Our Great High Priest
Part II—Holding Fast
“Having
therefore a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son
of God, let us lay hold of our confession” (Hebrews 4:14).
There is a good deal of uncertainty in the world today.
It would be safe to say that there has never been a period in human history
when there wasn’t a large measure of uncertainty. Uncertainty is germane to the
human condition, since God expelled His creatures from the “womb” of
So uncertainty is a fact of life. The only refuge in this uncertainty is the return to the citadel of God—but this time not in dependence upon the flawlessness of the human flesh, but the power of God now residing within our spirits. Thousands of years of human history have proven irrefutably, that the human being is not capable of measuring up to God’s standards. Therefore, God has sent the redeemer—Jesus Christ—to accomplish this by the indwelling presence of His Holy Spirit. Thus, the flesh is still faltering, but the Spirit of God within holds us fast.
This
redemption was accomplished by the coming of the Son of God to earth; by His
living out the implications of the human condition; by His death on the cross;
by His resurrected life; and by His sending of the Holy Spirit to dwell within
the heart of all who will receive Him.
Who has passed through the heavens. In the process of redemption, God sent His Son—the
projection of His own being—“who passed through the heavens.” What does that
mean? And how many heavens are there? The debate about the number of heavens
has been an endless one through the centuries of Christian theology and will
probably not be resolved this side of our final abode. But the blessings and
ministrations of God are from a point beyond the heavens. Ephesians 1:3 says
that we are blessed with spiritual blessing in the epiouranios. Without getting too technical, it is a Greek word that
means the “supra-heavens.” It is really not a matter of material location, because
we are thus talking about time and space. It is rather a position in the
eternities beyond time and space, beyond the heavens. How many heavens are
there? It is not all that important. Christ came from a position beyond time
and space—the infinity of God. He came from beyond time and space in an instant
and in an instant shall carry us beyond time and space to dwell eternally with
God. So the source of our salvation is infinity; the substance of our salvation
is Spirit; the end of our salvation is eternality. All of this was accomplished
by our great high priest who “passed through” the heavens to dwell with God’s
creatures on earth. Christ is beyond the reach of fleshly failure—He cannot
fail. And thus our salvation, which is of the Spirit of Christ, once vulnerable
in the earthly paradise is now beyond the reach of human failure, secured by
the power of Christ.
Let us therefore hold fast to our
confession. What does that mean? It
must be remembered that this book was written originally to the Jews. All the
way through the epistle, there is a continual undercurrent of warning as befits
those who had, as a nation, forfeited their position with God by their
carelessness. Now they are confronting God’s last effort to redeem His people,
in the person of Jesus Christ. If they do not seize the opportunity to identify
with Christ, they have no other hope. Accordingly, the author uses the Greek
word krateo which means “to grip” or
“to seize.” Their forefathers had let their glorious position as the oracles of
God slip away from them. They had bartered the riches of God’s glory for the
gold and silver idols and ritual debaucheries of their pagan neighbors.
Warnings to them must be couched in dramatic terms, in order to awaken in the
people of God the stirrings of a last hope.
The confession. A confession is a collection of ideas. So the Greek homologeo—and the English word
“confess,” which is from the Latin. A confession isn’t necessarily a vocal
utterance, but the beliefs one holds. It is not one’s faith, but what one
believes about one’s faith. The author is saying, “You’re on the right
track—don’t give up as your fathers did, because we have a great high priest to
bring into reality all that God purposed in the redemption of His people. He is
not saying, “Don’t give up your faith”—but “don’t give up your confidence in
your confession of faith.”
The
Great High Priest is the fulfillment of all the sacrificial system ordained by
God to accomplish the redemption of His people.
For
Jew and Gentile alike, Jesus Christ, the Great High Priest, has spanned the
endless reaches of God’s universe to bring to His creatures the full force of
God’s power in deliverance from the curse of the Fall and the recovery of the
eternal oneness with God.
David
Morsey
November
1989
Next month “Part III—Let Us Come”