"Having then a Great High Priest, who has passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son Of God, let us hold fast our confession" (Hebrews 4:14) (Author's translation).

In all cultures, for all time, there has been some form of deity--a "great spirit," or animistic object of fear or reverence--and a real or supposed link between the deity and the people, or the flesh and the spirit. Universally it has been assumed that the deity was unapproachable by human beings, apart from some sort of intermediary. But all such links have failed to provide the true oneness between God and man, until the coming of Christ, the Great High Priest. Even the Aaronic priesthood, established by God Himself, ultimately deteriorated into the tragic farce of Pharisaism.

God uses this familiar figure of the priest or mediator in communicating the truth about Christ--not merely a priest, but the priest; the "One Mediator between God and man." He is the vital connection between the mortal flesh and the eternal spirit--between the insanity of this transient world, and the eternal substance and significance of the spirit realm.

Hebrews 4:14-16 is a pivotal passage in the whole of scripture. It outlines for us the essential elements in the connection between ourselves and God--the Only true Deity. It is our escape route from the disintegrating course of this world.

Having then a Great High Priest.

We have such a priest--a link to the Deity. The earthly realm, once the garden of God, once presided over by a creature very like Himself, has become a literal hell of natural catastrophes and His creature, the brewer of a seething cauldron of violence and avarice and degradation. Our human persons are presently prisoners of this chaos. Our minds and bodies, victims of forces that constantly belie the grandeur of our divine origin and purpose.

But how shall we escape? Through our High Priest--the Great Connector with God and the spirit realm. He is our key to the ultimate recovery in the grand design which God had for us in the beginning of creation.

But when? At death? At the end of the world? A year hence? A thousand years? Now! Not in some distant future, now. The moment we take Christ into our spirits we become part of God's realm--the realm of the eternal spirit. Our bodies--our outward shells, our cocoons, must await a later glorification, but our inner spirits are immediately eternal; immediately like Christ. The body still must bear the outrage of the human predicament, but that is only superficial and temporary. The true nature of our beings is spirit and completely impervious to Satanic forces. However long we remain on the earth; however battered by the enemy; we are essentially a part of the kingdom of God, and as such, invincible. "As [Christ] is, so are we in this world" (I John 4:17). "We are in it, but not of it." And as Paul cried out in the midst of his constant struggle, "For which cause we faint not; though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day. For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory, while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal" (II Corinthians 4:16-18).

This great connection is assured in the prayer of Jesus recorded in John 17. It is regarded as a priestly prayer. In it, Jesus prays that God will accept His people (not only the disciples, themselves, but those who will believe on Him through them) as one with the Father, even as He is one with Him. This is our great escape--our one link with the eternal spirit realm; our one great bulwark against the ravages of the disintegrating forces of a fallen humanity.

Who Has Passed Through the Heavens Not "into" (as some translations) but "through" (as dia must indicate). Not only did Jesus sojourn on the earth, and taste its debilitations, and devastations, nor yet did He only encompass the created spheres of the sidereal universe, but penetrated beyond the space/time realm to the eternal spirit realm beyond. And yet, it was beyond, not in the sense of distance or location, but beyond in the sense of a new dimension in which He can exist side by side with the material realm and yet be outside it. As, for example, the fourth dimension might conceivably be side by side with a third dimension and yet be outside of it. So in a sense, Christ occupies a realm that is neither strictly heaven, nor earth, but a spirit realm superseding both heaven and earth.

Let Us Hold Fast Our Confession

The Greek word--homologia--means not "profession," as merely an outward expression, but "confession" meaning both what we say with our lips and what we believe in our hearts. And, "to hold fast (kratomen)" means not so much to hold onto it lest it slip away, but rather to cling to it as our certain anchor in the storm.

And so, despite the ravages and convulsions of a world gone mad; despite the struggles and turbulence of our personal lives; despite the failures and follies of minds subject to the deceptions and temptations of the flesh, we are secure in the citadel of the Kingdom of God, our passage into that Kingdom granted and guaranteed through THE GREAT CONNECTOR.

David Morsey

January 1986

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