Our Great High Priest in His Person and Work

1. GREAT

Verse fourteen also says that Jesus, the Son of God, is a great High Priest. According to our experience, the word great here means excellent, wonderful, glorious, and most honorable. The Chinese version of the Bible says that we have an honorable and glorious High Priest. Christ today is such an excellent, marvelous, wonderful, glorious, and most honorable High Priest that no human word can fully describe Him. Although we cannot find the adequate word in any lexicon, the experience of being on His shoulders and on His breast in the Holy of Holies tells us that He is a great and wonderful High Priest.

1. In His Person

Our High Priest, Christ, is great firstly in His Person. He is the Son of God, God Himself (1:5, 8). He is also the Son of Man, man himself (2:6). He, being both God and man, has the divine nature and the human nature. He not only knows the things of God and the things of man; He is also in the things of God and the things of man. No other high priest has ever been like Him.

1. In His Work

Secondly, our High Priest, Christ, is great in His work. He has made purification of and propitiation for our sins (1:3; 2:17). He has taken away sin and has solved the problem of sin. He has tasted death, not only for every man but also for everything (2:9). By tasting death, He conquered and subdued it. Death could not hold Him (Acts 2:24, 27). He has also destroyed the Devil who has the might of death (2:14). By His death on the cross, Christ has annulled Satan, the power of death. By conquering death and destroying the [296] Devil, He has released us from the slavery of death (2:15). We have been freed by Him not only from the slavery of sin but also from the slavery of death. Through His suffering, He has been perfected to be the Captain of our salvation (2:10). He has fought the battle and has entered into glory. As the Pioneer, He is leading us on in the same way to glory. He is now taking care of God’s house as Moses did (3:5-6). As the Builder of the house, He surely knows how to take care of it. He is now also bringing us into rest, as Joshua did (4:8-9). He has given us the Sabbath rest in the church age, and He will bring us into the Sabbath rest of the kingdom age. As our High Priest, He is great in all these wonderful and excellent works of His, which no high priest in the Old Testament had ever accomplished.