Jesus the Priest, part 4

Without a doubt, the best person to minister to an alcoholic is a former alcoholic. The best person to minister to a grieving person is someone who has lost a loved one. The best person to minister to a woman is a woman. A good minister is one who is able to sympathize. I can’t say to a mother that I know what it’s like to give birth; that’s simply not true. God would have a hard time convincing us that He knew the hardships of being human if He had not taken on that role through Jesus. 

When you sin, you have a priest in heaven who sympathizes with you, because He has been in your shoes. There is nothing that you have been tempted with that Jesus was not tempted with. I can assure you that even as the devil knows the best way to tempt you; He pulled out all the stops to tempt Jesus; there is nothing that wasn’t thrown at Jesus. When you come to the altar and ask forgiveness, He knows the road that you took to get there and He loves you anyway.   

We can never say, “Well, God doesn’t know how hard it is to resist sin.” He does, He’s been there. He knows what it’s like to go 40 days with no food and then be offered bread. He knows what it’s like to be offered the entire world to forsake the Father. He knows every kind of temptation and all the struggles that we have to overcome. When we pray to God for deliverance from sin or forgiveness from committed sin, He can sympathize with us. 
 

Which leads us to the second point: because Jesus is our priest we can come before God with no fear. Hebrews 4:16 says, “Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.” There is absolutely no way that we could dare to come before God with the sin that mars every one of us. If we would come before God, we would melt away in the brilliance of His holiness. 

Our sins have forever barred us from ever standing in the presence of God, much less the hope of ever living forever with Him in heaven. For that matter, we don’t even have the ability to pray to God. What does a perfect and Holy God have to say or hear from fallen, sinful, rebellious people like us? We have no basis what-so-ever for a relationship with God the way we are. We are unable to stand before God because of our sin. There is a gap between us and God that we can never bridge. 
 

But the Biblical job of a priest is to do just that: to bridge the gap between man and God. In the Old Testament the priest would sacrifice an animal for the atonement of sin, to keep the relationship between Israel and God alive for another year. But Jesus did more than that: He forever removed anything that would keep us from God. Now, when we come before God, He does not see us and our filthy sin. Instead, He sees His perfect Son, born in a manger, tempted in every way, yet was without sin. When we are baptized, we take on the appearance of Christ, in God’s eyes, so that when we come to the altar, He receives us like a child.

Continued tomorrow