With this study the central theme of Hebrews, our Lord's Priesthood, is introduced. Priesthood is defined for us in 5:1: A priest is appointed "to act on behalf of men in relation to God ... to offer gifts and sacrifices for sins."
There are three considerations here which will occupy us for three studies:
1. His relation to men
2. His relation to God
3. The ground of His Mediation
A priest must be able with one hand to hold our hand, with the other to hold God's hand, and then join His hands together. He must be acceptable - fully acceptable - to both parties.
The reason a priest is needed at all is ... sin. If it were not for that, there would be no need of mediation; communication would be direct and intimate. But there can be no such connection between a holy God and unholy men unless something is done about the sin that separates them.
In this study we introduce the first element of the three, His relation to us. How well fitted is Christ to represent us? How does He relate to us in our sinfulness?
Heb. 4:15 says that He is "able to sympathise with our weaknesses." Is that true?
A heavy emphasis is laid in Hebrews on our Lord's experience of temptation.
Heb. 2:18 "Because he himself suffered when
he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted."
Heb. 4:15 "... we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as
we are, yet was without sin."
So we can have confidence in Him. In His own experience of temptation the Lord has fully shared with us our struggle with sin. He knows what it is like to have to fight sin in the same arena with us with only the weapons we have. He has lived inside our skin. When He represents us before God, therefore, we can trust Him to "do it right", because He knows what it is like to be us. He really is one of us. "He was made like His brethren in every respect."
For the life of faith, it is so important to be sure of this that I want to press this theme. Can I really count on the Lord's sympathy? Does He really understand me? When He represents me before God as my Defending Counsel, is my case really safe with Him?
That He experienced temptation as I do is reassuring. But He does lack my experience of yielding to it, of actually sinning, of bearing guilt and shame for His own sin. Does that so separate Him from me that I can never really trust Him to understand me? Is it true that there is a whole area of experience, real to me but unreal to Him, so vital that it disqualifies Him from being able to represent my case adequately? Do we not need someone who, as well as having fellowship with us in temptation, also has fellowship with us in failure? If He has not shared that with us, can He really sympathise?
Let us try to answer the question carefully, in stages.
Think first about the experience of temptation.
For us to experience temptation, the sin that tempts us has to be in our thoughts and appear desirable, or it will not be a temptation. If it exerts no pull upon us, it is not a temptation. A man is tempted, says James, "when he is lured, enticed by desire."
Up to that point no sin has occurred, only temptation. The transition to sin occurs only at the point when we give inward consent to the thought so as to embrace it. "Desire, when it has conceived, gives birth to sin."
The experience of temptation may be likened to receiving a visitor at the door of your home. Like a visitor standing on the porch, the sin stands there before your very eyes, asking to be admitted. At that point it is a temptation only. It becomes a sin of yours, only when you invite it in. Until you open the door and stand aside to let the visitor in, you have not sinned. You have only been tempted.
This is a necessary distinction we must make to avoid a false sense of guilt. To have a sinful thought present to your mind, and to find it desirable, is not yet to have sinned. That is temptation, not sin.
Some folk think themselves incurably wicked simply because evil thoughts persist in crowding into their minds. That is not true. You do not sin until you willingly indulge these thoughts. While you fight the desire, even though it persists, you do not sin.
When it is said that Jesus was tempted as we are tempted, we must understand this. Thoughts of sin, inviting Him to action, were present in His mind. He had to wrestle with them. And the intensity of the struggle was at times very great. The temptation to avoid the Cross was one, as Gethsemane shows. There were other times too ... when He rounded on Peter at Cæsarea Philippi, for example. The vehemence of His outburst then is some indication of the effort He had to exert in resisting the temptation to avoid suffering, and thereby fail to be faithful.
Jesus was tempted as a man is tempted.
He enjoyed no protection from temptation
that other men lack. He had to cope with it as a man of flesh and
blood, with all the weakness and frailty and vulnerability that goes
with that. His human nature was equipped with the same instincts as
ours, so that He was exposed to temptations of the same kind as we
are:
... temptations that appealed to the instinct of self-preservation,
so that it was no easier for Him to contemplate laying down His life
than it is for other men.
... He could be tempted along the line of His sexuality as we can
be.
.. He experienced the same need of acceptance with his fellows that
we do. It was no easier for Him than it is for us to feel ignored, or
neglected, or scorned, or hated; it was no easier for Him than it is
for us to be snubbed, or insulted, or lied about, or betrayed - and
He suffered all these things.
He knows how these experiences make us feel - the hurt, the frustration, the bewilderment, the fear. He suffered, being tempted.
But He resisted every temptation ... to the end of the line. And because He resisted far on beyond the point where the rest of us yield, He suffered more than we do.
In the end, we yield to sin in the interests of self-preservation. Rather than die fighting, we prefer to be taken captive. We surrender.
He never did. He passed on into realms of human struggle, therefore, into which the rest of us never come. He carried the battle with sin into regions of darkness deeper than the rest of us ever know. It is simply impossible for us to have a struggle with sin more difficult than He had. To use a phrase used later in Hebrews, "He resisted unto blood, striving against sin." Heb. 12:4 We have not, or we would be dead - not here to argue about it! In His suffering, He learned what obedience meant.
There is no-one in the world whose sympathy with us in our struggle with sin can be anywhere near as sensitive, as exquisite, as His.
But even this may leave unanswered still the difficulty some feel: that there is one experience the Lord does not share with us, the experience of guilt at having failed; for it is in our guilt that we feel loneliest. And we sometimes feel, mistakenly as I believe, that if we lose His companionship with us in that, we lose Him just where we need Him most.
"Lord, You don't know what it's like to have failed, to be burdened with shame for your own sin."
It is of course true. He doesn't.
What He does feel is worse. He feels our shame worse than if the guilt were His.
A mother who will not disown or abandon her drunken, profligate son is on that account dragged down into the squalor and degradation and shame of her son's condition. She suffers more than he. He is half-drugged against a true appreciation of his own shame. She is not, and she feels it more keenly than he.
And Jesus suffered this - He was the Friend of sinners.
The better man you are, the more keenly you will feel the shame of moral failure. Paradoxically, therefore, it is only the man who has not failed who can appreciate the shame of failure truly. The shame of peoples' sin sat more heavily on Jesus than ever it did on them.
The sinners who met Him in the Gospels knew this. Peter was one: "Depart from me, I am a sinful man, O Lord." Peter, I believe, was afraid he would burden Jesus if Jesus stayed with him ... would involve Jesus in his own shame.
Though not guilty with us, His love involves Him in our guilt. His loneliness is no less severe than ours because He knows no guilt of His own; He knows our guilt as a burden no other can share with Him.
Because He suffers with us at the lowest depths to which we sink in sin, as He did at the Cross, without yielding inwardly to sin Himself, He experiences the shame of our sin more truly, more exquisitely, than we sinners do. It 'registers' on Him more truly than ever it does on you or me. No-one ever feels shame for their sin more keenly than Christ feels it for them. The sin itself dulls us, as it does not dull Him. To see this is to see our desire that He should know guilt for sin as we know it to be a perverse desire. There can remain no better reason for it than that we just want Him to have failed, too. And that is both wicked and stupid. Wicked, because the only reason left why we should want it is to mock Him, to sneer at Him. And stupid, because to have someone else share our guilt with us never does relieve the loneliness we hope to assuage thereby. It does not work that way. The comfort we profess in knowing that others are no better than we is no real comfort at all. Superficially it is; but when we have to answer - alone - for our sin, it is no comfort to us then to know that others must do so as well. In the moment when we are exposed finally to condemnation, our isolation is so complete there is no possibility of comfort in the knowledge that it is happening also to others.
Christ cannot know guilt as a sinner knows it, but as a Saviour knows it. That is what qualifies Him to relieve us of it.
He is different. Thanks be to God! It is that one vital difference that qualifies Him to redeem us. He retains the power to lift us. It is precisely because He did not sin that He can draw us up out of our sin. To lift a man out of a well, you have to be standing at the top; you cannot lift him out if you are down in it with him.
Just as the mother we thought about would fail her son if she took to drink to assuage her own pain, so would Jesus have failed us if He had yielded to sin. The moment the mother did that, she would lose the power to lift her son. If Jesus had sinned He would for ever have lost the power to lift us, to redeem us. He would need another Saviour to redeem Him. He must not sin, or He can never sanctify us. This is why, in the High Priestly prayer of John 17, He said, "... for their sake I consecrate myself, that they may also be consecrated in the truth."
For our sake, He consecrated Himself.
We may now see the force of the two things, apparently contradictory at first, that our author says:
1. Heb. 2:18: "Because He Himself has
suffered and been tempted, he is able to help those who are tempted;
and ...
2. Heb. 7:26: "It is fitting that we should have such a High Priest,
holy, blameless, unstained, separate from sinners. He has no
need to offer sacrifice first for His own sins."
If He had sin of His own, then His sacrifice would no more have availed, even for His own salvation, than any sacrifice of ours could avail for our sin.
But His purity does not alienate Him from us.
The Lord's sinlessness, far from being a matter for regret to us, is cause for our greatest rejoicing.
When I see that He was indeed sinless, and see also that the shame of my sin sits heaviest of all on Him, that He stands with me bearing my condemnation with me, then I see how real and unique is His love for me. He stands by me to the last. If, when He stands with me in the condemnation I bear, He does not also have His own purity to give me, then I am altogether lost. But if, when I know it is all up with me, I find Him there beside me, bearing with me as though it were His own the condemnation I endure, then I can yield myself to Him, sure of His love, and confident of His power to lift and hold me, and never let me go. I can trust Him to be to me all I can never be to myself. In that moment the condemnation is lifted from me, and I know He bears me on His heart into His Father's presence.
He is my priest: able to sympathise with me in my weakness, but, having no sin of His own, able to bear me with Him into the Father's presence.
Therefore (5:8-9) "since, Son though He was, He learned obedience in what He suffered, He is become the source of eternal salvation to all who obey Him."
In Catterick Army Camp in the U.K., there is
a painting of a sapper, sprawled on his stomach in no-man's-land
between the two front lines of opposing armies. The two ends of a
communication cable broken by shrapnel have been brought and held
together in his hands ... and he has died doing it.
The title of the painting is just one word:
"Through!"
That is a picture of the priesthood of Jesus.
In His death for us He, Who though separate from sinners, was yet the Friend of Sinners - He, Who though sinless, yet bears our sin - He got through for us to God ... right through.
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