CRITICAL AND EXEGETICAL NOTES
Hebrews 7:18. Disannulling.—Setting aside from its active place and work, as that which has had its day, and is no longer efficient. It had to be superseded. A stronger word is now used than that in Hebrews 7:12. Weakness, etc.—See following verse. Sufficient in relation to man’s spiritual needs. The Jews recognised imperfection in the Mosaic system, as they expected perfection only when Messiah should have appeared.
Hebrews 7:20. Not without an oath.—Sign of an immediate call. Compare the Levitical priests, who came into office by simple right of descent. See the allusion to Psalms 110:4.
Hebrews 7:22. Better testament.—διαθήκη should have been translated covenant. Heb. Berîth. Of “testaments” the Hebrews knew nothing.
MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.— Hebrews 7:18-22
The Reversion to an Older Order of Priesthood.—Here was a difficulty for the bigoted Jews to explain if they could. When God proposed to call out a new priest, why did He not choose a man out of the house of Aaron, and arrange his priesthood on the Aaronic lines? The only answer that can be given is, that the Aaronic priesthood had worn itself out; its mission had only been temporary, it had now come to its end: it was an effete thing, and therefore an ineffective thing. Illustration may be taken from the king-priests of the Maccabean era, or from the Annas or Caiaphas of our Lord’s time. It is manifest that the Priest-saviour of a sinful world could never have come in the order of which such men were representatives. The reversion to the older order is the public declaration of the helpless inferiority of the later.
I. The inferiority is seen in its temporary character.—It was a priesthood for a nation, not for the world; for a time, and not for ever—the for ever of the life of humanity. The Jewish was a temporary revelation, a preparation for a fuller revelation that was to come, and be universal and permanent. The temporary is transitional, and there need be no alarm when the time comes for it to pass away. Christianity is no reformed Judaism; it is the return upon the primary principles of God’s dealing with humanity. But in one line Judaism prepared the way for it. St. Paul’s teaching of the relation of Christianity to the Mosaic system should be noted.
II. The inferiority is seen in its limited range.—This is only hinted at here, and further unfolded later on in the epistle. It is suggested in the sentence, “the weakness and unprofitableness thereof.” The range of Judaism was outward and ceremonial. It took man’s conduct and relations—not his will, heart, motives—into its management, imposed its penalties upon disobedience, and arranged its sacrificial and ceremonial conditions of restoration to privilege. But man wants more than the ordering of his conduct: he wants a power of inward renewal, an object of love who can be to him a supreme inspiration to righteousness.
III. The inferiority is seen in its imperfect agents.—Stress is laid on the fact that each priest is not, as an individual, directly called, and set apart for his office by God. There is no precise recognition of ability and fitness—no Divine consecration of each man. Consequently a Jewish priest might be a good man, or he might not. He was a priest because his father was, and not because he himself was a good and priestly man. Their imperfection as persons stands out distinctly in contrast with Melchizedek, who, by direct selection and appointment, was priest of the Most High God; and in contrast with Christ, who in Scripture is declared to be “a priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek,” and to whom the Divine call directly came at Jordan: “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” It was an inferior covenant, administered by inferior men. Valuable enough for its time, and for its mission; but its time had passed, and its mission was done. Let it go. The greater High Priest had come, the surety of an altogether better and spiritual covenant. Cease to exaggerate the importance or authority of the Aaronic priesthood. Welcome the new Priest, the Melchizedek of the new era, on whom the most solemn Divine assurance rests—you have read it many a time in the word, you know its full significance now: “Thou art a priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek.”
SUGGESTIVE NOTES AND SERMON SKETCHES
Hebrews 7:18. Good Things may become Ineffective.—We have always to take account of the fact that, while the animal world can repeat itself generation after generation with absolute precision, the moral world never has repeated itself, and never can repeat itself, in two succeeding generations. “One generation passeth, and another, and a differently thinking, and differently circumstanced, generation cometh; but the earth abideth ever.” The birds build their nests to-day exactly as the same birds built them in the trees of Paradise. The foxes make their burrowed holes just as they made them of old in the hillsides of Palestine. But man makes his house to-day altogether otherwise than Adam did when he wove tree-branches into a bower outside Eden. Moral man moves forward. He does not think to-morrow as he thought to-day. He wants something more to-morrow than he wanted to-day. And the Divine revelations to the moral being, man, must always be precisely relative to what he is, and thinks, and wants, when the revelation is given. Indeed, a revelation which, in form, can adapt itself to all the generations of humanity, is inconceivable and impossible in the very, nature of things. There are permanences in humanity; moral man has his unchanging essentials, and there is an essential in all Divine revelation which meets the essential and permanent in man, but we are not dwelling upon that feature now. If man is ever changing—moral man, intellectual man, social man—and revelation must of necessity change to adapt itself to the changes, then things that are good, right, adapted, Divine, may come to be practically ineffective, and have to be put up on the shelf of history. Illustration may be taken from the work of the Puritan divines, or the Schoolmen, or the Cambridge Platonists,—most valuable and effective in their day; most ineffective in our day. The world’s lumber-room is full of good things that have had their day, and have ceased to be living forces. The stamp of the Divine on the Mosaic economy in no way exempts it from the operation of the ever-working Divine laws, which are superior to any local and particular revelation. Mosaism was a good thing, but the world’s progress made it ineffective.
Hebrews 7:19. Law replaced by Hope.—Law is an external and authorised direction, which takes the ordering of a man’s conduct and relation into its control. Strictly speaking, the range of law—certainly of revealed law—is external: it has nothing to do with thought, or feeling, or will: it is concerned with actions, with conduct. The apostle Paul states this with great plainness and force, when he compares the righteousness which comes by the law, and the righteousness which comes by Christ. “For Moses writeth that the man that doeth the righteousness which is of the law shall live thereby. But the righteousness which is of faith saith thus … If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Jesus as Lord, and shalt believe in thy heart that God raised Him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.” Law, as ordering of conduct, has its time and place and work; it belongs to the rudimentary stages of the moral life. It is the proper thing for the child life of individuals, of nations, and of humanity. Joubert says the great principle guiding the education of humanity is, “Force till right is ready.” Hope is an effective force on thought, feeling, ambition. It is the inward inspiration of effort to win righteousness. Hold something before a man, and you make the man act from himself with the view to the attainment of that which he hopes for. Here is the difference between law and hope. Law takes the man into its control, and makes the man do what it would have him do. Hope makes the man take himself into his own control, and bring himself into all obediences and goodnesses. Therefore hope is such an advance upon law, that we may say the Divine anxiety, (and the answering human anxiety) is to get the orderings of law replaced by the inspirations of hope. Christ both elevates and redeems humanity, by bringing in a hope. It is a better hope, because all the law could offer was the acceptance and reward of obedient acts; but this hope offers the acceptance of, and Divine satisfaction in, loyal, loving, obedient persons. That which is the law for the individual, the nation, and humanity, is also the law for the Christian experience. The young Christian can only begin with laws and rules for the precise shaping of Christian habits and conduct. If he grows, that law power will pass, and give place to the ennobling and sanctifying inspiration of Christian hope.