Hebrews 7:23-28 | Göttinger Predigten im Internet

The Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost | 24 October 2021 | A Sermon on Hebrews 7:23-28 | by Samuel Zumwalt |

23 The former priests were many in number, because they were prevented by death from continuing in office, 24 but he holds his priesthood permanently, because he continues forever. 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. 26 For it was indeed fitting that we should have such a high priest, holy, innocent, unstained, separated from sinners, and exalted above the heavens. 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. 28 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.

THE WORD OF GOD: SAVES

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

The Bible is the Church’s metanarrative. This means we have a grand overarching story that explains everything. Despite our pattern of reading portions of Scripture each week, those readings cannot be divorced from the whole of Scripture which has a particular beginning, a very large middle, and the ultimate goal of our Father’s loving welcome. The book of Hebrews, from which we have been reading for the past three weeks, cannot be understood without knowing what came before it both chronologically and theologically and without knowing why and how God’s Son Jesus, the living Word of God, saves. We Christians have an amazing story to live by and an amazing story to share. Let us sing stanza one of LBW #390, “I Love to Tell the Story.”

Everyone Needs A Priest

Surely you have heard, and perhaps you have even said the words, “I don’t need a priest to get to God.” Having grown up very near the gold buckle of the Bible Belt and having been raised in a very anti-Roman Catholic version of pietistic Lutheranism, I heard those words proudly shouted loud and often, near and far. When half your relatives including one set of grandparents, a beloved aunt, uncle, and cousins are all Roman Catholic, you can’t miss the dismissive tone.

The problem with such a viewpoint is that it is neither biblical nor theologically true. Each of us is a sinner. David says in Psalm 51: “I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me” (51:5). David did not first become a sinner when he slept with another man’s wife, got her pregnant, and, then, arranged to have her husband killed to hide the sin. David, you, and I are all born sinful and unclean. As the Old Testament makes clear, there can be no forgiveness of sins without a blood sacrifice. That’s why God appointed Moses’ brother Aaron to be a priest. That is why there was eventually a Temple in Jerusalem. That is why there were still so many priests in Jerusalem in the first century before the destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D. The only way to get forgiveness of sins was a blood sacrifice in the Temple. Jews needed a priest for that.

Even though the Temple was destroyed by the Romans as a result of continuous Jewish uprisings in Jerusalem and Jews were dispersed, neither the Jews nor the Gentiles suddenly became sin-free as a result thereof. Born in bondage to sin as Paul’s letter to the Romans describes in its opening chapters, both Gentiles and Jews need a priest. You and I also need a priest. We have no access to God the Father without a priest. We can have no forgiveness of sins without a priest.

Let us sing stanza two of LBW #390, “I Love to Tell the Story.”

The Baptized Have A Priest

If you have been baptized into the Lord Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection, you have a priest forever. All other priests, like us, were born in bondage to sin and could not free themselves. That is why they regularly had to offer blood sacrifices for their own sins first and, then, for the people. Like us, they were weak. Like us, they died, because the wages of sin is always death.

The blood of the sacrifice is the necessary part of the sacrifice, because the blood carries the life force. Killing the sacrifice, offering up its blood, was a substitutionary sacrifice. That means the sins of those for whom the sacrifice was offered were placed on the sacrificial victim. The point of Hebrews is that Jesus Christ, the Living Word of God, is both the eternal High Priest and the innocent, once-for-all sacrifice for sins. By His eternal prayers for us sinners before the Father, we have access to the Holy God into whose presence nothing unholy, evil, or stained can be admitted. It is only by the Blood of Jesus, the sinless Lamb of God, that we can be saved.

Thus, the unnamed preacher of the book of Hebrews addresses not only the faulty notion that we don’t need a priest but the equally faulty notion that sinners in this life are already saved. No, we are justified by the Blood of Jesus and will be saved. But Hebrews clearly speaks to those who, because of our bondage to sin, have begun to turn their back on Jesus and seem to be looking back wistfully to the blood sacrifices still being made in the Jerusalem Temple. Now that the Living Word of God, Jesus Christ, has borne the sins of the world on His lonely cross, all other sacrifices are not only unnecessary; they no longer provide forgiveness or access to the Father.

Let us sing stanza three of LBW #390, “I Love to Tell the Story.”

Tell His Story Truthfully

In three weeks, we will hear our final reading from Hebrews 10 exhorting us not to neglect assembling together for worship as is the habit of some. Because we remain sinners, we need a priest. Because we have been baptized into the Lord Jesus’ death and resurrection, He is our great High Priest who continues to offer up to His Father intercessions for us sinners. Rather than to act as if His once-for-all sacrifice has made us no longer sinners and has already saved us, we know that we need Jesus’ true Body and most precious Blood day after day. As we have heard many times from Acts 2:46, the newborn Church continued daily worshiping in the Temple, that is joining in the ordered prayers, but shared in the breaking of the bread, the Lord’s Supper, in their homes because Jesus was and is the eternal High Priest and the once-for-all Blood sacrifice.

As with the Church across space and time, we Christians live among people who live by and tell other stories. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, which is the proper warning about the revisionist historians among whom we live today. They deliberately live by lies, because they wish to destroy all vestiges of prior history. As I heard last week at the Touchstone Conference near Chicago, the 20^th century had more Christian martyrs than any previous century. Why? Because the Marxists and Communists deliberately sought to take away the history and culture of the people, whether in Russia, Poland, or other Eastern European nations, in order to create a new history and a new world. Devout Christians and Jews were the target, then, and this has been so in China, North Korea, and wherever Marxists take control.

Do not think it cannot happen here. That is the warning of older Christians, Jews, and even atheists in other lands who have lived through the nightmare and have even moved here. The tearing down of statues is part of the Marxist game plan. The destroying of the economy, the looting and burning in cities, the trashing of the American Constitution, the control of media and social media, the takeover of school curricula and of church bodies, and, yes, even trying to redefine what it means to be human and to be married are all part of historical revisionism in the service of Marxism, which is one of the most destructive, hateful, and soul-crushing lies ever told. We Christians live by a different story, God’s Story, and we must tell His Story truthfully.

We are all sinners. We Christians don’t tear down statues that are part of the history of the world. We don’t pretend that anyone but God is the hero and the goal of history. Yes, Christopher Columbus’ legacy includes slavery, but the history of so-called indigenous peoples includes slavery, human sacrifice, and cannibalism. Would the world have been better if Columbus had stayed home? Thomas Jefferson’s legacy includes slavery. Would the world have been better without the Declaration of Independence and a nation that continues to do so much for so many?

Franklin Roosevelt turned his back on Jewish children and adults seeking asylum from the Nazis. He gave away Eastern Europe to decades of Soviet oppression. Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi claim to be devout Catholics, but they (and all us taxpayers) have the blood of more than 60 million aborted babies on our hands. Mitch McConnell’s family wealth comes from ships built and financed by China and carrying goods made by slaves for sale. Bernie Sanders, the socialist darling, has never had a real job and yet he owns three houses and is not living paycheck to paycheck. Is there anyone sinless save Jesus Christ and Him alone? We don’t tear down statues. We tell history truthfully with the sins and the successes of our ancestors and our leaders, because God is our only hero. We tell the old, old story of Jesus and His love, because everyone needs a priest, and Jesus is that Great High Priest who alone saves. He is the Truth we need.

Dear ones, we are all great sinners in thought, word, and deed, but we have a greater Savior, Jesus Christ, whose Blood alone can cover our sins and give us access to His Father. As the baptized come to the altar today, look at the empty hands you lift up to receive Jesus. He, the Living Word of God, is our High Priest forever. He will save us. Cling to Him. Tell others His Story. Tell it truthfully. Sing it out joyfully as we are led in song by God’s gift of the organ we dedicate this weekend. God’s amazing grace in Jesus Christ sets us free to serve our neighbors.

In the name of the Father, and of the +Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

©Samuel D. Zumwalt, STS

szumwalt@bellsouth.net

St. Matthew’s Evangelical Lutheran Church

Wilmington, North Carolina USA

Bulletin insert

The Word of God: Saves

Praying

Almighty and everlasting God, increase in us the gifts of faith, hope, and charity, and, that we may obtain what you promise, make us love what you command; through your Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen” (Daily Prayer, 623).

Listening

Hebrews 7:25 “… he is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through him.”

St. Gregory Nazianzus [4th century Patriarch of Constantinople, Turkey]: This is the advocate we have in Jesus – not a slave who falls before the Father… It is not in God to make the demand, nor in the Son to submit to it; the thought is unjust to God. No, it is by what he suffered as man that he persuades us, as Word and encourager, to endure” (Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: Hebrews, 117).

Hebrews 7:25 “… since he always lives to make intercession for them.”

St. John Chrysostom [Late 4^th – early 5^th century Patriarch of Constantinople, Turkey]: “Do you see the humiliation? Do you see the manhood? For he says not that he obtained this by making intercession once for all, but continually and whenever it may be needful to intercede for them” (118).

Hebrews 7:26 “For it was indeed fitting that we should have such a high priest…”

St. Basil the Great [4th century Bishop of Caesarea Mazaca, Turkey]: “Now, he who has redeemed us… if you examine his condescension to us through grace, he calls us brothers and descends to our human nature. He does not need a ransom, for he himself is the propitiation” (118).

Hebrews 7:27 “… since he did this once for all when he offered up himself.”

St. Augustine [Late 4^th – early 5^th century Bishop of Hippo Regius, Algeria]: “Who then is so just and holy a priest as the only Son of God, who had no need of a sacrifice for the washing away of his own sins, neither original sins nor those that are added from human life? … And what could be so acceptably offered and received as the flesh of our sacrifice made the body of our priest? Four things are to be considered in every sacrifice: by whom it is offered, to whom it is offered, what is offered, and for whom it is offered” (118).

Hebrews 7:28 “… the word of the oath… later than the law, appoints a Son… made perfect forever”

St. Ephrem the Syrian [4^th century theologian and hymn writer from Edessa, Turkey]: “And Jesus Christ was a much better mediator than the former priests in that thing, which he promised us through the New Testament. While before it was necessary that the priests were many, because death interrupted the older ones in the course of their office and they did not last forever, now there is no other high priest with our Lord, ‘who lives forever to make intercession for us,’ not in the victims of the sacrifices but in prayers” (118-119).

Reflecting

Do I remember that the Crucified, Risen, and Ascended Lord Jesus Christ prays for me constantly?

Learning

The Ten Commandments (from Luther’s Small Catechism)

As the head of the family should teach them in a simple way to his household.

The Eighth Commandment

You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.

What does this mean?

We should fear and love God so that we do not tell lies about our neighbor, betray him, slander him, or hurt his reputation, but defend him, speak well of him, and explain everything in the kindest way.

Doing

Pray for every unbaptized child and adult you know and for the child’s parents, too.

Pray for your unchurched loved ones and friends. Invite one or more of them to worship.

Discuss with your spouse, your family, or a friend how the 8^th commandment could improve most conversations in this country and, particularly, the content of political speech.

Pick up a new Portals of Prayer devotional booklet in the narthex for daily use. Consult Lutheran Book of Worship, p. 191, for the daily lessons for the Week of Pentecost 22 (Year One) and read them daily before offering your prayers on behalf of your family, the world, our nation, our state, and our local communities.

Reflect on the commandment and Luther’s explanation: ask God to show you the most personal application of it you can make in the coming week.

Join a Bible study at St. Matthew’s either on Sunday morning or during the week.

For Husbands and Wives

Repeat daily: “I (name) take you (name) to be my wedded wife (husband), to have and to hold from this day forward; for better, for worse; for richer, for poorer; in sickness and in health; to love and to cherish until death do us part, according to God’s holy ordinance, and thereto I pledge you my faith.”