Q. How can Heb. 2:17, be reconciled with Heb. 8:4? The latter Scripture seems to imply that ascension seems to have been a necessary preliminary to the Lord’s entering upon the office of High Priest; yet the former speaks of His making reconciliation for the sins of the people.
What is meant by reconciling sins? Is not John 17 in character the High Priest’s prayer?
A. To me a very blessed aspect of the Epistle to the Hebrews is, that it is the complement, in a certain sense, of that to the Romans. The latter sets the believer “in Christ” before God in divine righteousness, recognizing an unchanged evil nature, a carnal mind; but also a new nature, the spiritual mind (ch. 8:1-11). The former shows us the divine provision of grace to maintain us there by the priesthood of Christ. This is alluded to in Rom. 5:10; reconciled by His death, we shall be saved by His life, i.e., His priestly intercession on high. So in chap. 8:34, who also maketh intercession for us.” Then in Heb. 7:26, we read (as putting both thoughts together), “He ever liveth to make intercession for them.”
But all this supposes Him to stand in the capacity of High Priest, between a reconciled people and God; and to this Heb. 8:4 refers. He exercised no true priestly service then, until He ascended to glory.
But still there was something which He did as a priest before He went on high. Just as the High Priest on the great day of atonement of old was making good the claims of God, and putting the sins of the people on the head of the scapegoat, while after all he was not in his normal place as between a reconciled people and God, so the Lord Jesus, ere He entered on the normal exercise of His priesthood, as a priest He did the work of the cross; both actively as offering Himself, and passively as the victim offered, in making atonement for the sins of the people. This is what is referred to in Heb. 2:17, where the word is incorrectly translated “reconciliation.” There is no meaning in reconciling sins; there would be in reconciling people It should be “to make propitiation (ιλάσκεσθαι) for the sins of the people.”
John 17 is wrongly taken as an intercessional or priestly prayer. Now, the Lord is there as Son, not priest or advocate, and He is occupied in putting His disciples into His own place on earth before the Father and before the world, with an allusion in the end to their place in the Father’s house by and by. He looks to the Father to keep them where He had kept them while with them.
Priesthood is for mercy and grace for help in time of need, to a feeble people who have to cry to God, in a place of danger and liability to fall and start aside from Christ.
Q. Why was the Lord Jesus called the “Word?”
A. He is called the “Word,” as the Person who is the impersonation of the mind of God in the abstract. Eternal in His being. “In the beginning was the Word;” having a personal existence. “The Word was with God;” His deity expressed in the words “And the Word was God;” His eternal personality in the words, “The same was in the beginning with God.” The Word then, was, before all creation, eternal; in nature divine; in person distinct, and in personality eternal: the expression of the whole mind that subsists in God.
W. S. It is commonly held that the Body of Christ is also the Bride. Can you prove me this from Scripture, &c.?
A. There is no doubt that the Body of Christ and His Bride are both names used for the Church. At the same time it is to be understood that there is an earthly Bride of the Canticles—the Jewish remnant of the last days. In Eph. 5, while Paul is exhorting husband and wives, his mind cannot pass on without thinking of Christ and the Church. He quotes the passage (Gen. 2:23, 24) referring to Adam in Paradise, and Eve taken out of the man—bone of his bone, and flesh of his flesh—while he slept, and then the statement, “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh,” used in Eph. 5 to convey the union of Christ—the second Adam—and the Church; the Eve, so to speak, for the Paradise of God. “We are members of his body; we are of his flesh, and of his bones.”
There is no allusion in Rom. 7 as to union with Christ, or to the Church at all. It refers to the law and a risen Christ, and the impossibility of having rightly to do with both together, as for a woman rightly to have two husbands. The word “married” is not in the original at all (Rom. 7:4).
In 2 Cor. 11:2, the Church is espoused to one husband, that she may be presented as a chaste virgin unto Christ.
In Rev. 21:9-27; 22:14, the Church is distinctly named the “Bride; the Lamb’s wife.” Babylon, the whore, said she sat as a queen, and was also described under the figure of a city, or polity; so is the Bride. She is looked at here as a polity or center of administration of the kingdom in heavenly glory. It is not the Father’s house, but the, displayed glory, in the light of which the saved nations walk (v. 24).
In Rev. 22:17, “The Spirit and the Bride say, Come.” The Spirit dwelling in the Church produces bridal affections in her, and she invites Christ while He is absent, as the Morning Star (v. 16).
There is an earthly Bride, of which the Song of Songs speaks—the elect remnant of the Jews.