Approved Mediator

One summer in the mid-1970’s I took part in an exercise that has stuck with me throughout my life. As an evangelistic outreach, our youth group went through the community around our church doing a religious opinion survey. We asked two questions to start a spiritual conversation: 1) If you were to die tonight would you go to heaven, and 2) Why do you think God should allow you into heaven?

We didn’t have much success in evangelism. My memory is that no one came to Christ or even began attending church through that effort. What sticks with me to this day was the answers we got to those questions. I don’t believe we ever had anyone respond to the first question negatively. Absolutely everyone believed they would be granted entry to heaven. Except for a handful of born again Christians we met on their doorsteps, everyone we surveyed said that they believed the things they were doing would gain them entry to the presence of God; whether it was good deeds outnumbering sins, or the performance of religious duties, the universal idea was that doing the right things would guarantee entry to eternal life in glory.

There’s a problem with that outlook: It excludes God from having any say in the grounds we have for approaching him. The underlying assumption is that we can come to God on our own terms and He must receive us on those terms.

If we are going to live in relationship with the all-powerful, perfectly holy Creator and Sustainer of all things, we must understand and come to Him according to His terms for the relationship. In today’s passage the author of the letter to the Hebrews begins developing the theme that Jesus Christ is the great high priest for sinful mankind. In developing that theme, he is telling us about the way God has made it possible for us to come to Him.

Let me highlight 3 principles of our relationship with God in today’s passage:

1)God requires a mediated relationship with sinners.

Hebrews 5:1 ESV

1 For every high priest chosen from among men is appointed to act on behalf of men in relation to God, to offer gifts and sacrifices for sins.

The office of high priest was instituted by God. We learn from the Old Testament that God, through Moses, instructed His people to recognize one person in the community as the high priest. And there was a purpose to the position. It wasn’t so that the high priest could wear some fancy clothes and do some things no one else could do. While the high priest wore unique garments and performed unique rituals, there was a purpose to all that uniqueness. Here’s what the Lexham Bible Dictionary says about it:

The Lexham Bible Dictionary High Priests in the Old Testament

In the Old Testament, the primary purpose of the high priest was to serve as a representative and mediator between the people and Yahweh.

Mediation - acting as a representative of God to the people and as a representative of the people to God - was the purpose God had in commanding that the position of high priest be created. Travel back in time to the days of the Exodus recorded in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. God, in fulfillment of promises made to the patriarchs of Israel brought the people out of Egypt and dwelt in their midst. He instructed them to built a tabernacle at the center of the camp as the place of his presence. But the only direct access they could have came through this mediator/representative in their midst. The average Simeon or Reuben could not just barge into the holy of holies to seek the presence of God. To do so would have been to bring upon themselves the judgment of God. For centuries the people of God lived with the eternal God as their next door neighbor. But their relationship with him was a mediated relationship. It was all made possible because of the high priest who was appointed to act on behalf of men in relationship to God.

We need to ask the question, why does the author of this New Testament letter spend the better part of five chapters talking about the office of high priest? The answer is that the primary purpose of a high priest remains in the new era that Christ Jesus brought in. In other words, God still requires that sinful humans have a mediator to represent Him to them and them to Him for us to have a relationship with Him.

This is probably surprising to many. We have become familiar with the idea of direct access to God - that the curtain in the temple was torn when Jesus died so that God is directly available to all who would seek Him. But what is essential for us to see is that our direct access is still mediated access to God. At the death of Christ a change occurred in the mediation of the relationship between God and man. But it is still necessary to approach God through a high priest.

2)God must appoint the mediator of His relationship with sinners.

This is the point the author drives home in Heb. 5:4.

Hebrews 5:4 ESV

4 And no one takes this honor for himself, but only when called by God, just as Aaron was.

The point is quite plainly stated: A high priest is not self-appointed. The only valid mediator of the relationship between God and sinners is the one God calls to the task.

This point is very powerfully illustrated by an incident recorded in Numbers 16. It’s a lengthy chapter that we won’t take time to read this morning. I will summarize it and leave it as homework for you to read later. It’s a chapter that describes a rebellion led by a man named Korah and some associates he surrounded himself with. Aaron, Moses brother, had been chosen by God as the high priest. But Korah and his friends aspired to take Aaron’s place. They said, “Hey, you’re no better than us. We think we should be able to do what Aaron is doing.” So Moses said, “Here’s what we’ll do. Tomorrow, you and your group perform Aaron’s duties alongside him and we’ll see how God responds.” So they did. Aaron burned incense as the high priest, the rebels did likewise, and God responded by making the ground beneath the rebels collapse and bury them alive. When the general population saw the rebels die that way, they started another rebellion against Moses and Aaron, blaming them for their friends’ deaths. So God sent a plague on the people - a plague that was only ended when Aaron, the high priest God had chosen, acted to atone for the people’s sin of rebellion.

The principle established in Numbers 16 is that only a God-chosen mediator can respresent God to sinners and sinners to God. Thus, one of the most important questions for us to ask ourselves is, who is the mediator God has appointed for us to live in relationship with Him?

3)God has appointed Jesus Christ as the mediator of His relationship with sinners.

This is the point of vss. 5-10 as a whole, but particularly of Hebrews 5:5-6.

Hebrews 5:5–6 ESV

5 So also Christ did not exalt himself to be made a high priest, but was appointed by him who said to him, “You are my Son, today I have begotten you”; 6 as he says also in another place, “You are a priest forever, after the order of Melchizedek.”

In these verses he quotes from two Psalms that had become popularly recognized as messianic psalms in the 1st century - Psalm 2, and 110 - and applies the to Christ. He’s telling us that the Bible - the OT scriptures - say that Christ is the high priest/mediator whom God has appointed.

I made reference before to the tearing of the curtain in the temple in Jerusalem when Jesus died. That happened to show that God’s Son had fulfilled what the human priesthood had depicted for so many years. The mediation of the descendants of Aaron was no longer necessary. The high priesthood of Jesus didn’t just provide an alternative way to come to God, it replaced the sacrificial system completely.

Jesus Christ, God’s son is the fulfillment of everything the Old Testament high priests represented. He is now the sole mediator appointed by God the Father to bring us into a right relationship with himself. That’s exactly what the apostle Paul wrote in 1 Timothy 2:5-6:

1 Timothy 2:5–6 ESV

5 For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, 6 who gave himself as a ransom for all, which is the testimony given at the proper time.

This is what this morning’s entire passage builds to: Jesus Christ, God’s Son is the eternal high priest chosen by God to represent the Father to sinners and sinners to the Father. Our relationship with God the Father depends entirely on having Christ bring us to Him. There simply is no other means of having a right relationship with God. We must put our trust in Christ to act on our behalf with the Father in heaven, just as the Israelite worshippers had to trust in the high priest to act on their behalf in the most holy place. We live in relationship with God by trust in Christ, or we do not live in a right relationship with God at all.

So, what is the real issue?

Perhaps someone listening right now is thinking, Well, Randy, what you’ve been saying is all interesting, but I don’t really see why it matters. How is this all relevant to me?

Think about why the author of Hebrews wrote this passage and who he wrote it to. The original recipients of the letter were predominantly Jewish people who had made a profession of faith in Christ, but they were in danger of going back to Judaism. This passage was written because the author was concerned that his readers were abandoning the only God-approved means of approaching him for the sake of something that was no longer valid in God’s sight. In other words, he was concerned that they were pinning their hopes on a false hope.

That’s the real issue: If we don’t rely on Christ Jesus for everything pertaining to a right relationship with God, we are clinging to false hope.

And that is a danger, not only for Jewish believers in the 1st century, but for evangelical Christians in the 21st century too. We could easily lose sight of the truth that our whole relationship with God is mediated by Jesus Christ and begin to base our eternal confidence on false hopes. We could be deceived into a belief that God will welcome us in glory because of our good deeds, or because of our performance of certain rituals, or because we consider ourselves to be spiritual or religious, or because other people tell us they like and respect us. But those are not the terms that God has set on being able to live in intimate fellowship with Him for eternity. He has declared His Son to be the only high priest we now have to make a relationship with Him possible.

The most important question any of us faces, therefore, is the question of our relationship to the Mediator God has chosen and approved.

The hymn writer has captured the very essence of Christianity in the words of the chorus that is so familiar to folks of my age: “On Christ the solid rock I stand. All other ground is sinking sand. All other ground is sinking sand.”

Don’t rely on false hopes. Jesus Christ is the only real hope of eternal life there is. Make sure you’re trusting in him. Amen.