We have so missed having parents join us for chapel this year! So we thought we would invite the whole community in to experience chapel with us today through a video of the singing and the chapel talk from Hebrews 8:1-6. We sang a couple verses from our hymn of the month “Sing Praise to God Who Reigns Above”, followed by “Give Me Jesus” and “Come Thou Fount”. Then the chapel message shared the main point that “Jesus is the true and final priest of a better covenant.”

Please feel free to put the video on in the background sometime today or tomorrow to share in this chapel moment with our students!

 

 

Here is the script of Mr. Barney’s chapel message:

Introduction on Priests

Today we’re continuing in our series on the book of Hebrews where we’re learning how the heart of the problem is the problem of the heart, and that we need to run the race of faith with endurance and look to Jesus. And in order to encourage us not to fall away, one of our author’s big ideas is that Jesus is our great High Priest. Jesus is the perfect priest or mediator between God and human beings. A mediator is someone who helps two people who are estranged to be reconciled. A mediator heals the relationship between two people by understanding both sides and bringing the two people together again. 

Priests would have been very familiar to people in New Testament times. There were temples to various gods and goddesses in every city, and priests would mediate between gods and men, making sure that people provided the proper offerings and sacrifices and did things the right way for that god so as not to make him or her angry. They thought that the gods made everything in the world run smoothly for you, if you followed the right traditions and priests held a high position in society. Everybody knew that priests were important. In some ways priests were like the scientists and economists of the ancient world; they made sure people could live prosperous and comfortable lives and nothing too bad would happen. And if something bad did happen, like a plague or disease striking the land, then you would check with the priests to see what to do about it, just as we look to our medical and economic professionals for what to do today.

Of course, among Jews it was different because there was only one God and only one temple, or in the wilderness days when Israel just came out of Egypt, one tabernacle: one place where God would dwell with his people to bless them and to receive gifts and offerings from them, and where priests would instruct the people on how to live with God so as to be blessed by him. And there was only one line of priests among the Levites. Among the Jews there was only one right way to do things, and that was the way that God had revealed. This is kind of like today, where a lot of people in our world who aren’t Christians think that everybody can have their own truth or way of living and doing things, and that’s okay as long as nobody hurts anybody else. But when you believe in one true and living God, that doesn’t really make sense. Because if there’s only one true God, there’s only one truth, only one way the world actually is, only one way that actually works to be reconciled to God and live forever with him. 

Well today we’re going to learn that…

Jesus is the true and final priest of a better covenant,

1. Because he ministers in the true holy place of heaven,

2. Where he offered himself once for all as a perfect sacrifice,

3. In order to mediate a new covenant founded on better promises.

 

Hebrews 8:1-6, ESV

Now the point in what we are saying is this: we have such a high priest, one who is seated at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in heaven, a minister in the holy places, in the true tabernacle that the Lord set up, not man. For every high priest is appointed to offer gifts and sacrifices; thus it is necessary for this priest also to have something to offer. Now if he were on earth, he would not be a priest at all, since there are priests who offer gifts according to the law. They serve a copy and shadow of the heavenly things. For when Moses was about to erect the tent, he was instructed by God, saying, “See that you make everything according to the pattern that was shown you on the mountain.” But as it is, he has obtained a ministry that is as much more excellent than the old as the covenant he mediates is better, since it is enacted on better promises.  

 

Jesus is the true and final priest of a better covenant,

1. Because he ministers in the true holy place of heaven,

2. Where he offered himself once for all as a perfect sacrifice,

3. In order to mediate a new covenant founded on better promises.

 

In the chapter before this, the author of Hebrews shared about Melchizedek and argued that Jesus is a high priest in the priestly order of Melchizedek rather than from the levitical priesthood. Like I said before, talking about priests and the right way to do things, like picking a priest, would not have been strange or boring to the first Christians. Everybody knew how important priests were. But for Jewish Christians, the idea of Jesus as a priest might have come as a surprise. We talk about Jesus as Messiah and Lord, as a prophet and a king, but not so often as a priest. Because after all, there’s only one true God, only one temple and only, as far as they knew, one priesthood. And that would be the levitical priesthood, following the descendants of Levi, that we hear so much about in the books of Exodus and Leviticus. That’s why our author needs to explain that in scripture there’s actually another priesthood, in the order of Melchizedek following Psalm 110. Well, I won’t go in detail on that, because Mr. Seibel already shared about Melchizedek last week, and he has a visitor coming in a few weeks to share the second part of ch. 7.

But as our author says, “the point in what we are saying is this”; that is, all this discussion of Melchizedek is meant to show you that “we have a high priest” and that high priest is Jesus. And he’s not just a high priest in a succession of other high priests, he is the true and final high priest of a better covenant. Why?

 

1. Because he ministers in the true holy place of heaven.

 

Now most of us these days don’t know much about holy places, temples and tabernacles. So one of the things you need to understand is that in the ancient world a holy place is meant to represent God’s heavenly dwelling on earth. We could think of it like a special outpost of heaven on earth. When you walked into a temple, it’s like you got transported up to heaven and the whole world was summed up and contained in that space in a special way. 

And so, people wouldn’t have been surprised to hear that there was a throne in heaven, where the Majestic Glory of God was in some sense located, and that surrounding him were the true holy places of heaven, a sanctuary like the tabernacle in the wilderness that Moses had set up following God’s instructions, with outer courts and a holy place for the priests and a most holy place where God’s throne was and where only the high priest could go once a year. That’s what it’s like in heaven, says our author, except that the heavenly tabernacle is the real deal, the true sanctuary, set up by God himself, not by human hands, the perfect and true and eternal dwelling place of God.

This is important because one of the first things you would have wondered about, if you heard that Jesus was a high priest, was where is the sanctuary or temple that he ministered in. Because you know he didn’t serve at the Jerusalem temple during his lifetime. And you know he’s not ministering in any of the pagan temples in your city, whether you lived in Alexandria in Egypt or any of the Greek or Roman cities of mediterranean world. The answer to that question, according to our passage, is that Jesus serves as a priest in heaven, which is after all the true holy place, that every tabernacle and temple is supposed to represent as a shadow or copy. We can see this even in the instruction given to Moses by God, that he was supposed to make the tabernacle according to the pattern shown him on the mountain, implying that there’s a prototype and real place that the pattern of the tabernacle is embodying, is representing in its own way. If Moses doesn’t follow God’s instructions in making the tabernacle, it won’t represent the true holy place of heaven very well. 

So, Jesus can be the true priest of a better covenant, because he ministers in the true sanctuary of heaven. But what does he do there as priest, you might ask? Well, we get an answer to that in verse three, where it says that “every high priest is appointed to offer gifts and sacrifices; thus it is necessary for this priest also to have something to offer.” What gifts or sacrifices does Jesus offer? In the previous chapter our author concluded that because Jesus is in the order of Melchizedek, rather than Levi, and because he is perfect and lives forever, “he has no need, like those [levitical] high priests, to offer sacrifices daily, first for his own sins and then for those of the people, since he did this once for all when he offered up himself.” (7:27)

So, that’s where we get our second point:

 

Jesus is the true and final priest of a better covenant,

1. Because he ministers in the true holy place of heaven,

2. Where he offered himself once for all as a perfect sacrifice,

 

I don’t imagine that it’s a shock to you to hear of Jesus offering himself as a sacrifice. But just think about what this means. Jesus is both the priest or mediator between God and human beings, and he’s also the sacrifice that heals the bond of relationship between us. If you’re looking for healing from the disease of sin, if you have been estranged from God, if you don’t know the way to live so that God can dwell with you and give you life, Jesus provides the answer. He offered himself once for all at the climax of history by dying on the cross for our sins. In doing so he offered the perfect and true sacrifice in the heavenly sanctuary that mediates between God and human beings and heals our relationship. 

And you know, even though it doesn’t always look like it right now in this in-between time, it’s through Jesus’ priestly sacrifice that we can find true and lasting life, and health, and abundance, and peace. All the problems of the world, that human beings have been trying to solve through their own methods, whether the pagan priests and sacrifices of old or the scientific and economic know-how of today, all those problems are ultimately and finally resolved in Jesus. No other priest or sacrifice, no scientific method or economic policy or invention of technology can solve the human problem: sin. The root of the problem goes too deep. As Mr. Seibel has said, the heart of the problem is the problem of the heart. How do you solve that problem? Only by Jesus’ sacrifice.

 

Jesus is the true and final priest of a better covenant,

1. Because he ministers in the true holy place of heaven,

2. Where he offered himself once for all as a perfect sacrifice,

3. In order to mediate a new covenant founded on better promises.

 

Jesus’ priestly ministry doesn’t just solve our problem of sin and guilt and leave us there. Jesus’ priestly ministry also enacts a new covenant that is founded on better promises. Next week Mr. Seibel is going to walk us through the next passage that talks more about this new covenant that was prophesied in long before by the prophet Jeremiah, so I don’t want to steal his thunder, but what our passage does say is that this new covenant is founded on better promises. You may know that the old covenant that God made with the people of Israel was founded on the promises that he gave to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, promises to give them a land and people as numerous as the stars of the sky, and to bless them and make them a blessing to the whole world. It also included that he would give them the law and a priesthood and a sacrificial system, so that they could know how God wanted them to live in the land He had given them. But if they broke his covenant by rejecting his law and not following his instructions, there would be consequences. Of course, if you know the story of the Bible, then you know that that’s exactly what happened, Israel broke the covenant, proving that the problem wasn’t just that people didn’t know what they ought to do, but that their hearts were sinful and evil. It wasn’t just a lack of information about how to live. They didn’t want to live the right way.

Well, the new covenant made through Jesus has better promises, because Jesus’ sacrifice can actually take away our sin, so that we have God’s law written on our heart and the problem of the heart gets solved, so that we actually want to live the right way. This I think is the most important big picture application for this text to our lives right now. Where is your heart at? Do you have this new covenant heart? Do you want to obey God and live the right way? Or are you still trying to solve your problems your own way? Do you realize that the biggest problem you have is the problem of your heart? Only Jesus, the truth and final priest, can solve the problem of your heart by offering the perfect sacrifice in order to bring you back to God and give you a new heart. And if you get that, everything else in life will come right in the end.