GOD'S GREAT PRIEST
GOD’S GREAT PRIEST
One aspect in which Christ is presented in the epistle to the Hebrews is as the great Priest over God’s house. He is that in connection with our privilege of drawing near. God delights to have His saints near to Himself, enjoying the liberty of His house. He has not only manifested His love in the gift of His beloved Son, but he has given the Holy Spirit as the powerful Witness of His love in our hearts. We are assured by a divine Witness of the efficacy of Christ’s work, and of the unspeakable love of God as the source of all our blessing. There is not a cloud on the love of God, or a spot on our consciences to keep us from enjoying it. There is nothing to keep us at a distance from the blessed God, but everything to attract us into nearness to Himself.
Everything connected with our old state and history was dealt with and removed in the death of Christ, but that is not all. The declaration of God has come out in the death of His Son, who came into death, not only to banish every cloud and remove every spot, but in order that there might be a way paved with divine love over which our souls might travel adoringly into nearness to God. It is “the new and living way”; it lives in all the blessedness of divine love, and Christ is the One who has opened it up. He had to remove in holy judgment all that we were, but in the very place where He did so, He disclosed the depths of the heart of God that we might live in the love of God.
The One who has done all this is the “great priest over the house of God”. He is the great Centre and power of attraction by whom those who love Him are withdrawn from every rival influence and led into the blessed privilege of approach to God. He attracts those whom He has sanctified — His brethren — because they are kindred to Himself, and in being drawn away from everything else to Him they give [p. 156] spiritual evidence of being, in truth, His assembly.
It is as we “approach” that we realise the blessedness of Christ, the Son, as the “minister of the holy places” (chapter 8: 2). He leads our hearts into the holy love of God, and into the vast and glorious purposes of that love, which find their centre in Himself and their circumference in a universe of bliss filled by Him with the knowledge and praise of God.
He thus secures a company intelligent as to the mind of God, and knowing the love of God, and therefore capable for the service of God in praise and worship. The house of God is thus furnished with those who are morally suited to its greatness. Nothing less than Christ’s assembly would be suited to the greatness and blessedness of God’s house. God’s house is filled, in the sense that there is a company there capable of entering into His mind and the thoughts of His love, able to trace adoringly the perfection of His ways in Christ, and thus able to give Him now the praise and glory that is due to Him. Those who thus fill God’s house are the sanctified company referred to by Christ as “my assembly” in Matthew 16.