Fr. Stephen De Young: So verse four, “Now consider how great this man was, to whom even the patriarch Abraham gave a tenth of the spoils.” So he’s saying this means he was greater than Abraham. Because Abraham tithed to him; he didn’t tithe to Abraham. And this is keeping with this theme we’ve seen so far in Hebrews. How Christ is greater than the angels; Christ is greater than Moses. Melchizedek, which is the priesthood we’re going to say Christ has, is greater than Abraham also, who is the father of all who believe, right? He’s the father of the faithful.

Verse five, “And indeed those who are of the sons of Levi, who receive the priesthood, have a commandment to receive tithes from the people according to the law, that is, from their brethren, though they have come from the loins of Abraham.” So the people pay their tithes to the priests. That’s who receives the tithes. Sons of Levi, the Levitical priesthood, sons of Aaron. Why was that? Well, because the Levites were the tribe that was given no land. When the land allotments were given out, the Levites got no land because their inheritance was not a piece of land but was God himself. And so the idea was that they would live from the other tribes who did have land, would work the land, work their ancestral land, and they would give a tenth. And that would go and that would support the Levites so that they could be about their priestly work. And this is brought over right into Christianity. We’ve seen St. Paul talking about how those who have roles of leadership of the church should have their expenses paid for so they’re free to carry out that work by the people who tithe to the church. So he’s saying the Levites received tithes from the people. But they’re from the loins of Abraham. They’re descendants of Abraham, meaning Abraham’s greater than them, than these Levites who received tithes. Because as you pointed out, Abraham tithed to Melchizedek.

Verse six, “but he whose genealogy is not derived from them received tithes from Abraham and blessed him who had the promises.” So Melchizedek is not descended from the Levites, obviously. [Laughter] Levi was not born yet. And so he’s receiving tithes from Abraham. And as he points out here, Abraham, remember, is the one who received all the promises from God. All the promises of salvation, all the promises of blessings, all the promises of everything were received first by Abraham. He’s as great as you can kind of get among humans, if you’re a first century Jewish person. You don’t get higher than Abraham. That’s why Abraham’s appealed to all the time. They say to Christ, “We know who our father is. Our father is Abraham.” That’s it. He’s the peak. And St. Paul’s here pointing out, “Yeah, but he tithed to Melchizedek.”

Verse seven, “Now beyond all contradiction the lesser is blessed by the better.” It should be greater, but the lesser is blessed by the greater. I don’t bless the bishop. The bishop blesses me. So this is how it works. You don’t normal— in normal circumstances, you shouldn’t have the poor giving to the rich. It should work the other way. You don’t have an elderly established person being mentored by somebody fresh out of school. It goes the other way. So that’s why St. Paul says this is beyond all contradiction. This is the way it works.

Verse eight, “Here mortal men receive tithes”—the Levites—“but there he receives them of whom it is witnessed that he lives.” So what’s he saying there? This is one of the ways he’s greater. The Levites, all of them, live a certain number of years. They get to be 30 years old. They start serving in the priesthood. Then they die at some point. That’s the end of their priesthood. Those are just saying: this Melchizedek priesthood doesn’t have this beginning and ending. It’s just all life, eternal life. And of course he’s pointing ultimately to Christ as the one who lives here. But so he’s saying here: we have these mortal men. They receive tithes from other people, but here we have this one who lives. So he’s greater. Another way he’s greater.

Verse nine, “Even Levi who receives tithes”—so Levi himself receives tithes—“paid tithes through Abraham, so to speak, for he was still in the loins of his father when Melchizedek met him.” So Levi, by definition—it’s actually his great-grandfather—but his great-grandfather is greater than him, and so Melchizedek has to be greater than Levi himself, let alone the Levites, the descendants down later.

Verse eleven, “Therefore, if perfection were through the Levitical priesthood (for under it the people received the law)”—the Torah—“what further need was there that another priest should rise according to the order of Melchizedek, and not be called according to the order of Aaron?” So he’s saying, if the Torah is it, if the Torah is the end all and be all, if this was the final thing that we’re just supposed to follow forever until the end of days, this first covenant—there’s no other new covenant, there’s no new covenant like he talked about earlier in Hebrews. This is just it. Then why doesn’t Psalm 110 say, “I’ve made you a priest according to the order of Aaron?” Or Levi or Zadok. Why would there be this other priesthood that the Messiah would hold? That is, as he says, disconnected from Aaron’s priesthood. It’s a different thing. It’s not related in any way. Aaron’s priesthood is not derived from it. It’s not derived from Aaron’s. So he’s saying Psalm 110, by prophesying this about the Messiah, points that there is some greater priesthood than the priesthood of Aaron. Which means that Aaron’s priesthood can’t be it. Which means the Torah can’t be it. Because it was under that priesthood that they received the Torah. As he says, there’s got to, again, be this new covenant, which requires a new priesthood. And this priesthood is now, he’s talking, is possessed by the Messiah according to Psalm 110. This is what he’s preaching, according to Psalm 110. Christ’s priesthood is a true high priesthood. It supersedes the priesthood of the old covenant.

Verse 12. “For the priesthood being changed, of necessity there is also a change of the law”—of the Torah. “For He of whom these things are spoken belongs to another tribe, from which no man has officiated at the altar.” I’ll read the next verse. “For it is evident that our Lord arose from Judah, of which tribe Moses spoke nothing concerning priesthood.” So first, the priesthood being changed, this says there’s also change of the Torah. What does he mean by that? Well, the Torah was explicit: only the Levites are allowed to serve in the priesthood. Notice he refers to Christ as our Lord. Remember verse one of Psalm 110: “The Lord said to my Lord.” So the Lord, the Messiah, is from the tribe of Judah, even if they didn’t want to accept Jesus as the Messiah. St. Paul’s making this argument from the Torah. We won’t name him here, but the Lord, Messiah, the Christ, comes from the tribe of Judah. So if he’s going to be a priest according to Psalm 110, he can’t be a priest according to the Torah. People from the tribe of Judah are not allowed to serve as priests.

Interlocutor 1: He’s talking here not about… Well, he is talking about Christ. But in terms of his argument, he is talking about the fact that the Messiah, being a son of David, is from Judah, and not from Levi.

Fr. Stephen De Young: Yes. So this figure being talked about in Psalm 110 verse one is the Messiah, meaning he’s from the tribe of Judah. It’s the son of David. That means he can’t be a priest under the Torah. So again, this is another argument of—there’s now something greater than the Torah. There’s now this new covenant, like he was talking about with Moses, where he’s talking about Christ being greater than Moses. But he’s making this argument from the Torah and from Psalm 110. So he’s saying, if you read the Torah and you read Psalm 110, you have to accept what I’m saying. Doesn’t work otherwise.

Verse fifteen, “And it is yet far more evident if, in the likeness of Melchizedek, there arises another priest who has come, not according to the law of a fleshly commandment, but according to the power of an endless life.” So it’s far more evident if. So he’s saying, this is demonstrated if another comes. He’s not now again saying, “Well, look, Jesus did this. Therefore you have to believe it.” The other he’s talking about is the one prophesied in Psalm 110. So if Psalm 110 is saying this other person is going to come in the likeness of Melchizedek—this person like Melchizedek is going to come, we’re in Psalm 110—that makes it pretty evident that what he just said is true. That this priest is not going to be of the tribe of Aaron. Therefore something has changed vis-a-vis the Torah, in terms of its ultimacy.

And the reason he calls the commandment fleshly is why? This isn’t fleshly like sinful. This is fleshly like, as St. Paul has said before, Israel according to the flesh. Christ is descended from David according to the flesh. That’s a way of saying “by genealogy.” So this person isn’t a priest by genealogy, by being in this line of Aaron. But this priest, this figure, is a priest by being in the likeness of Melchizedek, meaning that they have this life and this priesthood that is unending. That’s one of the characteristics. And those are incompatible. If you have your priesthood by genealogy, by definition, it has a beginning and an end. Because it’s by descent. So those two are incompatible.

For seventeen, “For he testifies, ‘You are a priest forever, according to the order of Melchizedek.’” Here he’s pointing out that word “forever.” olam [עוֹלָם], in eternity. Which you can’t say about the Aaronic—even Aaron didn’t have it eternally. It started at a certain point. He died and passed on the high priesthood to his son, Eleazar. Who passed it on to his son, Phinehas.

Verse eighteen, “For on the one hand there is an annulling of the former commandment because of its weakness and unprofitableness, for the law made nothing perfect; on the other hand, there is the bringing in of a better hope, through which we draw near to God.” So on the one hand, the former commandment, the former way of determining the priesthood… The reason we move on from that is because it was weak and it was unprofitable. The weakness, what’s the weakness? Well, it’s humans based on linear descent, and they were corrupt and wicked. And then the unprofitableness is because, nineteen, it’s unprofitable because the law made nothing perfect. It brought nothing to completion. It was just this maintenance, this constant maintenance. But it never actually fixed the problem of sin. And that’s what’s being pointed out. On the other hand, there’s bringing in of a better hope now, through which we draw near to God. And that was—the whole aim of the Torah was to allow God to dwell with his people and people to safely draw near to God. Because sin was taken care of. But it only did that weakly. And it never did that perfectly because there was this constant cycle of sacrifices and Day of Atonement every year and all these things. But now we have this better hope where we can draw near to God permanently. Without this constant need.

Verse twenty. “And inasmuch as He was not made priest without an oath (for they have become priests without an oath, but He with an oath by Him who said to Him: ‘The LORD has sworn and will not relent, ‘You are a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek’‘).” That is from again, Psalm 110. So he’s reiterating again, that the oath is: the Lord has sworn, Yahweh has sworn, and will not relent, will not take it back. Meaning there’s not some turning— And he’s saying Aaron and those priests were not made priests with an oath. [Laughter] God did not take an oath and say “Aaron, you will be a priest forever.” He didn’t even say your priesthood will last forever. Remember, God did say that to David, that “your throne will be before me forever.” He never said the Aaronic priesthood was forever. That’s what he’s pointing out here. Whereas God does swear this oath, like the oath he swore to them about the Messiah, about the priesthood of the Messiah. That not just his reign as king, but also his priesthood, would be forever.

“By so much more, Jesus has become a surety of a better covenant.” So him now fulfilling this role as the Messiah and high priest is the initiation of this new covenant. The Torah was the old, the previous one, the old one. And now we have a new one under Christ, which is not throwing away the old one, but it’s bringing the old one to fulfillment. Filling it up to overflowing. All the things that it did are now done perfectly, and are all done once and for all. It’s not doing something different, but it’s doing it more, better, perfectly, completely.

Verse twenty-three. “Also there were many priests, because they were prevented by death from continuing.” I’d like to continue to be the high priest, but I’m dead. [Laughter] So they weren’t able to keep doing it forever.

Verse twenty-four. “But He, because He continues forever, has an unchangeable priesthood.” That’s obviously better. That’s better. A better priesthood.

“Therefore He is also able to save to the uttermost those who come to God through Him, since He always lives to make intercession for them.” So if you draw close to God through Christ, that’s permanent forever, as he was saying before, because you’re not doing it through the means of the rituals performed by a particular priest who’s going to have to keep performing them over and over again, and is eventually going to die and have to be replaced by someone else. So that’s another way Christ is better. Because he does it forever, always, when he is the one through whom you draw close to God.

Verse twenty-six, “For such a High Priest was fitting for us, who is holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners, and has become higher than the heavens.” So these are all things that characterize him. When it says fitting for us, that’s not saying, because we’re so great. That’s again, not a super great, it’s more was necessary for. This is what we really need. If this is going to be complete and perfect and really work and not just be a constant maintenance, this is the kind of high priest we need. Not a fallible sinful human who’s going to die and be replaced. But we need someone who is holy and harmless and undefiled and separate from sinners, who has become higher than the heavens.

Verse twenty-seven, “who does not need daily, as those high priests, to offer up sacrifices, first for His own sins and then for the people’s, for this He did once for all when He offered up Himself.” There’s two pieces there where it’s superior. Number one, all the human priests. I’m a human priest. I’m a sinner. When I offer the Eucharist, I offer the Eucharist for my own sins. As well as everyone else’s. In fact, I pray a prayer during it where I ask God not to withhold his grace from the rest of you because of how wicked I am. Which he would certainly be entitled to do, if he wanted to. But Christ doesn’t need to do that because Christ has no sins of his own. He doesn’t have to offer any sins that he sacrificed for himself. But also, he doesn’t have to, every day, offer sacrifices for us because he’s already offered up himself. So it’s not just that he is the perfect high priest who brings the whole concept of high priesthood to fulfillment, to filled with overflowing to completion. But his sacrifice brings sacrifice to its completion. Because he offered his whole self to the Father. And he’s God. He’s God. So there’s no other sacrifice now necessary.

Verse twenty-eight, “For the law appoints as high priests men who have weakness, but the word of the oath, which came after the law, appoints the Son who has been perfected forever.” So the law, the Torah, appoints as high priest humans like us who are weak and fail and sin. But the word of the oath, the oath he just quoted from Psalm 110 makes the Son the high priest, who has been perfected forever, who has been perfected in eternity is what it literally says. Because once again, St. Paul’s being very clear, as he was back in chapter one, Christ didn’t come into being either. Eternal means both are— This is who he is. He is unchanging. He always is, who is the high priest. Yessir?

Interlocutor Two:  I have two questions, each of which is a can of worms.

Fr. Stephen De Young: Okay. Open said cans.

Interlocutor Two: Okay. The first and smaller can is—you can answer both after that. So the first smaller can is how can anybody read this and understand what it means without the introduction you gave. I’ve read it. And it doesn’t make much sense. You can follow it. It’s not illogical. But you don’t get it. So we’re stuck here with the Bible. It’s important and we in [21st] century America have limited access to it. Number two, seems like we’re in some situation. This is really difficult [inaudible] similar to the Torah. We have a human priest. We have the Eucharist. We have confession. We do this maintenance system to get us past our sins. So, what do you say to that?

Fr. Stephen De Young: Okay. So the first part is not too much of a can of worms, but we as people in the United States have all been raised to some extent, Puritan Protestant. And one of the teachings of Protestantism is the perspicuity of Scripture, meaning anyone can pick it up and read it and get the gist. That has never been the teaching of the Church.

Interlocutor Two: You’re right.

Fr. Stephen De Young: And in fact, the Scriptures themselves kind of teach the opposite. Like I’m thinking of St. Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch. Where the Ethiopian eunuch is reading the Isaiah scroll. And St. Philip asks him, “Do you understand what you’re reading?” He says, “how can I unless someone explains it to me?” So at bare minimum, there are parts of Scripture that are very difficult.

Interlocutor Two: No doubt.

Fr. Stephen De Young: And that the average person can’t just pick up and read, right? In or out of translation, right? And whereas we’re going to see when we get there, St. Peter says that about St. Paul’s epistles. He says in them, “there are many things that are hard to understand.” You know, he says that “ignorant men twist them to their own destruction because of that.” If St. Peter had trouble, who knew Christ better than anybody, we might sometimes find it tricky too, right? [Laughter] So to understand what St. Paul’s doing.

Interlocutor Two: So the solution is the Church helps us through this?

Fr. Stephen De Young: Yes. This is one of the reasons why sola scriptura, as much as you may want to believe in it, it doesn’t work. It just doesn’t, it doesn’t work. Because we need to be taught to understand the Scriptures, right? And St. Paul, as we just saw a bunch of examples, when he’s reading the Scriptures for him, the preceding Scriptures, he interprets them using this wealth of tradition from the other people who have read them over the previous centuries and come to understand them. He doesn’t say “Ignore all that stuff. All that stuff’s rubbish. That’s not in the canonical text. I need to just read the canonical text, and it’ll be apparent what it means.” He never does that. In fact, he’s doing this really careful close argument with other people who really understand the Torah and solve what’s said about exactly what it says and what that means. So he clearly doesn’t think it’s just easy to read it on the face and be like, “oh, okay.” Casual read. And so, that’s the reason why there is the Protestant teaching of the perspicuity of Scripture: it’s required by sola scriptura.

Now, we would agree on the other side. We would agree that a person, you know, the most simple, uneducated, illiterate person who’s ever lived could hear the Gospel read, Gospelss read in the liturgy, although we have homilies too. Homily means to say the same thing. So ideally, that’s what it’s for: explaining what we just read. So even that implies that there’s… I’ve never been to a Protestant church where they just stand up and read the Scripture and sit down and don’t preach it [sarcastically] because it doesn’t need to be explained. But that simple, illiterate, complete person can come to the liturgy, hear the Scriptures, participate in the liturgy, receive the Eucharist, and have everything they need to find salvation in Christ. They don’t have to know any of the stuff I just went through to find salvation in life.

Interlocutor One: You mean you can find salvation without thoroughly understanding chapter seven of Hebrews?

Fr. Stephen De Young: Yes, it is. Believe it or not. Believe it or not. Again, we’re influenced by Western theology, where salvation is all about having your theology worked out intellectually in your head and having the right opinions and believing the right things. But if it’s about how you live your life, you could have never cracked open the book of Hebrews in your life and never even heard it read and still live the life in Christ far better than I do, having spent a ludicrous amount of money studying this stuff. So those two aren’t necessarily the same thing. So that’s first worm can done.

Interlocutor Two: My Protestant upbringing again.

Fr. Stephen De Young: Well, most of us here are stuck with it. A couple lucky folks. [Laughter] So the second worm can is about how our situation is different from theirs. It’s hard to… How do I want to put it? You know, we want like—okay, well, I have the Holy Spirit and the average Israelite, unless they were like a king or a prophet or something, didn’t. How is that experientially different? That’s a tough question to answer. Especially because it would have to be some kind of qualitative difference, not a quantitative difference. I can’t be like, “my prayers are 50% more effective.” There’s no way to quantify it. We weren’t living in that time to know the difference. I suppose the Apostles and the first Christians, when they received the Holy Spirit, there was—and we see these things, and when we went through the book of Acts, the Acts of the Apostles, we saw these sort of big displays of the difference when that, what happened. You know, the kind of transformation that happened there. Whereas we’re able to sort of take it for granted. I mean, we haven’t—I suppose somewhere there’s a convert to Orthodox Christianity from like really Orthodox Judaism who could tell us more about that. About what it’s like to really try to keep all the commandments of the Torah. Go through all the mildew cleansing and all the, you know, and go through all that, and then experience receiving the Holy Spirit and the life of the Church. And how that’s different. I haven’t had that personal experience.

Interlocutor One: I’ve known a couple of Jews who became Christian, and they’ve been excited about it.

Fr. Stephen De Young: So they would have that, the actual experience of that move. But we haven’t been, like—here’s another example, just a practical example. The religious life of someone in ancient Israel was maybe once a year, maybe less, they would make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem with an animal, they’d afford to bring one or they’re going too far, they’d bring some money and buy one there, which they would turn over to the priests, if they were male, and the head of the household, they would get to go into the outer courts surrounding the temple, surrounding the tabernacle, long enough to hand over the animal to the priest. That was their worship life. Later on, they got the synagogues where they would go and sing a couple of Psalms, read a couple passages of scripture, and have various people talk about what they thought about it.

Interlocutor One: A Protestant service.

Fr. Stephen De Young: [Laughter] Yeah. Mixed with the discussion group, like a Bible study discussion group. They would have that weekly, a little more of a worship life. But the only people who could even go into the temple were the priests during their appointed times. Whereas we, not just on Sundays, but every time we have a service, walk into the holy place. And the high priest would go behind the veil into the Most Holy Place one day a year through the Day of Atonement ritual. They started tying a rope to him with bells on it, so in case he dropped dead, they could drag him out, because they couldn’t go back in there to rescue him, or get the body out, without being struck dead [themselves]. And when he went back there, he had to throw up this huge cloud of incense, because God was going to appear there, and if he saw him, he’d die. And all these rituals had to be done exactly so, or people would die, compared to us now going and gathering for worship and celebrating the liturgy. Like, we haven’t experienced that difference, but that’s a big difference, right?

Interlocutor One: Well, we are in the presence of an actual miracle in the Eucharist. Every Sunday, which is…

Fr. Stephen De Young: Not just cooking some goat kidneys.

Interlocutor One: Yeah, I mean, I’m sitting in the back of the choir singing, you know, and worried about the next thing, and I said, “Oh, wait, yes, that’s why I’m in the presence of a miracle, aren’t I?”

A bishop, I know, got a call from one of his priests that they thought one of the icons was weeping oil. And he was all excited, “What do we do? What do we do? Is there a process? What do we do?” You know, he’s all… And Bishop said to him, “You know, you’re so excited.” He said, “You know, every Sunday, bread and wine, right in front of you on the altar, become the body and blood of Christ. You’ve never called me. You’ve never gotten excited. But now there’s a little bit of oil dripping off an icon and you’re all worked up.” [Laughter] So which is the greater miracle?

Like, and see—we’re sort of spoiled. People complain that they can’t go behind the iconostasis. Whatever they want.But the old covenant, you wouldn’t have even been in the building. This would be like if I told you, okay, we’re going to do old covenant services from now on. So once a week, the male head of the household could come and meet me in the parking lot and hand me some bread. And I’ll disappear back into the church, and I’ll do some stuff, and I’ll come back and give you a few pieces of bread to take home to your family. That’s your new worship life. I think you’d call the bishop pretty fast, wanting a new priest. Say that, tell him that I’ve gone crazy. But that’s comparable. And if you complained about it and said, we want more worship life, I’d be like, I’d go to somebody’s house and read the Bible and talk about it. Sing a couple of Psalms while you’re at it. Not satisfactory to us. [Laughter]

So yeah, there are these huge differences. It’s just we haven’t experienced them. So we haven’t come out of one and gone into the other. And St. Paul’s talking to a group that has come out of one and gone into the other. Or that he wants to come out of one and go into the other. Depending on the person. So does that empty that proverbial worm can? At least partially.

Interlocutor Two: I didn’t think we were stuck in the second place.

Fr. Stephen De Young: Yeah, you said you were playing devil’s advocate.

Interlocutor Two: I wanted to hear a further elaboration on that.

Fr. Stephen De Young: Right. And the key thing I think is what’s back in seven verse nineteen, “for the Torah made nothing perfect. On the other hand, there’s the bringing in of a better hope through which we draw near to God.” I think that hope, it doesn’t say, but now we’re made perfect. Sorry, Calvinists. There, I got one in. Mark your bingo cards. It doesn’t say “now we’re made perfect.” It says “now we have the hope.” Now we have the hope that in Christ we can become saints. Doesn’t mean all of us will. But we can. Under the Torah, that was impossible. Torah can’t make you perfect.

Interlocutor One: Torah doesn’t even—

Fr. Stephen De Young: Try? [Laughter]

Interlocutor One: Yeah. It doesn’t. There’s no promise element in it. Some modern forms of Judaism have imported an idea of immortality, but strictly speaking, there’s no promise except you’re going to get the land of Palestine.

Fr. Stephen De Young: For a while. And things will go well with you until you die. So I think that is the core of it. So yes, my life is not now perfect. I still struggle with sin. I still have to repent. I still have to be forgiven. But now there’s a hope. Now there’s the Holy Spirit, which means there’s the fruit of the Spirit. Now there’s actual transformation because in Christ, humanity has been united to God and has been transformed. So there’s now this ability to draw near to God. There’s this hope. There’s this path before me that wasn’t there, open before me before.

Interlocutor Two: Differences are pretty big.

Fr. Stephen De Young: This is a good point, I think, to leave off because I don’t think we’re going to get through chapter eight. Okay. Time-wise everything is good. So thank you, everybody. Thank you.