A KINGDOM OF PRIESTS

A KINGDOM OF PRIESTS
Harry Foster

THE priesthood of all believers is a Scriptural truth. What does it mean? And what are its implications? Since it is only made possible by a vital, faith association with Jesus Christ, we must first enquire what priesthood means to Him. We have to consult the letter to the Hebrews for this, and there we are told that there are two orders of priesthood, that of Aaron and that of Melchizedek. Christ fulfils both of these orders. The high priesthood according to Aaron was completed with finality when He was both priest and sacrifice, offering Himself to God and so securing perfect and eternal acceptance for believing sinners. We can have no share with Him in this Aaronic priesthood. It follows, then, that our participation must be in association with Him as a priest "after the order of Melchizedek". The essence of the Melchizedek priesthood was that it derived, "not by virtue of a commandment imposed from outside, but from the power of indestructible life within" (Hebrews 7:16 Phillips).

The question arises, Is this indestructible life also working in us? The answer is that by the infinite grace of God, it is. The further question follows, Is the priesthood of the believer meant to be a sharing with Christ of His king-priest Melchizedek service to God and men? I suggest that it is. That this is what is meant by the "kingdom of priests" produced by redemption through the blood of Jesus. I even venture humbly to express my opinion that this was what the writer of the epistle found difficult to explain to his readers because of their spiritual superficiality (5:11). We dare not claim to be better than they, but if by God's grace we can receive some 'solid food', it will relate -- I think -- not only to the significance of Christ as our Melchizedek high priest, but also to our calling in Him to a priesthood which is eternally valid. It is a striking feature of Melchizedek that he had neither beginning nor end. His was an eternal priesthood. If sin had never existed, men would still have needed a priest; not Aaronic, not to provide propitiatory sacrifices, but to mediate lovingly between them and God. When sin, death and the curse are banished from God's redeemed universe, men will still need a mediatorial priesthood and will find that God has provided one -- the eternal 'better' priesthood of Melchizedek. The great difference, however, between past eternity and the future is that by means of the cross Christ has gathered a redeemed people into fellowship with Himself. He is Melchizedek, the great King-Priest, but we are to share His destiny, to reign with Him and minister with Him, a whole kingdom of priests. The Bible finishes on this note, presenting the Church as a city-temple at the centre of God's universe, a glorious community which receives earth's glory of behalf of God and ministers it to Him; and is filled with His radiance in order to illuminate the nations of the new earth. This is to be our vocation. And for this we need spiritual preparation.

Another significant feature about our great King-Priest is that His helpfulness to others is based on the background of His life of suffering. Even the Son of God needed to qualify for His priestly task. Sometimes we are aware of how He is helping us, and we are grateful for His loving concern. At others we are ministered to without knowing how. But in both cases what Christ does for us is based on what He is, and this is closely associated with what He suffered. It is not that He asks us to consider His trials and equate or compare them with our own, but rather that His sufferings have given Him the character of one who can understandingly help people. There can be no doubt about this. The Hebrew letter, which stresses the importance of His priestly ministry, abounds in reminders of what He had to endure in order that He might be fitted for this ministry. I could devote this article to a consideration of our beloved Melchizedek, with encouragements to make full use of His loving, priestly help, but this might still leave us all on a milk diet. God's wish for us is that we may grow spiritually by taking 'solid food' and, as I have already said, this involves a divine call for us actually to share in Christ's priestly work, not in an Aaronic sense but in a Melchizedek ministry.

This is our calling. This is our present privilege and our future destiny. But it can never be a matter merely of names or titles: it must be the outcome of a life with God and of capacitating suffering. In addition to our personal need of disciplining, there are sorrows and sufferings which are specifically aimed at equipping us for priestly service. This was true of Christ, and it was clearly evident in some of His chosen servants -- Stephen,[21/22] Paul, Peter and John. Take John, the one who saw and communicated to us the vision of the Church's eternal destiny as reigning priests. We have a few glimpses of him at the beginning of the Acts, but otherwise we have no information at all about his long and arduous life. We know that he suffered; we realise that even as an old man he had to endure hardship for Christ's sake in the isle of Patmos. What was it all for? The answer surely is that this was what qualified him to exercise his priestly ministry to the churches of Asia and to us all. He started off his great revelation with the personal introduction: "I, John, your brother and companion in distress ...". That is what men need -- a brother and a companion in distress. John was a true priest.

The Old Testament gives us other striking examples of the relation between suffering and priesthood. We have Abraham and Job and many more. We may argue that we are not great apostles like John nor great historical characters like Job. We are very little people and faulty at that. For this reason I call your attention to a man with whom we all feel much more at home -- Jacob. Somehow every Christian feels a kinship with the patriarch Jacob. We are ready to identify ourselves with him and his experiences. His characteristics seem so to tally with our own that we always find help and comfort from his story. He was such a failure in himself; and so are we. But he was truly loved and chosen by grace; and so, thank God, are we. Thirdly he was a man who, in spite of everything, truly wanted God's best; and this should be our spirit also.

Jacob certainly attained to priesthood. In fact this seems to be the one salient achievement of his life, pin-pointed in this same letter to the Hebrews: "By faith Jacob ... blessed the two sons of Joseph, and worshipped, leaning on the top of his staff" (11:21). This is surely the priestly function, to offer worship to God, and to convey God's blessing to others. Even as Jacob did this, though, he gave every evidence that he was a broken man, who had to lean heavily on his crutch. Indeed it was this brokenness which fitted him for his ministry. Seventeen years before his death he had been taken into the presence of Pharaoh, the greatest world ruler of that time, and had there also acted in a priestly way. He blessed Pharaoh! He, the lame old failure of a man who could only describe his life in the words: "... few and evil have the days of the years of my life been, and have not attained ..." (Genesis 47:9). But the record goes to repeat the marvel of this priestly visit to the Egyptian monarch: "And Jacob blessed Pharaoh". Jacob shows what God can do with any of us, if we put ourselves in His hands. It may seem fantastic to expect that we can ever be reigning priests. It may seem even more absurd to think that even now we can exercise such a ministry. Yet the heavenly praise concerning God's redeemed, priestly people terminates with the words: "And they reign upon earth" (Revelation 5:10 R.V.). This is what we are meant to do, now and for ever. Can we learn from Jacob how to qualify for such king-priest service? We will try to do so by considering four great landmarks in his life. On each one of these occasions he erected a pillar -- a visible evidence of a spiritual experience. The very fact that there were four may give a hint that these truths are universal. They apply to us all.

Pillar 1
We read of the first crisis in Genesis 28:18. This first pillar marked Jacob's realisation that he was a related man, and by that I mean not only related to God, but to all God's people. At a time of deep personal need Jacob was visited by God in a dream, and was shown what he called Bethel -- the house of God. Now he did not see an actual house, but only a ladder of communication between earth and heaven, but he suddenly became aware of the fact that he was not a lone traveller, an isolated individual, but had, by God's grace, become a member of the divine household. The Head of the house was God Himself, the extent of the house the whole earth ("to the west and to the east, and to the north, and to the south"), and the time range also infinitely great. This house is spiritual, but it is real, and what is more, it is holy, so much so that Jacob was afraid and called it dreadful. Now exactly what it meant to Jacob we do not know. Bethel became a central feature of his life, and God pledged Himself to see to it that Jacob came safely back to it. What we do know is that the spiritual fulfilment in Christ is the spiritual house in which we, by grace, have a part. It is ruled by God from heaven. It is found everywhere on earth where two or three are gathered together into the name of the Lord Jesus, and it has reached over the centuries past and is timeless in its range. Jacob was not asked to build a house for God. He exclaimed "This is the house of God". He had found it. He was in it. His business was to learn how to behave himself in it, and this is our [22/23] business too. Jacob had to allow God to discipline his life in accordance with his holy association so that he could bring his tithe -- his whole tithe -- into it.

A place in the household of God is a matter of grace and not of moral or spiritual attainment. It was at the beginning of his career, when he was an empty and discredited man, that God broke into his life with this revelation. Jacob only dimly realised the tremendous significance of this relationship, but he made a positive committal of himself to God by raising his stone pillar, the first of the four. From then on, God dealt with him in discipline as a potential member of His house. How about us? "We are members of this household if we maintain our trust and joyful hope steadfast to the end" (Hebrews 3:6. Phillips). It is always costly to maintain fellowship with God and with His people, to have our personal faults and weaknesses exposed by the friction and discipline of dwelling together in unity. Just as Jacob was glad to get away from Bethel (it was a dreadful place to him), so we are always tending to run away from the tests and even humiliations of keeping a right spirit with our fellow Christians. But God brought Jacob back to Bethel, and He will do the same with us, for it is a basic condition for king-priests that they shall be in right relationship with all other members of God's household. We may argue that we would do this if only our fellow believers were transformed men. The truth is that we are the ones who must be transformed. God must change us from Jacob to Israel. And that is precisely what He will work on, if we will accept the fact that we are related men.

Pillar 2
This second pillar marked Jacob as a separated man. After twenty years of gruelling discipline he erected his second pillar (Genesis 31:45). This was done in his final break with Laban, and was really an outward symbol of that break. Laban would never pass that pillar into Jacob's territory and, what was more important, Jacob would never again return to Haran, the land of mixture. For Laban's house did not typify the world in its starkest sense. That had been abandoned long ago at Ur of the Chaldees. Haran was the halfway house, the place where God's name was invoked but His will disobeyed. Jacob had lived there for a long time and he had had enough of it -- more than enough! It was a relief to him when God broke into that half and half life, with its mixture of gains and losses, joys and disappointments, saying: "I am the God of Bethel, where thou anointedst the pillar and where thou vowedst a vow unto me: now arise ... and return ..." (Genesis 31:13). It was not easy to break away -- it never is -- and Laban pursued and finally caught up with him. But Jacob would not go back. Laban's God might be the God of Abraham, but He was also the God of Nahor (the halfway man), whereas Jacob was pledged to the one who was not only the God of Abraham but "the fear of Isaac". So they parted, and Jacob erected his stone pillar which was accepted by Laban. They said goodbye to each other, the one to return to his one-foot-in-the-world, religious mixture, the other to move back to the house of God.

So chapter 32 opens with the statement: "And Jacob went on his way, and the angels of God met him". It is always so. This kind of separation is not merely negative, a moving away from mixture, but a positive separation unto the will of God, and as such will receive heaven's approval. When Jesus had repudiated the world, the angels ministered to Him in the wilderness (Mark 1:13). When, in the garden of Gethsemane, He was able to set aside His own will and choose the will of God, "There appeared unto him an angel from heaven, strengthening him" (Luke 22:42-43). Heaven is always on our side when we come clearly out on God's side. The separated man is the only really happy man.

This whole subject of separation is a difficult one and it is often misunderstood. If it is only outward, it is pharisaical and detestable to God. The crux of true separation is its inner loyalty to God. What happened to Jacob was inward; he was disillusioned with the life of compromise and eager to get back on to the ground of a life governed be the mind of God. He had not even meant to give outward expression to separation; he had not planned to build the second pillar; this action was forced on him. Not that he was, in fact, a wholly separated man for, in addition to Rebekah's hidden image, there were other strange gods which had to be put away and buried before the party could actually live in Bethel. Nevertheless this was a crisis for Jacob, the crisis of separation unto the will of God. This is a 'must' for those who are called to be king-priests.

Pillar 3
We now come to the outstanding event of Jacob's life, the crisis of his transformation from [23/24] Jacob to Israel. For this, too, he erected a pillar (Genesis 35:14). There were two parts to this experience; the first at Jabbok, where God crippled and re-named him but where no stone was raised, and the second at Bethel where the third pillar was raised. We are probably familiar with the story of the all-night struggle at Jabbok where Jacob met his Waterloo and out of crippling despair found an altogether new experience of God. This was where he first received intimation of his new name of Israel -- a man who could rule with God. The very name brings us close to our subject of king-priests, so we do well to examine the matter more closely. What happened to Jacob was what, in New Testament language, we would call an inner experience of the cross, a realisation that not only have our sins been put away but our entire 'old man'. "What is thy name?" God asked the clinging Jacob, who had to confess that he was Jacob, the twister, the crooked deceiver, the fugitive and the failure. This confession was followed by God's word of transformation: "Thy name shall be called no more Jacob ..." (Genesis 28:27-28). No more Jacob! "No more I ...". The old man is smitten. In Christ he is slain. "I have been crucified with Christ ..."

Words are quite inadequate to describe the soul's discovery of how the cross demands an end to what we are in ourselves. This was the first half of Jacob's crisis, but although it was a revolutionary experience, we note that the sacred record still does not call the man 'Israel'. "Jacob lifted up his eyes", "Jacob said ...", "Jacob journeyed". All of which leads us to expect that there is another part to this transforming experience, and rightly so, for there is also the positive side of the cross: "... no more I, but Christ in me" -- no more Jacob but Israel. So it was that at Bethel God appeared to Jacob again, this time to bless him with the confirmation of the words spoken at Jabbok, for this time it says: "And he called his name Israel". Then God withdrew, leaving Jacob to face this call. He did so in positive terms by setting up his third pillar, with another anointing of oil and the additional element of a drink offering. This reminds us that if we will appropriate our new life in Christ, if we will add to the faith that we have been crucified with Christ the assertion that nevertheless we live, the Holy Spirit will give substance to our faith and make us know the reality of Christ's new life within.

Now this is no fairy story. We are not told that the man was never again called Jacob but always and only Israel. No, it is not like that. We would love to have an automatic end to the old man in us and an automatic continuation of smooth experiences of the new, but this would remove the need for constant faith. Only as faith is alert and active does it work out that it is no more Jacob. So we find that sometimes he is called Jacob and sometimes Israel, at times almost in the same breath and with no clear reason why it should be so. Still the related man and the separated man has now become the transformed man. What more is necessary for God to be able to record: "And Israel journeyed." (Genesis 35:21)? Jacob's fourth pillar will answer that question.

Pillar 4
The fourth and final pillar of Jacob was put up on the way to Bethlehem (Genesis 35:19-20). It represented for Jacob the deepest death, but it also made him a 'resurrection man', a man of resurrection faith. How different are the Lord's ways from ours! When we have come to a new place of utter yieldedness to Him we rather expect that experiences of death are past forever and that from now on we shall be conscious only of life and glory. Yet see what happened to Jacob. Rachael was his great treasure. Theirs was one of the great love stories of all time. Sacrifice was easy when it was made for her; she was always his first and greatest concern; through the last years of his life he never forgot her and he recalled the sad day of their parting when he was on his own deathbed. There was a sense in which he buried his own heart when he buried Rachael. His sinful self had had to be broken at Jabbok, but now his finest love, his greatest earthly treasure, had to be buried between Bethel and Bethlehem.

Why? Let us answer that question by considering what happened. Out of that death a new life was born. Jacob's pillar was therefore not so much an advertising of his loss as an expression of his faith for the future. Rachel called the baby boy, 'Benoni' -- 'Son of my sorrow'. There was no question about the bitterness of the moment. Every experience of the cross's demands upon us is bitter. But the real question is what attitude do we adopt before God and men? Self pity will draw attention to itself -- Son of my sorrow -- saying, in effect, Look what a great sufferer I am! [24/25] Look how much it is costing me to go on with God! 'No', said Jacob, 'not that! Rather look at God's glorious purpose in it all. Even with a breaking heart, welcome the values for Him which will emerge from this death.' So he changed the child's name to Benjamin -- 'Son of the right hand'. Thus it was that in his hour of deep, personal loss he was able to trust and worship, and it was in token of this that he erected his final pillar and then marched on like a prince. "And Israel journeyed ... "

Not that this was the end of his story. There were still further challenges, further failures and further sorrows to come, but it is as though his life had now found its firm foundation on, these spiritual truths. They made him the man he was, the man of God, the princely mediator, the king-priest. And they point the way for us. Let us notice how each pillar required positive faith action on Jacob's part. God spoke and worked, but God did not put up the pillars. Jacob had to do that himself. This reminds us of our need to be positive in appropriating and entering into what is said of us in Christ, so making our calling and election sure. God's kingdom of priests consists of related people, separated people, transformed people and resurrection-faith people. Perhaps this gives a new dimension to the phrase: 'The priesthood of all believers'.

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