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How the Book of Hebrews is arranged gives us insight into how important it is to have a deep appreciation for what Christ’s death and present ministry as High Priest mean to God the Father. The Book of Hebrews shows a comparison between Old Testament religious realities and obligations as opposed to the greater obligation that we have to Christ. The way Hebrews is arranged shows Christ to be superior to seven different people and things from the Old Testament. The chart below shows, in order from the greater to the lesser, the importance of these seven. Note that the most important in this arrangement are the prophets; the least in importance are the animals that were sacrificed: CHRIST For fifteen hundred years prior to Christ, the Jews had been sacrificing animals as part of their religion. When numbers of Jews became Christians shortly after Christ’s resurrection, they still continued on, in a robotic-like fashion, offering animal sacrifices as they had been obligated to do in past religious observances. They had not worked out the reality that Christ was a complete end to these sacrifices. What was even more troubling was that those sacrifices were inferior to most other things in the Old Testament. Unconsciously, the Christian Jews were adding the least important things to Christ’s death. The animal sacrifices, which are the last in the list and of least importance, were the things that the Jewish Christians were adding to the work of Christ. Christ’s work
is infinitely valuable to God the Father, so nothing need be added
to it. To add anything to Christ’s work is to imply that His
death is not adequate. How does this apply to us today? Once and only once, God the Father happily humiliated Jesus for the children’s benefit. We must recognize that God angrily refuses to allow His children to humiliate Christ again by adding anything to Christ’s work. This attempt to add shows a lack of confidence in His Son’s blood (Hebrews 10:30). He will tear away anything we add to Christ’s blood (Hebrews 10:26-29). He rejects as malignantly evil any conscience that tries to improve on the blood of His Son (Hebrews 10:22). His most severe warnings and strongest child-training (Hebrews 12:5-13; 10:26-39) will fall upon the Christians who devalue His Son’s death. Grace is a free gift, but such grace was gained by the Son’s suffering. We have no right to add anything to that suffering. It is in chapters 4-7 that the comparison is made between the Old Testament high priest and the ascended Jesus Christ. Christ is vastly superior to Aaron, the great priest of the Old Testament. The most obvious difference is the sphere of service. Aaron acted on earth and Jesus served in Heaven in the presence of God the Father. Hebrews 4:15-16 says: Having then a great high priest - Jesus the Son of God, who passed through the Heavens - we should grasp our confession firmly. For we do not have a high priest who is incapable of sympathizing with our weaknesses, since He had been tempted in a like manner in every way apart from sin. Let us then confidently approach the Throne of Grace, that we might receive mercy and find grace for help at exactly the right time. In drawing the contrast between the two, the writer to the Hebrews points out that the earthly priesthood was continually changing because the high priests would die, but Jesus Christ would be an eternal high priest because He was deathless. Hence He is able to save to the complete end the ones who are coming to God through Him, since He is always living to make intercession (Hebrews 7:25). As High Priest, He actually combines two institutions of the sacrificial system: He is the priest who offers the sacrifice and He is the sacrifice. He did not enter Heaven with the blood of animals but through His own blood, and as a result, we are sanctified once for all. This was due to the reality that He offered a satisfaction to God once (Hebrews 10:12). Since Jesus combined roles of priest and sacrifice, His sacrifice would be eternally effective. The infinite value of His person to God made His sacrifice priceless and once for all, and His personal presence in Heaven made His priestly intercession effectively potent. That being the case, Hebrews 1 says He sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high because He had made a cleansing for sins (Hebrews 1:3). This was in great contrast to the Old Testament, for there were no seats in the tabernacle or temple of the Old Testament because the priests had to be continually busy. Animal after animal had to be sacrificed, and offering after offering had to be made. But because of the infinite value of the Son of God to the Father, only one sacrifice for all time had to be given. So two realities merged: The representative nature of the high priest’s office could be eternally filled by Christ, and the once-for-all-time sacrifice of Christ could take away the entire sacrificial system. One would be ongoing and one would occur just once. Between the two, the believer has the privilege of confident security concerning the issue of sins, and the believer can be confident about sympathetic help through the person of the High Priest.
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resently, Christ is doing more for the
believer than He did for His disciples when He was on the earth.
When Christ was ministering on the earth, He had limited Himself to
the outward form of a servant and the nature of a man (Philippians 2:7). But when He was exalted
to Heaven, He did three major things. First, He sent the other
comforter, the Holy Spirit, in His stead to minister in the life of
believers (John 14:26).
The Spirit of God inside of us can have a potentially greater
ministry to us than Jesus Christ, who is on the outside of us.
Secondly, He became the head of the body of Christ (Ephesians 1:20-23). That body is His
fullness. His life, character, and abilities are filling up
the countless millions of believers upon this earth. Thirdly,
He has a ministry that is largely unnoticed, and that is serving as
the ascended High Priest (Hebrews 2:17; 3:1).
He fulfills the analogy of the Old Testament high priest with a
present ministry in Heaven. This comparison and the
significance of this ministry is developed in the Book of Hebrews.
