Q. H. How can Hebrews 2:17, be reconciled with Hebrews 8:4? The latter Scripture seems to imply that ascension seems to have been a necessary preliminary to the Lord’s entering upon the office of High Priest; yet the former speaks of His making reconciliation for the sins of the people.
What is meant by reconciling sins? Is not John 17 in character the High Priest’s prayer?
A. To me a very blessed aspect of the Epistle to the Hebrews is that it is the complement, in a certain sense, of that to the Romans. The latter sets the believer “in Christ” before God in divine righteousness, recognizing an unchanged evil nature, a carnal mind; but also a new nature, the spiritual mind (Rom. 8:1-11). The former shows us the divine provision of grace to maintain us there by the priesthood of Christ. This is alluded to in Romans 5:10; reconciled by His death, we shall be saved by His life, that is, His priestly intercession on high. So in Romans 8:34, “Who also maketh intercession for us.” Then in Hebrews 7:26, we read (as putting both thoughts together), “He ever liveth to make intercession for them.”
But all this supposes Him to stand in the capacity of High Priest, between a reconciled people and God; and to this Hebrews 8:4 refers. He exercised no true priestly service then, until He ascended to glory.
But still there was something which He did as a priest before He went on high. Just as the High Priest on the great day of atonement of old was making good the claims of God, and putting the sins of the people on the head of the scapegoat, while after all he was not in his normal place as between a reconciled people and God, so the Lord Jesus, ere He entered on the normal exercise of His priesthood, as a priest He did the work of the cross; both actively as offering Himself, and passively as the victim offered, in making atonement for the sins of the people. This is what is referred to in Hebrews 2:17, where the word is incorrectly translated “reconciliation.” There is no meaning in reconciling sins; there would be in reconciling people. It should be “to make propitiation (ἱλάσκεσθαι) for the sins of the people.”
John 17 is wrongly taken as an intercessional or priestly prayer. Now, the Lord is there as Son, not priest or advocate, and He is occupied in putting His disciples into His own place on earth before the Father and before the world, with an- allusion in the end to their place in the Father’s house by and by. He looks to the Father to keep them where He had kept them while with them.
Priesthood is for mercy and grace for help in time of need, to a feeble people who have to cry to God, in a place of danger and liability to fall and start aside from Christ.