The Great High Priest

Nearly Every religion the world has ever made has a priest.

Go back to ancient Egypt. The priests of the temple shaved every hair from their bodies, washed themselves over and over through the day, and dressed only in white linen, because wool and skin and hair were the marks of common men, and a priest could not be a common man.

Go to the temples of India. The Brahmin stands at the top of the whole order of things, set apart by his very birth, guarding himself against the touch and the food and the shadow of the people beneath him, because to be a priest was to be untouched by ordinary life.

Go to the monasteries of the Buddhist world. The monk shaves his head, leaves his family, takes the robe, and renounces the things that ordinary people live for, so that everyone can see by looking at him that he is no longer one of them.

Look wherever you want. The shrines of Shinto, the high places of the old pagan world, the altars of Rome. The story is always the same. The priest spends his whole life and his whole strength trying to prove one thing. That he is not like you. He climbs. He separates. He distances himself from common people, because in every religion man has ever invented, the way up to God is to stop being ordinary.

And then there is Jesus.

Here is the strange and wonderful thing. Of every priest who has ever lived, he is the only one who actually is set apart. Not by shaving his head. Not by his robes. Not by his caste or his birth into a tribe. He is set apart by his very nature, because he is God of God, and he is set apart by his perfect record, because he is the only man who never sinned. He alone has the right to stand at an infinite distance from us. He alone could look at this room and say, you are not like me, and be telling the simple truth.

But that is not what he does.

The one Priest who is truly, rightfully, eternally set apart is the one Priest who comes down. He does not climb away from us. He comes to us. He takes our flesh. He is made like his brothers in every way. He is tempted in every way that we are. The only Priest who never had to become like us is the only Priest who chose to.

Yet without sin.

And that, brothers and sisters, is the High Priest the writer of Hebrews puts in front of us this morning. Look at him in verse 14. Tightly hold to your tempted yet transcendent Great High Priest, and trust that you can truly talk to Him daily.

1. Tightly hold to the truth of your transcendent Great High Priest. Heb 4:14

2. Trust the tempted Great High Priest who understands your weakness. Heb 4:15

3. Talk to the gracious Great High Priest every day to receive his tender mercy. Heb 4:16

1. Tightly hold to the truth of your transcendent Great High Priest. Heb 4:14

The Great High Priest- Mega High Priest! 1. Right lineage. He had to descend from Aaron, of the tribe of Levi. The office was hereditary and restricted to Aaron's family (Exodus 28:1, 29:9). No one outside that line could hold it.

2. Divine appointment. He did not take the office himself. God called Aaron to it (Exodus 28:1). When others tried to seize priestly privilege, like Korah, judgment followed (Numbers 16).

3. Consecration and ordination. He was set apart through a prescribed ritual of washing, special garments, anointing oil, and sacrifices over seven days (Exodus 29, Leviticus 8).

4. Physical wholeness. He could have no disqualifying bodily defect (Leviticus 21:16-23), and he had to observe strict purity and marriage restrictions befitting his office (Leviticus 21).

5. Proper garments. He served in specific holy vestments, including the breastpiece bearing the twelve tribes' names over his heart and the turban marked "Holy to the LORD" (Exodus 28). To serve without them was to risk death.

The defining function tied to all of this: only the high priest could enter the Most Holy Place, and only once a year on the Day of Atonement, with blood, to make atonement first for his own sins and then for the people (Leviticus 16).

That last line is your hinge into Jesus next week. The Aaronic priest atoned for himself first. Christ had no sin of his own, so he is the better Priest of a better order.

Two year-old male lambs without defect each day: one in the morning and one in the evening (Exodus 29:38-42; Numbers 28:1-8). These were offered with grain and drink offerings as a sweet aroma to the Lord, symbolizing the people’s ongoing consecration and dependence on atonement.

What the high priest did offer daily

The high priest (starting with Aaron) had his own daily grain offering (a tenth of an ephah of fine flour, mixed with oil, half in the morning and half in the evening). This was prepared on a griddle, broken into pieces, and wholly burned on the altar—it could not be eaten (Leviticus 6:19-23).

The high priest’s more unique role

The high priest’s most distinctive sacrificial duty was on the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur, once a year, Leviticus 16). He offered sacrifices for his own sins and for the people’s sins, entered the Most Holy Place, and performed the ritual with the two goats (one sacrificed, one as the scapegoat).

2. Trust the tempted Great High Priest who understands your weakness. Heb 4:15

Here is a question that has comforted God's people for centuries. If Jesus was tempted just like we are, what is the difference between his temptation and ours?

There is a difference, and it is everything.

When temptation comes at you, it does not just knock on the door from the outside. It finds a friend on the inside. There is a traitor in you. Something in your own heart that hears the temptation and wants to say yes. The fire arrow flies in, and it lands in dry grass.

That was not so with Christ. When the temptation came at him, and it came harder than it has ever come at you, it found nothing in him to catch hold of. The arrow flew in and struck a spotless nature and went out. He himself said it. The ruler of this world is coming, and he has no claim on me. Nothing in me.

So do not hear that and think it makes him distant. Hear it and know it makes him strong. He is not a Priest who watched the storm from the shore. He walked all the way into it. He felt the full weight of temptation, the weight you and I never feel, because we give in long before it crests. The one who surrenders never learns how heavy the assault really is. Only the one who endures to the end feels its full force. And he endured it all, without sin.

That is the kind of High Priest you are holding onto. He has been where you are. He felt what you feel. And he never once fell. So when you go to him in your weakness, you are not explaining yourself to a stranger. You are running to the only one who knows the full strength of what you are fighting, and beat it. Hebrews 2:18 “18 For since he himself has suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are tempted.”

Christ's temptations were real, not pretense. They were genuinely like ours in their outward assault and in their painful weight. But they were unlike ours at one point: in us there is a traitor within, an indwelling corruption that "closes in" with the temptation from the outside. In Christ there was no such inner answer. The dart struck a spotless nature and found nothing in him to catch hold of (John 14:30 . LBC 8:2 says the Son took man's nature "with all the essential properties and common infirmities of it, yet without sin.

3. Talk to the gracious Great High Priest every day to receive his tender mercy. Heb 4:16 Approcah

Throne of Grace Condidence Mercy = Pardon Grace = Streagth to go on. time of need

Have you time enough to eat, to drink, to sleep, to talk unprofitably, it may be corruptly, in all sorts of unnecessary societies, but have not time to live unto God?

John Owen (Puritan Divine and Statesman)

It is better to lose anything than to lose time; we can recover lost money, but time is irrecoverable.

John Chrysostom