Hebrews Lesson 97 August 23, 2007
NKJ Isaiah 41:10 Fear not, for I am with you; Be not dismayed, for I am your God.
I will strengthen you, Yes, I will help you, I will uphold you with My righteous right hand.'
Open your Bibles with me to Hebrews
7. We missed last time, but the time before we had sort of a review summary of
these first 6 chapters leading up into this chapter 7 which focuses on the
contrast between the limited temporary priesthood (the Aaronic priesthood, the
Levitical priesthood) versus the royal high priesthood after the order of
Melchizedek. Hebrews 7 is to a large part an exposition of Psalm 110:4 from the
Old Testament. The focus of this section is to demonstrate these limitations
and that because these limitations were understood even within the Old Testament
because of Psalm 110:4 that the Jews should have understood that the Levitical
priesthood was going to be replaced with a superior priesthood that would not
end. So that is what the writer is doing in this particular section from verse
11 down through the end of the chapter is stressing the permanence of the
Melchizedekean priesthood. We see that because of the third line in Psalm 110:4
NKJ Psalm 110:4 The LORD has sworn And will not relent, "You are a priest forever According to the
order of Melchizedek."
It is that word “forever” that
indicates the difference. So he unpacks it. That is one of those words that you
can just (say, you can) move over very quickly and not pick up all of the
significance of it.
Remember 1446 BC was the approximate date as far as we can determine when the Exodus
occurred. They left Egypt in 1446 and went to Mt. Sinai and it was there that
God revealed to Moses the 613 commandments of the Mosaic Law. While they were
there at Mt. Sinai, for that year that they were there, it was the time when
they constructed the clothing for the High Priest. He had the snazziest uniform
of anybody in the Old Testament. He had the finest threads. The reason I use
the word threads is because the scriptures emphasized it couldn’t be mixed
threads; it had to be of linen. The colors were glorious and brilliant. He
would be seen from a distance. It wasn’t loud but the blues and the reds and
all the jewelry and the gold breastplate, all of this - when the sun hit that
breastplate and reflected off of it, all of this was such that it would draw
tremendous attention to him. He was dressed better than anybody else in the
whole nation and probably dressed better than any priest in the ancient world
of any other religion.
It was with the Mosaic Law that the
Levitical priesthood was established and that Aaron was appointed as the High
Priest. God stipulated that the
high priesthood would follow from those who were directly descended from
Aaron. So from approximately 1445 BC when Aaron would have been anointed and installed as the High Priest
down through the time of David which was roughly about 1,000 BC. So we are talking a little over 400 years. The Levitical priesthood
had functioned and they had a direct lineage of high priests from Aaron. Then
during David’s life, sometime between approximately 975 and about probably 1000
BC somewhere in there David wrote Psalm 110:4.
So the Old Testament priesthood, (the
Levitical priesthood, the Aaronic high priesthood) is functioning well and
there are no problems and yet there is this indication in Psalm 110 that the
Messianic Royal High Priest will come and He will not be a descendent of Aaron.
He will not be from the tribe of Levi and that He will have a qualitatively
different high priestly ministry and it will be a ministry that will go on
forever. So that is the background to understanding the structure and the
argument in these next verses.
So we come to verse 11 and it
begins:
NKJ Hebrews 7:11 Therefore, if perfection were through the Levitical priesthood
Then there is a parenthesis there.
Of course, it is not in the original. This is understood from the syntax. It is
a correct understanding.
(for under it the
That is, the Levitical priesthood.
people received
the law), what further need was there that another priest should rise according to the order of
Melchizedek, and not be called according to the order of Aaron?
So it is a question that is based on
a conditional supposition in the protasis. Protasis is a technical grammatical
word for the first part of an “if” clause. You have “if such and so then so and
so”. The first part is called protasis – pro for first. Then the second
part is called the apodosis. Therefore the condition is expressed - “if
perfection were through the Levitical priesthood.”
In the Greek you have an opening
clause made up of three particles - ei men oun. The oun is your concluding particle, your
inferential particle that means therefore. He is drawing a conclusion from the
previous ten verses. The conclusion then involves an “if” clause, a men. The men
is a continuational particle. The key if clause is the ei there.
This is really a second-class condition.
I think the last time I covered this I treated it as a first-class condition,
but more (the same significance) as a debater’s type of use of a first-class condition which is “if we are going to assume this is true;
but then it is not”. Actually this is a second-class condition. I did some more
work on this since then. There are only fifty second-class conditions in the
entire New Testament.
The key marker that you always look
for (You always memorize certain things when you are going through a language
that what makes a first class condition a first class condition.) is it starts
with the particle “ei”; and then you have an indicative mood verb. Then in the
apodosis you have an indicative mood verb. In a second-class condition also
starts with a ei, but what makes the difference is in the
second clause. In the apodosis you have a particle that is not translated is
just an. Of the 50 second class
conditions in the New Testament, 11 of them do not have the an. See that is what you were taught to
look for, that an. That is your sort
of syntactical marker that you have a second-class condition. That is not
there. But nevertheless that is what was happening in the transition of Greek
at that time in the Koine Greek. The an was dropped more and more and eventually that disappeared
from the language. So I didn’t catch that when I was going through it last week.
This is actually a second-class condition. The significance is the same as I
interpreted it last week. That is that this is not a true proposition in the
condition.
“Therefore if”. I am going to retranslate the first part of this
before we get into a complete - I want to look at each of these words before we
get into a complete retranslation.
“If perfection.” Perfection is the
noun teleiosis.
Teleiosis
the root there is telei. You have teleao, tellos, and you have a whole bunch of different words built off of
that same root telo
which has to do with bringing something to completion, not so much the idea of
perfection in the sense of flawlessness. In fact it is doubted by many people
that the word group ever refers to perfection or flawlessness anywhere in the
Scripture. It always has to do with bringing something to completion, something
that is partial or incomplete and it is leading to that which is complete. It
is the same word that you have for perfect in I Corinthians 13:8-13 when it
says:
NKJ 1 Corinthians 13:10 But when that which is perfect has come, then that which is in part
will be done away.
Some people try to make that flawlessness.
It means when you are face-to-face with the Lord or when you go to heaven or
something like that. But, that totally runs against the context that the word
there used in I Corinthians 13. It has to do with completion and the completed
canon.
So Hebrews 7:11 shouldn’t be
translated “If perfection came through the Levitical priesthood” but rather “if
completion”. If the Levitical priesthood was the completed final end
priesthood, then it wouldn’t be necessary for another priesthood - is what he
is saying.
“If completion was through the
Levitical priesthood, and it is not.”
That is how he is setting it up. It
is a second-class condition.
Now the next phrase that we have to
look at there is the phrase “if completion were through the Levitical
priesthood.” That is the preposition through which is a translation of the
Greek preposition dia plus the genitive. Dia
takes either a genitive or an accusative. If it takes the accusative case, it
has the idea of causation. You would translate it because. Let me give you and
example. This is one of my favorites.
NKJ Ephesians 2:8 For by grace you have been saved through
faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God,
NKJ Ephesians 2:9 not of works, lest anyone should boast.
There is a dia plus the genitive. If “faith” was in the accusative case, you would translate it “for by
grace you have been saved because of faith”. But you are not saved because of
faith. You are saved because of the grace of God. Faith is simply the
instrument or the means through which you appropriate that which God has
already accomplished for you and you are saved because of His grace and because
of the work of Christ on the cross. So through indicates the instrument or the
intermediate cause of something. So we see that the Levitical priesthood is
viewed here as simply the intermediate cause of how the people came to know the
law. As we will see, we will look at some passages related to the
qualifications and purpose of the priesthood in the Old Testament.
One of their purposes was to
instruct the people on the requirements of the Mosaic Law. They were to teach
the people the 613 commandments of the Law, the prohibitions and the positive
mandates. They were to teach them. So people learned the law through the priesthood
just as you learn the Word of God through the teaching of a local pastor. So as
the writer of Hebrews is setting this up he says,
NKJ Hebrews 7:11 Therefore, if completion were through the Levitical priesthood
What need would we have for another
priesthood? But you see it didn’t come through the Levitical priesthood. Then
there is a parenthetical statement that says “for under it”.
the people
received the law), what further need was there that another priest should rise
according to the order of Melchizedek, and not be called according to the order
of Aaron?
Under it needs to be analyzed just a
little bit. This is in the Greek preposition epi. It is used with the genitive again.
It means on the basis of something. It has the idea that through the Levitical
priesthood, for on the basis of it. There you have the third person singular
feminine noun. The feminine noun relates to the noun for priesthood so we know
that the “it” there refers back to the priesthood.
“For on the basis of it (i.e. the
priesthood) the people received the law.” So the law established the priesthood
and sets up the qualifications for the priesthood and defines the priesthood,
but the purpose for the priesthood was to teach the people the law and then to
lead them in the various ceremonial rituals that were involved in the Old
Testament law.
So for under it the people received
the law.
That is the Greek verb nomotheteo.
It is a perfect passive indicative, third person singular.
Now everybody always hears those grammatical
terms and wonders, ‘Well, what does all that mean?”
The perfect tense gives us the time
frame. It is completed action. So it is looking at the fact that the people had
completed the action of receiving the law. This is what had happened in the past in the Old Testament.
He is bundling the entire Old Testament period up together in one big bundle
looking at it as completed action in the past. So the people received the law
through the priests in the Old Testament.
It is a passive voice because the
people don’t perform the action; they receive the action. The action is
actually performed by the Levitical priests who carry out the instruction and
lead the people in the ritual. The perfect tense indicates it is completed
action. The passive voice indicates the people received the law. The indicative
mood is a mood of reality. It is a third person singular because “people” is
viewed as a collective noun which means it acts as a singular rather than a
plural even though it is talking about a group of people. So it talks about the
fact that in the Old Testament the people learned the law through the Levitical
priesthood. That was part of its function. But that apodosis “if completion
were through or if it were possible through the priesthood, what further need
would there be for another priesthood?”
That is his point. If we got it all
with the Levites, why would Psalm 110 come along and talk about a different
priesthood, a priesthood that isn’t mentioned for almost a 1000 years? From the
time of Abraham in approximately 2000 BC to the time Psalm 110:4 is written
there is no mention in the Scripture of Melchizedek. All of a sudden out of the
blue, David writes about the fact that there will be a priesthood associated
with the rule of the Messiah that is eternal in nature.
So God has given them the law and
the law is to be taught to the people by the priesthood. Now just a couple of
things about the Law, because people always get confused about the Law. People
tend to look at the Mosaic Law through the eyeglasses of the Pharisees in the
gospels. We make the mistake of thinking that the Pharisees are accurately
interpreting the law. They are not.
This is why Jesus comes along and
says, “Your righteousness had to exceed the Scribes and the Pharisees.”
They have a legalistic self
righteousness. It is not a consistent obedience to the law. They have taken the
law and they have basically reinterpreted it within their own traditions. Their
traditions have become more important than the Law itself and has caused them
to misinterpret the Mosaic Law and caused them to almost deify the Law in and
of itself or make an idol of the Law itself so that if anybody were to come
along and questions the Law, they wouldn’t really be questioning the 613
commandments that Moses gave; they would be questioning rabbinical
tradition.
Now what happened was this. In the
Mosaic Law you had 613 commandments. Some of them were positive; some of them
were negative. The warning passage, the discipline at the end of the Mosaic Law
in Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28 (We have gone through these before) the five
stages of discipline or five cycles of discipline that you have at the end of
the Law was set up and says “if you disobey the Law and you get involved in
idolatry and you disobey the Law, then God is going to take you out of the
land.”
This happened historically to the
Northern Kingdom, approximately 10 tribes. It is always referred to as ten
tribes even though when Assyria defeated them a lot of the people in the north
headed south get out of the way. The Northern Kingdom of Israel was taken out
under divine discipline in 722 BC. Then the Southern Kingdom was
taken out in 586. This wasn’t pleasant. This was not a wonderful period that
people looked back to with fond memories. In 722 when the Assyrians came
through, they killed - well over a couple of hundred thousand Jews were
slaughtered. There was famine. There were all kinds of torture. There were
families that were ripped apart. All of this took place. It was a horrible,
horrible experience.
Then the Babylonians came along a
little more than a hundred years later under Nebuchadnezzar. You had invasion
by Nebuchadnezzar in 605. You had another invasion by Nebuchadnezzar in 592 and
then his third and final invasion led to the destruction of Jerusalem and
destruction of the Temple and everything is wiped out. That occurred in 586.
This is a horrible time. Nobody wanted to go back through this again. Nobody
wanted to go through this again so when the Jews came back under Ezra and
Zerubbabel and Nehemiah there were those who were extremely conservative among
the priests who said, “Okay. We have to establish some guidelines here to make
sure that we don’t violate the Law. If you make a mistake and violate one of
those 613 commandments, God is serious. He is going to knock you on the side of
the head with a whole bunch of 2x4’s. We didn’t like it so we have to do
something to make sure we don’t break those 613 commandants.”
So what they did was they were going
to take various interpretations of those commandments and extrapolate those and
develop them into hundreds and hundreds of other commandments to build a fence
around the law.
Therefore, if you wouldn’t break any
of these extra commandments – if you wouldn’t break through the outer
fence of protection – then you certainly wouldn’t break one of God’s 613
commandments. So they set as it were a border fence around the law. That became
known as the Mishnah eventually. At the time of Jesus it was still oral. But,
by the late first century it was written down. This is rabbinical theology;
this isn’t biblical. This is the development of Judaism. This is where you get
the rise of your three major groups in Israel – the Pharisees, the Sadducees,
and the Essenes.
Now the Essenes aren’t mentioned in
Scripture. They are mentioned by Josephus, but they
are not mentioned by the New Testament at all. They were monastic, not
completely, but they tended to be very ascetic. They were very concerned with
moral purity. They lived out in the desert near the Dead Sea in a community
near Qumran. These were the people that stored the Dead Sea Scrolls and hid
them in the caves around Qumran. So we would classify them as the
hyper-righteous ascetics.
The Pharisees were the
conservatives. They were the ones who were really concerned with preserving
Jewish tradition and the biblical text. They were very moral. When you look at
them through Jesus’ eyes, they turn morality into a means of spirituality so
that produced what we now call legalism. They were the religious conservatives
within Israel.
The third group was the Sadducees.
The Sadducees were the religious liberals. They didn’t believe in miracles.
They didn’t believe in the existence of angels.
This is why when the Sadducees came
to Jesus and said, “You have this woman and she is married to a man and he dies
and then she remarries a second time and then he dies and she remarries the
third time and he dies and she remarries a fourth time and he dies. She
remarries a fifth time and he dies and she remarries a sixth time and he dies
and she remarries a seventh time and he dies.”
See I have seven there, the number
of perfection. So she had 7 husbands and they all die.
They said, “Well, whose wife is she
going to be in the resurrection?”
Jesus is saying, “You guys don’t
even believe in the resurrection. Why answer that question?”
They said, “Wait a minute. You ought
to get the DA after her because all of her husbands died. That is
kind of suspicious.”
The Sadducees didn’t believe in
angels. They didn’t believe in resurrection. They didn’t believe in life after
death. That is why they were sad you see.
(Laughter) See, you will
never forget that now.
So we had the Pharisees and the
Essenes and the Sadducees. That becomes Judaism. That is what begins to be
hardened and calcified about the time of Christ in the first century. Now what
happens (just to let you know how it develops from there) is when the temple is
destroyed in AD 70 and there are no more sacrifices, the Sadducees
have nothing to offer. The Essenes expect the Messiah to come back. They sort
of disappear. Some of them - a lot of people believe a lot of the Essenes went
to Masada because Qumran wasn’t very far from Masada. So a lot of them were
probably killed in Masada around AD 73.
For those of you who don’t know,
Masada was sort of like the Alamo - the Jewish version of the Alamo. After the
Romans destroyed Jerusalem, the more radical zealot elements all left to go to
one of Herod’s fortresses out in the desert up on top of what we would call a
butte. He had built this fortification up there and they were able to hold out.
But the Romans couldn’t let a pack of Jews hiding out in the wilderness stay
there. They had to go and destroy them.
That is a remarkable story in and of itself.
That would have wiped them out.
So the only group that was left that
had any kind of clout and any kind of faith or trust in the Bible as something significant
were the conservatives, the Pharisees. So the Pharisees were able to pull
things together and to reshape Judaism (Jewishness) so that you could survive
in an environment without a temple and without sacrifices. So over the next
hundred years, the Pharisees and their immediate descendents were the ones who
shaped what has became modern Judaism. Modern Judaism has nothing to do with
the Old Testament. Modern Judaism is rabbinical theology as defined by the
Pharisees and then further refined during the first 1,000 years after Christ.
So when you are talking or witnessing to a Jew, a lot of times he is going to
have some very unusual interpretations of the Old Testament because that is
what Judaism and rabbinical theology say. It doesn’t have anything to do with
the Old Testament.
Sometimes you get people that think,
“Well the Jews believe x, y and z about the Old Testament. Who are we to say
that it means something different?”
That is because we have to
understand that modern Judaism is shaped by rabbinical theology and not as it
was in the Old Testament. So all of this is simply a way of introduction
saying, why was the law important? Don’t think of the law in negative terms
just because of what the Pharisees did to it. The law had a role and as I
pointed out in previous studies in this series, the law was considered good and
perfect and just by the Apostle Paul. So therefore it had within its purpose
within its function – it was righteous. So we have to recognize that
there were certain limitations to the Mosaic Law. The Law could never justify
according to the New Testament. Acts 13:39 along with Romans 3:28 and Galatians
2:16 which says:
NKJ Galatians 2:16 "knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law but by
faith in Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Christ Jesus, that we might be
justified by faith in Christ and not by the works of the law; for by the works
of the law no flesh shall be justified.
One of the basic problems that
Christians have is trying to understand their relationship to the Law.
I will never forget the first church
I ever pastored. About 6 months into pastoring there I made the comment from
the pulpit that the Ten Commandments didn’t have anything to do with anybody
today. I visibly saw hackles come on the back of people’s necks. They had never
heard that before. So I spent about the next month having to go back and teach
on that – that The Ten Commandments didn’t establish those principles as
being wrong. Murder was murder and murder was wrong before the Ten Commandments.
Idolatry was condemned before the Ten Commandments. Adultery was condemned
before the Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments are nothing more than a
prelude to a legal document similar to the prelude of our Constitution in
relationship to our body of federal law known as the U.S.
Constitution. It is the first Ten Commandments which
summarize the fundamental principles that are then carried out in relationship
to both civil and ceremonial law in the other 603 commandments in the Mosaic Law.
The Ten Commandments had to do with Israel only and once Israel went out of
existence then the Mosaic Law was no longer a factor.
People today have so much trouble.
The Law does have a role today because it sets a pattern and precedence. We can
go to it for patterns and precedents, but it is not a law that is to be taken
point-by-point and applied to other nations or other circumstances. So here are
about 4 points on the relationship of the church to the law.
I hope it didn’t upset anybody here that last night Texas celebrated its
400th execution after reinstating the death penalty in 1982. I don’t
think I need to go into the fact that if you are a Bible believing Christian,
then you shouldn’t have a problem with the death penalty. You (might) ought to
have a problem with the fact that it is not consistently applied or applied as
frequently applied as it should be or as efficiently as it should be.
But nevertheless the death penalty isn’t contrary to anything in
Scripture. In fact it is mandated by Scripture. In the
Old Testament capital punishment was associated with teenage rebellion. Why? To
protect the divine institution of the family and the divine institution of the
nation so that you wouldn’t have rebellious kids who weren’t properly oriented
to authority growing up. So you had the death penalty. You also had the death penalty
for adultery and death penalty for homosexuality and death penalty for all
these other things. You don’t have the death penalty for those things in the
New Testament because we are not a nation. We don’t have to have a civil
government. That is why these things are not carried into the New Testament
with death penalties. You are not addressing a political institution in the New
Testament. The church is not a political institution. It is a multi-national,
multi-ethic organism that is in all nations across the board. There is not to
be an establishment for the Christian theocracy in the Church Age. So since the
law ended, the church is not under the law and the law is not a basis for the
spiritual life of the church.
Okay, we have looked at the
limitations of the Law. We have
looked at the church in relationship to the Law. Now I want to look at the
purposes for the Mosaic Law. There are six purposes for the Mosaic Law and I am
going to summarize these under 6 points. A couple of them I won’t talk about
much because I already have in some degree. This will synthesize it for you.
Now all of this was important in the
Old Testament. It was the priest that was to communicate and to teach the law
to the people. If you go back into the book of Leviticus, the work and the
qualifications and the responsibilities of the priesthood are outlined. That is
why it is called Leviticus because it has to do with the regulations for the
Levites. There are two sections that are important. One is in chapter 8 through
10 where God regulates the priesthood. I just want to go back and pick up a
couple of things for illustrative purposes here in Leviticus 8 through 10.
In chapter 8 we have the
consecration of Aaron. This is where his sons are publicly recognized. We do
something similar to it today in the church. It is called an ordination. It is
a time publicly recognized the formal service dictated in this case by the law
indicating that Aaron and his sons were specifically identified and set apart
for the service of God. Because they are set apart for the service of God, the
Mosaic Law contains certain regulations for them. There were some things they could do and some things that
they couldn’t do. So chapter 8 describes their consecration. It describes how
they are washed initially and how the blood of the sacrifice was sprinkled on
them as a sign of their salvation. It typifies salvation. It is not a sign of
their salvation. But it shows that they are being set apart to God. You have
the various offerings that had to be offered outlined in chapter 9. There had
to be a sin offering. There had to be a burnt offering. There had to be various
peace offerings and grain offerings. All of these offerings were designed
according to verse 7 to make atonement for themselves. They were a fallen
priesthood. They were just as much sinners as the people they were
representing. First before they could serve the people they had to be cleansed
and they had to have these sacrifices applied to them.
Also we see that God has specifically
defined who would serve as a priest and who wouldn’t.
There were those who were qualified
and those who weren’t. Aaron’s high priesthood would go through as a descendent
down through his son Eleazar. He had two sons Nadab and Abihu in chapter 10 who
decided that they could define how to get to God and how to serve God on their
own. See you have the same problem today.
You have a lot of people who want to
say, “Well, I think that the way God would do it is this way.”
So they trot down their little
avenue of Nadab and Abihu rebellion. So we learn that they tried to come to
God’s presence with their own fire that wasn’t set apart through the correct
formal service that had been defined by the Mosaic Law. So this is why the text
says that they offered profane fire. That means common. It wasn’t set apart. It
wasn’t set apart through ceremonial sanctification. So when they went in, the
Lord devoured them. They just sort of evaporated. He zapped them right there.
They had the instant death penalty because God is emphasizing the fact as He
said in verse 3:
NKJ Leviticus 10:3 And Moses said to Aaron, "This is what the LORD
spoke, saying: 'By those who come near Me I must be
regarded as holy; And before all the people I must be glorified.' " So
Aaron held his peace.
Then if you get down into chapter
10:8ff there are certain regulations that priests had to follow. They were not
to drink wine or any kind of intoxicating beverage. They couldn’t drink wine or
beer. They had to eat certain prescribed foods. They were given the remnants of
certain offerings to sustain them. If you skip over a few chapters to chapters
21 and 22, there are further regulations for the priests that if you are going
to serve God you have to live a certain kind of lifestyle. In terms of
grooming, they were told in verse 5:
NKJ Leviticus 21:5 ' They shall not make any bald place on their heads, nor shall they shave the
edges of their beards nor make any cuttings in their flesh.
You know how the Roman Catholic
priests - they would cut their hair a certain way. Well, that is what pagans
did. So when God gives these regulations for the priesthood, it is set against
what the pagans did so that they wouldn’t follow pagan practices. They weren’t
to trim their beards a certain way. They weren’t to shave a bald spot on their
heads a certain way. They weren’t to cut their flesh to scar themselves a
certain way, which is what many of the pagan priests did. They had to have a
family that was held to a higher ethical standard. So in verse 9 if a priest’s
daughter was a prostitute, then she would be burned at the stake. The burning
at the stake had to do with the picture of purification. So there was a higher
standard there. He had to marry a wife that was a virgin (verse 13). He
couldn’t marry a widow or a divorced woman or a woman who had been a
prostitute. They were qualified because they had to be descendents of the tribe
of Levi. If you read through all of these qualifications they were all physical
and genetic. They couldn’t have any sort of blemishes. They couldn’t be crippled in any way
because they had to picture man at his best. There is no qualification that
they had to be a believer. There was no qualification for them spiritually. It
had to do simply with the genetic heritage with Aaron and the Levites. So the
priesthood was regulated, but it was regulated on the basis of physical descent
and it is on the basis of physical qualifications and some moral
qualifications, but no spiritual qualifications.
Now we will stop there, come back next time and look at some of the other issues related to priesthood as it was understood by these Jews, these Hebrews that are receiving this letter. These came out of the priesthood and they probably had some distorted ideas based on what the rabbis taught at the time as to what the future priest would be like at the time that the Messiah returned. That is why he spent so much time dealing with the need for a new priesthood and why Jesus fits this qualification. This was clearly set up in the Old Testament.