We Believe In Jesus: The PriestSample

What is a Priest? Genesis 3:1

We’ll define a priest as: “A person who mediates between God and his people so that God will receive them into his special holy presence to grant them his blessing.”

We all know that God is invisibly present everywhere all the time. But at certain times and places, he also manifests himself in special, visible ways. For example, he does this in the radiant splendor of his heavenly throne room. And he sometimes does this on earth, too. And whenever creatures come near this kind of manifestation of God, we have to be properly prepared, represented and led, so that we can receive God’s approval and blessings. In the Bible, this kind of preparation, representation and leading was the job of the priests. 

When most Christians think about priesthood in the Old Testament, their minds go immediately to Aaron and his descendants, who were ordained as priests during the days of Moses, as we read in Leviticus 8–9. 

But it’s important to recognize that even before the days of Moses, there were already priests who served God. In a very broad sense, even before the fall into sin God ordained Adam, the father of the human race to be his priest. And following Adam, all of humanity was originally called to be God’s priests in this general sense. 

In a more technical sense, we find men like Melchizedek in Abraham’s day, who is mentioned in Genesis 14. He was both the king and priest of Salem. Job 1 indicates that Job himself acted as a priest for his family. And according to Exodus 3, Moses’ own father-in-law Jethro was God’s priest in Midian. 

Eventually, God established an official and exclusive priesthood in which Aaron and his descendants replaced all other forms of priesthood. But all these different types of men were true priests of the Lord. And each is part of the Old Testament background of Jesus’ priesthood. 

Click here to watch We Believe in Jesus: The Priest, lesson four in the series We Believe in Jesus. Biblical Education, For the World, For Free. thirdmill.org