Scripture: Genesis 14: 17-20 and Hebrews 6: 19-20
Sermon: The Mystery and Majesty of Melchizedek
Topics: Melchizedek, Hebrews, Priesthood
Preached: June 23, 2002 pm service Woodlawn
Rev. Mike Abma
Genesis 14: 17-20
17 After his return from the defeat of Chedorlaomer and the kings who were with him, the king of Sodom went out to meet him at the Valley of Shaveh (that is, the King’s Valley). 18And King Melchizedek of Salem brought out bread and wine; he was priest of God Most High. 19He blessed him and said,
‘Blessed be Abram by God Most High,
maker of heaven and earth;
20 and blessed be God Most High,
who has delivered your enemies into your hand!’
And Abram gave him one-tenth of everything.
HEBREWS 6: 19-20
19We have this hope, a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters the inner shrine behind the curtain, 20where Jesus, a forerunner on our behalf, has entered, having become a high priest for ever according to the order of Melchizedek.
This is the Word of the Lord
Thanks be to God
INTRODUCTION
For the fun of it, I typed in “Melchizedek” into the Google Search engine. I wondered if this Old Testament name still had some present day currency. What I found was an elaborate website for the Dominion of Melchizedek.” According to this website, the Dominion of Melchizedek is a collection of islands in the South Pacific near the Marshall Islands. The website includes a constitution, pages and pages of statistics, it even notes July 18 as its national holiday.
I left that website thinking what an odd curious place this Dominion of Melchizedek must be. The next website I visited ended all the dreaming. Apparently the Dominion of Melchizedek is a total fraud. It is an elaborate scam of a father and son duo engineered to allow for banking fraud schemes. This father and son were in court facing fraud charges in London England in 1999. For some reason the Dominion of Melchizedek website is still there.
Perhaps the name Melchizedek simply attracts a certain degree of mystery. The Melchizedek of the Bible certainly has an aura of mystery.
CONTEXT
The context of Melchizedek’s appearance is a large-scale battle between 4 large and powerful kings against 5 rebellious vassal kings. In this group of 5 rebels are the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah. As might be predicted, the big kings come and totally destroy the 4 smaller kings, taking livestock and citizens captive. In among the spoils of war are Lot, his household and his possessions.
Someone who escaped the battle was able to reach Abraham and tell him the bad news about his nephew Lot. What Abraham does is enlist the help of 3 Amorite brothers, Mamre, Eshcol, and Aner – the three Amorite musketeers – plus the fighting men within his household. The total is 318 armed men. And Abraham sets out to rescue Lot.
It is interesting that when John Calvin preached a series of three sermons on Melchizedek in 1559, he spent a fair bit of time questioning whether Abraham was justified in taking up arms. Calvin comes down remarkably hard on any private person taking up arms for any purpose whatsoever. That, he says, is the business of kings and magistrates, not private citizens. Why? Because kings and magistrates have a God-given authority and responsibility to use arms to protect the peace.
Private citizens do not.
Calvin goes so far as to call Abraham “a silly old man” to be taking up arms and taking a tiny force of 318 men to go against a much bigger foe. The only way Calvin can justify Abraham taking up arms is by seeing this action as being authorized by God himself. Calvin then compares Abraham in this instance to be much like the Judges that would come centuries later. Just as God raised up judges in times of need, God raised up and authorized Abraham to use force this one time to rescue his nephew Lot.
Rather miraculously, Abraham in a surprise night attack, routed the enemy and saved his nephew. “To the victor go the spoils” and so to Abraham and his company went not only Lot but all the captives and their possessions.
MELCHIZEDEK APPEARS
It was while Abraham and company were returning home that they ran into two kings: Bera, the king of Sodom and Melchizedek, the king of Salem (or Jerusalem).
From the context, it is quite clear that the only reason the king of Sodom meets Abraham was because Abraham won the battle. The king of Sodom came to Abraham out of his greed for a good share of the plunder.
In contrast, Melchizedek, the king of Salem, who wasn’t even involved in the conflict, would have come to meet Abraham whether Abraham had won or lost the battle. That is because Melchizedek came to give rather than to take. What Melchizedek gave was bread and wine to feed Abraham’s hungry troops and hungry captives. What Melchizedek gave was a blessing, both on Abraham and on God Most High who had given Abraham the victory.
And that is all we are told of Melchizedek. Only these two little verses in Genesis 14:18-20. In all of the Old Testament there is only one other little verse in Psalm 110:4, that refers to Melchizedek. It goes: “You are a priest forever in the order of Melchizedek.” These are the only two times in the whole Old Testament that Melchizedek, this mysterious priest-king, is mentioned.
BOOK OF HEBREWS — The Mystery of Melchizedek
That makes what the Preacher in the book of Hebrews does with this mysterious Melchizedek truly remarkable.
Let me first say a few things about the book of Hebrews. The book of Hebrews is a book of collected sermons to Jews who were on the fence, so to speak. They were conscientious, law-loving Jews who had real misgivings about accepting Jesus as the Messiah. These were Jews who actually believed that there would be two Messiahs: there would be a priestly Messiah from the line of Aaron and there would be a kingly Messiah from the line of David. These were Jews who knew their Old Testament history. They knew that whenever a king tried to act like a priest — as in the case of king Saul making the offerings instead of waiting for Samuel the priest, or as in the case of King Uzziah offering incense on the altar instead of the priest (2 Chronicles 26) — there was always trouble.
What the author or the preacher of Hebrews does is take all these Jewish Messianic expectations and show how they were surprisingly fulfilled in not two Messiahs but one – the great high priest and king, Jesus Christ.
To help make his case, the preacher of Hebrews takes this mysterious Old Testament priest-king Melchizedek, and clearly portrays him as like the Son of God.
Melchizedek as the king of righteousness foreshadowed Jesus the true king of righteousness;
Melchizedek, the king of Salem meaning peace, pointed forward to Jesus the true prince of peace.
Melchizedek, as a mysterious priest who seems to come out of nowhere, with no clear beginning and no clear end, pointed towards Jesus who is our eternal high priest who is the same yesterday, today and forever.
After making the case that Melchizedek of old was a foreshadowing of Jesus, the preacher of Hebrews makes a pronouncement that would have been even more difficult for his Jewish listeners to swallow. He makes the claim that this shadowy and mysterious figure of Melchizedek was in fact greater than Abraham. That was quite a claim. We can imagine the Jewish listeners asking, “But how could this be? How could this Melchizedek be greater than our father Abraham?”
Well, the reason is this, says the preacher. It is a general rule that “the lesser person is blessed by the greater.” Given that general rule, since Melchizedek was the one who blessed Abraham, Melchizedek must have been greater than Abraham.
Not only that, but the assumption was also that the one who collected the tithe was greater than the one who gave it. Again, it was Abraham who gave the tithe and Melchizedek who collected it.
THE MAJESTY OF MELCHIZEDEK?
Now why does the preacher who wrote the book of Hebrews, go out on a limb by first seeing Melchizedek as a foreshadowing of the Messiah and then claiming that Melchizedek was actually of greater dignity than father Abraham, who all Jews held in the highest esteem?
The preacher does this for two main of reasons:
First of all, in referring to Melchizedek, the preacher clearly was shaking many of the expectations of the Jewish community. As I noted earlier, many Jews expected two messiahs: a messianic priest in the line of Aaron and a messianic king in the line of David. But guess what, says this preacher? Jesus has come both as a king in the line of David, and as a priest in the line or order of Melchizedek. There are not two Messiahs but one.
But the second and in fact main reason the preacher of Hebrews refers to
Melchizedek is to demonstrate as clearly as he can the shortcomings of the Old law and the Old priesthood. If he hadn’t upset his audience already, he surely would have ruffled feathers when he described the Old law and Old priesthood as weak and useless. Why? Because they couldn’t ultimately deliver what we all desperately need, which is to appear righteous, or perfect, in the eyes of God. For that we need a new high priest, a new law, a new sacrifice, a new hope. All these are found in Jesus Christ, the great high priest of the new covenant. The old priesthood and the old sacrifices could never make anyone perfect – could never make anyone perfect in God’s eyes. But through his once and for all sacrifice on the cross, Jesus covers all our sins and makes us appear righteous even perfect in the eyes of our heavenly father.
All this would have been very difficult for the Jewish listeners of Hebrews to swallow.
It meant out with the old and in with the new.
It meant that the old priesthood, the old law, the old sacrifices had been eclipsed by a new high priest, a new law, a once-and-for-all sacrifice.
It meant pinning all our hopes for salvation on one Messiah, one name, one Lord, one priest, one king.
THE MESSAGE OF MELCHIZEDEK
We are not Old Testament Jews.
We do not have a priesthood that we feel obliged to defend.
We do not have a sacrificial system that we feel atones for our sins.
But we still have our rules and our social laws.
We still have our assumptions about life:
what it means to succeed and what it means to fail;
what it means to be a somebody and what it means to be a nobody;
what it means to get ahead and what it means to fall behind.
Perhaps in the Jewish mindset the most important question was whether they appeared righteous in the eyes of God. That is why there was the priesthood and the sacrificial system.
But for many of us, the most important question has become whether we appear respected in the eyes of the world. That is why we have our elaborate system of laws and rules defining who are the winners and who are the losers; who are the successful and who are the failures; who are the respectable and who the contemptible.
In the midst of our own social rules of success and failure, of respectability and contemptibility, the magnitude of the grace of Jesus Christ is still hard for us to swallow.
CONCLUSION
In his classic book, The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker concludes by writing that we all approach the end of life plagued by the question of whether we have done enough. We all approach the end of life wondering whether the world sees us as successes or failures, as winners or losers. And that is why, Becker observes, most of us are tempted to fashion something – like our memoirs, or a foundation, or anything at all that will act as an offering – to make clear our contribution to society, so to speak. Of course, the thing that drives us to write our memoirs, to create a foundation, or to do any of these things that seemingly establish our legacy to the next generation is because we all want our lives to count for something.
But regardless of what our offering is, regardless of what our memoirs contain or how large the foundation is, we are all plagued by the question, “Is it enough?”
Is it enough? Even when we have worked hard, saved, served, volunteered, even when we have tried our best to be an exemplary friend, neighbor, spouse, parent, Christian, there is still that nagging question, “Is it enough?” It is a nagging question because we know there will always be someone – a parent, a teacher, an employer, a spouse, a child, our own inner selves – who will remind us it has not been enough.
The brutal truth is that when we bring our offering to the altar of God, the offering of our own lives, it is never enough.
But that is why we too must hear the voice of the preacher of Hebrews.
That is why we too must know Jesus Christ as our high priest and our king.
Every priest must bring an offering to the altar of God. Jesus, the great high priest, brings himself. He placed on the altar the deepest possible sacrifice – his own life made perfect through suffering. And the miracle is this: when Jesus lays his own life on the altar, in some mysterious way, our own lives were placed there too.
When our lives are placed with his
our restless lives become restful;
our unrighteous lives become righteous;
our flawed lives become perfect;
and our broken lives become healed;
Why?
Because when Jesus Christ, our great high priest, lay down his life on the altar of God as an offering once and for all, he was declaring yesterday, today, and forevermore – ENOUGH.
Amen
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