SOME months ago there appeared in the English Churchman the report of an address by the Bishop of Carlisle, which justly gave rise to some controversy. The address was chiefly taken up with a criticism of the word “priest,” as that is applied to ministers of the Gospel in the Prayer-book and Articles of the Church of England. He strongly condemned the abuse to which the word has been subjected by those of a sacerdotal tendency—”priest” was originally the Anglo-Saxon word for presbyter or elder—and he expressed the opinion that this abuse was largely at the root of what we shall call, to be plain, the Romish pretensions of many of the clergy in the English Church. His condemnation of the word “priest,” in its misapplied sense, was so thorough, and besides, so unusual for a bishop, that zealous Presbyterians read this part of his discourse with special pleasure. Their pleasure, however, was mingled with pain, for they also saw that he condemned the use of the word “priest” (hiererus) in the New Testament in places where it is applied to Christ. He maintained that Christ “never once, directly or indirectly, called Himself a priest,” that “the one letter in the New Testament in which Christ was called a priest was the letter to the Hebrews,” and that the author of this epistle showed that “Jesus Christ Himself was not a priest on earth. He was only a priest after he had suffered death upon the Cross and had ascended on high.” The bishop boldly described the application of the word “priest” to Christ, in the Old Testament sacrificial sense, as a survival of “Pagan and Jewish notions.” It was a “false” word and conveyed a false idea. This way of handling the matter was rather a startling revelation of the bishop’s views on the inspiration of the Bible and God’s relation to ancient Israel. According to his opinion, it would appear that Christ is only a priest as an intercessor. This excludes the priestly activities of Christ in His obedience and sufferings unto death, and in doing so, takes away, in our humble judgment, all the virtue and glory out of the substitutionary work of the Redeemer on behalf of sinners.
It is our present purpose, first, to define the use of the word priest in the Scriptures, and then, secondly, to present a few Scriptural reasons for maintaining that Christ exercised His priestly office in the days of His flesh as certainly as He does so now in heaven. This doctrine has always been among the things most surely believed among us, but a simple statement of it may not be without profit.
1. Observe the use of the word “priest” in the Scriptures.
(1) There is a general and subordinate sense in which the word “priest” is applied to all believers.
All the children of God have liberty now to draw near to Him through Christ without any purely human mediator, and, in this way, they are called “a holy priesthood,” who “offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God by Jesus Christ.” These are sacrifices of obedience and thanksgiving, but in no sense sacrifices of atonement.
(2) There is a special and official sense in which the word “priest” is employed, and in this respect it is applied to a divinely ordained class of God’s servants under the old dispensation, and to the Lord Jesus Christ alone under the new.
In this official sense ministers of the gospel are never called priests in the New Testament. They are only priests in the same sense in which all the children of God are, though they have special duties to perform as gospel ministers.
(3) The definition, then, of an official priest embodies three ideas.
First, he is a mediator between God and sinners; secondly, he offers a sacrifice or sacrifices for sins; and, thirdly, he makes intercession on behalf of men. These things the priests of the old economy were in symbol and type. Christ was all in actual reality. He is the “one mediator between God and men” (1 Tim. ii. 5); He “hath given Himself for ‘His children,’ an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling savour” (Ephes. v. 2); and he makes intercession as “an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous” (1 John ii. 2).
2. The Scriptural reasons for maintaining that Christ in the days of His flesh was a priest and exercised His office as such, appear to us very abundant.
If any are blind on the subject, it must be with the excess of light. No doubt, this was the feature of His work that was chiefly hidden from “the wise and prudent” in His own day; they could not help seeing Him to be a prophet, and they had some kind of glimpse of Him as a king, but they utterly failed to discern that He was the great High Priest of His people’s profession, who was giving “his life a ransom for many.” His own disciples saw Him to be the priest in the measure in which they were enlightened from above, and at times the veil was on their eyes; but after He rose from the dead and ascended to the right hand of the Father, they received the Holy Spirit in richer degree, and saw more clearly. And we, in the last times, have now the complete and finished canon of divine revelation in our hand. May we get light from on high to understand and receive the truth as set forth in it!
(1) Christ’s appointment to the priesthood dates from eternity.
He is “the Word who was with God and was God,” and it was the Father who said, “Thou art my Son, to-day have I begotten thee,” who also declared, “Thou art a priest for ever, after the order of Melchisedec.” The call to the priesthood was long prior to “the days of his flesh,” and therefore prior to His resurrection or ascension. (Heb. v. 4-7.)
(2) Christ’s appointment to be the “High Priest of our profession” was reflected upon earth in the priestly office, with its sacrificial offerings, which was set up by God in the family of Adam almost immediately after the Fall.
The Eternal Son of the Father was in due time to become “the seed of the woman,” and to take away sin by the sacrifice of Himself, and He began even then, through the agency of the ritual of the old dispensation, to give foretastes of the fruits of His priestly work yet to be done on earth. God’s people during that period were obtaining the early benefit of Christ’s priesthood by means of type and figure, and His people in this later age may learn much of the nature of His priestly work from a prayerful and Spirit-guided study of the older ritual. It is utterly subversive of the whole teaching of Scripture, from first to last, to maintain, as some do, that the priesthood and sacrifices of the Old Testament were a form of Paganism, the result of human wisdom, and not the infallible appointment of God for that dispensation, and in essence one with the doctrine of the New Testament. Such a view is only infidelity in disguise. According to the testimony of an inspired Apostle, the priesthood, the sacrifices, and the holy places were figures and shadows of “good things to come” (Hebrews, chapters ix. and x.), and this is the view that every mind, taught by the same Spirit, cordially accepts and delights in.
(3) The typical High Priest of the old dispensation killed the sacrifice before he entered into the holiest of all with blood, and in like manner, the Lord Jesus Christ “offered up himself” as a sacrifice upon the Cross before He entered, by His own blood, into heaven, of which “the holy places made with hands” were figures.
This is the express teaching of the Epistle to the Hebrews, the testimony of which, from beginning to end, is that Christ performed the work of a priest on earth before He ascended to heaven, and the men must be very ignorant, or very presumptuous, that venture to take any different view. Consider such passages as the following: “Wherefore in all things it behoved him to be made like unto his brethren, that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, to make reconciliation for the sins of the people” (Hebrews ii. 17). “But Christ being come a high priest of good things to come, by a greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made with hands, that is to say, not of this building; neither by the blood of goats and calves, but by his own blood, he entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us” (Heb. xi. 11, 12). “And every priest standeth daily ministering and offering oftentimes the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins; but this man, after he had offered one sacrifice for sins for ever, sat down on the right hand of God” (Heb. x. 11, 12). Can any statements more plainly assert the fact of Christ’s priesthood on earth?
(4) Much of the glory and virtue of Christ’s redeeming work in life and death is implied in the circumstance that He was Himself the High Priest as well as the sacrifice.
It was “not possible that the blood of bulls and of goats should take away sins.” These were irrational animals, of a lower order than men in the scale of being, and could not be real substitutes for them, or make atonement for their sins. They were dragged unintelligently and unwillingly to the altar; their sufferings had no moral worth, and so could in nowise satisfy the justice of God for sin. But in the Lord Jesus everything was otherwise. He possessed a true, real, holy humanity, without the least moral imperfection, and this in union with absolute Godhead. In Him all the infinite perfections of Deity, and the finite perfections of humanity, were truly and properly united. As man, He was able to suffer in the room of men; as God, He was able to satisfy the claims of God. Thus He went forward to Gethsemane and Calvary, and gave a willing, holy, perfect obedience to the demands of the righteous law, both in precept and penalty. Though He was taken with wicked hands and nailed to the Cross, this did not imply that He was an involuntary, unwilling agent. He said distinctly to His disciples, “I lay down my life, that I might take it again. No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again” (John x. 17, 18). The Lord Jesus was active all through His obedience and sufferings as the Great High Priest, surrendering Himself to the sword of infinite justice, and enduring all the pain and agony and shame which were necessary to satisfy the thirst of that fiery sword, until at last He quenched its flames in the merit of His blood, cried “It is finished,” and gave up the ghost. He has now entered within the vail as His people’s surety and representative, and His priestly action on earth forms the meritorious ground of His intercession with the Father. Take away the merits of His priestly work on earth, and His intercession loses its strength and efficacy. It is because He is Jesus Christ the righteous, the just and perfect propitiation for sins, that the children of God have an all-powerful advocate with the Father. (1 John ii. 1, 2.)
We shall (D.V.) take up next month the statement that Christ is not called a priest elsewhere than in the Epistle to the Hebrews.