Sermon Text: Hebrews 7:25–28
Preacher: Pastor Brian Sauvé
An Inescapable Concept
So this morning, we start a brand new series for a brand new decade, called 2020 Vision: 12 Emojis & That Define Spiritual Health.
I’m kidding. Some of you just left the church. Y’all can sit back down; we’re still about the Bible here at Refuge. Specifically, the book of Hebrews. We’ll be continuing this morning in our study of this great book, picking up where we left off last Sunday in Hebrews 7:25. Look there with me, if you would; this is the Word of the Living God:
“Consequently, he is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them. For it was indeed fitting that we should have such a high priest, holy, innocent, unstained, separated from sinners, and exalted above the heavens. He has no need, like those high priests, to offer sacrifices daily, first for his own sins and then for those of the people, since he did this once for all when he offered up himself. For the law appoints men in their weakness as high priests, but the word of the oath, which came later than the law, appoints a Son who has been made perfect forever.”
-Hebrews 7:25–28
In this short section, the author of Hebrews takes all of what he has been telling us about Jesus’ high priesthood after the order of Melchizedek, and applies it—which means he tells us what it all means and why it matters and what we ought do with it.
To bottom-line it for us, right here up front, his big, capital-A application is that, because Jesus is this kind of High Priest, he can actually save us—meaning he can actually bring us to the transcendent God of heaven and he can actually deal with the guilt of our sin.
To do this, he tells us three things about this salvation: the extent of this salvation, the method of it, and the demand of it.
Its extent, meaning how far this salvation reaches and where it takes us. Its method, meaning how it was accomplished. And its demand, meaning what it asks of us. So we will handle the text this morning by looking at all three of those aspects of this salvation, beginning, number one, with the exent of Jesus’ salvation.
The Extent of His Salvation
Verse 25 tells us plainly that the extent of this salvation is a fairly broad thing, to put it mildly. He says, verse 25,
“Consequently, he is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them.”
-Hebrews 7:25
When Jesus saves, he does so “…to the uttermost.” You could also translate that phrase as “completely” or “at all times.” This makes his salvation utterly unique, in a category of one. There is no other kind of salvation or use of the word “save” that can stand next to this salvation and hold its head up as an equal.
Every other type and instance of salvation is just a lowercase whisper of what the salvation of Jesus is like. If a doctor saves you from cancer, you will still eventually die of something. If a police officer saves you from an armed robbery, you are not thereby safe from all future dangers.
Jesus’ salvation is totally different—he saves to the uttermost. What does that mean? If we’ve been paying attention so far in Hebrews, we know a few things. Number one…
1. This salvation is a restoration of humanity to its creational purpose.
He says in verse 25 that this salvation can be described as “…those who draw near to God through [Jesus].”
See, one of the great tragedies of the last century or so of mainstream Christian theology and church life is that we have so reduced the scope of what it means to be saved, of what Jesus came to do.
In his great book, The Courage to be Protestant, David F. Wells explained that one of the things that brought Evangelicals together over against some of the liberal streams of Christianity that were gaining traction was a kind of line in the sand where they said, “Real Christianity must hold to the inerrancy of Scripture and the substitutionary atonement of Christ.”
And they are correct in that. Those were important battles that needed to be fought, and really have to be refought over and over again, generation to generation—that the Bible is true and that Jesus died as a substitute for sinners. And the first generation of Evangelicalism didn’t mean for this to happen at all, but what did happen was that, over the next generation or two, those two big theological truths began to be seen as the whole of what is important in Christianity, rather than as a foundation to be built on.
And so we began to speak of the life and death and resurrection of Jesus as if it was only about forgiving human sin—of course it was! And as we’ll see in this text, we have no hope if it’s not! But the forgiving of human sin is a road to go somewhere else, not a destination.
The forgiveness of sin—justification by grace alone and through faith alone—is a road that brings us to God. Peter writes in his first epistle that Jesus died, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God.
The point of our sin being forgiven is the restoration of humanity in the God-Man, Jesus Christ, to our creational, original purpose: Fellowship with God himself. Every other blessing we get is downstream of this blessing, God himself, who is the wellspring of all blessing.
And to that end, number two,
2. This salvation is exaltation beyond innocence.
We are saved to the uttermost, and that means not a mere return to innocence of Eden, but exaltation to glory. This High Priest brings us up to be seated with Christ in the heavenly places. In Ephesians 2:5–7, Paul writes,
“…by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.”
-Ephesians 2:5–7
Or in Romans 8, Paul says that all who are called are justified, and all who are justified are glorified. Jesus came down in humble human form, not to remain there, but to rise to glory, and to bring a new humanity to that glory.
His salvation is meant to make a people, in other words, who inherit the earth and rule it in his name and bearing his image and for his glory. This salvation is to the uttermost—eternity to eternity, heaven to earth, all powers and principalities and visible and invisible and thrones and dominions and authorities brought under his scepter. Jesus Christ is our great High Priest after the Order of Melchizedek to that end.
Now the question we ought to ask is simply this: How? How does he accomplish this totalizing salvation?
The Method of His Salvation
The means through which this salvation is won, or we could say, the method of this salvation, is also clear in the text.
The method of Jesus’ salvation is the impeccable, substitutional, exalted, and eternal intercession of a divine High Priest. Do you hear those five aspects?
His salvation is accomplished through the impeccable, substitutional, exalted, and eternal intercession of a divine High Priest. Let’s see each of those five aspects together, starting with the one that maybe struck your ears as the strangest, that word “impeccable.”
1. Impeccable
Jesus won this salvation by being perfect. That’s what impeccable means, perfect. Verses 26 and 27,
“For it was indeed fitting that we should have such a high priest, holy, innocent, unstained, separated from sinners, and exalted above the heavens. He has no need, like those high priests, to offer sacrifices daily, first for his own sins and then for those of the people…”
-Hebrews 7:26–27a
Jesus is the very embodiment of divine perfection; he is what a perfectly righteous human life looks like. Literally everything he did—from the level of his passions to his motivations to his desires, outwards to his words and deeds and body language; from what he did do to what he did not do—everything he did was perfect.
Jesus was perfect as he meekly and patiently and tenderly dealt with the immoral Samaritan woman at the well. He came to seek and save lost sheep, the hurting, the oppressed.
Jesus was perfect as he cursed and warned and insulted the Pharisees and lawyers—“You brood of vipers! You whited tombs! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?!”
Jesus was perfect as he healed the blind and lame and raised little ones from the dead. And he was perfect in his rage, as he patiently wove a whip of cords to drive the moneychangers out of the Temple.
Jesus just is what perfect humanity looks like. And because of that, he could save us, because he had a perfect record of law-keeping human righteousness to give like a garment to cover over sinners. Number two, his salvation was…
2. Substitutional
He saved by becoming a wrath-bearing, substitutional and sacrificial Lamb, to die in our place for our sins. Verse 27,
“He has no need, like those high priests, to offer sacrifices daily, first for his own sins and then for those of the people, since he did this once for all when he offered up himself.”
-Hebrews 7:27
He did not need to offer up sacrifice for his sins, because he had none! And so he did not begin by offering sacrifice for his own sins, but by becoming that offering for the sins of other! This gets even more explicit later in the book.
“…he entered once for all into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves but by means of his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption.”
-Hebrews 9:12
“…so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him.”
-Hebrews 9:28
“And by that will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.”
-Hebrews 10:10
All of this was foretold by the prophets, was it not? Didn’t Isaiah tell us in Isaiah 53 that he would be pierced for our transgressions and punished for our iniquity, that by his stripes we would be healed?
Jesus, the just, became a curse for us, so that in him we could be counted righteous. Third, he accomplished this salvation to the uttermost through his exaltation.
3. Exalted
He is the exalted High Priest. Verse 26 again,
“For it was indeed fitting that we should have such a high priest, holy, innocent, unstained, separated from sinners, and exalted above the heavens.”
-Hebrews 7:26
In just a minute, in Hebrews 8:1, the meaning of this exaltation is made clear, that “…we have such a high priest, one who is seated at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in heaven, a minister in the holy places.”
He can bring us to God because he didn’t just identify with us in our sin, but we are identified with him in his resurrection and ascension to the right hand of God! That’s why Paul could tell the Colossians to look to the right hand of God, because their very lives are hidden with Christ in God.
He saves us by way—not only of his humiliation on the cross—but his exaltation to the crown. Number four, this is not temporary. His high priesthood is eternal.
4. Eternal
Look at verse 25 and 28,
“Consequently, he is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them… For the law appoints men in their weakness as high priests, but the word of the oath, which came later than the law, appoints a Son who has been made perfect forever.”
-Hebrews 7:25, 28
He doesn’t just bring us to this heavenly seat for a moment; he is immortal, and so our salvation is eternal. And what he is doing for us eternally, in this seat, is the fifth method of this salvation: Intercession.
5. Intercessional
His salvation is intercessional, that is, it is the work of a divine High Priest, pleading for us. Verse 25 told us that he can save us to the uttermost, “…since he always lives to make intercession” for us.
What does that mean? Remember from Hebrews 2:10–18, that we have an Advocate in heaven where we used to have an Accuser. Because he has died for our sin and clothed us in his holiness, we no enemy can accuse us before the holy throne of God.
Now, the Lord Jesus stands there, our great High Priest, arguing our case, interceding for us. This means that when you sin—and you do—the Lord is pleading your case. This means that God will never cast you out of his presence, because your Advocate is standing in the gap for you.
And so we have seen the extent of this salvation—to the uttermost. And we have seen the method of this salvation, the impeccable, substitutional, exalted, and eternal intercession of a divine High Priest. Now, lastly, we need take up the demand of his salvation.
The Demand of His Salvation
This final part is very urgent, since it is the question of what we are supposed to do with what we have seen in this chapter. Make no mistake—the reason we have this text in our Bibles today is because the author of the letter wrote it to a group of Christians with the express intent that it move them.
It was given to move them towards trust in and dependence on the Lord Jesus Christ, his immortal high priesthood, and away from the urges of their flesh, which flirted with the idea of returning to the comfortable familiarity of the Levitical Priesthood and its Old Covenant universe.
This text isn’t just about transmitting information about Jesus, but also transmitting the demand of Jesus—don’t settle for a different priest or priesthood! This salvation makes totalizing claims on you and on the world.
And maybe you and I sit here and think, “But I’m not tempted in the way these Hebrew Christians were. I’ve never thought to myself, ‘If only there was a son of Aaron around to sacrifice my bull, I would feel religiously better.’”
I understand that; it’s easy to read the letter to the Hebrews and think that there is much to learn about the Bible, the covenants, the Old Testament, but not so much that is all that practically relevant to you and I.
That, understandable as it may be as a conclusion after a cursory glance at the letter, would be utter folly. We are made of the same stuff as them, and so while our specific temptations may be rearranged, we are tempted in the same basic directions.
We can know that with some confidence, because there are only really fundamentally two directions: Christ and his Kingdom, his Priesthood, his Gospel, or some other counterfeit, knockoff, invented priesthood. We are always being given the choice between the True Priest, the Lord Jesus Christ, or some defunct and impotent substitute—Levi or otherwise.
The reason this is an inescapable concept is twofold: One, human beings were made for God, and so they will spiritually starve without some sense of the transcendent, and two, human beings were made in the image of God, and so bear an ever-increasing weight of bloodguilt for their own sin and the sin of the world they live in.
Let me just quickly show you both of these in action, ok? Because you already know this, even if its not on the same terms. Think about the longing for transcendence: Everyone—from atheists to New Agers to mystics to Mormons—long for the numinous, the transcendent, and the the spiritual.
You see it in atheists rhapsodizing on the beauty and the glory of the Universe, or of the intricacy of biology, or the elegance of a mathematical concept.
You see it in an increasingly spiritualist culture of mystical New Ageism, from special crystals to special oils to special thoughts you can think .
You see it in Mormonism, which preaches the future potential god in all of us, the eternality of marriage and family, and the special powers of the living prophet.
You see it in the unlikeliest of places. Why do you think fantasy novels and worlds—from Brandon Sanderson to J.R.R. Tolkien to J.K. Rowling—are so massively popular? We want transcendence, and in a culture increasingly built on the hollowed out pillars of secularity, anchored in midair, we will counterfeit it anywhere we can.
How about guilt? Our culture has no real way of dealing with the guilt of sin, but since we are made in the image of God, we are weighed down with a ponderous load of bloodguiltiness, growing daily.
And so we turn to all kinds of schemes to try to pay off that guilt in our own minds. Think about this recent example: The Golden Globes awards program is going meatless this year, supposedly to raise awareness for environmental issues.
This is the film industry, which is probably one of the strongest bastions you will find anywhere for frantically turning any pretty young woman it can find into a sexual object, strip her naked (or virtually so), film her doing evil things, and then sell it to millions of people around the world.
It’s an industry that is laboring to normalize sodomy, adultery, prostitution, and fornication. It loves and vociferously lobbies for the so-called freedom to kill babies in the womb—because, how else will you keep worshiping at the altar of Molech, free sex for anyone, anywhere, with no covenant or consequences?
Ours is a world awash in bloodguilt, drowning in it, and how do we try to deal with it? Veganism. Let’s go meatless. Let’s buy some carbon credits to offset our environmental impact. That will make me feel righteous.
We turn to the prophets and priests of plastic virtue-signaling to negotiate us some peace, some make-believe righteousness by means of a “virtuous” diet.
Enter this inescapable concept of a priesthood. Think about it: What is a priest, and what does he do? He mediates. He represents. He represents you to the transcendent. He mediates peace between you and the transcendent.
Whatever you turn to in order to grab onto the transcendent, that is your priesthood. Whatever you turn to for peace, to deal with your guilt, your conscience, that is your priesthood.
This is a not-whether-but-which sort of issue. It is not whether or not you will appeal to some kind of priest for some kind of salvation, but rather which priest you will appeal to.
Will it be Levi? Buddha? Muhammad? Joseph Smith?
Will it be a political priest?
Will it be a wife or a husband?
Will it be a child?
Will it be a job?
Will it be a certain amount of success or money?
Will it be a home?
Will it be a guru?
Will it be a righteous diet?
Everyone everywhere is always looking to some person, experience, system, philosophy, or ideology to mediate an experience of the transcendent—because, remember what we were made for: God.
We were made for a transcendent God, and so we live in longing for the transcendent. The pursuit of that transcendent longing is not optional for human beings.
We were made for a holy God, and we are not holy, and so we live in longing for someone to make us clean, to make us feel better, to free us from our guilt.
Friends, Jesus Christ, immortal High Priest after the order of Melchizedek—he is the only real one. He is the only one who will bring divine transcendence here, come and dwell with us, God with us, and then bring us up with him to the throne of the divine.
He is the only one who will cleanse us, truly—the only one who will by his scarlet blood wash us clean of our scarlet sin. And he has. He has done that. He offered himself willinglingly, and he does so now. He pleads with us to trust in himself and not in one of his rivals, who are only ever frauds and hucksters anyway.
“…he is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them.”
-Hebrews 7:25