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Let’s turn now to our reading, tonight we’ll be looking at Hebrews chapter 5, so we’ll be reading verses 1 through 10 of chapter 5 of Hebrews this evening.
Give your attention to God’s word.
Hebrews chapter 5.
But only when called by God, just as Aaron was.
So also Christ did not exalt himself to be made a high priest, but was appointed by him and said to him,
You are my son, today I have begotten you.
As he says also in another place,
You are a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.
In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears to him who was able to save him from death.
And he was heard because of his reverence.
Although he was a son, he learned obedience through what he suffered.
And being made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him.
Being designated by God, a high priest after the order of Melchizedek.
Amen. You may be seated.
Let’s ask God bless our time this evening.
Father in heaven, we come before you asking that you would give us your spirit.
We would open our hearts, open our eyes to see, hear, understand what is from your word.
We would cherish it.
We would be able to implement it into our lives, that we would hide this word in our hearts.
Your spirit would be present this evening.
We pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
The title of the message this evening, as you can see from the bulletin, is Appointed by God.
Have you ever been to a coronation?
Just a couple of years ago, England had their first new monarch in a very long time.
Queen Elizabeth II reigned for over 70 years before her death.
Now I didn’t go to the recent King Charles’ coronation, although my brother lives over there.
But based on the films and traditions, I know something that happened at that moment.
At a certain point in the ceremony, the future king has a crown placed on his head by someone else,
usually the Archbishop of Canterbury.
And it happens so frequently and regularly that we can miss it,
but it’s a demonstration of the ruler’s humility to be appointed by another, does not crown himself.
Have you ever seen a king crown himself?
There have been a few self-anointed kings,
but beginning to reign with such a display of high-handed arrogance rarely goes well.
It rarely goes well for that monarch.
We sense that there’s something proper about the office being bestowed by another.
It represents humility and deference, as well as providing legitimacy to their rule.
You will find that even many tyrants will go through the motions of being humbly anointed by another
in order to help them bolster their own legitimacy.
Even under false pretenses, this act of being appointed by another
represents the humility that the leader ought to have, even if he doesn’t.
But how much more if it is actually true?
This evening we’re looking at another important aspect of Jesus’ priesthood,
namely that he was appointed by God as high priest.
All legitimate priests must be appointed by God.
Jesus follows the pattern of the Aaronic priests who were appointed by God,
while at the same time superseding them by his own exalted appointment.
This evening we’re going to see three things.
First, that Christ is appointed by God to honor, the honor of high priest.
Second, he is appointed by God to learn obedience through suffering.
And third, he is appointed by God as the source of eternal salvation.
Our passage divides up pretty neatly into verses five and six, seven and eight, and nine and ten.
So, verses five and six, appointed by God to honor.
We see here this phrase, no one takes this honor to himself.
There are no self-ordained priests, including Jesus.
This is one of the reasons that we take ordination so seriously in the OPC.
We’ve been talking about the need for new deacons and elders at Grace OPC,
and considering upcoming nominations for these offices.
It involves a multi-step process of being nominated by the congregation,
then approved by the elders, then ordained through the laying on of hands by other elders.
No one is a self-appointed office bearer.
Now, an important qualification is willingness, even an aspiration to serve.
But that doesn’t mean that we ask office bearers to anoint themselves or even nominate themselves.
It never goes well for church leaders who are self-appointed or self-ordained.
But if there ever were a person who had every right to appoint himself,
it was, of course, the son of God himself.
Yet even he declined to do so.
We see in verse 5, so also Christ did not exalt himself.
And one of the things that we see here is that this highlights an important aspect of the inner workings of the Trinity.
We find, for instance, in John chapter 8, verse 54, Jesus explains, Jesus answered,
If I glorify myself, my glory is nothing.
It is my Father who glorifies me, of whom you say he is our God.
There is a charge leveled against Christianity by thoughtful atheists that God is simply an egomaniac.
He’s always seeking his own glory above everything.
He just wants attention.
And anyone else, we call it narcissism.
So why not God?
Now I think there are several good biblical responses to this.
I’ll just mention two.
One is from the infinite worth of God as God.
God is absolutely unparalleled.
He is the most infinitely pure, holy, beautiful, and glorious being to ever exist.
So for him to seek anything less than his own glory would make him an idolater
and undermine the moral fabric of reality.
Now this is an excellent answer to that false charge of the atheist.
But I think there’s also another way to answer that question as well.
And two, so second, which comes from the Trinitarian nature of God.
While God is one in essence, there’s one God.
He is three in persons.
And we see this portrayed in Scripture.
This seeking of his own glory that God does comes out in this Trinitarian dance of, we might call it, humility.
The Father glorifies the Son.
The Son glorifies the Father.
And the Spirit glorifies them both.
So when God is seeking his own glory, it is actually a selfless act within the Trinity itself.
Thus we say that good biblical worship is to the Father, through the Son, and by the Spirit.
And we catch a glimpse of this in our passage in Hebrews 5 this evening,
of that dance within the Trinity in which the Son, instead of exalting himself to a self-appointed high priest,
submits to the Father’s appointment.
The centrality of Christ and his work in our salvation is by the design of the Father,
who appointed him to that role as high priest.
Taking the spotlight off of Christ and attempting to put it on the Father or the Spirit instead
would be to go against the design of the Trinity in salvation.
Christ is the focal point on purpose.
When we put our own spotlights on Christ, we are following the example of the Father and the Spirit,
making him front and center.
But the appointment by God doesn’t just show that Christ’s humility in not exalting himself.
It further solidifies his legitimacy as priest.
The prior priests from Aaron’s line were all appointed by God,
and in solidarity with them, Christ is also appointed by God.
This precludes any concerns that he does not have adequate credentials as high priest.
As we see in our passage, the same one who calls Christ Son is the same one who appointed him to the priesthood.
The two quotes that we have in our passage are from Psalm 2 and Psalm 110,
which is why we read them earlier in the evening.
What’s interesting is that these two Psalms are also the two Psalms that are quoted in Hebrews, Chapter 1,
that we looked at a few months ago.
In Hebrews, Chapter 1, we have a series of quotes about the glory of the Son,
and it begins with a quote from Psalm 2 and ends with a quote from Psalm 110.
Now the quotes are from different parts of Psalm 110, but it’s the same Psalm.
What’s interesting is that Psalm 110 is the single most quoted Psalm in the New Testament,
but every other author stops by verse 3.
It’s only Hebrews that draws out the significance of verse 4,
which mentions the priesthood of the Messiah and his similarities to Melchizedek rather than Aaron.
The writer of Hebrews is absolutely fascinated with the implications that are packed into verse 4,
and we’ll see him explore each part in the coming chapters.
But right now in Hebrews, Chapter 5, his point is centered around Christ’s divine appointment as high priest.
However, this appointment to the priesthood was not a cushy appointment.
The honorary exaltation that comes is a reward for the humiliation which came before it.
The Westminster Confession of Faith and the Catechisms find this to be a helpful way of dividing Christ’s ministry,
his humiliation, and his exaltation.
Consider, for instance, Philippians 2, familiar passage, Philippians 2, 5 through 11.
Therefore, God has exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name,
so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
So we see Christ’s divine appointment to the priesthood.
It would be immensely costly.
This honor would require unimaginable suffering before resulting in that unparalleled glory and honor,
which brings us to our second point in verses 7 and 8 that Christ was appointed by God to learn obedience through suffering.
In Chapter 4, we looked at how Christ is a sympathetic high priest,
and we contrasted that with his being an empathetic high priest who, like the human high priest, is a sinner just like the people.
But in case we were thinking that Christ’s lack of sin in any way prevents him from understanding our pain,
we have verses 7 and 8 of Chapter 5.
In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears
to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverence.
Although he was a son, he learned obedience through what he suffered.
Christ was appointed to suffering.
The picture we have here is embarrassingly pitiful.
The writer of Hebrews piles up descriptors, prayers, and supplications with loud cries and tears.
This is not cool, calm, collected, and in charge.
This is a picture of desperation.
It can be all too easy to gloss over the horror of the crucifixion in our minds.
Crucifixion was meticulously designed by the most highly advanced civilization to maximize the shame and pain of its victims.
Apart from what Jesus’ death on a cross means for our salvation,
it would be repulsive to decorate with crosses as extensively as we do.
It would be like decorating with stylized gas chambers,
waterboarding instruments, or other weapons of torture used to destroy and humiliate their victims.
And yet, as Christians, the cross is rightly precious to us because on it our dear Savior suffered for our sins.
But I think we can get sometimes in our head that since Jesus willingly submitted to this death,
He laid down His life of His own accord, as He says in John 10.
No one takes it from Him that He was serenely composed throughout His crucifixion ordeal.
But if we pay attention, we see that even before that difficult night in Gethsemane,
this was already upsetting for Him.
John 12, verse 27, Jesus says, even before He is betrayed, now is my soul troubled.
And what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour. But for this purpose I have come to this hour.
His resolution was clear. It didn’t make it any less painful.
The crucifixion was not a tidy business.
And the weakness and humiliation that Christ displayed in submitting to it left the disciples who watched in complete despair.
If it had appeared that Jesus was compositely in control of the whole situation,
the disciples might have held onto a little more hope.
Instead, what they observed left them devastated to the core.
The man who had healed lepers with a touch, raised the dead, sent demons running at a word,
commanded storms, walked on water, taught with authority,
has been whipped within an inch of his life, and then nailed up naked like a rag doll to a wooden post.
On top of that, in the midst of it all, he was agonizingly asking God why He had forsaken him.
The fact that he didn’t deserve it and could put a stop to it at any point probably only made it harder.
Rather than his suffering being tempered by his being the Son of God and his willingness to undergo it,
if anything, those realities probably made it all the worse.
However, the point that the writer of Hebrews is making in our passage is not that you should feel sorry for Jesus,
for going through so much. Instead, that you understand He can truly sympathize with you in your own dark night of the soul.
Dark night of the soul refers to a time when you cannot feel God’s presence.
We sometimes call it a crisis of faith. Instead of feeling sure about what you know about God,
instead of feeling God’s presence with you, feeling that He loves you, you feel nothing, emptiness, or that He’s gone or hates you.
Most, if not all of us, will go through this at one point or another.
And the point is Jesus has been there too. He understands completely.
He’s been to those depths feeling abandoned by God, not just feeling the weight of sin, which was not His,
but even experiencing the full excruciating wrath, judgment of God against that sin.
He’s felt the abandonment of God and prayed in desperation Himself.
In His atoning work as fully man, Christ cast Himself on God’s mercy, knowing it was His only hope.
To Him who was able to save Him from death. And He was heard.
Now at first glance, it seems like an odd thing for the writer to say.
Sounds like Christ came to the very edge of death, but was kept from dying.
The problem is this isn’t the case, of course. There’s no question that Christ really died.
And the writer of Hebrews knew this. So how do we reconcile this?
Well, if we take a closer look at the word from, we can see what He means.
In the Greek, this word is more often literally translated out of.
With this understanding, we can go back and see to Him who was able to save Him out of death.
Rather than keeping Him from death, we see that the resurrection that Jesus experienced afterwards was delivered out of death.
His deliverance from death didn’t keep Him from entering it in the first place.
Instead, it brought Him back from the dead, delivering Him from it.
And then the next phrase, He was heard because of His reverence.
This is not meant to be a contrast between flippant prayers versus reverent prayers.
Praying with more elevated diction, greater trepidation, or awe of God’s majesty is not the secret sauce to getting God’s attention.
Now this doesn’t mean that fear or reverence has no place in Jesus’ attitude in prayer.
This Greek word is found only in the book of Hebrews, and it does mean caution or fear.
But the broader teaching of scripture informs us that our prayers are heard or ignored based on our life, our relationship to God.
Two verses from Proverbs summarize it nicely.
Proverbs 28-9, if one turns away his ear from hearing the law, even his prayer is an abomination.
Or Proverbs 15-29, the Lord is far from the wicked, but He hears the prayers of the righteous.
So we should think of this reverence which granted Jesus an audience as a reverence of life.
You might think of the older phrase, God-fearing, which was often used to refer to Christians.
If you took it literally, you might be able to lump lots of people into that group who were not Christians.
I mean, the book of James even says that demons fear God.
Instead, this phrase, God-fearer, was meant to capture the Old Testament moniker, those who fear the Lord.
So this is a reference to believers, those whose lives are marked by heeding God’s commands, treating Him as holy,
and as evidence that they have heard and they respect Him.
And Jesus, of course, was all that and more.
When we read the Psalms, we find them filled with similar prayers of desperation,
relying on God’s loving kindness or covenant loyalty or commitment to compassion in His dealings with His people.
So it’s no wonder that the Gospels record Christ constantly reciting the Psalms throughout His time of suffering.
Although He was a son, He learned obedience through what He suffered.
This verse has given more than a few people headaches, wondering what it might mean for God to have to learn something.
We already remarked last time when we looked at chapter 4 that God possesses all knowledge and wisdom as God.
And this includes all three members of the Trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are perfect in wisdom and knowledge.
So God as Christ was not learning something new here.
And nor should we take this verse to think that Jesus was being disciplined by His Father for disobedience.
His obedience was perfect.
Rather, Jesus, as a man, experienced obedience in practice.
Like the difference between knowing the cost of something and paying the cost, He gained the human experience of this ordeal.
He was given a positive command to suffer for the sins of the people.
And Jesus continued obeying His Father all the way to the end through the entire ordeal.
Our salvation is not based on philosophical ideas like some other religions,
but upon a flesh and blood man who lived and died on a cross in Palestine about 2,000 years ago before rising again.
Real obedience in real history to accomplish real salvation.
He told His disciples why He went to the cross in John 14, 31.
I do as the Father has commanded me so that the world may know that I love the Father.
As the Son of God, He was the one being in the universe who had all ability and every right to avoid discomfort of any kind.
Yet, so that the world would know that He loved His Father, He practiced obedience up to and beyond a most gruesome death.
The writer of Hebrews is going to expand on this point later,
but he intends for us not only to take comfort from the fact that Jesus suffered on our behalf,
but also to take comfort in Jesus as an example, as God leads us, even as sons as well, through some difficult roads of suffering.
Some of it is physical suffering. Some of it is mental, emotional suffering.
Hebrews is going to address the issue of discipline in regards to sons in chapter 10.
So I think instead here we might consider how Paul’s sentiment in Philippians 3.10 relates.
Paul says, his desire is that he may know Christ and the power of His resurrection and may share in his sufferings, becoming like Him in His death.
I can’t tell you the number of Christians who suffered horribly, especially in distant lands for their faith,
who have found this to be so comforting, knowing that they are having fellowship with Christ in His sufferings by their own,
considering the truth that their own sufferings were this participation, this fellowship of suffering with Christ in His.
And thirdly, we see that Christ was appointed by God as the eternal source of salvation in verses 9 and 10, and being made perfect.
Now don’t get confused by the wording in verse 9.
The writer of Hebrews is not trying to say that Jesus was anything less than sinless.
He already explicitly stated in chapter 4 that Jesus never sinned.
He’s saying that Jesus’ suffering completed His appointed ministry as priest.
We often think of perfection as without fault, but it might be clearer to say without lack or lacking nothing.
The Greek word for perfect here is related to the word that philosophers use, telos, which comes from the Greek meaning end or purpose or goal.
So by perfection, we should think of Christ perfectly completing the purpose, fulfilling the entire goal of His priesthood, being made perfect.
As a result of the humiliation and the suffering of the crucifixion, His experience as priest was completed.
Remember Jesus’ words from the cross. It is finished.
Jesus repeatedly told His disciples, it is necessary for the Son of Man to suffer many things.
Jesus’ ministry as priest does not require any more suffering. His suffering is complete. It is perfect.
He became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey Him.
Verse 9. We have here the third significant divine appointment that Jesus receives.
He’s designated by God as the source of eternal salvation to all who obey Him.
The first thing that I observe is something that I constantly bring up in my evangelism.
No matter the religious background of a person I’m talking to, Jesus is the only designated source for salvation.
As Acts 4-12 says, there is salvation in no one else, for there’s no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.
The suffering of the Son of God, the suffering that the Son of God was appointed to suffer was for sins that were not His.
It was the righteous suffering on behalf of the unrighteous.
This was to satisfy the justice of God, to preserve the moral fabric of the universe, since God cannot let sin go unpunished.
There are not a myriad of ways to God. All of us are cut off from Him.
Because of sin, there’s only one way back into fellowship with God.
Only one designated high priest who offered a sufficient sacrifice that could affect a real, or as Hebrews says, eternal, salvation.
Whether it is a militant Muslim, or a militant atheist, arguing against Jesus’ divinity, or a kind, smiling woman telling me that all roads lead to heaven anyway, my answer is the same.
There’s only one priest who offered a sacrifice that’s sufficient to expunge your record and give you that fellowship with God.
Everything else is a fool’s hope, comes down to a binary for every individual.
Either you pay for your own sins, your own wicked thoughts, words and actions in eternal torment, or you cast yourself on Jesus’ mercy, and He’ll deliver you by having suffered on your behalf.
But as we know, justification, being declared righteous before God, is only part of our salvation.
Jesus isn’t just the perfect sacrifice for sins. He’s the perfect and the perfect obeyer to provide His own righteousness for us.
He’s also the source of sanctification.
Sanctification means being made holy, to be holified, to make up a word.
There are two senses of this. First, being consecrated or designated as separate.
And second, thinking, speaking and acting in holy ways.
Most people in the world think mainly about pure behavior as holiness.
Many religions, philosophers, even going back to Aristotle, have thought that right behavior produces right character.
In other words, we become holy by obeying God.
Even Christians can get confused about this sometimes, but the scriptures are clear.
It’s the other way around.
Christians are not told to become holy by obedience, but to obey because they’re already holy.
We don’t obey to become holy. We obey because we are holy.
Obedience is a result of holiness, not a means to obtain it.
So when it says that Christ is the source of eternal salvation to all who obey Him,
it doesn’t mean that we gain Christ by obeying Him, but that Christ is the source of our obedience.
The word for here might be a better translation.
To make this clearer, He became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey Him in verse 9.
And in case you’re wondering, the Greek can go either way. It’s simply a judgment call based on context.
Although the obedience doesn’t make us holy, we should be careful to not miss the fact that this does not mean it’s dispensable to holiness.
The scriptures describe being a Christian in many different ways, and here it describes them as those who obey Jesus.
You could think of John 14, 15, where Jesus said, If you love me, you’ll keep my commandments.
Obedience to Jesus is the mark of someone who has had their sins forgiven, their heart replaced, and received the Holy Spirit, in short, been born again.
We need to be reminded of this, because Satan, the world, and our own sinful flesh will lie to us and tell us otherwise.
If Satan can’t get you to believe that you have to earn your own salvation, become holy by acting holy, he’ll lie to you in the other direction and tell you your obedience is irrelevant.
He might twist the truths of scripture and tell you that, since your obedience doesn’t merit your salvation, it’s meaningless.
Have you ever tried to continue doing something that you think is meaningless? It’s pretty hard to keep up.
Unfortunately, in an effort to combat this lie from Satan, some theologians throughout church history have resorted to contorting theology in order to suggest that maybe our works partially merit salvation, or earn a merit in a separate account somehow.
That’s a mistake. Christ’s merit alone is what we rely on to be declared righteous and granted peace with God.
But our obedience is not meaningless. It flows from Christ’s salvation, and it’s done in his power.
Think of a plumber. A plumber doesn’t become a plumber because he fixes pipes. A plumber fixes pipes because he’s a plumber.
His occupation, his identity, is what drives his conduct, rather than his conduct driving his identity.
His occupation and his actions are related. He wouldn’t be a plumber if he never did any plumbing.
Being a plumber entails certain activities which are intrinsic to the occupation.
But a plumber doesn’t become a plumber merely by fixing pipes.
So a plumber and his work can be distinguished, but not fully separated. A similar being, holy, and obeying Christ go together.
Christians obey Christ because they are holy, but obedience doesn’t make them holy.
We might think of faith and works. The book of James famously puts the dispensability of obedience with belief, or the need of works to accompany faith.
Works, or obedience, is the outflow and demonstration of having faith.
We need faith. It’s the instrument, the channel by which we lay hold of God’s powerful promises.
And obedience, even through difficulties, is the way that we too, though adopted sons of God, learn obedience in the footsteps of Christ.
Let’s wrap this up this evening.
Christ did not appoint himself as high priest, but submitted to the role and position given to him by his father.
The humiliating suffering he endured on his way to glory was both on our behalf in our place and as a comforting example in the midst of our own trials in this life.
God didn’t promise Christ it would be easy, and he doesn’t promise us a life of ease either.
But he does promise he’s with us, he’s got us, and he knows how hard it is.
Because of Christ’s own suffering and prayers of desperation, we can have the same hope that he did.
As Jesus told Martha, I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live.
And everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die.
With Christ as our example, we too can cry to the one who is able to save us from death, knowing that we too will be heard because of Christ’s priestly work.
Amen. Let’s pray.
Father in heaven, we thank you for sending your son, for appointing him to be a high priest, though it would cost so greatly.
We thank you that he has suffered that desperation, that cry of dereliction.
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? So that we might never ultimately know that level of suffering ourselves.
So that we might come to Christ and have eternal salvation, seeing him as our perfect source, being united to him.
Lord, we thank you. We pray that you would make this dear to us.
You would open our eyes to see it in our darkest days. We pray this in Jesus name. Amen.
Well, let’s respond by singing hymn 469. Let’s stand and sing hymn 469. Who are these like stars appearing?
Who are these like stars appearing?