...made a high priest forever after the order
of Melchizedek.
And so we have introduced here a strange
personality.
He has brought him an aura of mystery,
and he's puzzled a great many people.
You go into the country places, into the
hill places, and they will talk about Melchizedek
with a sense of awe.
And they'll discuss who this man Melchizedek was.
All this may seem to be doing what
one man wrote me.
A fellow wrote me a letter, and he
said that he thought that what the liberals
were saying about us evangelicals might be true,
that we were attacking mosquitos, or insects, when
there were tigers roaming the land.
And I wrote him back, and I told
him that I had had, I had known
that the liberals believed that there were great
tiger hunters, but that I personally had never
seen any skins tacked on their church doors,
but that the evangelical church, the Church of
Jesus Christ, back to the Pentecost, had accounted
for some pretty big tigers.
I said it in a nice way, but
I said it.
I wanted him to know that I wasn't
going to run with my tail down and
whimper like a spanked puppy, because he said
that witty thing about me.
Anyhow, here's the fellow Melchizedek, and it's a
long way from being an insect.
He is, as scripture says, Behold how great
this man was.
Look, look how great this man was, this
man Melchizedek.
In the 7th chapter of Hebrews, For this
Melchizedek, king of Salem, priest of the Most
High God, who met Abraham and blessed him,
to whom Abraham gave a tenth part of
all, first being by interpretation king of righteousness,
and after that also king of Salem.
That's another thing that intensifies the mystery that
lies around the man.
He is called Melchizedek, meaning king of righteousness,
and then he's king of Jerusalem, Salem, which
is king of peace.
And there's this thing about him, Without father,
without mother, without descent, having neither beginning of
days nor end of life, but made like
unto the Son of God, he abided a
priest continually.
Now, you know that the Jews were great
for genealogical tablets.
Everybody knew who he was descended from, or
from whom he was descended.
Abraham, and then Isaac, and then Jacob, and
then on down the line.
Everybody in the kingdom of Israel knew exactly
who his parents were, back to Abraham.
He knew the line, because it was all
kept there.
The reason it was kept was that the
Messiah was coming finally, and when the Messiah
got here, he had to prove his genealogy.
It had to be known where he could
go back in lineal descent from Abraham through
David on down.
And an odd and wonderful thing is that
when the Messiah had come and been crucified
and had risen and gone to God's right
hand again, the genealogical tablets were destroyed.
So that nobody that came after him could
say, I am descendant of Abraham through David
and so on, because there was no proof
of it.
So when it says here that this man
Melchizedek was without father and without mother and
without descent, it doesn't mean that he had
no father and he had no mother.
It means that there was nothing recorded about
him.
The priests all had their genealogy, and the
tablets were there, and every priest knew who
his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, great-grandfather, back
to Levi.
But Melchizedek had no such a record.
He appears suddenly in Old Testament history, and
he appears from nowhere, then he is not
heard of again, he goes out into nowhere,
they don't know who his father and mother
were, we don't know what his line of
descent was.
He came not according to the Jewish priestly
manner, but came in a manner all of
his own.
And so the man that wrote Hebrews said,
This man, this Melchizedek, was like Jesus in
that, consider how great he was, he was
like Jesus in that he came out of
another world, sort of, and there is no
way to identify him.
It was a tight question altogether.
Then he said, Abraham gave him a tenth
of the spoils, and verily they that are
of the sons of Levi will not read
it, because I won't explain it.
And if I read it, I've got 28
verses to read, and then after that I'll
explain, so I'll explain as I go along.
Now the writer sets out to show five
things.
The writer sets out to show that according
to the Old Testament, the Levitical priesthood was
not permanent.
He sets out to show that according to
the Old Testament, the Mosaic law was not
to be permanent, and that the Eternal Son,
when he came, would institute a superior priesthood
that would be permanent, and that the priesthood
should be eternal, and that the salvation of
man rests not upon the Levitical priesthood, but
the priesthood of the man that was to
come.
Now that's what he's saying.
You see, my friends, this all may sound
very dull to us, who are brought up
on television and comic strips and Reader's Digest
and everything cut out for us and put
in little capsules which we swallow, and we
don't have to do any thinking.
Here you have to do a little bit
of thinking.
I like to preach, though, to get people
to think.
You don't get as many of them, but
you get a better quality.
And I like to stir you a little
to think about this.
It involves thinking and puzzling and very hard
to get at.
But as we go along, you will see
these five things.
Now let's discuss them.
That the Levitical priesthood was not to be
permanent.
And what do we mean by the Levitical
priesthood?
We mean the priest that came from the
tribe of Levi.
Remember that there were twelve tribes of Israel,
and there was the tribe of Levi.
And the tribe of Levi had no inheritance
with the other tribes.
They were a people apart altogether.
And the priests came from them.
Not only the priests, but the Levites also
came from them.
But the priests, nobody could bring an offering
and make it in Israel, you know.
It took priests to do that.
And the priests had to come of the
tribe of Levi and of nobody else.
The high priests were all of the tribe
of Levi.
The tribe of Judah could give no high
priest and no priest.
The tribe of Benjamin, no high priest, no
priest.
The tribe of Gad, Dan, Zebulun, Issachar, all
the rest of them, no priest.
They had to come of the tribe of
Levi.
And of course this was built into the
Jewish religion.
The religion of the Jew, of the Hebrew,
was built around this.
The law was given, and the sacrifices, and
the temple, and the altar, and the priesthood,
and the prayer.
All these were built on this one thing,
the Levitical covenant, and built around the Levitical
priesthood.
Now, the man of God tends to show
that the Levitical priesthood was never intended to
be permanent.
Now, saying that to a Jew would be
like saying to an American that the Constitution
was not supposed to be permanent, or to
a Canadian that the Articles of Confederation were
not intended to be permanent, or to an
Englishman that the Magna Carta was not intended
to be permanent, because this was what was
built upon, you see.
The Jewish religion was built upon this priesthood
and upon this order.
And so when Jesus Christ came, they went
out saying that this Jesus Christ is a
priest.
And they said, hold on, he's not a
priest because he didn't come of the tribe
of Levi, he came of the tribe of
Judah, therefore he isn't a priest.
And they said, how can you say he's
a priest?
We've got an altar, and we've got a
tabernacle, and we've got priests and rabbis.
So the man of God wrote Hebrews in
order that he might straighten them all out,
in order that he might show to them
that Jesus Christ fulfilled all of the Levitical
order, and that now the Levitical order drops
away and is no more.
He does that by showing that in Psalm
110, written 400 years after the Levitical order
was established, that God said about somebody, he
is to be a priest forever after the
order of Melchizedek.
The writer says, this was Jesus he was
talking about.
He was to be a priest forever, not
after the order of Aaron or Levi, but
after the order of Melchizedek, who was somebody
other than the Levitical priest altogether.
Who was this Melchizedek?
Notice in Genesis 14, and the King of
Sodom went out to meet him after his
return from the slaughter of the cattle of
Laomer, and all of the kings that were
with him at the valley of Sheva, which
is the Kingsdale.
And Melchizedek, King of Salem, brought forth bread
and wine, and he was the priest of
the Most High God.
And Melchizedek blessed Abraham, and said, Blessed be
Abram of the Most High God, possessor of
heaven and earth.
That is, the Most High God was possessor
of heaven and earth.
And blessed be the Most High God, which
hath delivered thine enemies into thine hand.
And Abraham gave to Melchizedek tithes of all.
Here is the involved reasoning here.
That's what makes you skip it when you're
reading through the Bible, or hastily hurry over
it and say, I don't get it.
Here is what the man of God said.
He said, Abraham was the father of Levi,
and Levi was the father of all the
priests.
And the people gave to the priests tithes
of all they had, because the priests were
above the people.
And Abraham was above the priests because he
was the great father of all of the
priests.
And yet, remember, said the man of God,
that Abraham paid tithes to Melchizedek, which shows
that Melchizedek was higher than Abraham because the
lower pays tithes to the higher.
And therefore, Melchizedek was above Abraham.
And when the scripture says that there was
a priest coming who should be after the
order of Melchizedek, he couldn't be after the
order of Levi or of Aaron or the
Levitical priests, because he was already higher in
that the Levitical priests and their high priests
and all the rest had paid tithes in
Abraham.
Now, is that confusing enough?
I don't know, but I enjoy these things
and like to think about them.
And I like to have you walk along
with me and look the scenery over.
So there is the proof, said the man
of God, that the priesthood must pass away
to make room for another priest who was
to be after a higher order.
Then the second thing he proved was that
the Mosaic law was not to be permanent.
The law and the priesthood were interdependent according
to verse 12.
For the priesthood being changed, there is made
necessary a change also of the law.
And when the priesthood was changed, the law
passed away.
Now, there is where we stand, men and
women.
We stand not under the shadow of Moses'
law.
We stand not in the lighter power of
an Old Testament Jewish priest.
But we stand in the light of Christ,
who is superior to all Old Testament priests
and who made the law pass away when
he instituted his new covenant, which was made
after a better sacrifice.
So the weight of the argument in verses
18 and 19, For there is verily a
disannulling of the commandment going before, for the
weakness and unprofitableness thereof, for the law made
nothing perfect, but the bringing in of a
better hope did, by the which we draw
nigh unto God.
Now, here is a very strange thing, an
ominous thing, that when Jesus died on the
cross, the finger of God stretched out and
tore the veil apart.
The high priest used to go in behind
a great veil, a veil so thick that
it took four or five men to pull
it aside.
And when Jesus died, the finger of God
split that veil, rented in the middle to
show that he was finished with that now,
that there was a transfer of priests and
priesthood and covenants and altars and everything that
belonged to the Old Testament was now done,
and that the new priest was Jesus, the
new sacrifice was the Lamb of God, and
the new altar was in heaven, and that
the old had passed away.
But do you know what our friends the
Jewish priests did?
They went back after Jesus had died and
had risen again, they went back and sewed
up that veil, according to history, according at
least to tradition, they went back and sewed
up that red veil and tried to use
the old altar and the old sacrifices that
God had set aside by ripping them down
and saying, out they go, we have the
priest, not the fulfillment of the Aaronic Levitical
order, but the fulfillment of a higher order
than Levi, that of Mechizedeh, to whom Levi
paid tithe.
Now, if you open your mouth these days
to say anything, you are accused of being
anti-Semitic.
I remember once in the city of Chicago,
the Anti-Defamation League, of the B'nai
B'reth, wrote to the station where I
was preaching, and they said, this man Tozer
said that all the trouble in the world,
we heard him on the radio, and he
said all the trouble in the world was
caused by the Jews and that things would
never be right until the Jews were eliminated.
And I called the B'nai B'reth
people and I said, an interesting thing, I
understand, I'm supposed to have said that I
don't like Jews, and that this was a
Jew I was talking to, of course, and
I said I'm supposed to believe that all
Jews should be cast out and all the
trouble in the world came from the Jews.
Well, he said, that's the report we get.
I said, maybe just hold still while I
tell you a few things.
He said, only recently that I had as
assistant pastor a Jew.
He was my assistant pastor, a Christian Jew.
I said, I belong to two different societies
dedicated to the prosperity and salvation of the
Jew.
I'm a believer in the future glory of
the Jew when Jesus Christ, the great Jewish
Messiah, comes back to the world again.
And I have been a crusader in favor
of the Jew and the Jewish Messiah, the
Christ of God, for the last 30 years.
And I have written in favor of the
Jew and I have given to help the
Jew and I have baptized Jews in my
church and have Jewish members in my congregation
and I repeat, just got over having a
Jewish assistant pastor.
Oh, he backed down immediately.
So I called the station, but I didn't
call fast enough.
I said, I just talked to the B
'nai B'rath man.
He said, and how?
He said, he just called us now and
hung up.
He said, what did you say to him?
I said, nothing.
I just told him what I thought of
the Jews.
He said, you apologized all over the place
and said they had you all wrong.
It must have been somebody else.
I said, two other fellows.
It certainly wasn't me.
I never said it.
I don't believe in this.
I don't believe that the Jews cause all
the trouble in the world and I don't
believe that anything would at all be availed
if the Jew was gotten rid of.
I believe in the future glory of Israel
when the Messiah returns and Israel goes back
to the land in faith, not in unbelief
as she is now.
Think of it, the President of Israel is
now taking lessons from Buddhism.
So there's no belief there.
But there will be a day when Israel
shall shine forth and the word of the
law shall go forth from Zion and the
word of God shall go forth from Jerusalem.
But I can still say what I'm going
to say and if anybody says I'm anti
-Semitic, I live at 5 Old Orchard Grove.
Come out and see me.
Now, I'm not anti-Semitic, but I'm not
going to run around and paw over Jews
in order to keep from telling truth.
The truth is, the Jews are worshiping after
they know not what, because the heart and
living, beating life of their faith has gone
out of them long ago.
There is no altar, no shrine, no sacrifice,
no lamb, no priest, no high priest, no
Jerusalem, no Zion, no tabernacle.
They're still trying to carry on.
They will never be satisfied until they admit
that when that veil was rinsed, it was
rinsed by God for a purpose, to say
to everybody, Jew and Gentile, salvation is not
of Levitical order.
Salvation is of the eternal Son who was
made flesh to dwell among us and who
became not only the lamb that died, but
the priest who offered himself as a lamb
that died for the sins of the world.
So the Mosaic law was not to be
permanent.
That's why I have a great freedom about
the Mosaic law.
That's why I'm a free man from fools.
Some people go back to the Old Testament.
I have a young fellow.
He's the son of a missionary, and he's
a very bright fellow.
He writes me from time to time and
pesters me like a mosquito at a picnic,
always after me.
He wants me to start preaching that I
show you shouldn't eat chicken and you shouldn't
eat pork and you shouldn't eat.
I look up to God and say that
all that passed away.
And with the passing away of the priesthood,
there passed away also the law and the
covenant, and it all passed away.
And Jesus said, I give unto you a
new covenant, a new covenant sealed in my
blood.
And when you drink, you do drink in
memory of that covenant, not the old covenant
but the new.
So nobody is going to come and lay
upon me a burden which neither we nor
our fathers were able to bear.
Nobody is going to look at me in
a shocked and hurt manner and say, Would
you dare to eat that piece of ham?
Sure, a second one if I can have
it.
And I can do it as long as
it doesn't do me any harm physically and
as long as I can take it.
Some things I don't eat, bananas and raw
apples, but apart from that I can take
anything that's too thick to be drunk.
And I can eat it.
And I can eat it because I am
not laboring along under Levitical order.
I am now from under that in the
New Testament.
And my lamb is not a lamb with
four legs offered by a priest.
My lamb is the lamb of God that
taketh away the sins of the world.
My altar is not the altar in Jerusalem
behind that veil.
My altar was Calvary where he offered himself,
a lamb without spot unto God.
Freedom there, my brothers and sisters, in the
book of Galatians.
Paul really acts as eloquent in that book
of Galatians.
He condemns these people who follow Christians around
and tries to make Jews out of them.
He says, you ought to stop it.
He says, why is the grace of God
doing you no good?
So the Mosaic law was not to be
permanent.
Third thing, the Son, when he came, should
establish a priesthood, superior priesthood, and it should
come of the line of David and not
of the line of Judah, and not of
the line of Levi.
He came from David, David came from Judah,
therefore Jesus descended from Judah, about the tribe
about which says the scripture here, no priesthood
was ever mentioned.
So when Jesus came, keep this in mind,
dear friends, he did not simply come as
a detailed item by item fulfillment of the
Old Testament.
He came from above.
He was the Old Testament.
He was superior to it.
And when he came, he said, he have
heard it been said, but I say unto
you, and he put himself above all the
Old Testament and above everything, and he was
a priest forever.
So he could not be a Levitical priest
at all, for his priesthood had to be
eternal.
Thou art a priest forever.
Kind of pathetic, it seems to me, those
priests of the Old Testament times.
God bless them.
A man would get to be 30 years
old and then he became a priest.
You know, they had it pretty nice.
I was thinking about it yesterday when I
was reading up on this.
They began their work when they were 30
and retired when they were 50.
They just had 20 years of work and
no more.
Just 20 years of work.
Nowadays you start as soon as you can
get out of school and work until they
make you quit.
And some men worked beyond.
Look at Adenauer, 86 years old, 84 yesterday.
Still as tough as ever, 86.
He could have been retired if he'd been
an Old Testament priest 36 years before.
He'd been loafing around fishing.
But the priests hadn't anything to do after
they were 50.
I don't know yet what they did.
When a man gets to be 50 years
old, he's not old and he's not young.
And what they did with themselves, I wouldn't
know.
I said and have said, and maybe the
Lord will make me take this back sometime,
but I have said this, that all the
priests retired when they were 50, but the
prophets, they never retired at all.
They died in the harness.
And I'd rather be a prophet than a
priest so that I can preach on until
I fall over.
I pray God that I may not get
to be so that I have to be
silent and have silent Sabbaths, as Rutherford called
them.
I want to preach and labor and write
and work and pray and serve God's people
until I'm finished.
And then when I'm finished, why hang around
here?
But anyhow, the Levitical priests couldn't continue because
they retired and then they died.
And even the high priest, he couldn't continue.
He had to die.
But now we are, we have a priest
who abided continually and has an ever and
unchangeable priesthood.
Wherefore he is able to save them to
the uttermost that come unto God by him,
seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for
them.
And the fifth thing is that this priesthood
guarantees the covenant by which we have salvation.
His priesthood, that is the priesthood of Jesus
Christ our Lord, is non-transferable by an
oath, thou art a priest forever, and of
perpetual efficacy.
I want to stop here and talk a
little bit about that.
You know, another thing they'll condemn you for
if you don't get down and pet the
Pope.
And I won't pet the old boy.
And I won't say that I think that
all religions are alike and that I think
every road leads to heaven and all roads
lead to Rome.
I don't think so at all.
I think that the Catholic doctrine of the
perpetual mass, the perpetuation of the mass, is
a very vile and evil thing.
For every time the priest says his Latin
words over the bread and wine, they become
the very body and blood of Christ, offered
again for our salvation, so that Christ is
offered every Sunday all over the world and
many times in between wherever the mass is
said and the sacrifice of the Eucharist is
offered.
Now that, they say, they're returning constantly a
repeated sacrifice of the mass.
Now the Bible doesn't teach this at all.
The Bible teaches that there was one sacrifice
of everlasting efficacy.
It was done once, not repeated every Sunday,
but done once.
You can't, by repeating Latin words over a
great cup of grape juice or wine and
some biscuits, you can't call the man of
glory back who's been immortal since he went
there.
You can't call him back to die again
on the cross, to bleed again in his
veins and say, Father, into thy hands I
come in my spirit.
Death has no more dominion over him.
He's alive forevermore, and his priesthood is an
everlasting priesthood, and he guarantees the covenant.
It's perpetual efficacy, you see, who needeth not
daily as those high priests used to to
offer up sacrifices, first for their own sins
and then for the sins of the people.
For this they did, for this he did,
Jesus did once when he offered himself.
For the law maketh men high priests which
have infirmity, but the word of the oath
which was since the law maketh the Son
who is consecrated forevermore.
So there's the Holy Evangelist.
That's what that involved, highly complex 7th chapter
of Hebrews says.
That's what it says.
It's very hard to understand it.
I admit it, there are passages that are
hard to understand.
That's another reason why I think Paul may
have written Hebrews.
Remember what Peter said about him?
He said he writes some things that are
very hard to be understood, and the unlearned
and the unstable rest them to their own
destruction.
Well, here is the Holy Evangelist then.
He lives forevermore.
No age can heap its outward years on
thee, dear Christ, thou art thyself thine own
eternity.
As God is timeless, so the man Christ
Jesus is also timeless.
And he lives to intercede.
His whole interest and work is to be
our surety.
Before the throne my surety stands, my name
is written in his hands.
I believe in the security of the saints.
That is, I believe they are secure, not
by some technicality that Calvin might have thought
up, but I believe they are secure because
there is one who can't die, offering their
name before the Father day and night.
And I know, Father, thou hearest me always.
And no matter how much obliquely the world
may heap on my name, there is a
name before the Father kept bright day and
night by the intercessory prayers of my brother
and high priest Jesus Christ in the glory.
And no matter how weak I may be
or what poor sample of a Christian I
may be, I am kept because my Lord
Jesus Christ is my high priest, is there
not hanging on the ropes waiting for the
end, but there quietly, victoriously, triumphantly pleading his
own blood for his children.
He is able to save to the uttermost.
The week after next I'm going to preach
on a rescue mission.
And I preached a lot when I was
younger in the rescue missions.
And I heard and have heard, as you
have heard, this verse used this way.
Wherefore he is able also to save them
to the uttermost that come unto God by
him.
And then they made the uttermost, they changed
the preposition from to to from.
They said he saved from the uttermost.
But Scripture doesn't say he saved from the
uttermost.
It saved to the uttermost.
The Lord doesn't care where you came from.
It's where you're going that pleases him, you
see.
We get a fellow, he's a dope addict
and a bum and a general no good
and a ne'er-do-well and a
wife-beater and a child-deserter, and he
gets converted.
And then for the rest of his life
he spends it telling about what he was
saved from.
Oh, no, that's not Scripture.
The Bible doesn't say that we are to
talk about what we were saved from.
It says he's able to save to the
uttermost them that come unto God by him.
It's where we're going and who we're going
to see that matters, not where we came
from.
I was converted when I was 17.
I'd never been in jail in my life.
I wasn't a dope fiend.
I didn't smoke, I didn't chew, I didn't
drink.
I'd never deserted my wife.
I wasn't married.
And I was rather good-looking.
You wouldn't believe it now, but I was
red-cheeked and rather good-looking.
And there I walked about and everybody thought,
what a fine boy this is.
Well, I was in a way, too.
Mother thought I was.
What could I tell the people?
My testimony was just as dull as they
come.
I couldn't say, I was a dope fiend
and the Lord saved me from it.
I was a slave to cigarettes and the
Lord saved me from it.
I deserted my family and the Lord saved
me and I came back.
I couldn't say that.
None of those things were true about me.
So my testimony wouldn't have been worth two
lines of type.
But I could say, I have been saved
unto.
And I'd spend the rest of my life
telling about that, what I'm saved unto.
What I'm saved from doesn't matter.
What I am saved to is what matters.
He's able to save us to the uttermost.
All that come to God by him.
You know there will be a day when
your little past will seem only as a
wink of the eye.
With all your eternity out there.
For all your past is time and your
future is eternity.
So why match time over against eternity?
And so he saved me from, spent a
lot of time on from.
He saved us to.
He saved the uttermost, the uttermost in time
and the uttermost in condition.
And he does it because we have a
high priest, not after the Levitical order, but
after the order of Melchizedek, that strange man
who came out of nowhere and was a
priest a while and then disappeared and so
set up a type of the Son of
God who was to follow.
And that's what the 7th chapter of Hebrew
means.
I hope that it's done you some good.
Preaching a sermon like this isn't easy, as
my preacher friends present here know.
It's tough because if you don't make it
clear enough, then you might as well stay
at home.
And if you try to make it too
clear, your congregation goes to sleep.
But I hope we've had a happy medium
here and I hope you'll all go home
saying to yourself, His oath, his covenant, his
blood support me in the whelming flood.
And when all around my soul his way,
he then is all my hope and stay.
On Christ the solid rock I stand, all
other ground is sinking sand.
Amen.