Advent Priest

Psalm 50:1-15 - Advent 2 Midweek - December 7, 2011
Christ Comes as Our Priest

For our midweek Advent services we are considering a three-part theme by taking a look at what is often called the three-fold office of Christ, known as Prophet, Priest, and King.  Last week, we started with King, and we considered how Christ comes to us, not with earthly might, but rules our hearts and consciences through the forgiveness of sins.   Now, this week we consider what it means for Christ to come as our priest. 

But what is a priest?  God instituted the office of priest in the Old Testament so that they would offer sacrifices to God on behalf of God’s people.  That’s what a priest did.  God gave a very detailed description of the priesthood when He gave specific instructions to Moses.  But long before He brought the children of Israel out of Egypt, God had required that sacrifices be made.  In order to understand what it means for Christ to come as our priest, we need to understand the nature of a sacrifice and why God required them.  So let’s start at the beginning. 

God had warned Adam and Eve that the day they ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil they would surely die.  Of course, their physical death would not come to them for many years later, but the moment they disobeyed God, they died an immediate spiritual death.  No longer did they fear, love, and trust in God as God had created them to do.  They became sinners.  But hardly had God even yet rebuked them for their sin that He also promised them that the Seed of the woman would come to destroy the power of sin forever.  Christ would bruise the devil’s head, and the devil would bruise His heel.  But the Son of God would give His own life in order to redeem back His fallen creation from sin, death, and the devil.  This here was the very first Gospel promise.  It was also the first prophecy concerning Christ’s vicarious sacrifice on the cross.  The Gospel can’t be separated from the crucifixion of Jesus. 

God takes sin seriously, and so He required that blood be shed.  Death was the only possible payment for sin because it is the due penalty for sin.  That’s what God threatened from the beginning; and so that’s what God promised from the beginning.  In order to pledge to Adam and Eve that Christ would someday die in their place, God instituted for them the sacrificial system right there in the Garden of Eden even before He expelled them from Paradise.  “When was this?” you might ask.  Well, they were naked and ashamed.  Their makeshift clothing of leaves was insufficient to cover them.  So by sacrificing an animal, God made them better clothing from its skin to cover their naked flesh.  In the process He also taught them how He would cover their sin.   The first spiritual death was indeed Adam and Eve’s.  But the first physical death was that animal which God killed in their place in order to clothe them and point them to their Savior. 

The promise of the Gospel cannot be separated from the shedding of blood.  By teaching our first parents how to shed the blood of an animal, God taught them to hope in Christ who would come to offer His own blood as the perfect sacrifice.  Although we find no explicit mandate to offer these sacrifices until much later in the Old Testament, it is as clear as day that the first believers in Christ knew exactly what to do.  They knew the importance of sacrifice, because they knew what the promise of the Gospel consisted of. 

Consider Abel.  He offered the firstborn of His flock, and thereby confessed that the only begotten Son of God would offer Himself.  Consider Noah.  God saved him and his family from destruction.  And as soon as the waters dried, Noah confessed the price of his salvation by building an altar and sacrificing to God, offering up a pleasing aroma. 

(Then God said something very interesting to Noah as He gave him permission to eat meat, “You may eat all these animals,” God said, “but you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, with its blood.”  God later repeated this to Moses, saying, “For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given [the blood] to you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls.”  The meat was given to man for food.  But the blood was reserved for God in order to atone for sin.) 

Obviously, for the sake of time, I can’t exhaust all the examples of Old Testament sacrifices. But how can we pass up the account of how God commanded Abraham to sacrifice his own son Isaac?  But what did God end up doing?  He provided a substitute.  And that’s the whole idea.  Sacrifices in the Old Testament pointed to Christ who would save all men from their sin by His own substitutionary death on the cross. 

Even a very brief overview of Old Testament sacrifices reveals how they have always been connected to the promise of Jesus.   What made them acceptable to God, however, was not just the act of doing them.  God didn’t have it out for these poor animals.  No.  What made them acceptable, so that God would forgive sins, was the faith by which they were offered – faith that trusted in the atoning sacrifice that Jesus Christ would someday render in their place by shedding His own blood to wash away their sin.  The Old Testament saints were not justified by a different faith than ours.  It is today as it always has been: only the blood of Jesus can save sinners. 

It wasn’t long after Adam and Eve, or after Noah, or after Abraham, that people quickly forgot the purpose of sacrificing animals to God.  In other words, they forgot the Gospel – they removed the promise of Christ from the whole thing.  And so all sorts of pagan religions rose up throughout the world’s history and twisted the original purpose of sacrifice.  They turned it into something that God never intended it to be. 

That is why God gave such specific instructions to Moses and Aaron – in order to preserve true worship among them through whom the promised Savior would come.  Through the sacrifices of the priests, God established and remained faithful to the covenant that He had made with them.  He also provided them the opportunity to be constantly directed to the promise of Christ.  The sacrificial system that we read about in the Old Testament seems complicated and overbearing.  But it was according to God’s mercy that He gave it to them, because it taught them about Jesus. 

But even this great sacrificial system was abused.  Just as the heathen nations did it before, so also the children of Israel began to regard these sacrifices as their own good works pleasing to God.  People are naturally works righteous.  That means that they naturally want to look at the things that they do instead of what God does in order to stand before Him.  And so that is what they did.  They began to regard the many sacrifices that their priests offered as though they were doing God some sort of favor for God. 

That is why God says in the Psalm that we consider this evening, “If I were hungry, I would not tell you; For the world is Mine, and all its fullness.”  God did not require sacrifices because He was hungry, like the gods of the pagans.  God didn’t need any of their lambs or goats or bulls or rams.  God didn’t demand sacrifices because He needed anything, but precisely the opposite, because His people needed Him.  We are the ones who are hungry and starving for a righteousness and a life that we cannot find within ourselves.  We are the ones who need what God has to offer. 

God takes sin seriously.  Consider the scary image that our Psalm provides for us when describing the last Day of Judgment when Christ will come again.  “A fire shall devour before Him, and it shall be very tempestuous all around Him. He shall call to the heavens from above, And to the earth, that He may judge His people.” 

We cannot withstand God’s judgment.  But Christ comes as our High Priest in order to intercede for us so that we might avoid God’s fiery judgment.  That’s what a priest does.  He intercedes for the people by shedding the blood of an innocent animal.  And that is why before Christ could come as our Priest, He had to come as the innocent Lamb of God. 

In the Old Testament, once a year on the Day of Atonement, one spotless lamb was offered by the High Priest in the Holy of holies and its blood was sprinkled on the altar and on the mercy seat of God’s throne.  This one sacrifice atoned for all the sins of the whole nation.  But the one sacrifice of Jesus atoned for all the sins of the whole world.  His blood was shed on the cross and sprinkled on the mercy seat of God in heaven.  God didn’t need this sacrifice.  He didn’t need to take His holy wrath out against His own Son.  He could have taken it out against us sinners.  But He loved us.  And so He spared us from condemnation by shedding His own Son’s blood on the cross and redeeming us back to Himself. 

Since all Old Testament sacrifice pointed to Christ, there is no longer any need for sacrifice.  But Jesus continues to come to us as our own High Priest through the means of Grace.  The Gospel that we hear and the Sacrament that we receive give to us a real forgiveness that God is constantly mindful of in heaven.  Because that is where Jesus is revealing to the Father in His resurrected and glorified body what He has done to atone for all our sins. 

We do not come to Church in order to do God a favor.  No we come here in order to receive the favor of God.  And we do.  Because we receive the very righteousness that Jesus earned in our place as our Savior to whom so many sacrifices pointed.  Just as in the Old Testament Church, it was faith in Christ that made all sacrifices acceptable and pleasing to God, so also it is faith in Christ today that makes our sacrifices of praise worthy to be heard.  Offer to God thanksgiving, And pay your vows to the Most High, our Psalm says.  Call upon Me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you shall glorify Me.  And so we do.  Because we know what He has done to glorify us.  We do as those who have been made priests by God, fit to render acceptable offerings through faith in Christ.  Just as all Old Testament sacrifices pointed to what He did on the cross, so by faith, so do all our thanksgivings and praises point to the same thing. 

In Jesus’ name, Amen.