Hebrews 4:14

Hebrews 4:14. The following verses (Hebrews 4:14-16) might begin a new paragraph, and are closely connected with the fifth chapter; but on the other hand, Hebrews 4:14 looks back to the brief statement in chap. Hebrews 1:3; Hebrews 2:17, and Hebrews 3:1, and its hortatory form naturally makes it rather a completion of what precedes. It is, moreover, the author's manner to blend with admonitions, based on previous teaching, assertions of what he is about to prove.

It is a peculiarity of the Gospel that it seems now without a sacrifice and without a priest. The unbelieving Jews would naturally say, ‘Your new religion is without the first requisite of a Divine system; you have no sacrifice and no high priest how can sin be forgiven? who can intercede for you?' The objection is answered in this passage: We have a High Priest, a great High Priest, transcending in personal and official dignity all that ever bore the name, for He is Jesus, the Son of God, each title implying His superiority. No doubt His sacrifice has ceased, and He Himself has passed through the heavens beyond clouds and stars, even into the heaven of heavens, to the very throne of God itself; just as the Jewish high priest on the day of Atonement offered sacrifices of expiation, entered into the holy place, and then through the second veil into the holiest of all, to sprinkle the blood of atonement and to burn incense, an odour of a sweet smell, a symbol of acceptance to Him who dwells between the cherubim. The objection that we have no sacrifice or priest is met by the Tact that our High Priest has completed His work on earth, and has gone, not into an earthly tabernacle, the image of the true, but into heaven to the throne of God itself an evidence of the efficacy of His mediation and the means of perpetuating it. His entrance and His intercession there are really ‘a perpetual oblation' with the intimation of His ‘will' that the blessings He has gained be bestowed on them for whom He pleads. The exhortation is, therefore, that we hold fast our confession what we have acknowledged as true and Christian faith, the word being used in a wider sense than in Hebrews 3:1.