Christ: Our Prophet, Priest, & King

Christ: Our Prophet, Priest, and King

Who is Jesus?

The Doctrine of Christ

The Text

1 Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, ² but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. ³ He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power. After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high,

⁸ But of the Son he says,

“Your throne, O God, is forever and ever,

the scepter of uprightness is the scepter of your kingdom.

Introduction

This Christmas season we’re asking the question, “Who is Jesus?” And one of the answer Christians often give is: Jesus Christ is our Prophet, Priest, and King.

Have you ever heard that? What does it mean? Prophet sounds like a doomsday sandwich-board guy yelling on the corner. Priest. You think of clerical collars. And king; brings to mind empire and colonialism. And you think, this is going to be the most irrelevant sermon I’ve ever heard.

Raise the Need, State the Destination, Give Signposts:

I want to show you today that these three offices are actually the Bible’s way of answering three questions that everyone asks. Here they are:

• How do I know what is real and true?
• How can I live with myself and what I’ve done?
• Who’s really in charge of my life?

Every human being, whether they know it or not, is asking those same three questions. We’re all looking to something or someone to ground reality, to help us deal with our past, and to lead us into the future and protect us.

And the Biblical terminology for those is:

Prophet – one who speaks the truth.

Priest – one who deal with our guilt and shame.

King – one who takes command of our life and defends us.

And the Bible says that Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ alone, perfectly fills and embodies those three offices. In other words, the Bible says that…

If Jesus is God’s Prophet, We Can Know the Truth

If Jesus is God’s Priest, We Can Be Reconciled

If Jesus is God’s King, We Can Surrender

1. If Jesus is God’s Prophet, We Can Know the Truth

In the Old Testament, God’s people were constantly being misled and deceived. They were ignorant. God is constantly saying they’re blind, their deaf, they do not understand. They need to be taught the truth, and so God constantly sent prophets to give them the truth.

1 Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets.

Why would God need to send prophets to his own people? Because they were constantly going the wrong way. They did not naturally discern and follow the truth. They naturally believed error and falsehood. And this wasn’t just a problem in Israel. This has been a universal problem ever since the first man and woman disobeyed God in the Garden.

The first man and women were made to know God directly and immediately. God made them in his image—in other words, they were made to know God and image, or reflect that knowledge, that truth back to God and to one another. And Romans 1 says that when Adam and Eve rejected God, they were rejecting the truth and embracing a lie. Their understanding was darkened. They were alienated from the life of God because of ignorance.

And from that moment on, if any of their descendants were going to have true relational knowledge of God, it could only come through prophetic witness. Sure, creation could testify of God’s existence. But if you were going to know God’s name and have a relationship with him, it could only come if God revealed himself by a prophet. In other words, it’s as if humanity were outside of a door that only unlocked and opened from the inside. And God’s prophets were the ones who could open that door and declare the truth.

But when you come to the New Testament, the prophetic office ends. God stops sending prophets. Why?

² but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son,

God no longer sends prophets to give us the truth, because he has sent the true Prophet, Jesus Christ. In other words, according to the Bible, ultimate truth is related to an ultimate person.

And this is utterly different from the way our culture has thought of truth. For centuries, Western cultures have lived under the belief that all we can know are facts. We can’t know “T” universal truth, only particular facts. So, we can know the freezing temperature of water, or the distance from the earth to the Sun, but we can’t know why water and the Sun exist. And because modern man doesn’t know why water or the Sun exist, modern man doesn’t know why he exists either.

If there is no God, then there are no universals. Voltaire is right:

Man is a stranger to his own research;

He knows not whence he comes, nor whither goes.

Tormented atoms in a bed of mud,

Devoured by death, a mockery of fate.

But if Ultimate reality is a personal, living Being, then all truth is personal truth, and more importantly, the center of our life is a relationship to that person. God is not an abstract truth like absolute zero or the speed of light. He is the concrete personal reality behind and upholding all we see, say, and do.

Truth is not a database. The Christian story is about a Person… Christianity is not a system of ideas about God; it is the claim that God has visited the human race in the Person of Jesus of Nazareth. The real question is not ‘is Christianity true?’ in the abstract, but ‘Is He real?’”

In John 14:6, Jesus says, “I am the truth.” He does not claim to merely speak true words. He claims to be truth itself. When Jesus stood before Pontius Pilate and Pilate asked, “What is truth” he would have been better to ask, “Who is truth?” Truth is not merely factual claims about the world. Jesus says truth is ultimately personal.

Friend, he does not claim to be an advice columnist or even a trusted researcher. You can listen to him or refuse him, but don’t minimize his claims. He claims to be the true Prophet. The only one who can personally, and immediately reveal God to us, who doesn’t just tell us the truth, but who is himself the truth.

Jesus does not say, “I have some truth.” Not, “I can give you a method for finding truth.” He says, “I am truth itself. I am the universal holding all the particulars together.”

Jesus says, “Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice.”

So here is the question that matters today: Whose voice are you listening to? The algorithm on social media? The culture? Your own feelings? Or the One who says, “I am the truth?”

2. If Jesus is God’s Priest, We Can Be Reconciled

The Mosaic Covenant established a priesthood in Israel through the tribe of Levi. This is where “Leviticus” comes from. And the job of the priests can be explained in one word: reconciliation—bringing a holy God and a sinful people together. They accomplished this task primarily in three ways:

First, they upheld the cleanness laws. Because God is set apart and pure, only a set apart and purified people could be presented in worship to God.

Second, they offered sacrifices. Because God is sinless, only a sinless people can come to him. And the sacrifices symbolized that though Israel deserved to die for their sins, God willingly accepted animal sacrifices as their substitute.

Third, they interceded. They presented the needs of the people to God in daily prayer. Whereas the prophet represented God to the people. The priests represented the people to God.

Now, if I stood up 200 years ago and told a congregation, “You need a priest,” everyone would nod as if I had said, “The sky is blue.” That’s because the cultural framework said: there is a God, we have offended him, and we need reconciliation.

Today, when I say, “You need a priest,” everyone scrunches their brows. They think, “I’m not catholic,” or, “I’m basically a good person.” But if I said, “You need a therapist.” Everyone would nod their head.

What happened? Western cultures spent two centuries rejecting three ideas:

• That there is a God
• That we have sinned against him
• And that we therefore need reconciliation with him.

We’ve been told so often that guilt is a construct, shame is toxic, and self-esteem and acceptance is the goal. And we’ve seen the rise of a new priesthood called therapist.

Please hear me out: my point isn’t to bash therapy. Many of us in the room – myself included—have sat across from wise Biblical counsellors or taken medication prescribed by a doctor, and we thank God for those gifts of common grace.

But outside of the church, culture has said, you don’t feel bad because you’ve done wrong and need forgiveness. It says, “You feel bad because you have been wrong and you need validation.” Internal accusation, feelings of guilt, have been relocated to external injury.

I’m not saying we have not been terribly sinned against. I’m saying that our first and worst problem is that we ourselves are sinners. We have been wounded, and we are also wounders.

Each one of us can still name:

• The person we hurt and never asked forgiveness.
• The thing we did in college you still flinch at when it crosses our mind.
• The lie that bought us success but cost us a clean conscience.
• The search history we clear in a hurry.

That tightness in your chest when those memories surface is not just trauma. It’s the echo of your conscience, given by a holy God who says, “You owe me a perfect life, and you don’t have one.”

You see, you don’t just need a therapist who can help you cope with your guilt. You need a priest who can remove it.

After making purification for sins… [Jesus Christ] sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high,

Our guilt is like dirt and filth. Our souls are soiled, and Jesus Christ, through his work on the cross washes and cleanses us. Because Jesus Christ was perfectly righteous, he offers us his cleanness, his spotless record. Because he died, he takes our guilt and its penalty upon himself. And because he now lives, he intercedes for us.

The gospel is this: Jesus Christ heals our wounds by being wounded. The wounds we’ve received and the wounds we’ve given. Every sin on him was laid. He was wounded for our transgression. He was bruised for our iniquity. The punishment which brought us peace was laid on him, and by his stripes, we are healed.

The prophet who declares that you have broken God’s laws is also your priest who cancels your guilt, who buys your pardon with his own blood.

Your deepest need is not coping techniques. It is to come to him and say, “Jesus Christ, be my cleanness. Be my sacrifice. I bring you nothing but my guilt. Wash me.”

3. If Jesus is God’s King, We Can Surrender

The final office established by God in the Old Testament was the king. After Israel entered Canaan they were still surrounded by enemies who harassed them, and the job of the king was to command the allegiance of the people and to lead their armies. The king was the national deliverer.

And you find, as you read the Old Testament, that as the King went, so went the nation. If the king loved the Lord, the people would follow in obedience, and God would deliver them from their enemies. But when the kings forgot the Lord, and went after the idols of the surrounding nations, the people forgot the Lord and God raised up armies against them.

Now, much like the priest, most of us think we don’t need a king. We’re American for crying out loud. We got rid of Kings in 1776. But wait a minute. Everyone in this room has a king. To put it another way, everyone in this room looks to something or someone as their rescue, as their security. Bob Dylan was right: you gotta serve somebody.

Romans 1:25 says “they exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator.”

When you shake of God’s rule as your king, you don’t live as a free person. You only make yourself a slave to something else. I’ve used this quote a dozen times, but it really does get to the issue. The journalist, David Foster Wallace, who was not a Christian, says this:

There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships.

Which is the same as saying, everybody serves something.

The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.

Whether he realized it or not, Wallace was summarizing Romans 1. We were made to obey and serve our true King. And unless we serve him, we are enslaved to lesser things who cannot possibly rescue and deliver us.

A high-power executive bows to the throne of career. One layoff and the king she served strips her of her identity. “Who am I if I’m no longer the boss?”

A wife loves her husband deeply but subtly crowns him as her “functional savior”—he is where she gets security, admiration, and completion. And every time he disappoints—a forgotten anniversary, an argument—her resentment boils.

A man thinks himself a “good person” – morality has become his king. He volunteers, recycles, signals virtue, all of it to earn a sense of superiority and peace. But when he snaps at a family member or lapses morally, guilt crashes in like a tyrant: “You’re a hypocrite.”

If you bow down to a lesser king – you may get what you want for a while – but inevitably, they will become deaf and dumb idols that break your heart.

Whatever you crown, that is not God himself, will eventually crush you… or you will crush it with your expectations.

Lewis put it like this:

A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. That is why it is just no good asking God to make us happy in our own way without bothering about religion. God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.

Hebrews says:

⁸ But of the Son he says,

“Your throne, O God, is forever and ever,

the scepter of uprightness is the scepter of your kingdom.

Hebrews says it’s not enough to simply hear Jesus speak the truth, or to even see him as your priest, dying for your sins—you have to come under his rule as your king. You have to surrender.

The Romans raised him on a cross and put nails in his hands. But three days later, the Father raised him to the heavens and put a scepter in his hand.

Here’s what this means: the hands that wield the scepter of your life have already born the wounds of your death.

A Christian is not someone who merely says, “Jesus, tell me the truth,” or even, “Jesus, cleanse me.” A Christian is someone who finally says, “Jesus, command me. Where you send me, I will go. What you forbid, I will forsake. What you demand, I will offer with joy.”