Hebrews 7:25. Wherefore He is able also to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by Him, seeing He ever liveth to make intercession for them.
Yesterday we were commemorating the death of the Lord Jesus Christ and how thankful we should be that the death of Christ was not the end of the matter! He rose again from the grave; He ascended on high; He is now seated at the right hand of the throne of God; and He will come again in His glory. This same Jesus who ascended up to heaven will come again in like manner, and the Lord’s people are “looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ”. We were remembering the Lord’s death till He come – an aspect of the matter that we perhaps need to have more before our minds. Many things are going to happen before the Lord comes. We believe that there will be days of great gospel blessing, when many will be gathered to Christ throughout the nations. But we should never make any event in time more the focus of our attention than the glorious appearing of the great God, our Saviour, at last.
Today, as the Lord may enable us, we would like to think of what Christ is doing now. Although He has finished the work the Father gave Him to do, He is still very much involved in controlling the affairs of the universe and in taking care of the interests of His people. It is a great encouragement to faith to bear in mind that the Lord Jesus Christ, God in our nature, is constantly watching over the affairs of His cause – not just in a general way, but over the affairs of each individual among His people. He is interested in everything to do with each of His people. There is no turning in their road but He ordained it. He presents their case before the Father and secures for them the grace they need to enable them to persevere to the end.
We might (1) begin by saying something about the intercession of Christ: “He ever liveth to make intercession for us”. Then (2) the ability of this great Intercessor to save to the uttermost those for whom He intercedes. Then (3) those He is able to save: those who come to God through Him. So if you and I come to God through Him, we can take all possible encouragement in thinking of Christ’s intercession in God’s presence and of His ability to save them to the uttermost who come unto God through Him.
1. The intercession of Christ.
As we have noticed already from this Epistle, He is God. He is the brightness of God’s glory, the express image of His Person. But He has assumed our human nature, so that not only has He all the qualities and powers of God; not only has He had all the experiences that belong to human nature as such; but He has the capacity to sympathise. If we may say so with reverence, God as God cannot sympathise with us; He cannot feel along with us. God does not have feelings like that, but He provided a Mediator – a Saviour who has our nature. So there is a person who is God and is able to feel with us, because He was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin.
God is full of compassion, full of mercy and grace and kindness towards His people; but the Intercessor, the Mediator, having all these qualities has also the capacity to feel with and for His people. He knows what physical weakness and weariness is. He knows what it is to be tempted by the devil. He knows what loneliness is: “I looked for some to take pity, but there was none”. He was looking for a companion who could sympathise with Him and He did not find one. So we have a Mediator who is God and man, who has all the characteristics and capacities of such a glorious Person.
Now this Mediator is a High Priest. He is not just a Mediator; He is not just an Advocate with the Father; His mediation is that of a High Priest, One who has been appointed by God to bring us into the presence of God as worshippers. Christ has these major functions as High Priest; the priesthood is fundamental to Christ being a Prophet and a King. He could not reveal the will of God to us for our salvation if He had not wrought out that salvation as Priest and He could not conquer us and bring us to God if He had not opened up the way into God’s presence by His priestly activity.
His priestly activity consists, first, in offering Himself as a sacrifice to God in place of His people. It was God who sent Him to Calvary and inflicted His wrath on Him. It was wicked men who crucified and slew the Lord of Glory, and this was the hour and the power of the devil. God, men and devils were active in the death of Christ, but it was not God that offered up Christ as a sacrifice; nor was it men. It certainly was not the devil; he did everything he could to avoid that sacrifice taking place, to turn Christ away from the cross, since He knew what the cross was going to do. It was Christ who offered Himself up as a sacrifice through the eternal Spirit, and it is this activity that gives value to what Christ did at Calvary. It was not something done to Him; it was something done by Him. He willingly, powerfully and actively offered Himself; and in that act of submission and obedience He secured the atonement that was necessary for His sinful people.
The Person lived on although He experienced death in the human nature. It is the great mystery of the cross that, when Christ was saying, “Into Thy hands I commit My spirit”, and gave up the ghost, He lived on as a divine Person. He was offering Himself to God to satisfy God’s justice and, on the basis of that offering, He ever lives to make intercession for His people. He is in heaven today in our nature: the same Jesus who was crucified and buried, rose again and ascended. He appears in the presence of God for His people – this same Jesus with all the qualities He ever had and all the interest He ever had in His people.
He is there to make intercession. We must not think of Christ on His knees, as it were, begging for mercy for His people. He is seated on the throne of God and receives the souls of His people. Stephen saw Him and all His people will see Him. The intercession of Christ is not a pleading for mercy; it is Christ presenting Himself to the Father as the reason for mercy being bestowed on His people. His presence there is that of One who has every right to receive for His people what He is seeking for them. You see that in the prayer of intercession (in John 17). There is no one more intimate with the Father than Christ, but what reverence He shows as our representative when He approaches the throne of God! Yet He says, “Father, I will”. He does not say, Father, please may My people be with Me; but, “Father, I will that they also, whom Thou hast given Me, be with Me where I am; that they may behold My glory, which Thou hast given Me: for Thou lovedst Me before the foundation of the world”.
He is speaking as the One embraced in the love of the Father, not just as the eternal Son, but as the High Priest and representative of His people. He is asking with authority, presenting Himself as the reason for His people being with Him, which includes the whole journey by which they come to glory at last. We cannot be with Him at last if we are not kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation. So that little worry you have, or that great burden you have, is not going to keep you from getting to heaven at last if you are one of His people. His intercession secures all the grace that you need as long as you are in this world, and in passing out of this world.
Some of the Lord’s people spend a great deal of physical, mental and spiritual energy worrying about how they will die. We ought to be concerned about being prepared to die, but our main concern is to live by the grace of God. And if we get grace to live, we will get grace to die. The intercession of Christ will secure that for each of His people. “He ever liveth to make intercession for us” – to secure for us from the Father, on the basis of what He is and what He has done – all the grace we need to persevere to the end.
The emphasis here is on the fact that He ever lives to make intercession. The old priests died and other priests took over from them, but that does not happen here. This is a priest for ever after the order of Melchisedec. Melchisedec is a mysterious character; there are very different ideas as to who he was. But one thing illustrated by him is that there is no beginning and there is no end to the priestly activity of the great High Priest. He is not like the priests that died; He is a priest who lives for ever. Nothing will ever interrupt His intercession on behalf of His people. There will not be a moment when the Lord is not able to intercede for His people. His eye is on them always, and we believe that this intercessory work – this priestly, mediatorial work of Christ will endure to all eternity.
We will never be able to do without Christ in our dealings with God. One of the blessings of heaven is that His people will have a clearer view of Christ’s mediation and priesthood on their behalf than they ever had here. In one sense they have here, in principle, everything that they will have in heaven. But there the Lord’s people will have everything to perfection and that will include their view of Jesus Christ. He ever lives. We have experiences that get us down and experiences that elate us. We pray sometimes and at other times we cannot pray. We change, but there is no change in Christ and we must put our confidence in Him. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and for ever. As we leave this place after the remembrance of the Lord’s death, what a great blessing it would be if His people were able to keep in mind the fact that they have in Christ One who ever lives to make intercession for them in God’s presence. That is His one great aim, His one great occupation – and all to the glory of God.
2. The ability of this great Intercessor.
Because He ever lives, because He is acceptable to God, because He is ever active on behalf of His people, He is able to save them to the uttermost. Those for whom He has made intercession need to be saved, and they are all brought to realise that they need to be saved from the guilt of sin and from its corruption and pollution; they need to be saved from the consequences of sin in time and in eternity. One thing is sure about those who can conclude that they are saved: they have seen their need of that salvation. Salvation is deliverance from their state by nature; it is an introduction into a new state, a new relationship with God, a new character, a new principle governing their lives.
When we think of salvation, we should think of both aspects: what God’s people are saved from and what they are saved to. Of course, they are much more acquainted with what they are by nature and therefore they are inclined to be much more taken up with what they have been saved from. How they should rejoice in what they have been saved from – guilt and the dominating power of sin! Yet they may feel guilt on their consciences; they may feel sin powerful in their souls. But they know where to go to with their guilt and they can be thankful that there is a power greater than that of sin working in them, saving them from being given over altogether to the sin of their nature.
They have been saved especially from eternal misery. All that is necessary to make them miserable for ever is to leave them to themselves. You just have to look at some societies, and some people in a society, and see the misery when people are left to the corruption of their own nature, even to some extent. If people were left to live together in their sinfulness to all eternity, that would be a hell in itself; but in addition there is in hell the positive putting forth of God’s wrath against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men.
Our God is a consuming fire. His people discover that. “Who among us shall dwell with the devouring fire? Who among shall dwell with everlasting burnings?” (Is 33:14). That is the destiny of the Christless, those who are left to themselves. God saved His people from that and brought them into harmony with God, when their sins were blotted out. God says He will cast all their sins behind His back. Can you think where behind the back of God is? Everything is before His face, but He uses this expression to emphasise how complete is the forgiveness and justification of His people. Although He recalls their sins and chastises them for them, He will never bring up their sins in order to condemn them. As a consequence, they have fellowship with God and have the prospect of enjoying God eternally.
We understand very little of what it means to enjoy God; yet that is the ultimate aspect of salvation. In a measure, God’s people do joy in Him and will enjoy Him eternally. He is able to deliver them from all that is against them and put them in possession of all that will make them blessed. He is able to save them to the uttermost, and no one has ever been able to define what is meant by the uttermost. It does not matter what depths of sin they were in, or what trials they have, He is able to save them to the uttermost, He is able to deliver them from the worst of situations and to put them in possession of the greatest of all blessings – because He ever lives to make intercession for them, on the basis of His sacrifice. However low you feel you have sunk, however great you feel your temptations and troubles are, however remote the full enjoying of God to all eternity may seem, He is able to save you to the uttermost. He can take you out of the deepest pit and set you on high amongst the princes of His people.
When the text says He is able to save His people, it means He will save them. There are things that God is not able to do: He cannot lie; He cannot deceive; He cannot save the sinner for whom Christ did not die. But when it is said that God is able to do something, it means much more than that; it means it is in keeping with His will. He has the right to save them; He has the will to save them; and He will save them. There is no doubt about it. You remember the man who came to Jesus and said, “If Thou wilt, Thou canst,” and the Lord said, “I will; be thou clean”. The Lord can do everything He wants to do, and to say that Christ can save His people means that He shall save them. Not only has He secured their salvation by His obedience unto death and His intercession on their behalf, but He is willing to save them.
Nobody will ever come to God through Christ and find that He is not willing to save them. And that should encourage a poor sinner. There might be someone here today who is coming to God through Christ, who is holding on to Christ. This is the only hope they have for time and for eternity. A cry comes from their heart: “God be merciful to me a sinner”. That poor person asks, How do I know He will save me, that my cries will not be in vain?
Christ is engaged to save them that come unto God through Him. No one perishes who trusts in Him. That is the encouragement they have as they go on in the way. They have a High Priest in the presence of God living for ever to intercede for them and He is able to save them to the uttermost. Who knows what difficult turnings there may be in your road? Who knows how low you may be brought in your feelings? But hold on to this: He is able to save them to the uttermost. We feel more secure when things are going well with us spiritually and temporally, but we are just as much in the Lord’s care and keeping when things are devastating in our experience.
3. Those Christ is able to save.
They are those that come unto God by Him. This is characteristic of His people. Of course, some of His chosen ones have not yet come to Him; yet He remembers them. There is a providence behind the coming of a sinner to the Saviour that may go back through generations, and most people in the church today who are following the Lord can look back and recognise that the Lord was with their forebears.
The Lord is bringing people in all the time from outside who do not have a Christian heritage, but the nucleus of the Church in dark days is very often formed of those to whom the Lord gave a godly heritage. But when those without a church background look back, they can see that the Lord was leading them along the way by which they came to Christ. That was because Christ died for them and was interceding for them. The Lord does not begin to intercede for His people when they come to faith; He was interceding for them when He said, “I pray for them; I pray not for the world, but for those whom thou hast given Me; for they are Thine”. But no one has a right to conclude that the Lord is interceding for them unless they come to God through Him. Only then can the sinner take comfort from Him ever living to intercede for them.
By nature we go away from God. Sinners are saying to God, “Depart from us, for we desire not the knowledge of Thy ways. What is the Almighty that we should serve Him? And what profit should we have if we pray unto Him?” The fool hath said in His heart, No God. There are many fools today with PhDs, who write books emphatically denying the existence of God; they are intelligent, but this folly is in their hearts. They describe themselves as atheists, and others call themselves agnostics, confessing they do not really know whether there is a God or not. There are many practical agnostics and practical atheists; indeed every unregenerate sinner says in his heart: No God. Perhaps he cannot say it with as much assurance as he would like, but he has that wish. If unregenerate people think about God at all and know anything of the truth about God, they really wish that such a God did not exist.
Whether people are consciously thinking like that or not, their natural tendency is away from God. But Jesus Christ “suffered, the just for the unjust, to bring us to God”. He suffered to turn sinners around, to make God a reality to them, to give them desires to be reconciled to God, to live to His glory, to joy in Him – and that He would be their God and they His people. They come to God through Christ. They have realised that they have to do with God, they desire to be His servants, His children. But they cannot come directly to God – only through Jesus Christ, who said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father but by Me”.
Many try to come to God without coming through Jesus Christ; and they are not only in false religions. This is typical of the false gospel: Come to Jesus. Well, come to Jesus as the way to God, not just as a friend to help you through your time of need, or as your example. The Bible says we are to come to Christ as the way to God. When people come to Christ in the true, biblical sense, God becomes a reality to them and they become concerned to walk with God, live in dependence on Him and seek His glory.
God’s chief aim in everything is His own glory. If we made our glory our chief end – and that is what we do, in effect – we would be guilty of great sin because there is a higher end. Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him for ever. But God’s chief end is to glorify Himself because He is the chief end of everything. He is supreme and, if He had an ultimate end lower than His own glory, He would not be God. But the great wonder is that He is pleased to glorify Himself in the salvation of His people and, when He brings them to Himself, He glorifies Himself in their salvation. In doing so He confers on them the greatest benefit that God could possibly give.
If we are to take the comfort from the intercession of Christ we must be among those who come to God through Him. Does our being together at a communion make us more conscious of God as the author of our blessings and the One for whose glory we are to live? That should be one of the chief benefits of a communion season. You remember that Job said, “I have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth Thee”. This shows that there is development in the knowledge of God. If we had heard of God with the hearing of the ear as Job did, we would be very thankful. He was a very close friend of God, but his experiences brought him to realise God even more than he had ever done before. This is what shows that someone is really relying on Jesus Christ: God becomes a greater reality to them, and the glory of God becomes a greater concern.
You may be saying to yourself: I see so little of this coming to God through Christ in my own experience, but it is my desire; I say, like the Psalmist, that I thirst for God, when shall I appear before God? I think it was Rutherford who said that very often we are dry rather than thirsty, and I think the Lord’s people can understand that they have a feeling of their dryness, although they do not feel they thirst for God as they should. Have we got any thirst for God at all? Is it our desire to be reconciled, to live with the reality of God, to live in fellowship with Him and for His glory, to appear before Him? Do we depend on the Lord Jesus Christ for that?
The Lord is interceding not only for the great saints, if we can speak of them like that, who live and move and have their being in the consciousness of God’s presence, but also for these poor believers – as we feel we are – who just have to confess that they cannot do without God and Christ. They wish they had more of God and more of Christ. If your soul is really saying, O for more and more of Christ and more and more of God, then you can take this consolation as you go on in the way: that we have a great High Priest who has passed into the heavens, who ever lives to intercede for us and is able to save us to the uttermost. That means, as the Psalmist knew:
“Goodness and mercy all my life shall surely follow me:
And in God’s house for evermore my dwelling place shall be” (Ps 23:6).
It would be very nice, though it is very unlikely, to think that every one of us is among those who may conclude that He ever lives to intercede for them at God’s right hand. And we would say to those who have no reason to come to that conclusion what Moses said to his father-in-law: “Come thou with us, and we will do thee good: for the Lord hath spoken good concerning Israel” (Num 10:29). Could there be anything better than this: He died for us, He rose for us, He ascended for us, He is interceding for us?
It is not that we can do good to anyone, but it is an appeal to join the people of God, an appeal to come to the Saviour to whom we hope we have come. And we can assure you that if you come to this Saviour, you will find that He is able to save them to the uttermost who come unto God through Him. It does not matter where you came from; you might have come from the blackest pit morally and spiritually. It does not matter how long you have taken to come. The sinner that comes to God through Christ will find He is able to save to the uttermost.
1The sermon preached on the Monday of the August communion season at Dingwall in 2011, very shortly before his final illness became apparent. Reformation Press expect to publish a collection of Mr Cartwright’s sermons before the end of this year, DV.