Scripture Daily

Context No. 416 of 4322 · Hebrews

Context · Reflection

Hebrews 7:11-17: in context

11Now if perfection was through the Levitical priesthood (for under it the people have received the law), what further need was there for another priest to arise after the order of Melchizedek, and not be called after the order of Aaron? 12For the priesthood being changed, there is of necessity a change made also in the law. 13For he of whom these things are said belongs to another tribe, from which no one has officiated at the altar. 14For it is evident that our Lord has sprung out of Judah, about which tribe Moses spoke nothing concerning priesthood. 15This is yet more abundantly evident, if after the likeness of Melchizedek there arises another priest, 16who has been made, not after the law of a fleshly commandment, but after the power of an endless life; 17for it is testified, “You are a priest forever, according to the order of Melchizedek.”

Hebrews is continuing its argument that Jesus is a greater priest than the old temple priesthood, and in this passage it puts its finger on the crucial difference. The old priesthood, the Levitical one descended from Aaron, worked by physical descent: you were a priest because of your ancestry, because you were born into the right family. And that priesthood, the writer points out, could not bring things to completion, or there would have been no need for a different kind of priest to be promised. Jesus, moreover, did not even come from the priestly tribe. He came from Judah, a tribe Moses connected with kings, not priests. So his priesthood cannot rest on the old basis of legal descent at all.

On what, then, does it rest? Here is the heart of it. He became a priest, the writer says, not on the basis of a legal requirement about bodily descent, but by the power of an indestructible life. That phrase carries the whole weight. The old priests, however faithful, all had one fatal limitation: they died. Each one served for a while and then passed, and had to be replaced by another, and another, an endless succession of dying mediators. Jesus is different not because of his pedigree but because his life cannot be ended. Having passed through death and out the other side, he holds his priesthood permanently, and Scripture says of him, you are a priest forever. He never has to be replaced, never retires, never dies and leaves his people without a mediator. His intercession does not stop, because his life does not stop.

There is deep comfort in that for anyone who has watched every human help eventually run out. The people who support me, the mentors and friends and helpers I lean on, are all, by nature, temporary; they fail, they move away, they die, and I am left without them. Hebrews points to a priest whose help never ends because his life is indestructible. Am I resting my ultimate hope on helps that are bound to run out, when there is one whose ministry to me can never be interrupted, not even by death, because he lives forever?

Sources