The path to peace with God through the priestshood of His Son

the path to peace

Setting the Scene
" I am only human " is a common phrase used to excuse our blunders. Based on the assumed common knowledge that to make mistakes moral and otherwise is part and parcel of being human and is to be expected once in a while because that's just the way we are. The Bible agrees and refers to us all as sinners (Romans 3:23). The word sin has its roots in the world of archery, where to sin was to miss the mark (if the arrow fell short of the target the archer had sinned/missed the mark.) The mark that God intends man to hit is faith in, love for, and obedience to Himself. However, man throughout history has consistently failed to appreciate and reflect the character of God.
We like to think of ourselves as individuals, but the basic human nature that we inherit from our parents and which we share with the rest of the people now alive on the planet, now dead or yet to be born, is the one demonstrated by Adam in the garden of Eden. One that falls far short of the glorious image as sons of God we were made to reflect (revealed in full by Jesus Christ of Nazareth). It is because of this sinful nature we share and inherit from Adam that it is impossible for us to keep the first and greatest commandment.
" love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy mind and with all thy strength: " (Mark 12:29)
If (or rather because) we are not totally taken up with love for God we are breakers of the greatest law that God has given. Love for God is the attitude that inspires the keeping of the rest of His commands. If the stream of our obedience to God is polluted at the fountain of our love for God, no wonder we find ourselves breaking the many lesser commands. Who among us even knows all the laws of God, let alone keeps them flawlessly?
The Lord God is therefore displeased, not merely with our individual acts of wrong conduct, but with our very character and nature. He is not merely angered by the sins that we commit daily; in word, thought and deed but is more distressed at our sinful nature: which turns to sin as bees to honey, loving God like snowmen love the sun. As far as God is concerned we are as good as dead; we neither understand, love, nor obey Him.
This being the case, we can see that before God could really call us His friends and bless us - with more than our hearts can desire through an ongoing loving relationship - He would have to do two things. Forgive us for our many sins to date and change our inmost nature. Raising us out of our spiritual death to Him, to spiritual life, enabling us to comprehend and love Him. He would have to change us in such a way that we became sinners no longer, but instead, those that trusted in God and loved God; people, who by their lives, gave glory to the Lord, God Almighty who created them.
The first part in bringing us back into relationship with our Creator - having Him forgive the many sins that stand against and between us - is called justification, making it just as if we had never sinned in his sight. The second part - the deepening of our understanding of the character of God and the perfect restoration of his image of compassion and nobility, etc. in us, - is called sanctification - and takes time. The rest of this chapter will dwell on the first of these great themes/needs that lay in the heart of every man and woman on the face of the planet, justification, the need to be forgiven by God before we meet him.

Gospel of Grace
God cannot overlook sin. He is not corrupt like human systems of justice and cannot let the innocent off or condemn the guiltless. We must be and often have been punished (paradise lost, the flood, the confusion of tongues at the Tower of Babel etc.) for acts of godlessness, and our godless characters cannot dwell with a Holy God who cannot bear even to look upon sin (Habakkuk 1:13).
The response of the Almighty to mankind's sins and sinfulness is not blessing but cursing and righteous indignation, holy anger. In the beginning the penalty that would follow rebellion against God our Creator,
" the wages of sin is death." (Romans 6:23).
was issued as a warning before sin was ever committed on earth and the promise of punishment
" in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die." (Genesis 2:17).
was fulfilled in Adam for his disobedience and continues to be in his sinful offspring: but a man has arisen to halt our destruction and speak peace and salvation to the peoples, the man who is also the Lord Jesus Christ. Christ taught that the salvation he offered was not merely salvation from physical death but salvation for our body and soul from the punishment that God would justly inflict when he comes to judge the world. Rewarding every man and woman according to their works - which for all those who denied God and had broken His law meant everlasting torment comparable to such things as being burnt by unquenchable fire or being eaten by never dying worms. (Isaiah 66:24, Mark 9:44, 46 & 48).
God's punishment and instructions to punish evil are often very severe demonstrating his great hatred of evil. It should be noted however that His great hatred and severe punishment of evil is not evil, also that deceiving someone as to the true nature of God (the Devils work) is the nastiest thing you can do (securing their temporal and eternal condemnation). To desire justice and act in righteous indignation surprisingly requires a heart of love. For example if you love your parents a little bit (teenage years!) you will be a little annoyed if someone derides them or maybe not, you may deride them yourself! However when you have grown up, or perhaps when you were younger, your appreciation and love for your parents, may be, or have been, far greater and an unfitting word against them may arouse or have aroused more than a little anger. Or again imagine you read of an incident of rape in the paper. You are likely to have some desire that the man is brought to justice. Now if the lady abused turned out to be your wife, or your daughter, or your mother, because of your love for them your desire that justice is done on their behalf, would be far greater than that of Joe Bloggs reading the paper down the road. In turn your efforts towards making sure that the criminal serves his sentence would reveal the depth of your love.
In the same way God's laws are an expression and extension of His character which the Bible declares to be love (1 John 4:8). His ceremonial and moral laws are both primarily concerned with the well being of His people, and to disregard and disobey the laws He has given is to show disregard for the well being of your fellow man as well as distrust of God. The excuse that God's laws are not actually going to produce our well being and happiness and must be supplanted for others of our own making is clearly absurd. If the God of the Bible really is the omniscient (all knowing) wise Creator of the Universe and we are mere men, then whenever we disagree with such a God clearly the error must be with the finite not the Infinite, the limited not the Unlimited. The moral laws are higher` than the ceremonial laws (Matthew 12:30-34) - which are nonetheless the laws of God. So it can never be claimed that you can't fulfil a moral duty because you are serving the Lord in some religious ceremony i.e. going to church or reading the Bible (Matt 12:3&4, 11-12).

The point of ceremonial laws are after all is to be the soil from which the seed of obedience can grow and flourish to the end that His image set out in the moral laws may be restored in us. It is always right to do what is morally right. So just as we - at our best - make and implement laws for the good and safety of others so we follow in the footsteps of God; only His laws are unquestionably right and to break them is to provoke the Lord of Glory to anger! This is often done by neglecting or distressing those He in His mercy sustains; and who His laws were made to protect. The depth of His love is revealed in the punishment He meets out to those who break His commandments - the commandments of their Creator and Sustainer that flow from His heart of love. Yes at times the awesomeness of His judgement is a reflection of the magnitude of His mercy and love towards mankind.
"Ye shall not afflict any widow, or fatherless child, if thou afflict them in any wise, and they cry at all unto me, I will surely hear their cry and my wrath shall wax hot and I will kill you with the sword and your wives shall be widows, and your children fatherless."
(Exodus 22:21-24).
The keeping of His moral law perfectly would mean living a life full of compassion see
(Exodus ch20 & ch23, Leviticus ch25, Deuteronomy ch2, ch5 & ch19).
This ideal of compassion is captured well in the image of the kinsman redeemer. These were people with financial resources who purchased the freedom of a slave, their relative, who had been reduced to such poverty that they had had to sell themselves into slavery (Leviticus 25:47-50). This character of a saviour or redeemer is one seen throughout the Old and New Testaments not only as the character that God wants and expects of man but also as the character of God Himself. The Son of God even has Jesus another form of Joshua, which means God Saves as His first name.
God is revealed throughout the Bible not only as Creator but also as Sustainer of all living things. The God who provides for all our needs whether we realise it or not (Acts 15:16&17). God knows all of our needs better than we know them ourselves like a mother the needs of her child. He is conscious (though we are blissfully unaware) of our need of salvation from under his wrath. He would be just to send us to hell and let us all endure His judgement on our godless ways forever. Yet He has chosen not only to be just, but also to be very merciful and become the justifier of all those who call out to Him and trust in His Son for salvation.
This is what the sacrificial system was all about. It provided for those who acknowledged Him and their guilt in his sight a way to be at peace with Him again and approach God; knowing that they had nothing to fear because He had forgiven them and would meet them with blessing and not with judgement. The sacrifices and the sacrificial system all pointed forward to the time, when Christ would come to the earth, in the form of a man, and perform the sacrificial work, that He was ordained to do, from the foundation of the world (1 Rev 13:8, 1 Peter 1:20, Hebrews 4:3).
The priests were men appointed by God (in the Old Testament) to approach Him on behalf of the people and to obtain the forgiveness of their sins. The people also came to them for religious instruction i.e. instruction about how God expected His people to come before Him in worship/religious ceremony and how He desired them to live morally. The priests stood in the 'gap' offering the peoples sacrifices up to God and bringing the blessing of God down upon the people. Not everyone could take up this role only those to whom God had given it - last of all He gave it to Christ.

"And no man taketh this honour unto himself, but he that is called of God as was Aaron. So also Christ glorified not himself to be made an high priest; but he that said unto him, Thou art my Son today have I begotten thee. As he saith also in another place, Thou art a priest for ever after the order of Melchisedec." (Hebrews 5:4-6).
Before the priests could come before Him, they had to be ceremonially pure i.e. they had to offer up sacrifices first for their own sins. Christ was absolutely pure in everything he thought said and did (His love for God was perfect) and so had no need to do this and was pure in a way that the earthly priests could never be.
When a guilty party went to the priest with a sin offering (Leviticus ch6), they had to carry with them a spotless animal. The beast would be offered up in their place i.e. the animal would die the death that they should have died. The spotless life represented by its blood would be poured and placed or sprinkled before God so that God would see the blameless life of the animal instead of their sinfulness. So the animal acted as the sinners substitute in death and the sinner had the pure life of the animal representing them (imputed to them) and so were forgiven (Leviticus 6:7). The sinner was acquitted not because of anything that they had done but because of the work of the priest, the suffering of the sacrifice and its sprinkled blood. In the same way Christ acts as a High Priest, for us. Through the ascension He has gone into the presence of God and obtains our forgiveness. The sacrifice He brings before God is the sacrifice of His life.
"For it is not possible that the blood of bulls and goats could take away sins." (Hebrews 10:4).
Once a year the High Priest would seek to atone (obtain forgiveness) for the sins of the nation.
One of His tasks was to confess all of the sins of the people with his hands upon the head of a live goat (Leviticus 16:21.) The goat would then be taken far away into the wilderness. In the same way Christ is able to bear the sins of as many as necessary away. Though the death of some animal may not be an adequate substitute for the death of a man, the death of the Son of God was a more than adequate substitute for the sins of the whole world. Though the purity of an animal without blemish is a great deal less than the sort of righteousness that we would require in our courts - let alone God in His on the day He comes to judge the world - Christ perfectly fulfilled the demands of God's law. His righteousness substituted - imputed - to our account is enough to satisfy God on our behalf.
As long as their priests had compassion for them and went to God on their behalf (interceded for them) in the way God had commanded the people could be sure that God would have compassion on their penitent hearts and forgive them for their sin against Him (Job 42:8 & 9). Likewise because Christ now lives forever in the power of His endless resurrection life, after having offered himself up to death and that a cruel death by crucifixion to save us while we were yet sinners; we can be sure that His compassion will not fail us, and, that His death and His righteousness both reckoned to our account leave us with nothing to pay and no level of righteousness left unattained. Thus if we put our trust in Christ to save us He is able to do so for he became
" a little lower than the angels, for the suffering of death crowned with glory and honour, that he might taste death for everyone." (Hebrews 2:9)
He has kept the law of God flawlessly. His escaping corruption by Gods raising Him from the dead being proof of this perfection (Acts 2:24 &27). Just like the priests in the Old Testament He is able to transfer this His righteousness to our account to sprinkle us with his blood so to speak that only His perfect life and righteousness is seen when we approach to God. He can do this because He has
been given by God the power and position of priesthood in which He will serve forever.


Lastly not only is He able by His death, resurrection and ascension to Gods right hand to secure our Justification and make us legally right before God. He is also able to secure by His eternal word and the Spirit of God our sanctification. He is able to transform us making us pure and perfect in character as well so that we can live with and please the thrice-Holy God for all eternity.
(Revelation 21:27)