Messages from the Epistle to the Hebrews | Page 8

One thus sealed with the oath of
Heaven must indeed be "better," and cannot but be final; the goal of the
eternal purpose.
[D] [Greek: kata dunamin zôês akatalytou].
Then (verses 23-28) the discourse passes into what we may call its
epilogue. The thought recurs to the sublime contrast between the
pathetic numerousness of the successors of Aaron, "not suffered to
continue by reason of death," and the singleness, the "unsuccessional"
identity for ever, of the true Melchizedek, who abides eternally. And
then, moving to its end, the argument glows and brightens into an
"application" to the human heart. We have in JESUS (the Name has
now already been pronounced, ver. 22) a Friend, an Intercessor,

infinitely and for ever competent to save us, His true Israel. We have in
Him a High Priest supreme in every attribute of holiness and power,
and qualified for His work of intercession by that sacrifice of Himself
which is at once solitary and all-sufficient. Behold then the contrast and
the conclusion. To a great Dispensation, the preparatory, succeeds a
greater, the greatest, the other's end and crown. To the "weak" mortal
priesthood of the law, never warranted by the vow of God to abide
always in possession, succeeds One who is Priest, and King, and SON,
sealed for His office by the irrevocable vow, "consecrated for
evermore."
Such on the whole, as I recall it, was the exposition of my venerable
friend, in 1887. Each new reading of the chapter seems to me to bear
out the substantial accuracy of it; indeed the symmetry and order of the
chapter make it almost inevitable that some such line should be taken
by the explanation. Thus then it lies before us. It is filled in all its parts
with Jesus Christ, in His character of the true Melchizedek, our final,
everlasting, perfect, supreme, Divine High Priest.
This simple treatise is not the place for critical discussions. I do not
attempt a formal vindication of the mystical and Messianic reference of
Psalm cx. All I can do here, and perhaps all I should do, is to affirm
solemnly my belief in it, at the feet of Christ. I am perfectly aware that
now, within the Church, and by men unquestionably Christian as well
as learned, our Lord's own interpretation of that Psalm,[E] involving as
it does His assertion of its Davidic authorship, is treated as quite open
to criticism and disproof. One such scholar does not hesitate to say that,
if the majority of modern experts are right as to the non-Davidic
authorship, and he seems to think that they are, "our Lord's argument
breaks down." All I would remark upon such utterances, coming from
men who all the while sincerely adore Christ as their Lord and God, is
that they must surely open the way towards conceptions of His whole
teaching which make for the ruin of faith. For the question is not at all
whether our Redeemer consented to submit to limits in His conscious
human knowledge; I for one hold that He assuredly did so. It is whether
He consented to that sort of limitation which alone, in respect of
imperfection of knowledge, is the real peril of a teacher, and which is

his fatal peril--the ignorance of his own ignorance, and a consequent
claim to teach where he does not know. In human schools the betrayal
of that sort of ignorance is a deathblow to confidence, not only in some
special utterance, but in the teacher, for it strikes at his claim not to
knowledge so much as to wisdom, to balance and insight of thought. I
venture to say that recent drifts of speculation shew how rapidly the
conception of a fallible Christ developes towards that of a wholly
imperfect and untrustworthy Christ. And, looking again at the vast
phenomenon of the Portrait in the Gospels, I hold that the line of
thought which offers by very far the least difficulty, not to faith only
but to reason, is that which relies absolutely on His affirmations
wherever He is pleased actually to affirm.
[E] Matt. xxii. 44; Luke xx. 42. Cp. Acts ii. 34.
So thinking, I take His exposition of Psalm cx. as for me final. And that
exposition guarantees at once a typical mystery latent in Gen. xiv. and
the rightness of its development in the passage here before us.
But now, what "message" has our chapter for us, in view of the needs
of our own time?
First, as to its sacerdotal doctrine. It throws a broad illumination on the
grand finality and uniqueness of the mediatorial priesthood of our Lord,
the Son of God. It puts into the most vivid possible contrast the age of
"the law" and that of Christ as to the priestly conception and institution.
Somehow,