mini-army) and go fight to get his nephew back. He’s successful, and on his way back to his home, before he gets to where his tent is, he gets stopped by a procession coming out from the nearby city called Salem. At the head of this procession is the king of the city.
That’s all we get about this guy Melchizedek. Three sentences. But what’s weird about Melchizedek is—he doesn’t really seem to fit in the Bible’s story at all. He’s like this anomaly—and what’s cool about that (all on its own), is that it seems to suggest that there’s a lot more going on in the world of the bible than we’re really told.
The first three verses of chapter seven in Hebrews just rehearse the story to get everyone on the same page. They hit on a few things that the author of Hebrews wants to highlight to show that Melchizedek was patterned after Jesus—who’s the one Hebrews has been talking about for six chapters—this great Son of God who is God’s final message to us. Notice how crazy this is—this incident with Melchizedek would have happened well over a thousand years before Jesus, but the point Hebrews is making is NOT that Jesus was patterned after Melchizedek but vice versa—Melchizedek’s whole point in this part of Abraham’s life is to point forward to Jesus. So the five things that show he is patterned after Jesus are:
- He is the King of Righteousness.
- He’s the king of peace.
- He’s without father, mother or genealogy—now the point of this is not that Melchizedek or Jesus had no father or mother—both of them did, the point is the genealogy—neither of them could show by pointing to the right lineage that they could be priests. That’s not how their priesthood worked.
- It says Melchizedek had “neither beginning or ending of days” and the point here is not that he wasn’t born and didn’t die, the point is, in the Bible we don’t get a record of his birth or death, and so in the record we have it’s like, as it says, his priesthood never began and never ended.
Because you know, you might have read this incident in Genesis, and then thought…who is this guy? Where’d he come from? Where’d he go? What’s he doing being a priest? How’s he know about God? Why is there a righteous king in the land where I thought only Abraham knew God? How’s this fit into the story at all? And that’s the whole point. Melchizedek is like this weird plant in the biblical history. He appears, and then he disappears again. But here in Hebrews we’re seeing that he wasn’t random at all, and he turns out to be majorly important to the main story of the bible.
7:4-10
The point here is to think through the implications of what happened with Abraham and Melchizedek. First, the fact that Abraham paid tithes of his war spoils, and received a blessing from Melchizedek, shows that even Abraham acknowledged that Melchizedek was his superior. This would have been totally mind blowing for the first people that heard it, because they would have had to be like, “yeah, that’s what that means”…but for their whole lives they’d considered Abraham to be maybe the most important historical figure they celebrated. But that’s not all these verses say, cause did you notice that Levi gets some airtime here too?
In just a few sentences we learn that if Jesus is a priest from the Order of Melchizedek, than that means followers of Jesus don’t only have a different priesthood than the religion God set up before Jesus, it means they have something better—because the founder of that order was a greater person than Levi, and even greater than Abraham himself. And before that point even really settles in, we get more explanation about all this in the next few verses.
7:11-19
Notice the word “perfect” in the first and last verses of this section. That creates a little “package” of scripture and shows us the main point of these verses. The old priesthood the Jewish people had, the order of Levi, made nothing perfect. Another way to say that would be that it didn’t finally solve all the problems created in the world by human sin. It was like a band-aid. It was the band-aid God gave us, and so it was good, but it wasn’t the full healing we really needed from God.
Now this is a nice point, but, for me anyway, it doesn’t really seem to follow from what we’ve read so far—until you realize that when he quotes from Psalm 110 again in verse 17, the author’s doing the same thing he’s been doing through this whole letter. He’s working with the biblical timeline. Psalm 110 was written after the events in Genesis occurred—a long time after. It was also written a long time after the order of Levi was established. It was actually written during the time when those priests from Levi were doing their thing—being priests just like God told them. And then, after the order of Levi has been around for hundreds of years, and seems to be doing their job, God has David write that the king who will come from his descendants, and will rule the world forever will also be a priest—and a priest from a different order—he’ll be a king-priest like Melchizedek!
Maybe this is why he challenged us back in chapter 6 about being “dull of hearing.” Now if these things are all new to you, that’s totally fine, you’re still getting your bearings. But some of us have been walking with Christ and reading the bible for a while. And for anyone in that category, we should begin to develop a set of thinking skills to work out what the bible means when we read different parts of it. Like right here, we should be able to think it out something like—”If God had David write this all those years after Levi, it must mean that the more important priest is this king—not the priests from the tribe of Levi. And if that’s true, than what verse 12 and verse 16 and verse 18 and 19 say have to be true too. There must be a changing of everything! If there’s a new and better priest, there must be a new and better way of relating to God than the old law he set up.”
Look at the end of verse 19—God is using our priest Jesus to bring us a better hope, one that brings us near to God. Anyone who has Jesus as their priest can finally get over the distance between people and God. If you want to get closer to God, all you need is to let Jesus be your priest.
Just like we said about the soul anchor—does this matter to you? If you’re a person who’s ever felt trapped and far from God, this text is saying God’s answer to that issue is to give you Jesus as your priest, your go between for you and God. And a major thing you need to be able to enjoy this new closeness to God is to learn about this solution God provided for you…in other words, you need to learn about what kind of Priest Jesus is for you. He’s a priest that brings a better hope. It’s better than the hope that’s being offered by any other thing out there. And it’s even a better hope than the hope people had before Jesus, because God used the old ways before Jesus came, but now that he’s here, we have the best possible way of becoming close with God.
7:20-22
What’s awesome about this is how totally unexpected this is. I mean, I don’t think any of us could have written this. Imagine telling your friend, “Jesus gives us hope! Real hope!” And they’re like, “Wow. How does he do that?” What would you say?
I bet none of us would say, “Well, see we know it’s better because the priests from the order of Levi weren’t confirmed with an oath, but Psalm 110 says that the order of Melchizedek is…See what I mean? ”
Whenever you’re reading the bible and you run into something that totally surprises you…stop. Those are the places where you’re going to actually learn something. Let the bible surprise you and then pray and think and God will teach you new things.
The point of mentioning the Oath here—I think it was Alastair Begg I heard say this—the point of God taking an oath is not so we know he’s telling the truth, cause God never lies, the oath is just God’s way of showing that what he’s about to say is central to his purposes—so we should stop and really make sure we’re noticing and getting what he’s saying. Melchizedek seems like a throw away character, but then God comes along in Psalm 110 and says, “listen up—remember that guy Melchizedek?—yeah, he’s huge. But not actually because he’s huge…but because he’s a hint and a pattern of the truly huge figure—Jesus Christ.”
And the other thing about this oath is that it explains how Jesus being our high priest brings Christians a better hope—God took the oath and made the promise because promising is God’s way of making what the bible calls a covenant. As you read the bible you find out that as God is fixing the problems that we humans have created on planet earth, he keeps announcing how he’s going to do it by making these big, groups of promises called covenants. A covenant is God’s way of saying—“no matter what happens, no matter how things look, you can bank on this…I’m going to do this. You can bet your whole life on it.”
Why does having Jesus as a high priest give us a better hope in this world than anything else? Because it guarantees something the bible calls the New Covenant—which is God’s promise to finally close the gap that we put between us and him by putting his own spirit in our hearts and empowering us to be able to live lives of holiness forever. How does that work? Read the next couple verses…
7:23-25
See the point here? The oath God swore, and the promise he made, was not only that Jesus would be a priest, but that he would be a priest forever. Under the old order of Levi, the priests were regular guys who did what regular guys do…they got old and died. But Jesus isn’t like them. When he brings us close to God, we never need to worry that one day he’ll die and the next guy won’t be up to snuff. No, Jesus is an eternal priest, so when he saves us, he’s able to save us all the way.
And notice…why can he do that? Because we need a priest, and we need him to be praying for us…and Jesus does that! And he does it forever.
7:26-28
Stop and think about that. Right now, in heaven, forever…is a person, a human, praying for us. He’s a human who lives forever. And we kind of skipped over another awesome way to say that that came up in verse 16. It says Jesus is a priest on the basis of the power of an indestructible life. And remember…that’s an indestructible human life.
So, Jesus has become exactly the thing we needed. And that’s what verses 26 through 28 say.
8:1
Do you take advantage of this fact? If not, what’s your strategy for being right with God, and for being close to him?
The Crazy Things Christians Believe
Check out this quote by George Guthrie, from the chapter on Hebrews in the Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament.
“The early church understood Psalm 2:7 to refer to Jesus’ induction into his royal position as king of the universe at the resurrection and exaltation.”
As I was reading it, I was suddenly struck by what a crazy idea this is. Imagine it–a group of people meet someone who does some pretty amazing things, then gets killed, and after that they say he’s the king of the universe.
King of the universe.
How does anyone even start to think thoughts like that–especially about another person they actually knew?
Two reasons:
First, as Christians around the world celebrated this past Sunday, he didn’t stay dead. It was the fact that they actually saw him, talked with him, touched him, ate the breakfast he cooked–all after he had been killed and buried that set off this radical change in how they saw him. The New Testament is clear in many places that is was exactly these experiences (over the course of 40 days) which convinced them that Jesus was, in fact, way more than any other human they’d ever met.
But think about it, even if you did have a friend who rose from the dead, would that make you think he or she ruled the whole universe? I’ve never had another friend rise from the dead and come talk to me, so I can’t say for sure what my reaction would be. But I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t leap from “Great, you’re back! Wow, how’d this happen?!” to “You must be king of everything!”
And this get’s us to the second reason Christians made this leap. Jesus didn’t come out of nowhere. The first Christians were Jewish people who had been raised on the Hebrew scriptures, which consistently predicted someone who would come and end up to be ruler of the whole world. In fact he’d be Mighty God, and king over the whole created order. Hence, king of the universe. (See, for instance scriptures like Isaiah 9:6-7, Zechariah 9:10, Daniel 7, Psalm 72.) Specifically, when the first Christians saw Jesus rise from the dead, they realized he was fulfilling the prophecies contained in Psalm 2 and Psalm 110.
In other words, it wasn’t just that something amazing happened when Jesus rose from the dead, it was that God had prepared the nation of Israel with words to interpret the events of Jesus life, including the cross and the empty tomb.
So here they were, with a risen Jesus standing in front of them. Amazingly, in all of his pre-cross life, Jesus did nothing to make them think he couldn’t be this person. Instead everything he did and said added up to only one conclusion–he must be the promised one, whom their scriptures had pointed forward to.
And even after he ascended, and the Holy Spirit began his ministry, though the first believers didn’t (physically) see Jesus on the throne now, they had seen him ascend to sky, and figured (under the divine guidance of the inspiration of the Holy Spirit) that he must be the cosmic king of everything, like Psalm 2 and Psalm 110 said.
It’s crazy! But it’s true! And in the end, when you understand the story of the world, and the context Jesus emerged out of, it’s actually not crazy at all. It’s what God always said would happen, and it’s what we all should have been expecting, given the greatness and large-heartedness of God.
And that’s why Christians ended up writing things like this:
In these last days God has spoken to us by His Son,
whom He has appointed heir of all things,
through whom also He made the worlds;
who being the brightness of His glory
and the express image of His person,
and upholding all things by the word of His power,
when He had by Himself purged our sins,
sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high.
(Hebrews 1)
God was working in Christ when He raised Him from the dead
and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly places,
far above all principality and power and might and dominion,
and every name that is named,
not only in this age but also in that which is to come.
And He put all things under His feet,
and gave Him to be head over all things to the church,
which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all.
(Ephesians 1)
God also has highly exalted Him
and given Him the name which is above every name,
that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
of those in heaven, and of those on earth,
and of those under the earth,
and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.
(Philippians 2)