Hebrews 7:26-28

Hebrews 7:26-28. The final argument for this superiority is the moral fitness of the whole arrangement (see Hebrews 2:10).

For such a high priest was for us befitting a high priest who was holy (giving to God the reverence and holy love that were due to Him), harmless (innocent, guileless, unsuspected in relation to all human duty between man and man), undefiled (free, therefore, from personal pollution, and from legal defilement, such as often interrupted the priestly office), separated from sinners pitying them, helping them, able to sympathize with them, dying for them, but not belonging to their class, apart from them as He was apart from sin itself (Hebrews 4:15, where a form of the same word is used), and made higher than the heavens a phrase found only here, though the sense is expressed elsewhere (chap. Hebrews 4:14: ‘having passed through the heavens;' Ephesians 4:10: ‘far above the heavens'). It describes His higher authority, while implying that part of His work has been done on earth, and that for the rest it is essential that He should be at the right hand of God. And such a high priest and no other became us, who needs not daily to offer sacrifice for his own sins, as the high priest did on the Day of Atonement, and then for the sins of the people; but this (the offering for the sins of the people) he did once for all when he offered himself. This is the first mention in this Epistle of Christ ‘offering Himself;' the truth is introduced again and again: once struck, the note sounds ever louder and louder. As the writer compares Christ with the Levitical high priests, and as these did not offer sacrifices daily, there has been much discussion on the ‘daily' of this verse. The various solutions (that the high priest did offer incense daily: that the high priest might have taken part occasionally in the daily burnt-offerings; that ‘daily' means on the day appointed the Day of Atonement which is elsewhere said to be every year ‘from days to days,' Exodus 13:10, Heb. and LXX.; and that the high priest is regarded as doing what the ordinary priest did) are all unsatisfactory. Christ is now, and every day, in the Holy Place. If, therefore, He were a sinner, as the high priests of old were, He would need to offer for Himself each day, as the high priests offer, on the one day of every year when they appeared before God. But Christ, being completely free from all personal sin, had no need to offer except for others; and as He offered Himself once for all, His atonement has perpetual efficacy.