The Covenant of Moses was not the root of divine revelation. It was a distinctly temporary arrangement, solely for the Nation of Israel during a specific period of time until things were ripe for the ultimate revelation in Christ. Thus, every provision of the Covenant of Moses was merely a contextual implementation of something eternal. The Order of Melchizedek was much older and closer to that eternal provision than the priesthood of Aaron and his descendants.
I find it hard to explain this chapter any better than I already have in a previous commentary…
Our writer closes the door back into the Law a little tighter by showing that there is but one High Priest whom God will accept. That one does not stand in Herod’s Temple. Further, he warns that the spiritual reality of things has eluded them completely, because they have refused to grow beyond their poor Hellenized Judaism.
While there may be some debate about the absolute accuracy of it, the various rabbinical colleges all had a copy of the roll of High Priests, going all the way back to Aaron. Each man’s name, lineage and some words about his service, were included in this roll. Some of them were quite famous, offering exemplary service during their term of office. Some were equally infamous for their failures.
The office of High Priest is conceptually fuzzy in our minds. In standard Hebrew fashion, the logic is symbolic, not concrete, not merely a matter of metaphor or allegory. Spiritual truth is hardly explained, only exemplified within a context. The calling of the High Priest was at the behest of God. He set forth the original calling of Aaron and commanded how this office would be carried on by future generations. Obviously no single man in this fallen world could live forever, so the office had to pass from one man to the next. There must always be a man in the office for as long as the Covenant of the Law stood.
Because these were humans, chosen from among the Nation of Israel, they could empathize with the human failings that bound Israelis in their sins. He could serve in his representative office before God Almighty because he was called to it by God, but did so with a human heart no less fallen than those whose offerings and burdens he presented. He had to offer covering sacrifices for his own sins before attempting to offer them for others. Were he not called into the divine Presence by God, He would be stricken dead immediately. Often enough, the sins of the nation caused this anyway. At this, it was not literally God’s presence, but merely an earthly representation of such a presence. It was an earthly model of God’s throne room in Heaven. Yet, for the sake of sufficient sin, the High Priest could well expire on the Day of Atonement when he carried the blood sacrifice into that little room with the wooden box coated with gold leaf and mythical sculptures. He was just a man representing other men to a God no man could see.
Again, this whole thing was by God’s command. All the desire in the world could not make a man High Priest. It was an ironclad birthright issue. By Hebrew logic, this took away any pride a man might have, for what did he do to merit such an office? It was not possible to wear the vestments by merit, but by grace alone, by God’s command. So it was with Christ. He came to Israel by God’s command. Further, He came not merely as one of the Jews, but as the Son of God who commanded. Our writer quotes again the coronation song, Psalm 2, which bears a Messianic truth. If the Davidic king could be called a son of God, how much more so the Messiah Himself, the one who was both anchor and end of the House of David?
Many of the mystical connotations of David’s reign are tied up in the Messiah. The writer also quotes Psalm 110. We are reminded that David was permitted to touch the Ark of the Covenant. While under the covenant for which that Ark existed, it was forbidden. He was permitted because he somehow had seized upon the faith and covenant that came much earlier and still stood. The Covenant of Abraham, which included Melchizedek, both as men of faith who had fully committed their lives to Jehovah, was of a much higher order than the Law. We note that the Law was merely an outward expression of what holiness would be under strictly circumscribed limits: that people, that land and that time. It was not the ultimate revelation of holiness, but was actually a poor reflection of it. While very much binding on Israel as a nation, it could never save souls. That was a matter of faith, of commitment as a gift of grace. When David embraced that level of faith, the Law was fulfilled. Moreover, he could approach the Ark directly, the symbolic Throne of Jehovah, as if he were a High Priest of some other order. That was the prior order of Melchizedek, the order of Abrahamic faith.
Thus, in that Psalm, David reveals an oracle of God, which named him as a High Priest of that other, older order. This is why the Psalms declared God’s command that the whole world should bow before His King on earth. Not as King of Israel, though the image was dressed in that robe, but as King of Faith, the faith Israel was meant to have, but rejected. Still, that faith was at work and it wrought the Messiah. These were prophecies of the Coming One who would be God’s own Son and High Priest of Faith. This was Christ Jesus.
While on the earth as a man, this Jesus was a vastly superior High Priest, for His offering never failed. When He stood before the Throne of God, He was there as Son. His appeals for mercy were surely granted, for God was granting them to Himself. Waxing yet more lyrical, the writer offers an old play on words in Greek. It was a common game to combine two similar sounding words in Greek or Latin as a phrase that encouraged some virtue, or made some pithy statement. Here he uses emathan and epathen – “learning is suffering.” Jesus didn’t learn how to obey; obedience to God was His very nature. Rather, He learned as a man that obedience was suffering, a very Hebrew concept. To gain was to grow, to be changed, to cut off things of the past and leave behind the comfort of the womb. In short, the trauma of birth itself was hidden in learning by experience. What a man hears, he knows. What he sees, he understands. What he experiences, he is.
Summing all this up with His life, pulling together all the unfinished threads of human history and God’s promises, God redeemed all mankind. With Jesus as High Priest in Heaven, any other man claiming that role is a blasphemer. The standing High Priest so-called in Herod’s Temple at that moment was a fake. For this Hebrew audience in Rome, our writer warns there is no place to go if they leave Jesus.
On the cusp of further explaining the image of Melchizedek, the author stops. He pulls his readers up short in their headlong rush back to the comforts of a familiar Judaism. He’s wary of explaining because his readers are weary of hearing. After this many years of walking in Christ and reclaiming their true Hebrew identity, they still remained mere Jews of that latter day corrupt Judaism. They had not traveled back into the land of parabolic truth, of symbolic logic, of things that cannot be taught, but only caught by the spirit enlightened in the Spirit of God. They were sucklings, tender and fat of souls. No wonder persecution was so hard on them. What infant is ready to face hardship? These readers were unable to sift the truth from the mystical viewpoint of the old Hebrew mind. They were still hardly grasping concrete toys of mere human logic with clumsy little hands. They knew the nursing of simple ideas, but the meat of truth was not something they recognized as food.
