God chose Israel’s kings and priests. And so after the long history of Israel’s failures, it is no surprise that God would choose Israel’s final High Priest to complete what God had begun many generations earlier. And that is what we find in these verses of Hebrews.
However, the choice of Jesus Christ as the new High Priest in ancient Israel was very different than the previous selections. First, Jesus was not an Aaronite, or from the tribe of Levi. Jesus was from the tribe of Judah, which was the lineage of kings, following King David. After Saul’s failure, David became the model king, though all the kings following David failed to accomplish God’s plan for Israel.
But Jesus was an unlikely candidate for High Priest in the eyes of ancient Israel for other reasons, too. Jesus did not have the usual history of royalty and wealth that accompanies the other kings. Jesus was a common man of the people. He was poor and “beset with weakness” (v. 2). …
In the Old Testament the High Priest was supposed to serve as the archetypal model of the faithful Israelite citizen. But the Old Testament High Priests failed to provide a righteous model for ordinary citizens to emulate. It has been said that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And the Old Testament Priests and Kings had power, and were corrupt. And this meant that a truly righteous archetypal High Priest could not come from within the Israelite social system because the power of the system had corrupted them all. …
When the foundation is corrupt a new foundation must be established. And the leaders of the old foundation don’t like it. The old leaders always oppose the new leaders, especially when old leaders are corrupt and the new leaders expose their corruption. This was the case in ancient Israel, as it is always true whenever and wherever social institutions become corrupt, when they fail to model sufficient righteousness for the ordinary people. It was true back then, and it is true in every period of history, including our own.
Ezekiel prophesied this kind of covenantal renewal when he wrote about the valley of dry bones. …
