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Hebrews 7:15-16   And what we have said is even more clear if another priest like Melchizedek appears, one who has become a priest not on the basis of a regulation as to his ancestry but on the basis of the power of an indestructible life.

This chapter in Hebrews is extremely helpful in tying together all the different threads of God’s revelation of his Eternal Plan of Salvation that is at the very heart of the narrative of Scripture from Genesis to Revelation.  From the very beginning it has always been God’s ‘Plan A’ to send his beloved Son into our world to die on the cross in our place; and through his amazing sacrifice to forgive our sin and bring us into fellowship with him forever!  Revelation 13:8 and 17:8 refer to the “Lamb that was slain from the creation of the world”!

It is clear that Christ must be the only way of salvation, because the ‘old’ system of sacrifices, given in detail to Moses, could only ever be a stop-gap measure (see Romans 3:21-26, especially verse 25) – it could never have any lasting value of itself because it was enacted through fallen, mortal human beings in a broken, messed up, sin-ridden world.

It seems that the Sovereign LORD God gave us the Mosaic Law, and the sacrificial system on which it is based, to prove to us that there was no other way to redeem us, except through his own taking our place in death.  “And was there then no other way for God to take?  I cannot say;  I only I only bless him day by day, who saved me through my Saviour” (Dora Greenwell).

It is so helpful that even back in Genesis (4,000 years before his Plan was to be culminated in Jesus) God introduced us to Melchizedek who set the whole pattern for the need of a timeless priest who could save us through an ‘indestructible life’; and then, 3,000  years later, to give us a ‘Messianic Psalm’, which would declare the Promised Messiah to be “a priest forever, in the order of Melchizedek” (Psalm 110:4)! How clumsy and inadequate the old system was! “Not all the blood of beasts on Jewish altars slain could give the guilty conscience peace or wash away the stain.  But Christ, the heavenly Lamb, takes all our sins away; a sacrifice of nobler name and richer blood than they” (Isaac Watts).  How wonderful it is that the whole of the Inspired Scripture so clearly anticipates and exegetes the death and resurrection of Jesus!  How wonderful it is that by God’s grace we can know ‘the power of an indestructible life’.

– Bruce Christian