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Hebrews 7:26-28  Such a high priest truly meets our need – one who is holy, blameless, pure, set apart from sinners, exalted above the heavens.  Unlike the other high priests, he does not need to offer sacrifices day after day, first for his own sins, and then for the sins of the people.  He sacrificed for their sins once for all when he offered himself.  For the law appoints as high priests men in all their weakness; but the oath, which came after the law, appointed the Son, who has been made perfect forever.

When I read passages like this in God’s Word that are clear reminders for me of what it really means for me to know that Jesus is my Saviour, it has quite an emotional impact on me.  I like the way the Author of Hebrews introduces what he is about to say: “Such a high priest truly meets our need”!

I have been made in the image of God, and, like Augustine in Chapter 1 of his ‘Confessions’, I want to say to my Maker, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you”.   In today’s verses, the Author of Hebrews reminds me, not only of how and why I can find ‘my rest in Jesus’, but it gives me absolute assurance that this rest is genuine and everlasting – because it doesn’t depend on how well I perform any spiritual exercises, but on what Jesus, the perfect Son of God has done for me, by his substitutionary death in my place on the cross!

It reminds me of the amazing way God played out his eternal Plan of Salvation in human history: by choosing a people to be his very own; establishing his special relationship with them through gracious, binding covenant promises and a system of blood sacrifice to deal with their sinful nature; then demonstrating without doubt how anything depending on human performance could never succeed or last because of our innate sinful nature; and finally to solve all this quandary by sending his own beloved Son to do it all for us.

The focus of the whole (what proved to be imperfect) human system was the Temple in Jerusalem where the regular blood sacrifices were to be made, by the Levitical/Aaronic priesthood in accordance with the Mosaic Law.  It seems to me that it is not insignificant that the Sovereign Lord graciously and patiently left this Temple in place for 40 years after Jesus shed his blood as the perfect, once-for-all, sacrifice for sin, in order to give the Levitical/Aaronic Priesthood time to come to grips with the new reality of what the Author of Hebrews is describing here, but now it has been destroyed and never been rebuilt in 2,000 years, leaving the Levitical/Aaronic priesthood without their focal point.

“Not all the blood of beasts on Jewish altars slain could give the guilty conscience peace or wash away the stain.  But Christ, the heav’nly Lamb, takes all our sins away; a sacrifice of nobler name and richer blood than they.  My faith would lay her hand on that dear head of thine, while, like a penitent, I stand, and there confess my sin.  My soul looks back to see the burdens thou didst bear when hanging on the cursèd tree, and hopes her guilt was there.  Believing, we rejoice to see the curse remove; we bless the Lamb with cheerful voice, and sing his bleeding love.”  (Isaac Watts)  Thank you Jesus.

– Bruce Christian