Highlights in Hebrews
(with Roger Kirby)
Part 13 - Hebrews 4:14–16
Jesus the great High Priest
“Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has ascended into heaven, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin. Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.” Hebrews 4:14-16
Apart from a passing mention in Hebrews 3:1 this is the first mention of Jesus by the writer as the great high priest - an idea which is going to dominate the next 6 chapters and thus forms the central core of his book.
He is going to talk of Jesus as high priest against the background of the Old Testament and not the current reality of his day. The high priest used to be the spiritual leader of the people of God. But by the times in which the writer lived he had become a political figure as well. The Romans appointed him and he was regarded by them as responsible for the way the people lived within the Roman empire - quite a difficult task.
In those next few chapters we will have plenty of opportunity to think about the spiritual aspects of high priesthood. Here we will look at the political work of Jesus. This was that he had set up a new kingdom, the kingdom of God, of which he was the king or at least the Crown Prince under his Father God.
It is the kingdom to which we belong as citizens of heaven, as Paul said in Philippians 3:20 ‘our citizenship is in heaven’. If we are Christian we have two passports, representing two citizenships. One, the obvious one, is our citizenship, our membership, of a nation in this world, the one into which we were born. The second, less obvious but more important one, is our citizenship of the kingdom of God. We are here, now, members of it on earth. One day we shall become members of it in heaven when we die. What a huge privilege that is and will be.
It is hard to change your citizenship from one country to another. It is equally hard to change our citizenship and leave the Kingdom of God, which is just as well considering how easily we can be tempted to try to do so. That is what the writer means when he talks about how we are to ‘hold firmly to the faith we profess’.
And it is only from within the kingdom that we can ‘approach God’s throne of grace with confidence’. That is pretty obvious. The king does not go visiting other kingdoms, so we need to be members of his kingdom to approach him. The kingdom is not all pleasure and excitement. Many difficult things will happen within it but we need not worry because the king has been there before us ‘tempted in every way just as we are’. The prime temptation that the writer will have been thinking of was the way in which Jesus felt a natural human horror at the thought of the cross, and how he wrestled in the garden of Gethsemane with his wish that he could avoid it. Someone has said that the biggest miracle Jesus ever did was not to turn away from his destiny on the cross! But he didn’t, so we can ‘find grace to help in our time of need’.
What a king! What a kingdom! What a great high priest to lead his people not only in spiritual things but in all the many difficulties and troubles of their every day lives.
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