Our Perfect Savior - 19

Well, in our examination of the book of Hebrews, we have come to an extended treatment of Jesus as our great high priest. The truth of Christ's priesthood is found primarily, if not exclusively, in the book of Hebrews. There are some other portions of God's word where we find the activity of a high priest in the actions of Jesus as, for example, John 17, which has been labeled by most Bible students as Christ's great high priestly prayer.

And there Christ is taking the place of a high priest in representing his people before the throne of grace in prayer. And so the idea of Christ as priest is not exclusive entirely to the book of Hebrews, but there's more said about it in Hebrews than any place else. But also in our passage for today, and actually even a little prior to verses 9 and 10 for today, we have been introduced to a person by the name of Melchizedek. That too is pretty much a Hebrews thing, if I can put it that way. Melchizedek, this mysterious Old Testament person who apparently is very closely connected with the priesthood of Christ, and the priesthood of Christ cannot be fully understood unless we understand something about the person of Melchizedek. And we find out quite a bit about him in the book of Hebrews.

In the Old Testament, he's mentioned really only twice, once in the book of Genesis in three verses, and very briefly in the book of Psalms, Psalm 110 verse 4, which is quoted here in Hebrews chapter 5. But in Hebrews, it's quite a bit said. In fact, after our text for today, the writer of Hebrews takes a little intermission to chide his readers, those who are hearing or reading the epistle that he writes, to say, I have a lot to say about Melchizedek, but you probably won't be able to understand it because you should be a lot more advanced than you are, but you've been sluggards and studying the word of God and you're on milk instead of meat, but nevertheless, boom, here we go in chapter 6, right back into things about Melchizedek.

In other words, choke on this steak because that's the only way you're going to grow. So we're going to get some more about Melchizedek in the days to come, but today we are going to be looking at him in an introductory way. And so our text today is verses 9 and 10, which I will now read. And having been perfected, he, that is Jesus, became the author of eternal salvation to all who obey him, called by God as high priest, according to the order of Melchizedek. And here we have a portrait of our perfect savior and five aspects of salvation that are set before us in these two verses.

We'll see first the person of salvation, secondly, the way of salvation, third, the source of salvation, fourth, the nature of salvation, and finally, the breadth of salvation. The person of salvation in verse 9, and having been perfected, he became the author of eternal salvation. Speaking of Jesus, it says, having been perfected. And this is not the first time that the writer of Hebrews has pointed to this particular aspect of the preparation of Christ for his high priestly work, the perfecting of him, but he brings it up again.

Having been perfected, and I think because that is so strange to us, it doesn't hurt at all for us to think it through again. And so in the person of salvation, we realize, first of all, the truth of his eternal perfection. He is God. He is eternal God. He is holy God. He is perfect God. As God, he is, has been, will be, always will be, perfectly perfect, if I can put it that way. He has eternal perfection as God.

But then secondly, there's the aspect of his perfection as man, his human perfection. And that in the sense that, though he acquired a human nature in the incarnation, being conceived of the Holy Spirit in the womb of his mother, Mary, and thereby we talk correctly of a virgin birth, and he became a man, a human being, 100% man, human nature, exactly like ours, except for sin. His virgin birth assured that he had no inherited sin from Adam as we do. In our conception and birth, we are sinners from the moment we are born.

In fact, actually from before the time we make our way into this world, in our birth, we are sinners, sinners because of Adam's fall. But Jesus Christ, not having a human father and not having a lineage from Adam, conceived mysteriously to us by the work of the Holy Spirit, therefore, did not inherit the depravity that all of the rest of us inherit. So he was born into this world sinless, perfect in his humanity. And then throughout his lifetime, though tempted sorely repeatedly by the devil and by the trials of life, nevertheless, throughout his lifetime, he remained sinless, so that when he went to the cross, he was, in fact, the sinless Son of God. A perfect lion, without spot, without blemish, and therefore able to lay down his life as a substitute in the place of sinners, taking the punishment that is due unto sinners. He had no sin.

He deserved no punishment. He gave himself as a substitute for those who trust in him. He bore our guilt, our punishment in himself, because he had a human perfection, which would have been here, because he had a human perfection, which was the result of his virgin birth and the result of his 30-some years of a sinless life. And so eternal perfection is God, human perfection as a man. But now we read about a third area of his perfection, namely his qualifying perfection, something that took place in the latter part of his humanity upon the earth that qualified him to be our high priest, having been made perfect. This speaks of his becoming qualified for the role of high priest to which God appointed him. And we are told in the book of Hebrews that he was qualified by the temptations which he overcame. Chapter four, verse 15, for we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weakness, but was in all points tempted as we are yet without sin.

There it is again. Though he was tempted to the limit, tempted as we are and beyond what any of us have ever been tempted, he successfully resisted every temptation and remained sinless. But that experience of resisting the temptations that come to every human being was in some way part of his qualifying process to become our high priest. And so he's qualified by the temptations which he overcame. He was qualified by the sufferings which he experienced, verses seven and eight of chapter five, who in the days of his flesh, when he had offered up prayers and supplications with vehement cries and tears to him who was able to save him from death and was heard because of his godly fear, though he was a son, yet he learned obedience by the things which he suffered.

And having been perfected, he became the author of eternal salvation to all who obey him. So by the temptations which he overcame and by the sufferings, the kind of sufferings that only a human being can suffer as eternal God, he could not have been tempted in this way. As eternal God, he could not have suffered in this way. In order to suffer like men and women suffer, he had to become a man. He had to take upon himself our human nature.

And so by the temptations and sufferings which he experienced, he became qualified as high priest. As God, he had a perfect knowledge of all things and yet, mysteriously again, but yet he could not know what it's like for a human being to be tempted and to struggle with that temptation because as God, that was impossible for him. As God, he could not experience the sufferings, the trials, the difficulties, the pains, the experience of watching our loved ones die and so forth that we as human beings experience. As God, he knows about all these things, he has a perfect knowledge of these things, but he doesn't have an experiential knowledge as a human being.

The only way to do that is to become a human being and experience these things as a man. And so as a man, he needed to experience the struggles we face as men and women. Our struggles with sinful temptations, our struggles to fully obey God, this matter of obedience, which is a struggle for us. Was that a struggle for God? And again, we don't know how to understand the mystery of the triunity of God, God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. There has always been God the Father, there's always been God the Son, there's always been God the Holy Spirit.

Three persons, one God, all of them eternal, but there's always been this relationship between the Father and the Son. The Son has always been perfectly obedient to the Father, even before this world was created. That was not difficult for him in the slightest as God, but as man, we read of his struggle in obedience to the Father, crying out with tears to the Father to help him. Now, the wonderful thing is that he submitted to the Father perfectly, he obeyed perfectly, though he struggled with obedience, he perfectly submitted to the will of the Father.

He never stepped outside the Father's will one eighth of an inch. So he did not fail to obey perfectly as we do frequently, but he experienced the difficulty, the pain, the suffering that goes with that kind of submission as a man, which we have all experienced. And so our struggles with sinful temptations, he has now experienced as a man with a human nature. Our struggles to fully and perfectly obey God, he has now experienced as a man with a human nature.

He experienced the struggles of obedience to God as a man. And all of these experiences, the writer of Hebrews tells us, qualifies him to be able to represent his people. Earlier in the book of Hebrews, we were told that one of the qualifications for a priest such as Aaron was that he had to have the same nature as the people he represented.

He had to come from their experiences, their culture, their background as Aaron did as a member of the Jewish nation. And that was necessary for Aaron to be able to represent the people of Israel before God. Well, this is also necessary for Jesus Christ to be the high priest, to represent his people before God. And so the person of salvation is Jesus Christ, the perfect savior who has been perfected in a process that qualified him to become our high priest.

But then number two, we learn something about the way of salvation. And this also is strange because we read in verse nine, and having been perfected, he became the author of eternal salvation to all who, to all who, what would we have written in that next phrase? All who believe in him, right? But no, all who obey him.

Didn't see that one coming. Now we know from many texts that the way of salvation is by grace through faith. Hebrews two makes that clear, for by grace are you saved through faith and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God lest any man should boast. And so the way of salvation on the one hand is by God's grace, his enabling power, his initiative, what he has done to make salvation accomplished for his people. And it is acquired by his people through faith, by believing his promises. Faith is the instrument by which one lays hold upon Christ and acquires therefore for himself that which Christ as high priest did for those who trust in him. And we acquire that for ourselves by faith and faith alone, not faith plus anything else, faith alone without any act on our part, without any merit on our part.

So how are we to understand this term that tells us that he's the author of eternal salvation to all who obey him rather than saying all who believe in him? Well, I think this helps us to better understand the nature of saving faith, to distinguish it from some exercise of faith which falls short of saving faith. And the Bible does talk about those who believed on Jesus, but not savingly.

They believe on him and yet turned away from him when time passed by. So this helps us to understand what the Bible means when it tells us to believe in Christ. What is the definition of, what is a description of, what does true saving faith look like? In other words, are we to understand this phrase, all who obey him as the obedience that always follows the exercise of true saving faith, and a number of commentators take it that way, that this is not telling us the way of salvation, it's telling us the results of salvation, but the necessary results, the inevitable results, the essential results. It's impossible for someone to truly, savingly believe in Christ without coming into a different relationship with him, which will manifest itself in an obedient life thereafter. Not a perfectly obedient life, but a very different life than the life of an unbeliever, a rebel against God, but instead one who is living a life of obedience. However, I think there's a better way to understand this phrase to all who obey him.

And the number, another way is that this is a different way of saving faith, another way is that this is a different way of describing the act of saving faith. James Haldane says, obey and believe are synonymous. Now to us, they sound like opposites, don't they?

But I think properly understood, we should understand them as synonymous. You say, who is James Haldane? I've heard of Robert Haldane. Maybe you haven't even heard of Robert Haldane, but Robert Haldane is much better known, wrote a book on Romans, wonderful commentary on Romans. But he had a brother named James Haldane, who was also an eminent pastor himself, and he wrote a good commentary on Hebrews, and I took this from his commentary. Or John Brown, another excellent commentator, says in this regard, obey, that is submits to being saved by him in his appointed way.

To believe in him means to obey him in this sense, to be willing to submit to him for salvation, not relying in anything of ourselves, but to submit to him wholly for salvation, and to submit to his appointed way of salvation. That's what John Brown says this word, obey, means. And shall we go back a few years earlier yet to John Calvin? One more quotation. One more quotation.

This one may surprise you. And Calvin said, no one is precluded from salvation who becomes obedient to the gospel of Christ. No one is precluded from salvation who becomes obedient to the gospel of Christ.

Now, that's helpful in a number of ways. For those who think that the doctrine of election, the doctrine of predestination, the doctrines which were taught by John Calvin, they shut the door for some people to ever be saved. John Calvin says, no one is precluded from salvation who becomes obedient to the gospel of Christ. In other words, anyone and everyone who is willing to obey, who is willing to submit, who is willing to believe the gospel as it is presented will be saved. And he doesn't say that in this quote, but I'll add it.

We'll find out later. He was one of the elect of God. But nevertheless, no one is precluded. In other words, if someone is shut out, it's not because they weren't elect, they're shut out because of unbelief. They're shut out because of disobedience. They're shut out because they refuse to obey the word of God. And they will have no excuse before God except to say, I refused to believe. I refused to obey and therefore must hear, depart from me, you workers of iniquity.

I never knew you. Now, there are probably several texts I could quote that would suggest something similar, but listen to these words of Jesus in John chapter six. Then they said to him, what shall we do that we may work the works of God?

And Jesus might have said, no, no, no, you've got it all wrong. It's not by works. It's by faith. But he pulled the two together when he answered. Jesus answered and said to them, this is the work of God that you believe on him whom he has sent. You see, there is a sense in which belief can be understood as a work. There is a sense in which belief can be understood as obedience, as obey, or which faith can be understood as obedience. And I'll add one more thought before we move on. And that is just to say that the Bible much more frequently presents the call to come to Christ as a command. We are not very accustomed to thinking of it that way. We are more inclined to think of it as an offer, an invitation that's nicer, that's softer. And there's some truth in that. I don't discount that completely as some perhaps do.

I think there may be that element, but that's the mildest or the smallest side of it, the smallest element of it. It is actually a command. The command is repent and believe the gospel.

That's a command. And if you disobey a command of God, what have you done? You've disobeyed, you've broken his law, you've sinned. And so that's the sense in which this text talks about the way of salvation. Having become perfected, he became the author of eternal salvation to all who obey him. But thirdly, the source of salvation. And again, verse nine, we read, he became the author, the author of eternal salvation.

Author means source or author means cause. He is the source from which salvation flows. By his obedience, I think that's why the writer of Hebrews was directed by the Holy Spirit to bring in the idea of obedience to those who trust in Christ, because Christ qualified to become our representative by his obedience to the heavenly father. And by his obedience, in submitting to suffering, he became the cause of salvation.

The ultimate suffering, of course, being his death upon the cross. He suffered there the most of all, and he submitted to that obediently, though he struggled, but he submitted to it obediently without any sin, without any resistance, without any disobedience, without any lack of trust in his heavenly father. And in so doing, he became the author, he became the source, he became the cause of eternal salvation.

He offered the sacrifice, which secures salvation. And so it is the source from which salvation flows. It is the source which provides the necessary propitiation. We deliberately chose that hymn this morning, His Robes for Mine, because that hymn includes the word propitiation. I wanted to get it in your mind before we opened the book of Hebrews today.

Propitiation one, the hymn says. Well, here's the idea of a propitiation. Propitiation means to regain the favor or goodwill of another.

To regain the favor or goodwill of another. And of course, that requires that we understand that in our sins, we lost the favor, we lost the favor, we lost the goodwill of God, our creator. Instead of being his friends, we became his enemies. We became alienated from him, and it was because of our sin.

And there is not a single thing that we can do to change that. But in his gracious mercy, he has done. He not only requires judgment because of our sins, but he offers the propitiation which satisfies his judgment and allows us to be received into his presence as if we were as righteous as his own son, Jesus Christ. And so the source of salvation is Christ, because he provides the necessary propitiation. He qualified as our high priest. In that role, he offered the perfect sacrifice to the Father, the one that truly satisfies all the demands of God's law and the judgments and penalties attached to those who break his law. And the perfect sacrifice, of course, was himself. So as our high priest, he offered the sacrifice as our sacrifice to the Father. As our Savior, he became the sacrifice which he offered, an atoning sacrifice that satisfies fully the righteous wrath of God. Jesus, our great high priest, offered himself and died. That's the source of salvation.

It's Christ. But we move on, number four, to the salvation. And again, we read in verse nine that this salvation is eternal salvation. And having been perfected, he became the author of eternal salvation to all who obey him. The nature of salvation, it is eternal. In other words, it can never cease to be. It is eternal. It always baffles me how a full Arminian, there are mixed, there are those who have a mixed theology.

Sometimes we call them Calminians, partly Calvinists and partly Arminian, as are the majority of Baptists, actually, they're Calminian. But it always baffles me that someone can talk about everlasting life, eternal life, and this would not be the Calminians, this would be the full Arminian, that talks about everlasting life, eternal life, like we've got some in here whose background is free will Baptists, they'd be full five-point Arminians, and talk about eternal life, but you can lose it. Eternal life, but it can stop.

It can start, it can start, and it can stop. And so I suppose, I've never been in a church like this, but I suppose they must sing, you must be born again, again, again, again, you must be born again. But it's eternal salvation. If words mean anything, it means it is forever. Once it begins, it has no end. Eternal salvation.

It can never cease to be. And so that refutes the error of full Arminians. But furthermore, eternal salvation means it can never be repeated. That is the sacrifice that secures eternal salvation does not need to be repeated, it's once for all, because once accomplished, the salvation is secured as eternal.

Why would it ever need to be done again? So it is a one-time completed act of sacrifice upon the cross that secures eternal salvation. So the sacrifice need never be repeated again. The sacrifice can never be repeated again. If someone attempts to repeat it again, they are blaspheming the perfect sacrifice, which Jesus made upon the cross once and for all, and said, it's finished, and said, it's finished. I've now secured eternal salvation. There's nothing more to secure the sacrifice, the act which secures salvation can never be repeated again. And that refruits the errors of Rome, who have raised up a new order of priests, neither the order of Aaron nor the order of Melchizedek, but a new order of priests who claim to repeat the sacrifice of Christ, shedding of blood every time they say the Roman mass again and again and again and again. That's wrong, that's erroneous, that is terribly misleading about what salvation is and how it is secured and what it does for those who are saved.

In fact, it is blasphemous to act as if one could continue to repeat this act, which in its one time effect secured, not temporary, not broken, but eternal salvation. But now we come to the breadth of salvation in verse 10. He became the author of eternal salvation to all who obey him, called, we read in verse 10, by God as high priest according to the order of Melchizedek.

And this is where we get back into Melchizedek. The order of Melchizedek, that had been mentioned one time earlier in verse 6 of this same chapter, where we read, as he also says in another place, you are a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek. And that's a quotation from Psalm 110 verse 5. Psalm 110 had been quoted earlier, but not verse 5. Verse 5 is now brought into the discussion. And in Psalm 110 verse 5, God pronounces the Messiah who had not yet come, of course, in the days when David wrote that Psalm, but pronounces the coming Messiah as a priest after the order of Melchizedek. And so Melchizedek receives one mention in the Psalms and his first and really only other mention is in Genesis chapter 14.

We're going to take just a moment to look at that. And this is when Abraham is coming back from his victory over the kings that had gone down to Sodom and had defeated the armies of Sodom and Gomorrah and had taken away all of their people that weren't slain as captives, as slaves, the people, the women, the children, and all of their goods as their booty, their reward for winning the battle. And Abraham, because his nephew Lot was part of that group, took his private army. Imagine a man wealthy enough to have an army of 300 and some people.

I mean you have to feed those guys every day. So Abraham's a pretty impressive person here to have an army of 300 and some men, but that's still smaller, I think, than the five kings he was going up against. But God of course was with him and he went after them and he defeated them and he brought back all the spoil and all the people. And before he turned the spoil and the people back over to the king of Sodom, he was met, we are told, in Genesis 14-18 by another king.

Then Melchizedek, king of Salem, brought out bread and wine. He was the priest of God Most High. And he, that is Melchizedek, blessed him, that is Abraham, and said, Blessed be Abram. This was really before his name became Abraham. It's Abram. Blessed be Abram of God Most High, possessor of heaven and earth, and blessed be God Most High, who has delivered your enemies into your hand. And then the last phrase of verse 20, And he, that is Abram, gave him a tithe of all.

Melchizedek. We are told that he was king of Salem, which most scholars believe was the ancient name for Jerusalem. But not only was he a king, the king of Salem, but he was the priest of the Most High God, the priest of L.L.

Young. He did not know God as Yahweh. That was a name that was given to the Jewish nation particularly. But he did know God Most High.

He knew him as L.L. Young, God Most High. And so he was both a king and a priest, something that was forbidden in the Mosaic order of things. If you were a priest of the tribe of Levi, you could not be a king from the tribe of Judah. If you were a king of the tribe of Judah, you could not serve as a priest.

They must come from the tribe of Levi. And we know in the history of the Bible, a couple of kings who felt pretty confident of themselves. They were full of their own authority and power and decided they were perfectly qualified to serve as a priest. And they offered some kind of offering to God as a priest, and they were severely judged.

One struck with leprosy, and he died and so forth. God did not tolerate the combining of priest and king under the Old Covenant. But here is one who precedes the Old Covenant, who is both king and priest, who blessed Abram, which means that he was superior to Abram. We'll get that kind of reasoning later in Hebrews. And blessed God, as all of God's people are privileged to do and encouraged to do, and he received a tithe from Abram. Now we'll get into that part, the tithing part later comes up in Hebrews. But just to point out, when someone says, oh, I don't believe in the tithe, that's Old Testament. Well, this is Old Testament. Abram believed in the tithe in the Old Testament. What you mean is you don't believe we're under the Old Covenant, inaugurated in the days of Moses. You don't believe in the New Covenant people are under the Old Covenant that was inaugurated by Moses with the meticulous commands and responsibilities and requirements of the tithe. Tithing was included in some of those 613 requirements and prohibitions that are included in the law of Moses.

That was tedious and that was quite a heavy weight to bear. But it's real obvious, isn't it, that the principle of tithing preceded all of that by some hundreds of years. I mean, where did Abram get the idea that this was an appropriate thing to do when he found a man who clearly represented God, was a priest to God, was a true a true representative of God to him, that it was appropriate for him to honor God by giving him a tithe. Where did he get that idea if it started with Moses? Well, obviously it didn't. It started before that. But we'll save the rest of that application for another day.

But here's what I want to get to. I had a lot of fun this week exploring what I could find out about that word order. Jesus Christ is a high priest, we are told, after the order of Melchizedek. What does that mean? Well, the Greek word order is a noun. Taxis means assignment, arrangement, or a fixed succession. So it doesn't it doesn't require the meaning that I'm going to suggest, but it certainly allows it and maybe points in that direction. As a noun, taso, a verb, I mean as a verb rather, taso, it means to arrange or get this, set apart as a distinctive class.

Where am I going with this? Well, it seems that this text is suggesting that Melchizedek was just one priest in a line of priests. As Aaron was an order of priesthood, starting with Aaron and going on for hundreds of years until finally that priesthood was abolished in the destruction of a temple in 70 AD. So the suggestion seems to point to Melchizedek also being a priest in a line of priests. In other words, did he have a, did he have predecessors?

We're not told, but it's certainly possible. Did he have successors? Were there priests after Melchizedek that were in the order of Melchizedek just as they were priests after Aaron who were in the order of Aaron?

Again, the word is not so clear, so narrow in its definition that it requires that. When it says the order of Melchizedek, it could simply be saying in the assignment given to Melchizedek, the arrangement that God gave with Melchizedek. But nevertheless, the scripture says the order of Melchizedek, it could have said, if it meant to us to think only of Melchizedek without being in a line of successors, it could have said he was a high priest like Melchizedek.

But it doesn't say like Melchizedek, it says in the order of Melchizedek. Now that's as far as I can take that thought. I just wanted to raise it so you could say, wow, I never thought about that before because I'm sure none of you have, or probably none of you have. So you've got something to chew on for a while, but we can't, we can't answer these questions because the answers are not given us in the Bible.

But this question is also critically important. If he was a high priest, as we're told he was, who did he represent? He was a high priest who represented sinners before God. That's what a high priest does. That's what any priest does. He was a priest. He obviously was representing people who worshiped the God that he represented. The God, the true God, God most high, El Elyon. Now again, we are prone to think in terms that there were no true worshipers of the true God of these days, that God called Abraham out of the ear of the Chaldees and there wasn't anybody worshiping him and God made him a worshiper of himself and said he would make a great nation out of him, brought him to Canaan and they were in Canaan. It was full of nothing but idolaters and worshipers of false gods. But every now and then you get a hint that there were some people there who worshiped the true God. And here's one of those indications that if you've never thought about it before, I think this text requires that we think about it and accept the certainty.

This is not raising questions that can't be answered. This was a high priest. He wasn't just representing himself.

That's not what high priests do. They stand between men and God. He was representing sinners before God. He was no doubt offering sacrifices on behalf of sinners before God. Who were these people that he was representing? How many of them were there? Now that question we can't answer, but we can be I think 100% sure that he was representing a class of people who worshiped the one true God who lived in Canaan, probably in Jerusalem, when Abraham came into the land.

Now what does that suggest? Well whoever these people were, they were not Jews. We would call them today Gentiles, though they didn't use that term then, did they? But they weren't Jews. There weren't any Jews yet. Abraham was going to be the father of the Jewish nation, and he didn't even have a son yet at this point. So you've got Abraham, who's going to become the father of the Jewish nation, and is trusting God for his promise to give him a son. And he comes in contact with Melchizedek, the priest of the Most High God, who is a priest representing a group of worshipers who are not Jews, but they're worshiping the one true God. Now what am I getting at here? Well I think one of the reasons that Jesus is a high priest after the order of Melchizedek is not only so that he qualifies to be king and priest, as Aaron could not, but also because he represents the nations, not just Israel.

Now what did I call this last point? The bread of salvation. It is not just for Israel. It is for all people. It is not just for Jews.

It is for all the world. The high priest is not a priest after the order of Aaron, representing the people of the nation of Israel. He's a high priest after the order of Melchizedek, representing all the nations of the world. And that reveals the breadth of salvation.

Indeed it is true. All who will believe may come and be represented before God. All who will obey the gospel will be saved by the gospel, no matter what tribe or tongue or nation they are from.

Well let me wrap this up with two or three applications before we close. In all of this I'm just struck again by the fullness of the gospel. There are so many aspects of it. I'm beginning to think that maybe the gospel is infinite. When we get to heaven we're going to continue exploring aspects of the gospel that are not even revealed in scripture at this point. But there are so many things in the word of God about the gospel that believers never tire of learning more. The gospel isn't just something simple and trite and only for unbelievers and we go on to other things, we who are believers. The gospel is something that is so full, so rich, so complete, so amazing, so astonishing, so intriguing that the more we dig into it, the more we love it, the more we learn about it, the more we want to learn about it.

The gospel is a full gospel indeed. A second lesson, the one we've touched on pretty thoroughly already, is the nature of saving faith. Saving faith therefore to truly believe in Christ means not just to believe the facts about his death and resurrection but it means to repent of our sins and to submit to his authority. That's all included in a proper understanding of the word believe. The question therefore is have you submitted to the majestic authority of Jesus Christ or have you just simply professed to believe and maybe think you have believed because you believe the facts but there's no evidence of a life of obedience, there's no evidence of a life of submission, a sincere endeavor to submit to God's will and to obey him and to repent when you don't and to return to the path of righteousness when you are made aware of your sins. That's what characterizes the true believer and saving faith involves true repentance, sorrow for sin, turning from sin and true submission to the rightful authority of the King of Kings and Lord of Lords Jesus Christ.

That's the nature of saving faith. And the third thing I would mention is simply the mysteries of scripture such as Melchizedek. What a mystery, what a delightful mystery and I would just say to you learn all you can, everything that's in the Bible, learn everything you can about it.

There's more there to learn than you have learned so far so let's keep working at it and explore everything you can. Even the things we can't know for sure are profitable to explore and to think about and raise questions about, questions that no doubt we can have answered when we're in the presence of our Lord and that causes us to anticipate heaven all the more. There are a lot of delightful things about heaven but to me one of the most delightful things is to get these questions answered. Did Melchizedek have predecessors? Did he have successors?

How many people did he represent? Just right here in this message today we've got some questions to stick away at our mental pocket and hopefully to take with us when we go to heaven and to get answers from the Lord. Well with that I stop, let's bow in closing prayer. Father we thank you for this great high priest appointed and who has taken his appointment seriously qualified and has qualified himself in every way accepted in your presence and his sacrificial death accepted as the sufficient the sufficient sacrifice for our sins. Oh Lord may everyone under the sound of my voice run to Christ, submit to Christ, turn from sin, and become a follower of the Lord Jesus Christ we pray. Amen.