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Monday October 14 - Where is this priest?
...who serves in the sanctuary, the true tabernacle set up by the Lord, not
by a mere human being. Hebrews 8:2
The Christian faith was different from any other religion in the ancient world. They had priests galore; we had only one. They offered sacrifices; we trusted in a sacrifice offered ‘once for all’ (10:10). They had buildings, temples and sanctuaries where they thought their gods could be contacted; we had none, at least for centuries. This partly explains why Hebrew Christians were struggling: the familiar tangible, visible aspects of normal religion were missing. Where was their priest, their sacrifice, their temple?
Hebrews explains what has happened. All those visible elements of faith, like the tabernacle and temple, were, at best, signposts to the real thing to come. Hebrews describes them as a ‘shadow’ that reflects something real but isn’t itself the substantial reality. They’re like an early sketch an artist draws before producing the masterpiece. For Christians, what mattered was not a humanly constructed temple but the real temple where God dwelt in heaven. Unseen, yes, but real.
So, we don’t depend on religious buildings! The scholar Nijay Gupta recently commented that in the old days we could only phone people from a handset tied to one place, because it needed a connecting wire. Now we use mobiles and speak from anywhere. Temples were like old phones. God could only be contacted in particular places. But since Christ came, we can contact him anywhere and get through to the God who is everywhere.
Omnipresent God, teach me to live by faith and not by sight (2 Corinthians 5:7), dependent on tangible things. Amen.
Tuesday October 15 - What do priests do?
Every high priest is appointed to offer both gifts and sacrifices... Hebrews 8:3
The tasks of the high priest were varied – teaching, interpreting the law and the terms of the covenant, presiding over holy days, even acting as a public health inspector when it came to contamination in buildings and bodies. You can read the details in Leviticus. But the heart of their task lay in the offering of sacrifices and special gifts, like the grain or voluntary offerings. This was especially so for the high priest who annually had the privilege of offering sacrifices on the Day of Atonement – the greatest religious festival of the year when all Israel’s sins were wiped clean (see Leviticus 16). Hebrews 10 is going to build on that.
Meanwhile, the writer draws attention to the way our superior high priest fits the picture. Priests offered myriads of sacrifices, but Jesus never performed a recognisable sacrifice. Given how many priests did so, it would have been pointless to add to them. But he did have ‘something to offer’. That ‘something’ was himself. Unlike dumb animals which had no choice and couldn’t understand their fate as they were substituted for sinful humans, Jesus, though without sin, voluntarily surrendered himself to be the ultimate sacrifice on our behalf. He was, then, the priest to bring an end to the whole previous sacrificial system and render it unnecessary. Now that’s an offering and a sacrifice!
Thank you, Jesus, for offering yourself as the perfect sacrifice to remove all my sin and shame, and restore my relationship with God. Amen.
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PRAYER FOR TODAY
PRAYER FOR TODAY