The Study of Jesus.
I. The Person of Christ is the great miracle and mystery of the universe enshrined in the Christian faith; and that is the object which we are invited perpetually to contemplate. "Wherefore, holy brethren," signifies the lifting of a veil from before an august Being, who has been already described in His two natures, though their union has not been described, but is taken for granted. Our Lord is the central object of our profession. He Himself tells us that the bond of perfectness in our religion is devotion to His own Person. After having brought into a new and most marked prominence the supremacy of the love of God, as occupying all the heart, and soul, and mind, and thought, He demands literally the same all for Himself. There is a specific Christian grace that has no name in the New Testament, which is derived from the impress of the Redeemer on the heart and life. Be sure you aspire to this, or, rather, think nothing of aspiring to it; look at Him much, and His image will steal irresistibly into your nature and form and life, II. The office of Christ is here dwelt upon. He is the Apostle and High Priest of our profession. There is to us no person of Christ without His work; the personal Emmanuel is in the background; but the ministry of Jesus Christ fills up the whole visible horizon of thought. We are all in the school of Jesus, and, however busy we may be, like Martha, we must find time, like Mary, to sit and behold, and study the Master.
III. But the study of Christ is not yet exhausted; there remains the habitual consideration of the supreme faithfulness of our common Master. It inspires boundless trust in all the brethren of the Christian profession who keep their eyes fixed on Him who is its High Priest. Looking to Him, and considering His faithfulness, we at once see the perfect Example, and feel the Divine energy flowing from it into our souls.
W. B. Pope, Sermons and Charges,p. 101.
I. We have here one great comprehensive command: "Consider Christ." Now that word "consider" implies in the original an earnest, fixed, prolonged attention of mind. Our gaze upon Christ is to be like that of a man who resolutely turns away his eyes from other things to fix them, with keen interest and eagerness, with protracted, steady look, on something which he is resolved to learn thoroughly. (1) The first remark that I would make, then, is the very simple and obvious one that a Christian man's thoughts should be occupied with his Saviour. (2) But, still further, our gaze on Him must be the look of eager interest; it must be intense as well as fixed. (3) Still, further, another requisite of this occupation of mind with Christ and His work may be suggested as included in the word. Our consideration must be resolute, eager, and also steady or continuous.
II. Notice the great aspects of Christ's work which should fix our gaze. (1) He is the Apostle of our profession. He is sent forth from God, and brings God to us. He, and He alone, He, and He for ever, He, and He for all, is the sent of God. (2) Then we are to think of Him as our High Priest. "As Apostle," it has been well said, "He pleads God's cause with us; as High Priest He pleads our cause with God." The Apostolate and the Priesthood of Christ are both included "in the one word Mediator." The idea of priesthood depends upon that of sacrifice, and the idea of sacrifice, as this epistle abundantly shows, is incomplete without that of expiation.
III. Notice, finally, the great reasons for this occupation of mind and heart with Christ our Mediator. (1) Our relation to Christ, and the benefit we derive from it, should impel us to loving meditation on Him. (2) The calling of which we are partakers, should impel us to loving meditation. (3) The avowal which we have made concerning Him should impel us to loving, steadfast contemplation.
A. Maclaren, Sermons in Manchester,p. 289.
Christ our Priest.
Christ our Victim is slain. His blood is poured out on the cross. The cross and the earth are sprinkled with that blood. He Himself, as our Priest, is baptized with it. And when that sacrifice was accomplished He, our High Priest, went up with the marks of the sacrifice upon Him, the same Jesus, into the presence of God, there to plead the merits of His blood for us. And we are waiting, as the people waited without on that day of atonement, for Him to come forth to return again to bless us with the glorious effects of that His atonement, even everlasting salvation. Now in this, the principal work of Christ's priestly office, there are several minor particulars, all of interest as further explaining and setting it forth.
I. Note the qualifications for the office, and His fulfilment of them. (1) All bodily freedom from blemish did but faintly set forth the purity and spotlessness of the Lord Jesus. (2) Our High Priest was harmless, undefiled. (3) He was separated from sinners. (4) He is a merciful High Priest, full of sympathy, knowing how to compassionate and to succour them that are tempted and led out of the way.
II. Note the efficacy and finality of the High Priesthood of Christ. In the poured out blood of Jesus we have all that we can want pardon, acceptance, renewal unto righteousness. We have all we want, and we therefore want no more. His everlasting priesthood is enough for us. That He is in heaven, appearing for us, makes all human mediators vain and needless. That He has offered Himself for us makes all other sacrifices valueless. Every believer, however humble, is a priest unto God; a priest of the tabernacle which God built, and not man, to offer up the sacrifice of thanksgiving, even his body, soul, and spirit, consecrated and devoted to God's service.
H. Alford, Quebec Chapel Sermons,vol. vi., p. 145.
References: Hebrews 3:1. Homilist,3rd series, vol. i., p. 103.Hebrews 3:1-4. J. W. Brown, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxxii., p. 4.
Hebrews 3:1 , etc
I. The High Priest was one taken out of the people, and bound to the people by ties of the closest and most intimate kind. It might have been otherwise. This important official might have been a stranger introduced into the nation from an alien source; or he might, although being a Jew, have occupied a position of such complete independence and isolation as should have placed him almost in antagonism to the rest of the community. Such was the case of the priestly caste in other countries. But with the Jews the Divine method of constructing the ecclesiastical system, secured the most perfect identification of the man who was at the head of it with the feelings and sympathies of the rest of the people. We observe, also, as another result of the Divine arrangement, that all the Israelites, drawn as they were towards a single person, were reckoned before God as being inthe High Priest. The man who stands there in the sanctuary, arrayed in his gorgeous robes, is not to be regarded as a mere individual, is not to be looked upon as merely one out of many, though one above the many, and distinguished from the many, by superior dignity and higher privileges; but he is the head, in whom the whole nation is included, and involved, and gathered, and summed up before God. It was, for instance, as including in himself the entire mass of the nation, that the High Priest on the day of atonement had to enter into the most holy place with the blood of sprinkling, and afterwards to confess the sins and iniquity of the people over the head of a living goat.
II. Now in all this we have a lively and striking portraiture of the position which the Lord Jesus Christ, the great antitype of the Jewish official, occupies with respect to the blessed company of faithful people. The Lord Jesus is the ideal man. If you turn to the Jewish high priest you find that he was what every Jew was intended to be. The Lord Jesus alone possesses complete perfection of human character. But He is very much more to us than the pattern man. He does much more than exhibit to us in His own person what a king and a priest unto God ought to be. He is also, if I may so express myself, the inclusive man; He is the great Head, in whom His people are gathered, and summed up, and presented before God. If St. Paul teaches us anything by his writings, he teaches us this, that the entire spiritual community, the whole body of the faithful in Christ Jesus, are reckoned by God as being gathered and summed up, involved, included, represented in Christ before the throne of God. And this, in its Christian form, is precisely what, in its Jewish form, the Israelite was taught by the existence of such a personage in the state of the Jewish high priest. The ordinary Israelite, if he were a spiritual and a thoughtful man, would look with longing desire upon the unbroken communion which the High Priest, by virtue of his office, maintained with God. So the Spirit of Christ maintained an unbroken communion with His Father in heaven. This characteristic of His earthly life is still more characteristic of His resurrection life, in which He is, in a special manner, the High Priest of our profession.
G. Calthrop, Penny Pulpit,new series, No. 495.
References: Hebrews 3:1-19. Preacher's Monthly,vol. iv., p. 250. Hebrews 3:6-14. H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit,vol. v., p. 378. Hebrews 3:7. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xx., No. 1160; Homilist,2nd series, vol. iii., p. 46.