Messages from the Epistle to the Hebrews | Page 9

under the law, there was a need for priests who were "men,
having infirmity." For certain grave purposes (not for all, by any means,
even in that legal period) it was the will of God that they should stand
between His Israel and Him. But the argument of this chapter, unless it
elaborately veils its true self in clouds, goes directly to shew that such
properly mediatorial functions, in the age of Christ, are for ever
withdrawn from "men, having infirmity." Where they stood of old, one
after another, sacrificing, interceding, going in behind the veil,
permitted to draw nearer to God, in an official sanctity, than their
brethren, there now stands Another, sublime, supreme, alone. He is
Man indeed, but He is not "man having infirmity." He is higher than the
heavens, while He is one with us. And now our one secret for a

complete approach to God is to come to God "through HIM." And this,
unless the chapter is an elaborate semblance of what it is not, means
nothing if it does not mean that between the Church, and between the
soul, and the Lord Jesus Christ, there is to come absolutely nothing
mediatorial. As little as the Jew, for ceremonial purposes, needed an
intermediary in dealing with his mortal priest so little do we, for the
whole needs of our being, need an intermediary in dealing with our
eternal Priest.
In the age of Christ, no office can for one moment put one "man having
infirmity" nearer to God than another, if this chapter means what it says.
Mediatorial priesthood, a very different thing from commissioned
pastorate, has no place in apostolic Christianity, with the vast exception
of its sublime and solitary place in the Person of our most blessed Lord.
Then further, the chapter, far from giving us merely the cold gift (as it
would be if this were all) of a negative certainty against unlawful
human claims, gives us, as its true, its inmost message, a glorious
positive. It gives us the certainty that, for every human heart which asks
for God, this wonderful Christ, personal, eternal, human, Divine, is
quite immediately accessible. The hands of need and trust have but to
be lifted, and they hold HIM. And He is the SON. In Him we have the
FATHER. We do indeed "draw nigh to God through Him."
Therefore we will do it. The thousand confusions of our time shall only
make this Divine simplicity the more precious to us. We will at once
and continually take Jesus Christ for granted in all the fulness and
splendour of His High-priesthood after the order of Melchizedek. That
Priesthood is for ever what it is; it is as new and young to-day in its
virtue as if the oath had but to-day been spoken, and He had but to-day
sat down at the right hand.
Happy we if we use Him thus. He blesses those who do so with
blessings which they cannot analyse, but which they know. Many years
ago a Christian lady, daughter of a saintly Non-conformist pastor in the
west of Dorset, told me how, in a then distant time, her father had
striven to teach a sick man, a young gipsy in a wandering camp, to read,
and to come to Christ. The camp moved after a while, and the young

man, dying of consumption, took a Bible with him. Time rolled on, and
one day a gray-haired gipsy came to the minister's door; it was the
youth's father, with the news of his son's happy death, and with his
Bible. "Sir, I cannot read a word; but he was always reading it, and he
marked what he liked with a stick from the fire. And he said you would
find one place marked with two lines; it was everything to my poor
lad." The leaves were turned, and the stick was found to have scored
two lines at the side of Heb. vii. 25: "He is able also to save them to the
uttermost that come unto God by Him, seeing that He ever liveth to
make intercession for them."
CHAPTER V
THE BETTER COVENANT
HEB. viii.
The Person and greatness of our High Priest are now full before the
readers of the Epistle. The paragraph we enter next, after one more
deliberate contemplation of His dignity and His qualifications,
proceeds to expound His relation to the better and eternal Covenant.
We shall find here also messages appropriate to our time.
The first step then is a review, a summing up, a "look again" upon the
true King of Righteousness and peace (verses 1, 2). "Such a High Priest
we have." It is a wonderful affirmation, not only of His existence but of
His relation to "us," His people. "We have" Him.