Podcast: What’s the Deal with Melchizedek? (Daniel Stevens)

February 24, 2025 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Everything We Know (and Don’t Know) About Melchizedek

In this episode, Daniel Stevens discusses who Melchizedek is, how we should understand his appearance in the book of Hebrews, and how the presence of the Psalms and other Old Testament passages in the New Testament shapes our understanding of the incredible salvation that we have in Christ.

Songs of the Son

Songs of the Son

Daniel Stevens

Songs of the Son examines 9 psalms highlighted in Hebrews to reveal the preincarnate glory of Christ in the Old Testament.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

00:43 - Common Theories About Melchizedek

Matt Tully
Daniel, thanks so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

Daniel Stevens
Absolutely glad to.

Matt Tully
When you heard that we wanted to talk about Melchizedek today, this mysterious figure in the Old Testament, your reply was interesting. You said something like, "Yeah, let’s go for it. Everyone wants to know what the deal is with Melchizedek." And that kind of got me thinking that it seems like you’ve gotten questions about this guy before in your time teaching. Is that right?

Daniel Stevens
Yeah. Ever since I started studying Hebrews, whenever somebody finds that out, there is invariably a set of two questions that they ask me. Number one, Who’s the author of Hebrews, and is it Paul? And number two, What’s the deal with this Melchizedek guy? Usually my answer to both of those is that I have no idea, but we can actually talk a little bit more on each of them if we need to. And so this Melchizedek thing is something that seems to capture everyone’s imagination at least. He’s enigmatic; he’s mentioned just a few times, and so I’m happy to talk about it.

Matt Tully
What is it about him that you think is maybe most fascinating? Why is his identity such a thing that Christians—maybe young college students and seminary students—why are we all so drawn to this guy for some reason?

Daniel Stevens
Well, we’re given just enough information to speculate. He’s not one of those figures where we only have his name and nothing else about him, and he’s not someone that we get a whole story about. Instead, we have a couple details that are tantalizing. He’s mentioned only in three places in Scripture. First, in Genesis 14, where he appears as a historical person. Then in Psalm 110, in one reference, and then in Hebrews through chapters 5–7, exploring some details of Psalm 110. And so he’s clearly important. He’s important enough to keep coming back. He’s a king and a priest—things that aren’t really united until we get to Jesus. And he seems to be very important in some substructure of the biblical story, but it’s not made very clear or very explicit.

Matt Tully
There are some theories about his identity, and we’re going to walk through each of those passages briefly just to see what we can learn from Genesis, from Psalms, and from Hebrews to help us put a picture together of who this guy was. But what are some of the wilder theories, perhaps, that you’ve heard or encountered when it comes to his identity?

Daniel Stevens
We get a range of theories throughout interpretive history over the past 2,300 years, at least (that we have witness to), of who this guy is. Again, even in antiquity, people felt the need to speculate who he is. One of the earliest we have, and one of the grandest, is that he’s an angelic figure. That he is kind of a commander of the Lord’s armies in an apocalyptic scenario. We find this in one of the Dead Sea Scrolls—11Q Melchizedek, as it’s often called. It’s from Cave 11. Similarly, we also find in Christian theology speculation that, no, he’s not an exalted angel figure; he’s actually higher than that. He’s a pre-incarnate Christ figure, that he’s a Christophany of some kind. Others, and this is what we’ll find in later Jewish literature and we’ll also find it in certain Christian speculation and even weird offshoots, like in Mormon thought about him, that he’s the patriarch, Shem, the son of Noah. And that’s done by adding up who’s the oldest person alive at the time. If we follow the numbers in the Hebrew text, it would be him. And so that kind of runs the gamut of the more significant figures that he might be.

Matt Tully
Does one of those theories carry more weight with you than any of the others? Or would you say we just don’t know enough?

Daniel Stevens
I don’t think it’s any of those, and we can go into the reasons for why. I don’t think it’s a pre-incarnate Christ—and this is probably the one that has the biggest hold within Christian theology—because in the description in Hebrews, it’s very clear that Melchizedek is a type of Christ. He corresponds to Christ. And even in the language, he is “made like the Son of God.” And you can’t be made like who you are. There’s a correspondence. It’s not a one for one, these are the same, but it’s he’s like Jesus in certain ways. So I think that’s why it can’t be him. I also think he’s not an angel. This is slightly more credible in some ways, but he seems to be described both in Genesis and in Hebrews as human person. Even the role of priesthood might have something to do with that. A priest is someone who goes between God and man. In biblical usage, he represents the things of God to man and the things of men to God. And so he needs to be a human to be a priest. So that probably rules out the angelic figure. And he is described in Hebrews as “without genealogy.” We might get into what that means, but that tells me he’s probably not Shem, for whom we have a detailed genealogy. And so I think the biblical text itself doesn’t allow any of those options.

05:48 - Genesis 14

Matt Tully
Interesting. Well, let’s start walking through some of those passages, and maybe that will help us arrive at who you think he might be or at least to the extent that we can speak about him and define him. So the first passage, as you mentioned, where we encounter Melchizedek is Genesis 14. In that passage, he’s called the “king of Salem” and a “priest of God Most High.” As we read those, we might be quick to skip over that. We read a lot about different kings of different lands throughout Genesis, so what is it about this identity that we can start to notice as we read through this text?

Daniel Stevens
To your point, it is easy to skip over if we’re not paying attention. He’s the tenth king mentioned in this chapter. There’s a battle between five kings and four kings, which already gets most people lost in names of Chedorlaomer and all that.

Matt Tully
And Melchizedek might be the hardest name to pronounce of all of them. Once you get it down it’s good.

Daniel Stevens
And it might help to divide it, as later interpreters sometimes do, to its component parts: melek and tzedek, King of Righteousness, which we’ll get into. So he’s the tenth king mentioned in the chapter. Abraham ends up going out and defeating the army of a group of kings that had previously been victorious in battle, and he does this to rescue his nephew, Lot. He comes back with the spoils of war and with his rescued family, and he is met on the way by this figure who just suddenly appears, Melchizedek (King of Righteousness), king of Salem, which most later interpreters say is probably the same as Jerusalem. That’s in both Jewish and Christian tradition—probably the same as Jerusalem.

Matt Tully
The end of the word is the same, so what’s going on there?

Daniel Stevens
Salem itself is the same three letters as for peace, and so that often gets tied together. It’s difficult to know how Salem becomes Jerusalem or the other way around. It could be a shortened form of it, as often gets used later on. You can think even in medieval and early modern European literature, Jerusalem gets shortened to Salem. That happens often. So maybe something like that was going on. Or, and this is where Hebrews explores it, the significance of those letters, Salem and Jerusalem, being the same as peace, him being th king of Salem, gives him notions of being a king of peace. So that might be something. He meets Abraham. He brings bread and wine, which, understandably, Christian interpreters have seen some significance to. And he blesses Abraham. This is already significant because, as Hebrews shows us, the greater blesses the lesser. It’s a sign of Melchizedek’s superiority to Abraham that he comes out and blesses him. And what becomes interesting is that the language that he uses to bless Abraham, he speaks of “blessed be God Most High.” That language of God Most High isn’t used previous to this in the Abraham story. And yet in the next paragraph when Abraham is speaking to the king of Sodom, Abraham starts speaking “by God Most High.” And so it’s not only that Melchizedek seems to bless Abraham, but Melchizedek seems to teach Abraham in that, to give Abraham—this man chosen by God—the language with which he speaks about God. And so that that’s, again, this level of significance to him. And this joint function of both king and priest—we don’t get many priests in this early stage of the Bible already. We don’t get clear discussion. Not none. In Genesis there are others, but this priest and being a priest of the true God seems to be significant.

Matt Tully
Because we typically associate the priesthood with something that God gives to Moses at Mount Sinai. So until that point—

Daniel Stevens
Yes. Hundreds of years later.

Matt Tully
So until that point, God has not initiated a priesthood for Israel.

Daniel Stevens
Right. Even in that, before the priesthood is given to Levi, there is mention in Exodus of priests among the Israelites. And so it does seem that there were people who had the role of worshiping God or serving God for the people. But it didn’t have this official God-given position until it’s given to the Levites in Exodus. And so we do get this strange case of Melchizedek who doesn’t seem to be genealogically related to Abraham, so he’s apart from the chosen people. On the other hand, he is a priest of the true God. He is a king of Salem, which will eventually be the place where God chooses to set his name. And he blesses Abraham, who is the patriarch of God’s people. He’s the father of the fathers, the father of Isaac and then Jacob and the twelve patriarchs. And he seems to even teach Abraham a way of talking about the true God. So he’s hugely important in this one scene. And then he doesn’t appear again in Genesis. He doesn’t appear again in the Pentateuch. He doesn’t appear again in the historical books. He doesn’t appear again until Psalm 110, when in one line he is mentioned: “You are a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.” Then, that’s the last time in the entire Old Testament he’s mentioned.

Matt Tully
So what do you make of that? Before we get into Psalm 110 and unpack what might be going on there, what do you make of the fact that this, as you unpack all those details about him and his relation to Abram, there are things in there that probably would have struck an Israelite as pretty interesting, as significant. And yet he just is so briefly mentioned. Why might that be the case? Why isn’t there more about this figure?

Daniel Stevens
I’m going to lean a bit on the book of Hebrews for this, but I think that the way he’s described and the way he is given, enigmatically, as Hebrews says, “without father or mother, genealogy, without beginning of days or end of life”—the way he just appears has a function of both king and priest and blesser and then disappears—is that he has been intentionally written about in this way, so that his description maximally shows similarities to Jesus. And he’s been put there in such a way that we can’t really understand all of the ways that Melchizedek is significant until we see the thing that he points to, which is Jesus, who is the king-priest. That’s why he has all this grand mystery about him which demands some correspondence. That’s why even in the period before Christ comes, we find this need for speculation about him. Maybe he’s an angel, maybe he’s this, maybe he’s that. Because his significance exists not only in his historical life but in something grander that he points to.

12:08 - Jewish Interpretation

Matt Tully
What’s the history of Jewish interpretation? Throughout the generations, what have Jewish interpreters made of him? How have they tried to explain his significance to the biblical story?

Daniel Stevens
I can talk about that in brief. The earliest extra-biblical interpretation of Melchizedek that we tend to have, at least as far as I’m aware of, is that 11Q Melchizedek. So it’s a part of the Dead Sea Scrolls. It’s fragmentary, so we don’t have all of it. And in it, he is an angelic figure
who leads the armies of God on the day of the climactic battle between the forces of good and evil. He’s given, it seems, a matching figure on the side of evil. So if Melchizedek means King of Righteousness, we get a Melchiresha, king of evil, king of wickedness. And they seem to be angelic leaders of these armies that fight on this day. So that’s the early speculation from probably between third to first century BC. Then later on, because there’s a gap in the material evidence, in the Talmud and in the Targums—so Targums are Aramaic paraphrases with some interpretation of the Old Testament, and then the Talmud is a series of expansions and commentaries and debates and details and all these things. So in two different Targums of Genesis, so these Aramaic paraphrases, and in more kind of compressed reference in one of the tractates of the Talmud, there’s this assumption that he’s Shem. And this seems to be because his priesthood is a theological riddle that needs to be solved, and there needs to be a way in which the priesthood kind of goes through him and then is given eventually to Levi. And so there’s this speculation that the priesthood is somehow transferred from Melchizedek to Abraham’s line in that scene in some of those. But some of the references are also just a gloss without clear interpretations. Like, “Melchizedek, that is Shem,” or “That is Shem, son of Noah.” No other gloss. That’s the ancient to medieval range of options. In the centuries BC, the Melchizedek as an angel interpretation seems to largely fall away in favor of this. “Oh, he is just Shem.”

Matt Tully
Interesting.

Daniel Stevens
There may be others that I’m unaware of, but those seem to be the big ones.

14:22 - Psalm 110

Matt Tully
The main ones. Yeah. So as you said, we see Melchizedek next in Psalm 110:4, but maybe before we jump into that one verse with that one quick reference to him, set up Psalm 110 more broadly. What’s going on in the Psalm? I think listeners might be aware that different psalms are doing different things and are categorized in different ways. So how should we come at Psalm 110 initially?

Daniel Stevens
Psalm 110 is weird. We just need to put that out up front. It is a difficult psalm to interpret. It is somewhat disorienting if you just drop in. We begin in the middle of a conversation. It’s a psalm of David, that’s the superscription. It begins with, “The Lord says to my Lord: Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool.” So we have the Lord, we have David’s Lord, we have David, we have enemies out there, and we have waiting. Then there seems to be a prediction of a time in which this Lord of David has a rule that expands across the earth. Then suddenly, the scene shifts and we’re told that this Lord who will rule is also a priest. And then we’re given a vision of the final victory of this king who is a priest, who is the Lord of David. There aren’t a lot of clear references to when or who these people may be, and so it’s a little bit disorienting at first. There also is, in the way of some psalms, the poetic language is particularly condensed. And so it’s a little bit difficult what the reference is because we find some differences between what the Hebrew and the Septuagint of this (the Greek translation) is trying to kind of grasp what’s going on. But significantly, Psalm 110 is the most-referenced psalm in the New Testament. Both through allusion and citation, it is the most referenced psalm. Jesus himself references it when he’s debating with people in Jerusalem about the Messiah. How can the Messiah be David’s son if he’s David’s Lord? Citing Psalm 110:1, “The Lord says to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand.’” So Jesus himself is the beginning of where Christians get this kind of usage of Psalm 110. We’ll find it in Acts, we’ll find it in the writings of the apostles. And in Hebrews particularly, it seems to serve as part of the main structure of the book. Possibly going too far, some have even described the book of Hebrews as an exposition of Psalm 110, because we have the Messiah Christ as king and as priest, and that unfolding what it means for him to be priest is much of what Hebrews does. So it’s enigmatic. It itself is a bit of a mystery. In the New Testament, we begin to see how the pieces fit together. For how to approach the psalm on its own, one of the ways that I find helpful is to ask, So how is it understood? Well, clearly we could call it a royal psalm. It’s about a king. It’s about someone that David acknowledges as the Lord. But it’s more than that. It’s, in a sense, an apocalyptic psalm. It’s looking forward to a time when David’s Lord conquers his enemies, when God establishes his rule over all the earth. And we do see in it a story, which is often helpful. Not all psalms are linear. This one seems to be. There’s a time of waiting, a time of God expanding the rule of this Lord, his acknowledgement as priest, and then victory and judgment. And so that seems to be a way of kind of moving our way through it.

Matt Tully
It strikes me, as you describe Psalm 110 and then thinking back to how you were describing the way Melchizedek is first introduced to us in Genesis 14, there’s some parallels there where there is this enigmatic, mysterious dynamic to it where we’re not really told everything we need to put the pieces together. It’s a similar thing to Melchizedek, where it feels like it’s almost a sign pointing forward, and you have to just wait for more revelation, namely Hebrews, to maybe start unpacking what exactly is going on in this place. Do you see a connection there?

Daniel Stevens
I do, and I see this as a broader theme throughout the Psalms and throughout the Old Testament. And this is one of the things that I kind of make an implicit argument for in the book, and in the conclusion I think I say it more directly, that many passages in the Old Testament and many stories in the Old Testament clearly have a significance in and of themselves. They clearly tell us things about God and about his dealings with his people, but they also leave us with questions. Sometimes those questions are on the level of significance: What does this really mean? Other times, they’re kind of the more detail-oriented: Who is this about? Especially in the more prophetic language of the prophets and of the Psalms. And it’s only when we have the full life of Jesus—his pre-incarnate glory, his incarnation, his life of obedience and suffering, his death on the cross, his resurrection and his ascension and his coming again—that provides the key that lets us see what these things have been pointing to the whole time. So when we see in Psalm 110 a king who is also a priest, who is higher than David, who sits at the right hand of God, and whose enemies will be judged by God, well, now that we have the story of Jesus, we can see how that happens. When does the Lord sit down at the right hand of God? Well, this is in the biblical narrative after Jesus ascends and sits down, waiting until the time that he returns. He’s the one who is both king and priest. He’s the Messiah, and he’s the Lord of David, and he’s the priest after the order of Melchizedek. Similarly, also Psalm 2, greeting us at the beginning of the Psalter. There is a king who is on Zion who is the Son of God, and how nations respond to him, how the peoples respond to him, affects whether they rise or fall. Well, who is that? Well, we can say it’s a son of David, it’s a messianic figure. Well, we get the story when we come to Jesus. Psalm 22. We begin with a cry of a sense of abandonment from God: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The speaker seems to have enemies all around him, to experiencing extreme pain, he goes down to the dust of death. And then all of a sudden, there’s a sudden turn where the speaker speaks no longer of his death but of his deliverance. And the deliverance of this one person from death leads to generations praising God for having done it. And this one person’s death changes how grand swaths of people relate to God. Well, in the story of the Psalms, who is that? Is that David? Well, David’s living or dying doesn’t affect all of posterity. But when we have the narrative, we have suffering, crucifixion, death, and resurrection of Jesus. And so these hints in and of themselves, the stories are self-contained, they clearly tell us things about God and his plan and his relationship with his people, but they leave us with questions. Who is this? Where is this going? And that story of the incarnation—of his pre-incarnate glory, incarnation, life of obedience and suffering, death on the cross, resurrection and ascension—provides a way of looking at what was already there and seeing it more clearly.

21:00 - Are Old and New Testament Connections Really There?

Matt Tully
And that’s one thing that you do in this book that you’ve written, where you’re looking at the book of Hebrews and you’re looking at a number of key psalms, and you’re drawing some of those connections. You’re helping us to see what was being expressed in this typological form earlier in the Psalms that then comes to fulfillment as we see in the New Testament. Maybe one objection or concern that certainly skeptics might have, but even some Christians perhaps, as they hear you explain these things or make these connections is are these things really there? Were these actually intended? Or are there times when, either from a skeptic’s perspective, the New Testament writers are retroactively making these connections that are a little bit forced or it doesn’t really make sense, but they’re just picking up on some of the same language. Or maybe it’s a Christian who trusts in the Bible, but he’s still wondering if we are really supposed to read these things together just because there’s a shared phrase or a shared word. How would you respond to someone who has those kinds of concerns?

Daniel Stevens
I would say several things. First, I would draw attention to—and I’ve been careful with my wording in that I said it lets us see what was there, not new meaning. So I’ve been careful to say that, because God is the author of all Scripture. He knows the end from the beginning. These things have significance in what they’re pointing to from the time that they’re in. So I’m not saying that the New Testament rewrites the Old. I’m saying the Old has always pointed to these things. Second, if I had time, I would build an argument, and I do some of this in the book, that the New Testament authors, as they’re reading the Old Testament, are in fact doing so very carefully. And so when we come to, say, Psalm 110, like we’ve been talking about, we can ask, In terms of the Old Testament story, who is a king who is David’s Lord, who is also a priest, and who will have an effect on the judgment of all nations? Well, there isn’t a figure in the Old Testament who historically does those things. He points forward. This psalm points forward until such a time that that happens. And it so happens that the story of Jesus does that. Similarly, in Psalm 45 we have a king—clearly a human king—who is getting married. He is envisioned on the day of his wedding. And then in the middle of it, he’s called “God with an eternal throne.” Okay. Who in the Old Testament is a king who gets married who also is God with an eternal throne? Well, there isn’t anyone in the narrative. There are parts of the psalm that look like Solomon, because Solomon looks like the greater son of David. Sure. But the psalm itself requires a character that the history doesn’t yet have until Jesus comes. Those are the more granular details. Third, if we look at what Scripture is and if we take seriously the New Testament statements that these things are written for us—not to us, but for us and for us in a meaningful way—then there has always been a purpose in the Old Testament to speak to those who are members of the new covenant. That’s not the only thing it was for. It had real significance at the time it was written. But these things were also written for us. And if that’s the case, and if God has spoken in all of Scripture, and if the God who spoke in all of Scripture knew what he was doing all along, then we should expect that once the canon is complete, once we have all the books, we would see things in reading all of them that we wouldn’t see if we only had some of them. And this isn’t to say, again, that things got rewritten or changed. This is that God, who knows all things and knows the end from the beginning, inspired the authors of Scripture to write in such a way that when the fullness of revelation—at least as the fullness of Scripture was completed—we could see a grander chain of significance than if we only had parts. And what I think is also possibly a confirmation of this, to go to the book of Hebrews again, Hebrews begins with a description of God as a God who speaks. “Long ago, at many times and in various ways, God spoke to our fathers through the prophets. In these last days, he has spoken to us in his Son.” That’s how Hebrews begins. And Hebrews has much to tell us about what God has said in his Son. Interestingly, when Hebrews looks to tell us things about God’s Son, where does he go? He cites the Old Testament. And so, clearly then, the author of Hebrews sees that the speech of God in the Old Testament is also a speech about the Son. And so this is not something that later theology harmonizing all of this has done, but this there from the beginning of the Christian movement, that God’s speech in the Old has also revealed to us things about the New.

25:39 - What the Book of Hebrews Says About Melchizedek

Matt Tully
And as you said before, even Jesus himself is often quoting from the Old Testament in ways that add significance to things that were there before. Let’s talk about Hebrews 5–7 seven really briefly here. Obviously, the author of Hebrews is spending a lot of time in the book talking about why Jesus is better. That’s a good catchphrase for the book of Hebrews. Jesus is better in every way to everything else that’s come before him. And in particular, he contrasts Jesus’s priesthood with Aaron’s priesthood. And again, it’s making the case that Jesus is better. And he does that by connecting him to Melchizedek. So just briefly, can you summarize what his argument is and how that relates to Aaron and the Levitical priesthood of Israel?

Daniel Stevens
Through chapters 5–7 and going all the way to 5–9 really, Hebrews compares the priesthood and priestly administration of Jesus to the priesthood and administration under the old covenant. That is what we can call the Aaronic priesthood, that is the system of priests descended from Aaron. He advances this argument along multiple axes of how Jesus is better. So priests in the old order—Levitical priests in the children of Aaron—they die and they can’t continue their priesthood. Jesus, through his resurrection, has an indestructible life, and so he can always do his work. The Aaronic priests are themselves weak and stained by sin, and so they also need sacrifices for themselves before they can sacrifice for the people. Jesus, who is without sin, who is without blemish, doesn’t need a sacrifice for himself, and so he’s able to deal directly with the sins of the people without anything getting in the way. The Aaronic priests offer the blood of bulls and goats—animals—which, although it did things in the old covenant administration, is obviously insufficient for the life and the eternal life of a person. The blood of bulls and goats cannot take away sins. It isn’t something of a high enough purity or value. Jesus offers his own blood, the blood of the Son of God. The Aaronic priests offer sacrifices that are repeated—both the daily offerings, the Tamid, which are evening and morning every day; and then what Hebrews really focuses on, the Yom Kippur sacrifice, the Day of Atonement sacrifice, which is repeated every year. And Hebrews sees that that repetition means that it didn’t fully get the job done. Needing to do it again means the job isn’t finished. Jesus appears to offer himself once for all. There is no need of repetition, and the lack of repetition tells us the job has been finished. The priests stand in their service. They need to keep doing things. Jesus, having offered once, sits down at the right hand of God, showing that his sacrificial work is over. In all of these ways, Hebrews builds the argument that Jesus’s priesthood and his sacrifice are superior. There are others where they offer earthly tabernacle versus heavenly tabernacle, things like that. But again and again and again, Jesus’s sacrifice and his priesthood are superior, with the upshot that Jesus’s priesthood can save to the uttermost. It brings an eternal salvation. It can cleanse the inner person. And so it has eternal abiding and internal, full cleansing work, whereas the priestly sacrifices, Hebrew says, couldn’t do that. Where does Melchizedek come into this? The author to the Hebrews is very concerned with showing that everything that he says about Jesus is in line with everything God has already said. The New Testament doesn’t contradict the Old. You can’t have a sudden abrogation of the words of God. What God has said is what God has said. And so Hebrews is transparent. If Jesus were on the earth, he wouldn’t be a priest, because there are priests according to the Aaronic covenant. There are priests of the children of Levi. They have that administration. And Jesus does not come from Levi. He comes from Judah, about which Moses said nothing about priests. Notice that he’s upholding what Moses says about that line. He’s not saying we can ignore it. He’s upholding it.

Matt Tully
Because sometimes we can read Hebrews and even other passages and we can maybe run the risk of thinking that the priesthood was bad, that it was broken inherently. But it was doing what God intended it to do. And he established it.

Daniel Stevens
Yeah. Not bad, but good and temporary. The comparison in Hebrews is not from bad to good, but from good to better. And because of that, the Levitical priesthood is a good thing, but in Hebrews it’s temporary. It’s part of what is described as the old covenant, and Hebrews draws attention to the oldness, saying that the oldness is fading away. It was for a time until what Hebrews calls the “time of restoration” (or “reformation,” depending on your translation of it). And so it existed, it did a job, it did its job well, but part of its job was to point to something greater.

30:21 - Practical Application

Matt Tully
So now you’ve summarized what the Bible is telling us about Melchizedek, and obviously we went very quickly through Hebrews 5– 7, which is just packed full of really interesting stuff, and we can’t go into all the details now. But with this broad understanding of who this figure was and how Jesus connects to him and what he can teach us about Christ, what’s the actual takeaway for a Christian today listening to this? As we think about Christ through this lens of Melchizedek, both in Genesis and Psalms, what would be maybe a couple of takeaways that you would see that can help us in our walk as Christians, in our worship of the Lord, and in our faith as Christ’s followers?

Daniel Stevens
The first one, which I know is probably going to connect the least with people but it connects the most with the author of Hebrews, so I want to say that before I move on, is that the priesthood of Jesus is a legitimate priesthood. That is, it’s not something that was made up: “Oh, well, Jesus died and we need to figure out theologically how this happened.” But that the argument the author of Hebrews makes is no, there’s this thing that the Old Testament talks about. There’s Melchizedek the priest. There’s in Psalm 110 the order of Melchizedek type of priest. That’s what Jesus has. So this is a real priesthood that does real things. He really purifies us on the inside. He really presents our concerns to God. He really does maintain the covenant. These are real things he does for us. And that takes us a step into the biblical way of seeing the world. That we need someone to stand between us and God and maintain that relationship. That’s huge. We just don’t tend to think in those terms. Second, all of the Bible has been pointing to Jesus. This figure who enigmatically is introduced in Genesis 14, who is further raised in significance in Psalm 110, he’s not just there because God likes enticing us with intellectual mysteries. He’s there because in his very mystery and greatness, he’s pointing forward to the one that his life and his inscripturation is about—Jesus. And so it leads us to see the whole Bible as not this accidental collection of texts but as something God has been using to point forward at every step until we see this master story of Jesus. Third, It leads us to think more deeply about what Jesus does for us and who he is for us. It’s easy for us to either go to the generic language of “Jesus saves us,” which is good and true; or to rely heavily on Pauline language: “Jesus justifies us.” Again, good and true. But the full picture of what Jesus does for us in Scripture is bigger than that. We are unjust and we need to be justified. Yes. We are in danger and need to be saved. Yes. We are unclean and need to be cleansed. We are guilty and need to be forgiven. We are impure and need to be purified. And many of those are things that priests do. We need to be purified by a priest. We need to be cleansed by a priest. We need to be made holy. Jesus really does these things. And if we meditate on them, we see both this fuller picture of what Jesus does, and thus the fuller picture of who we are and what we need. We’re not just legal entities in need of justification, but we are people meant to live in the presence of a holy God, and that requires purification and sanctification. And so we see things about Jesus and about ourselves. We think more about his priesthood and his priesthood after the order of Melchizedek.

Matt Tully
It’s all so fascinating. And these are some of my favorite interviews, Daniel, where we can dig into the Bible and we start to see how Scripture is just this incredible document that God has given to us. This resource that does, from the very beginning of the Bible in the earliest pages in many different ways, start to point forward to this incredible salvation that we have in Christ. Sometimes we can, as you said, kind of simplify it and we can almost dumb it down, but when we go to Scripture, we start to see all the color come out as we really dig in. So thank you so much for doing that today, helping us to understand this enigmatic figure who actually has so much to teach us about Christ, our Savior. We appreciate it.

Daniel Stevens
Absolutely glad to. It’s been fun.

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