The Kingdom of God as the Promised Land

The Mystery Priest

Genesis 14:17-28

Hebrews 7:1-3, 14-17, 23-28

For the past ten years, we here at the NMMH Church have been studying the Kingdom of God as a dynamic, growing and victorious kingdom. It is Isaiah’s “highway of the redeemed” (Isaiah 35) that stands not only against the drift of our culture toward every type of distracting pleasure; it is the living evidence that we are not alone in our walk of faith.

God’s government has always had associated with it a system of priests. Under the Covenant of the Law, these priests followed a human ancestry back to Aaron, the brother of Moses. Since Aaron was descended from the tribe of Levi, you had to be a Levite in order to be a priest. If you could not prove your lineage, you were disqualified from the priesthood. It was as simple as that.

In that old order of things, human ancestry prevailed. It was done that way to make it clear to us that the human system of trying to earn your own salvation was doomed to failure. Not only did the people drift away from God because of the deadness of the law; the priesthood itself became corrupt because it was based not on a calling from God but on the family tree.

The priest, Eli, was brought up short because his two sons, Hophni and Phinehas, were using their inherited privilege to engage in temple prostitution. God used the child Samuel to tell Eli that he would be die in disgrace because of the corruption of his family. Ironically, Samuel’s sons also became corrupt, which gave rise to the first king of Israel.

When Samuel, awakened in the night, gave God’s verdict to Eli, Eli’s response was, “He is the Lord; let him do what is good in his eyes.” Eli was a man of faith despite his weaknesses as a father.

What the writer of the Book of Hebrews tells us about Abraham in the 11^th chapter is very important to understand, I think. Abram’s faith was not about a consistent obedience to some moral code. His faith was about his willingness to get up and go, not knowing where he was going. That is the ground of our faith as well. Abraham was told, “Leave your country, your people and your father’s household and go to the land I will show you.”

Faith demands that we leave behind something important to us. Otherwise it is not faith; it is accommodation. “Rise up and go, and I will bless you.”

We live today in a world in which the Church of Jesus Christ does not want to rise up and go. Instead, it wants to be accepted by the world – wants to be legitimized, accepted and a respected force in our culture. That is why it has been so political over the years.

That kind of life is not one of living by faith. It is a refusal to leave the political machinations up to God and, instead, is a statement of getting tired of waiting for God and deciding to take matters into our own hands. Living by faith is not made evident by success in securing the American Dream of power and wealth.

We all want to know where we are going. That is natural. We want to make the best of the brief time we are here with a minimum of stumbling. If you don’t know where you are going or have no plan for getting there, you are going to stumble along the way. That’s the price of faith. All the patriarchs stumbled. People of faith stumble because faith requires that we plow new ground.

The Scriptures make it very clear that God hates valuing the seen above the unseen. What is seen is temporary, the Apostle Paul tells us. But what is unseen is eternal. Two examples of this are the lives of Esau and King Saul, the first king of Israel. Esau despised his birthright. He found it to be of less value to him than a good meal after coming home from a hunting trip, so he sold it to his twin brother, Jacob. We are told that God hated Esau for that very reason – he valued the immediate over the potential. He sold out the unknown for certainty now.

King Saul had everything that was needed to be a great king. Instead, when the Prophet Samuel was late arriving at Gilgal to plead at the altar for God’s deliverance of Israel against the invading Philistines, Saul cut the waiting short and offered the sacrifice on the altar himself. Saul exalted himself to the office of priest because it was expedient, and his men were panicking. He incurred the wrath and the ultimate rejection of God.

Saul later went to the Witch of Endor to find out what was going to happen to him in another battle with the Philistines and because God had rejected him. He valued the immediate answer over the sovereign grace of God. He and his entire family were eventually wiped off the face of the earth, not because it was a bad family in human terms, but because it was a blight on the eternal plan of God to inaugurate His spiritual Kingdom.

I hope to encourage you to understand that “going” is not “doing.” “Doing” has already been done by our appointed High Priest. “Going” is the decision that everyone here in this church this morning has made – to stumble into the uncertainty of life hoping and praying that God is good on His promises. Esau and Saul refused to stumble into the uncertainty of life and, instead, took what they could grab today over what good things God intended for them tomorrow. It was a choice.

My recent trip to the Holy Land has done much to broaden my thinking on the Kingdom of God. What is going on over there is a fight over who really is entitled to the land. At our conference in the second weekend in October, I am going to address that very topic.

If you want to find an ethnic or racial heritage for the Promised Land, you won’t find it in the history of the Middle East. Nobody on record held the land for more than 400 years at any one time. The history of the land in Palestine is a lawyer’s nightmare. And yet, we live in a world today in which there are many American Christians who think they know exactly to whom the land belongs.

Jesus made it very clear that what you want or need will come only by first seeking the Kingdom of God through Christ. That comes first – not a deed to real estate.

Abraham rose up and went, leaving much of his life behind. He started off, however, with a huge mistake. God had made it clear that he should leave his father’s household behind. Instead, Abraham took along his favorite nephew Lot. Lot was a person of the world. God had not promised an inheritance to Lot. He had promised it to Abraham.

Lot never quite understood what it meant to live by faith in God. Instead, he lived by faith in Abraham. He would not have understood that the land that was promised to Abraham had little to do with the nation-state of Israel and much to do with the Kingdom of God completed in Jesus Christ. Lot had the spirit of Esau and King Saul.

Along comes this fellow Melchizedek, the mystery priest. Abraham had to go to Lot’s rescue when Lot was kidnapped and carried off into captivity. Abraham not only got him back in what is referred to as the “conquering of the kings”, he restored the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, a feat that turned out later to be rather dubious. God was not done yet with Sodom and Gomorrah nor with Lot.

Lot’s wife turned into a pillar of salt because she valued a wistful look back at her burning home over a spiritual hope in the unknown. To rise up and go means not to look back and long for what was. That was the very sin of Israel from the time they crossed the Red Sea to the time of the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD. They were forever looking back and grumbling.

Melchizedek appeared out of nowhere and blessed Abraham, who was returning from conquering the kings and rescuing Lot. Abraham gives 10% of the bounty to Melchizedek, who had no human ancestry to identify him as a priest. Melchizedek was a priest, not appointed by man, but appointed by God alone. By giving Melchizedek a tithe of 10%, Abraham demonstrated that God’s appointment is superior to that of man’s – that spiritual anointing is superior to physical ordination.

In the church today, we like to think that God calls and man ordains. That works imperfectly in some instances and doesn’t work very well at all in most, I think. Politics raises its ugly head in all of our human endeavors, even in the church, and we make mistakes in judgment. The message given to Abraham is the same message given to us – “Set aside your attachment to what defines you and go to the kingdom that I will show you.”

For us, it does not mean that we are to sell our homes and take off, leaving everyone behind. It simply means that we are to put our physical worlds into proper perspective. They identify where we live, rather than who we are.

Melchizedek has thrown the proverbial monkey wrench into the human search for goodness apart from God. The land, our heritage and our genealogy, while fun and interesting, are not worth anything in Kingdom terms because they are temporary and not eternal. Abraham, referred to in the Bible as the “friend of God” came from what is known today as Iraq and settled into today’s Palestinian Territory. So what? What is important is that he rose up and went, knowing not where he was going or why. That’s faith.

Yet, this man who was called the friend of God gave his tithe to a priest of unknown parentage and credentials – a type of the Christ to come. Abraham, as the promised father of God’s people, had every right to require that Melchizedek give him a tithe. Abraham honored Melchizedek for one reason only – that God had appointed Melchizedek priest and king – period. Melchizedek was a man like Abraham – having no authority other than God’s.

This brings us not only to our text this morning from the 7^th chapter of Hebrews but to a new understanding as to what we are saved from.

The 25^th verse of the 7^th chapter of Hebrews says this: “Therefore, he (Jesus) is able to save completely those who come to God through him, because he always lives to intercede for them.” This is one of the most overlooked and remarkable verses in the entire Bible, and it is packed with incredible truths that we as Christians need to grasp.

The picture that is painted by the writer of the Book of Hebrews is Christ’s superior priestly standing to that of the OT priests of the tribe of Levi – direct descendents of Abraham. It was that very claim that caused the religious establishment, proud of its elitist human traditions, to crucify our Lord.

The verse begins with the word “Therefore.” Therefore what? Therefore what the rest of this verse says is the great truth – the summation – of all this business about Melchizedek.

We need someone greater than Abraham and greater than Levi in order to be safe. We need a new and greater priest because there can be no perfection through the Human priesthood. All the OT priesthood could offer us was to point toward the coming Messiah. The lesser covenant was intended to bless the greater covenant.

Jesus, like Melchizedek, came out of nowhere. He was not of the tribe of Levi but of the tribe of Judah, disqualifying Him for priesthood. Like Melchizedek, his parentage is a mystery – how can the HS impregnate a virgin without violating her? Melchizedek comes as king of an obscure country – Salem, later to be conquered by King David and named Jerusalem, the physical center of redemptive history. Similarly, Jesus came as king of the New Jerusalem – the spiritual Jerusalem, now rather meaningless to us but evolving into the center of redemptive history.

There are three themes from v. 25:

1. Jesus is able to save completely and forever…

2. Jesus always lives to make intercession for us.

3. This eternal salvation is for those who draw near to God through Christ – those who rise up and go to where Jesus is.

All of this has little meaning until we grapple with what it is that we are saved from and what is this matter of intercession.

The major problems in the world, characterized by the Christian Right as abortion and homosexuality and our poor parenting and our financial pressures and the degeneration of our culture, are not what we are saved from. We want to know how to be reconciled to God so that we escape His terrifying wrath at the judgment. That has nothing to do with the law and how well or how poorly we are able to keep it. God is not impressed with our morality. What impresses God is our willingness to be Abrahams – to “rise up and go.”

God’s wrath never changes. It burns red hot. Our only hope is to have a faithful High Priest who will intercede for us forever. Our High Priest is Christ, who is a wall of asbestos between us and the wrath of God.

We need a king of righteousness; we need a king of peace; we need someone without a tainted human history; we need someone with an indestructible life who will never die and require replacement. We need someone greater than Abraham and greater than Levi – someone like Melchizedek, who blessed Abraham and who received tithes from Abraham. We need a superior priest over the Levitical system – a priest after the order of Melchizedek, who had no official order other than the anointing by God.

It is not as though Jesus as Priest loves us and God as Father hates us. God the Father has set up the system of priesthood for our salvation. It is His idea. He sends the priests, and He sends His own Son. The priests die, and they can no longer advocate for us. All this is designed so that God’s wrath can be appeased and we can be rescued – not from our peccadilloes, but from God’s own wrath.

Contrary a common evangelical assumption that all you have to do is say the magic words and you are instantly and forever saved, our present and future salvation does not depend on what we do or on when. It depends on the active, ongoing work of Christ at the Cross and onward from there – past, present and future.

Christ’s deity has secured for us His priesthood. Because He is our priest, appointed by God, His continual intercessory prayer for us secures our ongoing salvation. We are saved from the time we rise up and go to the time we depart this world because Jesus is praying for us eternally.

In addition, what this 25^th verse tells us is that Jesus is able to save completely those who “draw near to God through Him.”

Hebrews 13:21 says this: “May the God of peace, who through the blood of the eternal covenant brought back from the dead our Lord Jesus Christ, that great Shepherd of the sheep, equip you with everything good for doing his will, and may he work in us what is pleasing to him, through Jesus Christ, in whom be glory for ever and ever, Amen.

That’s it, isn’t it? It’s ongoing; dynamic; changing; growing; improving. God is equipping us with everything good for doing his will. What is His will for us? That we keep on drawing near to him forever and ever, seeking His Kingdom. It is God who is giving us the need and the urge to draw near to Him. And He is doing it through Jesus Christ.

The writer is telling us that God is not leaving us alone to our own devices in drawing near to Him. Rather, we draw near because our High Priest is asking the Father to put within us the urge and the need to draw near, thus ensuring our eternal salvation.

Is that not a burst of hope this morning? Our eternal standing with God does not depend on our ability to stand firm or stay the course. Our eternal standing with God depends on God’s own ability, through Christ our Priest, to keep us drawing near.

The evidence of your standing with God, then, is not what you did 100 years ago. The evidence of your standing with God is that you live in desire to draw near to Him.

That is your eternal security.