The Divine Intercessors

Introduction

Before there was light, before the waters were gathered and the dry land called Earth, there was a ruin, and over the ruin something moved. The Scripture does not say that an angel moved there, or a seraph, or any power drawn from the order of things made. It says that "the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters" (Genesis 1:2). Everything I have to say in this essay is an attempt to weigh that one sentence and to follow it through the whole of Scripture, because in it the doctrine of divine intercession is already present as a seed: when creation is at its worst, God Himself comes down to it, takes responsibility for it, and will not let it go.

My thesis is this. Intercession is divine in its nature, and not merely in its source. No creature can carry it out on behalf of another, because the fall of man is a ruin that no creaturely power can reach. In the New Testament it is ascribed only to the divine Persons, to the Son who lives at the right hand of the Father and to the Holy Spirit who dwells within the saints, and in Genesis 1 it is already the work of the Spirit, who hovers over the deep and sets a limit to its decay. Salvation, for this reason, is not a legal verdict pronounced from a distance. It is an ontological change, the remaking of a nature that has died, and it is wrought by the God who assumed our nature in order to save it, who lives always to intercede for all who come to the Father through Him, and who groans within the saints with groanings that cannot be uttered.

The argument proceeds in seven movements. I begin with why theological truth must be treasured and guarded, and with the truth about the Son that Satan labours hardest to suppress, since without the divinity of Christ the doctrine of intercession has nothing to stand on. I then turn to Adam's treason and to why the restoration of man must begin with God and not with man. The third movement is Genesis 1:1–3, where the Spirit's presence over the deep, the boundary He sets, and the Greek vocabulary of intercession disclose the pattern of redemption. The fourth considers what that presence means for a life that has fallen into darkness. The fifth argues that salvation is participation and not declaration, and that the Eucharist is the appointed means of that participation. The sixth reads Hebrews 7 for the priesthood after the order of Melchizedek, and the seventh reads Romans 8 for the intercession of the Spirit within us.

The stakes are not academic. A Church that regards the Son as a prophet, or a creature, or a man exalted by degrees, has no Priest and no gospel, and a Church that regards salvation as a declaration has no new life to offer. A believer who reads his sufferings as proof of God's absence will conclude, wrongly, that he has been abandoned. If intercession is divine, each of these errors is answered at once: the God who moved upon the deep has not left, the Priest who lives for ever has not failed, and the Spirit who groans within has not been silent.

The Truth, the Son, and the Lie Behind the Denial

The Household and the Treasure of Truth

"Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!" (Psalm 133:1). I have often asked where this dwelling is, and the answer is not difficult. It is the house of God, "the household of faith" (Galatians 6:10), where the brethren gather in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ to commune in His presence, to seek the face of the Father, and to be built up by the LogosLogosThe eternal Word of God, through whom all things were made, who became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:1–14). of God. A gathering of that kind is not held together by sentiment. It is held together by a common confession of the truth revealed by the Lord Jesus Christ and His apostles, and it is the care of that truth which makes the dwelling a household at all.

I hold that it matters, and matters greatly, what we believe. It is not enough to treasure theological truth; we are bound to protect it from false ideologies and heretical theories, from the lies and deceptions that wait like wild foxes and wolves to tear the flock apart and to keep us from our Lord Jesus Christ. The reason is that theological truth is freedom. The forces at work in the world are powerful enough to achieve their ends against a soul in which the truth does not dwell, but where the truth dwells and abides they become powerless, and the one who hosts it is delivered from the harm they intended. "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free" (John 8:32).

Notice the article in that promise. The Lord does not say that we shall know a truth, as though truth were a private possession that each man might shape to his own measure. He says the truth, and in saying so He tells us that truth is absolute and all encompassing, and that it is exactly as it was revealed. We either receive it or we do not; we have no liberty to modify it. The modification of truth is therefore unacceptable in kind, and not merely in degree, since a truth that can be adjusted by the one who holds it has ceased to be truth and has become opinion.

It follows that God is the arbiter of truth in everything He has revealed and communicated to the human race, and whoever wants the truth must consult Him. The embodiment of all truth is our Lord Jesus Christ, who said of Himself, "I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me" (John 14:6). Everything that follows in this essay turns upon that identification, because a man's attitude toward the truth will in the end be his attitude toward the Person who is the Truth.

The Denial of the Son

When the name and Person of Jesus Christ are set before men, very different responses are drawn out of them. The Muslim will tell us that Jesus is a prophet of God, that he is to be respected, but that he was a man and may not be worshipped. The Unitarian will tell us that there is only one God, the Father, and that Jesus Christ, though He came, was Himself created. The Latter-day Saints and the Jehovah's Witnesses, each in their own manner, deny His divinity as well. What is striking is that very few of them have any difficulty with His humanity; their quarrel is entirely with His divine nature.

Scripture does not leave the matter open. "Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father" (1 John 2:23), and the Apostle adds that "he that believeth not God hath made him a liar; because he believeth not the record that God gave of his Son" (1 John 5:10). The Lord Himself gave the qualifier for the acceptance of God in these words: "That all men should honour the Son, even as they honour the Father. He that honoureth not the Son honoureth not the Father which hath sent him" (John 5:23), and He grounded it in the Father's own gift: "For as the Father hath life in himself; so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself" (John 5:26). God does not permit Himself to be accepted apart from His Son. I say plainly, and without discourtesy, that for this reason Christians cannot be worshipping the same God as the Muslims, nor the same God as the Latter-day Saints, nor the same God as the Unitarians, since each of these refuses the honour that the Father Himself requires to be given to the Son.

The reasoning is simple, and I find it unanswerable. Those who say that God is Father must tell us whose Father He is, for no one goes about calling a man father who has no child. As to His essence, God is God; but fatherhood speaks of His hypostasis (His distinct personal subsistence) and of His position within the relationship of the Godhead. To call God Father is therefore to confess that He has a Son, and that Son cannot be you, and cannot be me. He must be related to the Father hypostatically, as the Son whom the Father has begotten. Consider then whether there was ever a time when God was not Father. There was not, which means that there was never a time when He was without a Son, and that Son must be God.

This is why I say that the doctrine of the Trinity is no ornament of the faith but its foundation. There is one God, who is Father; the Father has a Son; and the Spirit proceeds from the Father. The Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Father, and the Spirit is neither, yet the three are distinct within one hypostatic relationship and the God they are is one. Every other religion denies this, and no man can make sense of the God who has revealed Himself without it. One cannot be a Christian in the true sense while refusing the Trinity as a doctrine of reality, because it is the only account that does justice to what the Scripture says of God.

The Lie Satan Would Suppress

The Apostle speaks of those who have heard Christ and been taught by Him, "as the truth is in Jesus" (Ephesians 4:21), and who by putting Him on are defended from the lie. It is worth naming the lie, since Satan does not labour over trivialities. The lie he works to keep suppressed is that Jesus Christ is God. If the truth about the nature of Christ were universally accepted, the question of why God chose to become man would at once become urgent, and the answer to that question is the salvation of the entire human species. The concealment of the gospel of how God became man in order to save man is therefore advocated and resourced by Satan, and there is no knowledge more consequential to a human being than this one.

It was not His humanity that made salvation possible; it was His divinity assuming humanity. No son of man was able to meet the demands of the justice required to remit the treason of Adam. Only God could save man, and yet He could not save man as Himself, because man did not fall as God; he fell as man. God must therefore assume the properties of the man who fell, and I state this as a theological fact and not as an opinion. Whoever denies it cannot be saved. The Apostle John is unsparing on the point: "For many deceivers are entered into the world, who confess not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh. This is a deceiver and an antichrist" (2 John 7; compare 1 John 4:2–3).

The confession in question is not that Jesus was a human being, a man who was born and died; that is not difficult for anyone to believe. The confession is that the divine Logos, God Himself, took human flesh. This is hard to believe only until one considers who God is. A man cannot call God almighty and in the same breath say that there is a limit to what God can do, for that is a contradiction. If He is almighty, He is able even to become a part of His creature. The God who stoops so low is the God of intercession, and it is to intercession that I now turn.

Why Only God Can Intercede

In this series on divine intercession I have remained for some weeks in Genesis 1, because the chapter shows what must be seen before the subject can be understood. I propose that intercession, in its nature, is divine, and my reason is that only God can truly intercede for man. Throughout the New Testament it is carried out only by the divine Persons of the Godhead, by Christ and by the Holy Ghost. The subject matters because the power and efficacy of salvation cannot be realised in a man's experience until he understands intercession, for it is intercession that precedes salvation, and there is no salvation without it. The greatest event contributing to the salvation of the human soul was, and is, intercession; it is the antidote and the remedy to the treason of Adam.

Sin is a function of the will. I was not in the garden, and I could not have committed Adam's sin, but what I inherit is its consequence, which is passed down hereditarily through the generations. The human race is judged on account of one man, because God attributes the transgression to Adam and to the entire race together with him. By default the whole race is alienated from God, from His life, and from fellowship and communion with Him. Adam's treason made man incompatible with his Creator, and the incompatibility is one of fellowship: man cannot now enter into communion with God except through the means of intercession.

Man cannot institute that means for himself. The One with whom he seeks fellowship must be the One who establishes the way, because if man is ever to have a relationship with God again, it will be by the doing of God and not of man. Having fallen from grace, man is incapable of reinstating himself by his own volition into the relationship he has broken. The Scripture does not leave this as an abstraction. In the second verse of the Bible it is shown to us in the earth itself, and I want to set that passage out so that it is plain why there can be no restoration or redemption of the creation without the mediation of God Himself.

The Spirit upon the Deep

The Earth That Became

"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light." (Genesis 1:1–3)

The first verse introduces God as Creator. The second introduces a second state of the earth. On the reading I follow, which I take the Septuagint and other Greek and Masoretic witnesses to support, the earth did not exist without form but became without form: it underwent an alteration of state, a metamorphosis. Isaiah 45 confirms that this cannot have been the state of its making: "he created it not in vain, he formed it to be inhabited" (Isaiah 45:18). God did not create the earth formless, and He did not create it uninhabitable; the earth of verse 2 could not be inhabited because of what it had become. Whether that came about through the fall of Satan or through the judgment of God is beside my present point. What matters is that the earth is at its worst, and that it is visited by its Creator.

Genesis itself shows us that the earth lay submerged. I read the Scripture's account of the earth on its own terms, and on those terms the earth is the dry land that God brought up out of the waters by His gathering of them:

"And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good." (Genesis 1:9–10)

The Apostle Peter, whom the rulers perceived to be among "unlearned and ignorant men" (Acts 4:13), was given insight into this, and he speaks of "the earth standing out of the water and in the water" (2 Peter 3:5). The flood confirms it, for when God brought the judgment, "were all the fountains of the great deep broken up" (Genesis 7:11), and the waters upon which the earth had stood broke out of it. I do not accept that a cosmology which begins from the creature can correct this account. The creature did not make the earth; the Creator did, and He has given us His own description of it, which is the standard by which I read.

The Spirit and the Word

Notice what is present in the destructive state of the earth, something that is no part of the creation. The Spirit of God is not a creature; He belongs to the Godhead, and He is God. It is He whom we see hovering, brooding, over the face of the waters. God did not send an angel, which would have been a creature, and He did not send a seraph. He came Himself, and this tells us that God was taking responsibility for His creation.

To intercede means, in the sense of the word, to light upon, to fall into. The Spirit, who is not part of the creation, lights upon the earth while it lies in its chaotic and formless condition, and the presence of God over the creation is the first intercession in the Scripture. From it a principle follows. God intercedes for His creation when it passes into a state other than that in which He made it. He does not relegate the matter to another, and He does not absorb Himself in other concerns and say that the cause is not His and therefore not His problem. He does not disown the creation because it has taken on a different state from the one He gave it. In the darkest and most chaotic hours of a life, God is the only one who remains faithful to His creature.

Consider what this implies. He would not brood over the earth, and assume responsibility for its recreation, its remodelling, its restoration, and its redemption, only to fold His arms when man, whom He prizes, falls into the same chaos by rebelling and sinning against Him. If He does this for the earth, He will do it for the man whom He loves. The Lord Himself draws the inference in the Sermon on the Mount: "Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?" (Matthew 6:30). The information to be drawn from Genesis 1:2 is God's loyalty and faithfulness to His creation, even when that creation is faithless and removes itself from the state in which He created it.

I therefore read the story of Genesis 1, through verse 25, as a story of redemption. It is the story of a fall, depicted in the terms of the earth, and of the God who redeemed what had fallen. In verse 3 we see the whole Godhead at work: the Spirit hovers, God speaks, and the Word by whom the Father speaks restores. That speaking was a prophetic shadow, a declaration that God would not cease from the purpose of saving His creation whenever it deviates from its path. Yet when man fell, God did not only say; He became. "And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us" (John 1:14). Look at the degrees of God's manifestation in His dealings with creation: the Spirit present, the Word spoken, the Word made flesh. He assumed His creation that He might save it.

The Boundary and the Mark

The presence of the Spirit was intercessory in a precise sense. He hovered right on the face of the deep in order to preserve it, to prevent further decay, erosion, destruction, and chaos. He drew a line of demarcation: this far the destruction may go, and no further. That is the mandate of intercession. Intercession is a mechanism of preservation which God has set within creation, to guard against further decay and to hold back further ruin.

The Scripture shows the same mechanism in the history of Israel. When the people rebelled, the anger of the Lord was kindled in the camp and a plague went out among them, and men began to die. Moses said to Aaron:

"Take a censer, and put fire therein from off the altar, and put on incense, and go quickly unto the congregation, and make an atonement for them: for there is wrath gone out from the LORD; the plague is begun. And Aaron took as Moses commanded, and ran into the midst of the congregation; and, behold, the plague was begun among the people: and he put on incense, and made an atonement for the people. And he stood between the dead and the living; and the plague was stayed." (Numbers 16:46–48)

Where Aaron stood, the plague went no further. He stayed it because he engaged in priestly function, which is intercessory and mediatory in its nature. Consider also the day when Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses, and the Lord came down in the pillar of the cloud and rebuked them. "And the cloud departed from off the tabernacle; and, behold, Miriam became leprous, white as snow: and Aaron looked upon Miriam, and, behold, she was leprous" (Numbers 12:10). Both had sinned, yet Aaron was spared. I read the difference in the garment: Aaron was wearing the ephod of the priest, and what that vestment represented shielded him from the judgment, for it was intercessory. Had he not worn it, I am certain that he too would have been made leprous.

The vocabulary of the New Testament says the same thing in a form that can be read off the word itself. The Greek word for intercession in Hebrews is entynchano, a compound of en, meaning in, and tynchano, meaning to hit the mark. To intercede is to hit the mark within. The Greek word for sin is hamartia, which means to miss the mark. Where sin misses, intercession hits the target, and so the remedy for sin is not an amendment of the record but a hitting of the mark that man has missed. It was instituted by God, who stands apart from His creation, in the second verse of the Bible, and it is for this reason that the priesthood is divine and not human. It is given to man, as we shall see, for a purpose, but its origin and its power are not man's.

The Presence of God in the Dark

Return to the second verse for what is most intimate in it. The Scripture does not say simply that God was there; it says the Spirit, and a Spirit is a Person. The personal presence of God was in the formless and dark condition of the earth, and this tells us what kind of relationship He keeps with His creation. "The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit" (Psalm 34:18). The earth depicted a broken state. It was dysfunctional, it had missed its purpose, it had become formless and void, and a total darkness had enveloped it.

That condition may describe one chapter of your own life. You may find yourself, or you may have found yourself, in a season when everything seems formless and chaotic, when it is all dark and you cannot see where you are going, when it feels as though you are being crushed under the weight of circumstances and suffocating beneath the surface. The earth was submerged, but its case was deeper than that, for it was submerged under darkness; the darkness lay upon the face of the deep. You may be in the chasms of depression, of deep stress and anxiety, where nothing in life appears to work because no way out can be seen. The Scripture comforts us in exactly this place by telling us that the Spirit was there. In our distress He is present, in our destruction He is present, and when we are at our worst He is there. He does not leave us because we fall.

We departed by our own will; we rejected Him and rebelled against Him, and yet He does not leave us merely because our lives are in disorder. On the contrary, He draws nearer. "If it had not been the LORD who was on our side, now may Israel say; If it had not been the LORD who was on our side, when men rose up against us" (Psalm 124:1–2), and the Psalm goes on to say what would have followed. The distress in which you may find yourself is nothing compared with what it would have been had God not been there. The reason it is not as bad as it could be is that He is present, and the reason it has not sunk you to the depths of death is that He is present. You may not see Him, but a power of preservation surrounds you, and God has said that this is as far as it can go.

It is often asked why a good God allows the chaos. I answer that the question is aimed in the wrong direction. The question that needs asking is why my will departs from God's, and why it rebels against Him, for that is the consequence of rebellion. God never shifts: "Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever" (Hebrews 13:8). His purposes and His counsel are eternal, and when there is a deviation from anything He has purposed, the deviation is not from God but from the subject. The Scripture shows us also that no evil can exceed the boundaries which God has set for it. Satan had every wish to kill Job, and he could not, because God had fixed the limit of his activity: "all that he hath is in thy power; only upon himself put not forth thine hand" (Job 1:12), and again, "he is in thine hand; but save his life" (Job 2:6). The earth did not pray, and yet the Spirit was present. Who interceded for it, and who came to its aid? None other than God Himself.

It is a sad thing that we are still being introduced to the nature of the Father and to His attributes. The Lord says, "I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman" (John 15:1). A husbandman is one who is responsible for the care of the field, for its cultivation, and for its provision, and the great Husbandman is God, who is responsible for that which He has made. It follows that we must not use our circumstances to construct a theology of God. Many of us reason in this way: I am suffering, therefore God does not love me; my life is hard, therefore God does not care. I cannot see how those conclusions are reached, and I cannot see what entitles anyone to draw them. They display an ignorance of God, and an ignorance of the part that our own will plays in the outcomes of our lives.

What the Scripture shows throughout is that the operation of God within man is redemptive, and that the redemption includes the judgment of the antagonist. For this reason a veil is set over the world of man: should the redemption of God be made visible, the judgment of Satan would be made visible with it, and he would lose his strength and his sway over man. The Apostle calls it "the hidden wisdom, which God ordained before the world unto our glory" (1 Corinthians 2:7). We fall because our will is contrary to the will of God, and there is only one way back, which the Scripture teaches and which our Lord shows by His own example. When the will of man is not submitted to the will of God, man must pray. He must place himself on the altar and become the sacrifice and the offering; he must open himself to God, and be vulnerable to the point where the Lord Jesus says, "My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death" (Matthew 26:38). Christ reveals the state of His soul, and the pressure He feels in it, and then He says to the Father, "O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt" (Matthew 26:39). Without the intervention of God it is difficult, even impossible, for a man to light upon salvation, and we must be saved in every respect.

Salvation as Participation, Not Declaration

Not a Legal Fiction

The priesthood is a divine institution which God has given to man for a purpose. "For every high priest taken from among men is ordained for men in things pertaining to God, that he may offer both gifts and sacrifices for sins" (Hebrews 5:1): the priest offers sins to God on behalf of the people, and he represents God to the people, so that his office is intermediary in its nature. Yet the Scripture is explicit that "there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus" (1 Timothy 2:5). There are not two mediators; there is one. Moses is not the mediator between God and man, and Aaron is not the mediator between God and man. The one Mediator is a man, Christ Jesus, and He did not become a man until the incarnation, which means that for the four thousand years before it the human race had no mediator. God had therefore to provide placeholder ministries for that function, and they could not suffice. "For it is not possible that the blood of bulls and goats should take away sins" (Hebrews 10:4); it could sanctify, but it did not remit, it did not atone, and it did not satisfy the justice of God.

This is why salvation cannot be forensic or juristic. It cannot be a matter of conferral, a status pronounced over a man who remains what he was. Salvation must answer to what sin became, and sin is not legal; it is ontological, because Adam died. "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life" (John 3:16), and everlasting life cannot be a function of legal terminology. Christianity is not a legal functionary. It demands the entire transformation of the man through the agency of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Because Jesus Christ died in truth, my salvation must be in truth; it makes no sense that He should die really while my righteousness hangs upon juristic terms, for on that account He might as well have died juristically.

The restoration of the human being therefore requires that man be given an intercessor, one who would hit the mark in place of the man who missed it, and who would remedy, cure, heal, save, and deliver him from the pain of sin. If sin is not legal, then nothing God does about it can be merely legal. This is what I was trying to convey when I treated the sacraments: God intends us to participate in every progression and in every operation of our salvation. If Christ dies, I must die also, but I do not die in the sense proposed by the evangelical and Protestant theologians, as an act of mental ascent. No one goes to Jerusalem to take up a cross and announces that he has died with Christ. The Scripture names the way: "Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death? Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death" (Romans 6:3–4). Baptism is participation in the death of Christ. I do not decide the manner of it; the operation of that truth is God's. He is the one who invites us to salvation, and so it is on His terms, which we must agree to.

The Sacrament

The same principle governs the Eucharist, and it explains the offence that the Lord's words occasioned. He said to the Jews that He was the bread from heaven, and reminded them that "Your fathers did eat manna in the wilderness, and are dead" (John 6:49), whereas "I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever: and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world" (John 6:51). His hearers stayed, as men who supposed they could manage what was coming. Then He said, "Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you" (John 6:53). "Many therefore of his disciples, when they had heard this, said, This is an hard saying; who can hear it?" (John 6:60), and "from that time many of his disciples went back, and walked no more with him" (John 6:66). They did not wait long enough to learn how the flesh was to be eaten.

On the last night He showed them:

"And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and brake it, and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body. And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, Drink ye all of it; For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins." (Matthew 26:26–28)

He did not say that the bread symbolises His body. He said, this is. He was called Rabbi, a master of words, and the officers who heard Him testified that "Never man spake like this man" (John 7:46), so that I know there was no mistake in His communication. The statement was absolute; it was not a representation, not a mirror, not an allegory or a metaphor. I do not undertake here to account for the manner of it, and I observe only that the outward properties of what He gave afford no ground for revising what He said. What He gave, He called His body and His blood.

Sacramentology is the study of the mediums that are granted and consecrated to us for the purpose of participating in that which is divine. They are material, yet they depict a spiritual and mysterious reality. A man cannot deny the sacrament and still claim that he is part of the body of Christ, for "The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ?" (1 Corinthians 10:16). This is how we commune; this is how we partake of the body, and of the blood, and of the powers associated with them. If it is held that the sacrament is merely symbolic, why does the Apostle say of those who partake of it unworthily, "For this cause many are weak and sickly among you, and many sleep" (1 Corinthians 11:30), because they eat "not discerning the Lord's body" (1 Corinthians 11:29)? If there is no spiritual presence or power in it, there should be no spiritual consequences, and yet some are weak, some are sick, and some have died.

Anyone who can get through that difficulty will, I think, have to change his mind about the nature of the sacrament, and about what Jesus said. To call it symbolic is to set oneself against the Lord, who said that unless a man eats His flesh and drinks His blood he has no life in him. We do not give much thought to what He said; we adopt theologies and opinions that were handed down to us and that are contrary to His words, and then we wonder why we cannot build a rich spiritual life with God. Salvation, then, is communicated through participation, and the participation is carried by the intercession of the One who authored it. God assumes responsibility for us, and He asks us to take part.

Salvation is therefore a progression toward a final form, and the final form is sinlessness. Until we reach it we are still being saved. "But he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved" (Matthew 24:13), and the Apostle commands, "work out your own salvation with fear and trembling" (Philippians 2:12), because "our conversation is in heaven; from whence also we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ" (Philippians 3:20). He is to appear a second time: "unto them that look for him shall he appear the second time without sin unto salvation" (Hebrews 9:28). I cannot call a man saved in the final sense while he still sins, because salvation is not a form of words. It is nature; it is ontology; it is transformation and change. Until that day we must open ourselves to the intercession of the Spirit, and to that intercession the Letter to the Hebrews now directs us.

The Priest Forever and His Unceasing Intercession

The Priesthood Changed

The purpose of the priesthood is perfection. "If therefore perfection were by the Levitical priesthood, (for under it the people received the law,) what further need was there that another priest should rise after the order of Melchisedec, and not be called after the order of Aaron?" (Hebrews 7:11). God is concerned with the perfection of the human race, and the Levitical priesthood failed to bring it. The law was itself perfect, but it could not make anyone perfect. The very fact that God brought in another priesthood after a different order shows that the first fell short of its assignment, since otherwise there would have been no need of a second.

"For the priesthood being changed, there is made of necessity a change also of the law" (Hebrews 7:12). This is what the Jews do not catch: the Levitical priesthood has been altered, and the order through which the oil now flows is no longer that of Aaron but that of Melchizedek. Our Lord "sprang out of Juda; of which tribe Moses spake nothing concerning priesthood" (Hebrews 7:14), and no man of that tribe had given attendance at the altar. The law has been changed, and we do not look to a law of tablets written in stone but to the law instituted by this Priest. "For the law made nothing perfect, but the bringing in of a better hope did; by the which we draw nigh unto God" (Hebrews 7:19). Perfection is possible, and salvation is possible, because God has brought in another law, which the Apostle calls a better hope.

The Order of Melchizedek

Genesis 14 gives us the figure of that order:

"And Melchizedek king of Salem brought forth bread and wine: and he was the priest of the most high God. And he blessed him, and said, Blessed be Abram of the most high God, possessor of heaven and earth: And blessed be the most high God, which hath delivered thine enemies into thy hand. And he gave him tithes of all." (Genesis 14:18–20)

Abraham went to meet Melchizedek, the king of Salem and priest of the most high God, and Abraham paid him a tenth of all the spoils. Observe what Melchizedek brought. He did not come with bulls and goats; he came with bread and wine, and Abraham partook of the sacrament. He foreshadowed a priesthood that was to come, which would bring the remission of sins not through the blood of bulls and goats but through the bread, which is the flesh, and the cup, which is the blood of Jesus. The priesthood of Melchizedek is ratified on bread and wine.

When Christ took bread and wine in the upper room, He was instituting a priesthood. Peter tells us later that we are "a chosen generation, a royal priesthood" (1 Peter 2:9), and the question is what we are to offer. We do not offer the blood of bulls and goats; we offer the Eucharist, because we share in the priesthood of the High Priest after the order of Melchizedek, who comes bearing bread and wine. He is a priest "not after the law of a carnal commandment, but after the power of an endless life" (Hebrews 7:16), a life that cannot be dissolved, a life indestructible and impervious to corruption, and it is of Him that the oath is spoken: "Thou art a priest for ever after the order of Melchisedec" (Hebrews 7:17).

The Apostle continues with what distinguishes this priesthood from every other. "And they truly were many priests, because they were not suffered to continue by reason of death: But this man, because he continueth ever, hath an unchangeable priesthood" (Hebrews 7:23–24). The priests of the Aaronic order had an expiry date; the one Priest of the new order has none. A priesthood founded upon a temporal man could not have served as the type of this one, and the Apostle says of Melchizedek that he was "Without father, without mother, without descent, having neither beginning of days, nor end of life; but made like unto the Son of God; abideth a priest continually" (Hebrews 7:3). If Melchizedek remained a priest from the day Abraham met him until Christ came, then he abides across some four thousand years, which accords with what the Apostle says. Human beings have mothers and fathers, and a beginning and an end of days; Melchizedek therefore cannot have been a priest in the manner that a mere man is a priest, and I read him as playing an archetypal role in foreshadowing the ultimate priesthood. The priesthood of Christ keeps the name and the order of Melchizedek because of what Melchizedek represents, and the only priest after Melchizedek is Jesus, which means that the priesthood changed hands only when Christ came. The priesthood that Christ inherits is an eternal one.

Entirely and Always

"Wherefore he is able also to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them." (Hebrews 7:25)

The Greek word translated uttermost is panteles, and it means entirely: He is able to save them entirely, not in part, and not as a half job. The word translated ever is pantote, and it means at all times. Follow the connection between them. He saves entirely because at all times He intercedes. If He interceded only at times, He could not save entirely, and it is precisely because His intercession has no interval that His salvation has no remainder. His intercession is not a matter of two seconds. It is at all times.

The trigger of salvation lies in the clause that is easily passed over. The text does not say that He is able to save everybody; it says that He is able to save entirely those who come unto God by Him. Those who do not come to God through Him He does not save, though He intercedes for them. Here is the manifestation of intercession in salvation. The believer who is experiencing states of salvation in his life may take that as proof that Christ is interceding for him, and he can know how much Christ is interceding for him by how much salvation he is experiencing, with one qualifier, which is that he must come to God. The power of Christ's intercession, which He carries out at all times, comes into operation and is demonstrated when a man comes to God by Jesus Christ. To come by Christ is to say to the Father, in the name of Jesus, that He is qualified for salvation, and that on His qualification grace should be extended to me.

The Apostle then describes the Priest: "For such an high priest became us, who is holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners, and made higher than the heavens" (Hebrews 7:26). He is different from us, and more than a human being. He has no need daily to offer sacrifice, first for His own sins and then for the people's: "for this he did once, when he offered up himself" (Hebrews 7:27). He died once, and He intercedes for ever. "For the law maketh men high priests which have infirmity; but the word of the oath, which was since the law, maketh the Son, who is consecrated for evermore" (Hebrews 7:28). Salvation is communicated to humanity by two means, the death of Jesus Christ and the intercession of Jesus Christ, and the emphasis of the Apostle falls upon the second. The Apostle does not say that Christ is able to save because He died, though He died; he says that He is able to save because He ever liveth to make intercession. To experience that for which He died, I must come into the effect of His intercession, and the requirement is that I present myself, and that I make myself appear before God.

The Spirit Intercedes beyond Speech

"Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. And he that searcheth the hearts knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit, because he maketh intercession for the saints according to the will of God." (Romans 8:26–27)

The word that Hebrews uses of Christ is entynchano, as we have seen. The word that Paul uses here of the Spirit is hyperentynchano, with the prefix hyper, meaning over, above, exceedingly. While Christ at all times intercedes, the Spirit intercedes exceedingly, and the difference is one of location. The intercession of Christ is before the Father; the intercession of the Holy Spirit is within the one for whom He intercedes. The word translated helpeth is synantilambanetai, which carries the sense of laying hold together with, and against. The Spirit comes to partner with us against that which is against us, and what is against us here is our weakness and our limitation. Our infirmities are therefore not a repellent to the Spirit; they are the reason He comes near, and the reason He comes alongside us. A weak man does not repel God. He attracts Him, that His power may be made perfect in weakness: "My strength is made perfect in weakness" (2 Corinthians 12:9).

The Apostle makes two statements about us. The first is that we have infirmities and need the aid of the Spirit. The second is that we do not know what we are doing: "we know not what we should pray for as we ought." There is a way to pray for what ought to be prayed for, and we do not know it. We are unskilled in prayer, and that is a serious thing, because the prayer that makes a difference is praying for what we should pray for, in the manner in which we should pray for it. Notice what the Apostle does with that admission. He transfers the responsibility for the intercession from us to the Spirit. You do not know how to pray, but the Spirit does. You do not know what to pray for, but the Spirit does. In every case of our plight the Spirit is the one necessary for the achievement of the object.

We have been told for years that the Spirit cannot do it without us, and that He works with our help. The Scripture says otherwise. The Authorised Version renders the pronoun itself, following the grammatical gender of the Greek word for spirit, but the one who acts is the Third Person of the Trinity, as the second verse of the Bible has already shown. The Apostle has just told us that we do not know, so he cannot then say that the Spirit intercedes with our aid. The matter of help has already been dealt with in the word helpeth; when he comes to intercession, he says the Spirit Himself, and not by our assistance. This is something that only the Holy Spirit can do, and He does it exceedingly, standing over us in a mandate that we have no skill to share.

His intercession is carried out through an unspeakable mode, which the Apostle calls groanings which cannot be uttered. The emanation is from the Spirit and not from the human, and these are His groanings and not ours. The searcher of hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit maketh intercession for the saints according to the will of God. I set aside the interpretations of men and ask what the source says: the source says that the intercession is the Spirit's, and it has already said that we do not know. The highest form of prayer, therefore, does not involve us. It is for our sake, but it is not carried out by us; it is divine in its origin, and it is divine in its accomplishment, because the Holy Spirit takes up the operation. Its location is in us, since He dwells within us, but the one who intercedes is He.

Some say that these groanings are tongues. The Apostle says that they cannot be uttered, and tongues can be uttered, for "they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance" (Acts 2:4). That is not this utterance. The word in Romans means that utterance is impossible; there is no possibility of utterance in the intercession of the Spirit, which is speechless and carries no vocabulary. The highest frequency of prayer is speechless, because we do not know what to say, and the Spirit does.

To enter that dimension of intercession, I must do what the text has already told me to do. I must humble myself, admit my weakness, admit my limitation, and admit that I do not know. I do not have the words, specific to this matter, that are worthy of being heard by the Father, and I need help. The same Spirit who moved upon the face of the deep, who was the agent in the recreation and restoration of the earth, says to me that He has come to help, and asks what my weakness is, and what my infirmity is, and what my limitation is. The question that remains is whether we have permitted Him, whether we have allowed Him, whether we have accepted and embraced His help. We must come out of the modes of religiosity and into the reality of life.

Conclusion

The Scripture presents a single movement from the second verse of Genesis to the eighth chapter of Romans, and the movement is that God comes down. The Spirit lights upon the deep and sets a boundary to its ruin; the Word is spoken, and later made flesh; the Priest who lives for ever stands before the Father at all times; and the Spirit groans within the saints with groanings that cannot be uttered. Each of these is divine, and each is intercession, and the whole is the antidote to the treason of Adam. I have argued that it could not have been otherwise. Man, having fallen, cannot reinstate himself, and no creature can do for him what he cannot do; only the God who made him can hit the mark that he has missed, and He has done so by taking his nature, and by remaining present to him in every darkness.

The consequences are practical, pastoral, and eschatological. We are bound to care for the truth, and above all for the truth about the Son, since to deny Him is to lose the Father and to lose the Priest. We must come to God by Jesus Christ, for it is those who come to God by Him whom He saves entirely, and we must come to the table, where the participation in His death and life is given us in the bread and in the cup. We must open ourselves to the Spirit who intercedes within us, confessing that we do not know, and that He does. Our sufferings do not furnish a theology of God's absence, for the presence of God is what prevents them from being worse, and the boundary that He has set is the reason we are not undone.

We still await the day of final salvation, when the Saviour appears the second time and the sinlessness toward which we are being drawn becomes our condition. We approach it through the Eucharist, in which, as often as we eat this bread and drink this cup, we "do shew the Lord's death till he come" (1 Corinthians 11:26), and in which the Church makes known, "unto the principalities and powers in heavenly places," the "manifold wisdom of God" (Ephesians 3:10). We approach it by the word, which is a light to us, for "in thy light shall we see light" (Psalm 36:9), and by the vision of God for which the word prepares us: "Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God" (Matthew 5:8). As we behold, we are changed: "But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord" (2 Corinthians 3:18). The Spirit who moved upon the deep has not ceased to move, and the Priest who lives for ever has not ceased to plead, and between the two the ruin that sin made is being remade into the habitation for which it was formed.