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Hebrews | Chapter 5

Hebrews 5:1-10

“The perfect priest”

  1. Introduction
  2. 1-4 Four qualification for a priest
  3. 5-10 Jesus the perfect priest

 

Introduction

In the arena of religion one of the most important questions a follower of one religion can ask the follower of another religion is, “Who “mediates” between you and your god?” “Who do you go too when you have violated your religious practice and now need to be pardoned?” We Christians might ask, “What do you do about SIN?”  we are in the heart of the book of Hebrews chapters 5-9, and it is all about answering that question and as such it’s all about Jesus as our High Priest and what He alone has done about SIN! The Hebrews, in which the author writes, were familiar with the idea of the Messiah and they were familiar about the high priest, but they were not familiar with the Messiah also being the High Priest. To complicate things, the writer needs to combat what was known about Jesus as far as His earthly ancestry being from the tribe of Judah not form the priestly tribe of Levi as Moses and Aaron were. Jesus while on earth had no access to the temple as a priest, He never performed any priestly duties which would have contradicted the Hebrews concept of the priesthood.

1-4 Four qualification for a priest

As we continue looking at Jesus’ superiority over that of Aaron as high priest the first four verses deal with the general qualifications to be considered a high priest. We know this to be the case by the initial words of the writer in chapter 5 as we read, “for every high priest” and this indicates that he is not speaking specifically of Jesus Christ. This can be easily compared to the opening words of verse 5 where we read, “So also Christ” which indicate that this section is dealing specifically with Jesus as High Priest. So in the first four verses of the 5th chapter the writer lists four regulations or qualifications, to be a priest in Israel. The writer is reminding these Hebrews what a priest really is. He is NOT to be identified by what he wears or the tasks he officiates. These four qualifications for a priest are:

  1. 1a “Taken from among men”: I realize that in today’s society of political correctness and gender equality this maybe offensive but “A priest must first be a man”. But more importantly as this relates to Jesus, in order to represent humanity Jesus needed to cover His deity with His humanity. Paul writes of this in Philippians 2:6-7 saying, “who, being in the form of God, did not consider it robbery to be equal with God, but made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and coming in the likeness of men.” He entered the human race as a babe in Bethlehem.
  2. 1b “He may offer both gifts and sacrifices for sins”: The second qualification isn’t so much a qualification as it is a responsibility. Furthermore, it isn’t centered around what he does so much as WHY he must do what he does. The Hebrew priests chief concern is dealing with “sins”! The priest offered sacrifices to deal with the single most important problem facing humanity: That which separates man from God. He must deal with universal problem of continual personal failure, SIN and the enviable consequences of that failure of sin, GUILT! This is the experience of every single person in humanity and no person has been able to escape its grip over our lives. There is not a person save Jesus who has ever known what it is to not suffer from SIN and a sense of GUILT. The problem isn’t just sin and rebellion, no the problem is what do we do once we have had our “fun of sin and rebellion” and all we have left is guilt and shame? The antidote to sin and the consequences of sin, GUILT is life must be sacrificed and a priest must therefore offer that sacrifice. Jesus completely fulfilled this at the cross when as both the sacrifice (the Lamb of God) and the High Priest He became both the priest and the Victim. And as we noted already in 4:14 “passed through the heavens” presenting His own blood to the Father at the mercy seat.
  3. 3 “As for the people, so also for himself, to offer sacrifices for sins”: The third qualification of a priest is that he must himself be afflicted with the same single most important problem facing humanity, that which separates man from God. He must understand the same problems others face. But here lies the problem some of these Hebrews had with Jesus: How could Jesus Christ fulfill this and still be sinless? How could he live as a man and never sin, and yet understand how we feel when we sin? This was the area that the enemy was using to dislodge the faith of some of these Hebrews under intense persecution. We will return to this in a bit as it is the whole point of the passage.
  4. 4 “No man takes this honor to himself, but he who is called by God, just as Aaron was”: The fourth qualification of a priest is that he must be appointed by God! A man doesn’t decide this as a career choice but rather is called too it by God. The truth is no church, or institution can ordain priests, only God can do that. The purpose of a priest was to cleanse and strengthen humanity making us fit for life. If a priest didn’t do that then they were he is worthless. That is what God’s indictment was against the priests or shepherds was in Ezekiel 34 to who only used God’s sheep for their own benefit.

5-10 Jesus the perfect priest

Vs. 5-6 This next section, (verses 5-10), as noted deals with Jesus’ qualifications in light of the four mentioned in the first four verses. The difficulty in this section is that the writer doesn’t take Jesus’ qualifications in the same order as the above four. For instance, the first two quotations of verses 5-6 answer the qualifications of 1 and 4 that a priest had to represent humanity in its weakness and be called of God to do so.  To do this the writer quotes two psalms that prove his point.

  1. The first quote is out of Psalm 2:7, and it relates to Jesus being in the womb of Mary and born in Bethlehem. Thus, we see that Jesus fulfilled the first qualification of becoming a priest as He became a man; one with us in the essential humanity of our life.
  2. The second quote is out of Psalm 110:4 is where we are told that at the age of thirty, he entered upon the priesthood. The difference here is that this quote refers to a different priesthood than that of the Aaronic priesthood; one that was established before Aaron known as the order, of Melchizedek. We will learn much more about this mysterious person as we go on in Hebrews. But for now, this is a reference to Genesis 14:18-20 and here in psalm 110:4 were we see him as a person who was a king-priest (royal-priest) who lived in the time of Abraham. His ancestry is completely unknown, but we do know that he was the king of Salem which was the ancient name for Jerusalem and that he was the priest of the True God. We also realize that he lived long before Aaron and as such the priesthood of Melchizedek superseded the Aaronic priesthood and that his priesthood was unending.

Vs. 7-8 In the remaining 4 verse, we take up the 2nd and 3rd qualifications of being a priest the responsibility of taking care of the greatest need of humanity, dealing with sin through the sacrifice and how Jesus could never sin, yet fully sympathize with sinners? Again, this is in reverse order as the writer take up the 3rd qualification and how can Jesus sympathize with all that we humans go through, if he has never sinned? The answer to that is in verse 7 and as you read that verse there is no other incident that we know of in the ministry of Jesus that this could refer too other than Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, which is found in three of the Gospels (Matthew 26:36-46, Mark 14:32-42 and Luke 22:39-46). This verse fits perfectly into the description where we see Jesus making, prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to the Father who was able to save him from death. As the Lord and his disciples left the Upper Room, they passed through the dark valley of the Kidron, up unto the side of the Mount of Olives to the olive tree grove where it was his custom to go. Separating three of the disciples, Peter, James, and John, he withdrew with them into the deeper shadows of the garden. There followed a protracted period of excruciating torment of spirit that found expression in loud, involuntary cries, streaming tears, and ending in a terrible bloody sweat. Here we come face to face with the mystery of the Garden of Gethsemane:

  1. First, is the total unexpectedness of this to the Lord. He had gone to the garden, but he suddenly began to be greatly distressed and troubled. Nothing like this is recorded of Him before. In Jesus’ anticipation of what He would be going through and His explanations of it to the disciples, He had never once mentioned Gethsemane. There is no prediction of this in the Old Testament. There are many verses that predict what he would go through on the cross; but there is not one word of what he endured in the garden.
  2. Second, we note His deep unrest of heart, and distress of soul. Never prior to this do we ever read of Jesus experiencing such a thing. So deeply troubled is Jesus that He does something unprecedented in His earthly ministry he appeals to his own disciples for help. He asked them to bear him up in prayer as he went further into the shadows, falling first to his knees and then to his face, crying out before the Father. There we are told Jesus prayed three separate times each time asking the necessity of what He was presently experiencing. He even asked the Father to make clear to him if this was a necessary activity. The only explanation to Jesus’ behavior is to realize that this experience was so unexpected and sudden that it had left Him for the first time, confused. Such things come upon us all the time but had never come upon Jesus.

To this mystery Hebrews 5:7 reveals that Jesus was facing the full misery which sin produces in the heart of the sinner. The Garden of Gethsemane reveals that Jesus was being exposed to the full intensity of what makes sin in our lives so defeating:

  • Shame: Shame is the awareness of my unfitness. A self-contempt, a loathing of myself. Not being able to look myself because I have been false to my standards, and ideals. As Jesus went into the Garden of Gethsemane, suddenly, for the first time, he began to feel ashamed. All the naked filth of human depravity forced itself upon him and he experienced the shame of our misdeeds as though they were his. No wonder He cried to the Father, “If it be possible let this cup pass from me. Nevertheless,” he adds, “not my will, but thine, be done.”
  • Guilt: After awaking the sleeping disciples Jesus again returned to prayer and He began to feel a sense of guilt. Guilt is the sense of injury done to someone else. It is the awareness of damage that I have caused to the innocent or the undeserving. Jesus experienced an awful sense of guilt, as if He was deserving judgment. He writhed in silent torment and Mark tells us he began to pray more earnestly than ever before.
  • Despair: Once again he came to his disciples and finding them sleeping, he went back. And this third experience was the worst of all, as Jesus for the first-time experienced despair. He was crushed under a sense of hopelessness, of helpless discouragement, of utter defeat. His eyes filled with tears, his mouth was opened in involuntary, agonized cries, his heart was crushed as in a wine press, so that the blood was literally forced from his veins and his sweat fell to the ground in great, bloody drops.

This is what is meant by the writer of Hebrews in the words in verse 8, “Though He was a Son, yet He learned obedience by the things which He suffered.” Jesus through the Garden of Gethsemane experience learned what it means to obey God when every cell in his body wanted to disobey, when everything within him cried out to flee this experience. Yet, knowing this was the will of God, he obeyed, trusting God to see him through. He learned what it felt like to hang on when failure makes us want to throw the whole thing over. When we are so defeated, so despairing, so filled with shame, and guilt that we want to forget the whole thing. He knows what this is like, he went the whole way, he took the full brunt of it. You and I will never pass through a Gethsemane like he went through. He went the whole distance.

Vs. 9-10 Carries us on to the victory of the cross with the words “Being made perfect”. Because He alone entered into all that any sinner in all their weakness knows, “He became the author of eternal salvation to all who obey Him.” When we obey him, as he obeyed the Father, then all that God is, is made available to us, just as in the hour of his anguish. Jesus refused to question the Father’s wisdom. He refused to blame the Father, to say what He was going through was unfair. He refused to take refuge in unbelief even though this came suddenly and unexpectedly upon him. Instead, Jesus surrender to His Father’s loving care and looked to him to sustain Him through what He was experiencing. Psalm 107:27-29 says, “They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man, and are at their wits’ end. Then they cry out to the LORD in their trouble, And He brings them out of their distresses. He calms the storm, so that its waves are still.”

 

Hebrews 5:11-14

“Hold the pickles”

  1. Introduction
  2. 11 Prolonged immaturity
  3. 12-14 The cause of the problem

 

Introduction

We come to a pivotal section in our letter to the Hebrews, and the third warning of the letter where the writer warns the reader not to reject spiritual maturity. In this section from 5:11 to 6:12 the writer gives four examples he witnessed in these professing Hebrew believers: Three of them are stated and one is implied. Each of them are given a description that explains their condition:

  1. 11-14 The prolonged immature, those who have “come to need milk and not solid food.”
  2. 1-3 The maturing believer, those that have left “the elementary principals of Christ”.
  3. 4-8 The stillborn, those “who were once enlightened but now were endanger of falling away”.
  4. 9-12 The reproducers, those that have, “ministered to the saints, and do minister”.

The prolonged immature

Vs. 11 This section starts out with the words, “of whom we have much to say” and is a direct reference to the topic of Jesus being “a high priest after the order of Melchizedek”. The Greek word indicates that what he is referring to is the teaching about the Melchizedekian priest of Jesus, not Melchizedek specifically. The importance of this truth lay at the heart of these unsaved Hebrews who were returning to the Levitical sacrifices instituted through Aaron instead of the truth of the King of Peace High Priest Jesus, as the lamb of God. The writer wanted to explain this more to them but had to adjust his writing due to their prolonged immaturity. The phrase “hard to explain” is to be interpreted by the words “since you have become dull of hearing”. In other words, the difficulty of interpretation of this truth about Jesus was NOT difficult due to the TRUTH or the challenge of communicating it. The writer explains the cause of this difficulty by the condition of its most visible symptom, “dull of hearing”. Furthermore, these professing Hebrew believers had not always suffered from this condition as we are told that they had BECOME “dull of hearing” which indicates that they were not always in this condition. This is further brought out in 6:4 where we are told that they “were once enlightened”. Their problem wasn’t in that they COULDN’T receive the truth about Jesus it was in that they WOULDN’T!

First let’s be plain: There is nothing wrong or unnatural about a recently born-again believers in need of “MILK” which is further described in the comparison with the maturing believer in verse 1 as the “elementary principals of Christ”. But the problem described is one in which there were some who had been professing Christians for a good many years. Enough time had passed that the expectation of the natural development of maturity should have been achieved. By this time through a natural spiritual progression and a NORMAL spiritual DIET, maturity should have enabled them to have been able to rightly divide the Word of God as teachers. But instead, they were still dependent upon someone teaching them the basics of the gospel. It was a clear case of “arrested spiritual development”.

The rabbi is describing a spiritual condition like one would observe in the physical growth of humans. You can have the cutest little child, that says and does the cutest things when they are of a young age. But if these cute things they say and do persist as their bodies continue to mature and develop the same cute things, we observe at a young age are no longer viewed the same. Any parent would experience sorrow over the arrested physical development of their child.

12-14 The cause of the problem

To make matters far worse such an arrested spiritual development was something completely preventable as the person closed themselves off to hearing the truth. To clarify the condition of prolonged immaturity, the writer makes three observations about this problem.

  1. 12a “For though by this time you ought to be teachers”: The Greek word for time here is time contemplated not a definite period of time. These professing Hebrews had sat under solid teaching for a long enough period of time that not only should they have full understanding of the truth that should have been able to communicate it to others by this time! The writer clears up a common reason why this spiritual condition goes undiagnosed in many people who suffer from it: Age alone does not produce maturity! Our biological age in Christ doesn’t automatically determine our “spiritual maturity”. It is amazing how many Christians associate their biological years in Christ with the thought of their inevitable spiritual growth and maturity. They refer to this all the time, “Why I’ve been a Christian 35 years”, but such a statement doesn’t necessitate that they have spiritually matured to a level of 35 years of walking and depending upon Christ. I suppose we do this because physically, as far as our intellect is concerned, with have done nothing to mature. Time has passed and it has been matched by physical transformation. But our spiritual and psychological development is not the same as our physical development. Have you noticed that the same fleshly attitudes and actions have NOT dissipated from our life by mere passing of days? Passing of time never brings maturity! There is a big difference in having grown and matured through twenty-five years of experiences. Then having the same experience over twenty-five years and have not grown from it. These Hebrew professing believers had been going through the same experience again and again but had yet to grow spiritually from it and instead were simply marking time. That is the definition of immaturity: Repeating the same action over and over and expecting different results. There are far too many Christians in our society that have decided to engage in a prolonged adolescence, that is now merging into premature senility! You can recognize them by the pickling process: Those that have come to SIT, SOAK, and SOUR. The truth is age will never cure immaturity!
  2. 12b-14 “You need someone to teach you again…” The second observation the writer makes is that arrested spiritual development is self-identifying. There are two clear marks that provide a simple testthat we can determine whether we have this condition:
  3. The first mark is an inability to instruct others: Though these believers had been Christians for years they still couldn’t help anyone else. They had nothing to say when other believers were struggling with problems. They couldn’t even point them to Jesus. They were stuck even after many years in only being able to understand the simplest biblical truth. The writer describes them as: Needing milk for spiritual sustenance, instead of solid food. He further defines this as “unskilled in the word of righteousness”; which is the practice of the Word of God that results in in right conduct and living. The simple reason for this was because they only want milk. That is the first self-identifying mark of immaturity, is an inability to instruct others.
  4. The second mark is an inability to discern good from evil: This test is seen in the positive trait in verse 14 of those who partake of solid food who can discern both good and evil. The contrast by implication is that those of arrested spiritual development can’t do that. This trait shows up in many varieties:
  5. It can describe a person who knows what is right and even thinks they are doing what is right but are in reality continually doing the wrong things. These spiritually immature are always creating problems and difficulties with others.
  6. Then there are those that are doctrinally undiscerning: Christian’s who are characterized by Paul’s critique of them in Ephesians 4:14 as being “tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men..” They are in continual search for the latest theological fads, books, speakers, and video series that proclaim to offer something that they claim can’t be found or is essential to add to the simple application of the word of God. These doctrinally undiscerning; are in a never-ending quest for something to add to the Bible or that can replace it.
  7. Next is the emotionally gullible: Christian’s who are moved by emotional appeals. They are easily affected by emotional stories and respond to them purely on emotional stimulation and give of their time talent and treasure because of these emotional appeals. They lack the ability because of their dependence upon emotional stimulation to evaluate any work. If it has emotional content, that is all they are looking for.
  8. Finally, you have the spiritually immature who are personality followers: Those who fasten themselves to a particular personality or movement and read only their books and listen exclusively to them to the exclusion of others. Those who do this are immature and unable to distinguish the activity of ego, from the manifestation of the Spirit. They applaud what God condemns; and resent what God approves.
  9. The third observation the author makes is that “arrested development” causes the immature to lose out on so much truth that transforms and puts them in risk of losing even more. The use of the word “babe” in verse 13 carries NO implication of these professing Hebrews salvation. They are not called “babes in Christ” as Paul calls the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians 3:1. Instead the word in the Greek simply means the immature in contrast to the mature. The qualifying phrase in the context is that this phrase is referring to unsaved Hebrews who were intellectually convinced but not spiritually committed. The writer wanted to give them more on the riches of the Melchizedekian priesthood of Christ which would have blessed them, but because of their dull of hearing he couldn’t. There is a very grave danger that threatened these professing believers in chapter 6:4-8 that we will get to later if they continue in this condition of prolonged immaturity.