The Original International Man Of Mystery Series

I wonder if anyone can tell me what is the Old Testament passage most frequently quoted in the New Testament…

You might think it’s something like Leviticus 19:18, “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” If you’re really into the writings of the minor prophets, you might come up with an obscure verse like Habakkuk 2:4, “The just shall live by faith.”

Depending on how you do your calculation, there are something in the range of three hundred quotations from the Old Testament that can be found in the New. But the quotation that tops them all is from Psalm 110, verses 1 and 4, which run like this:

The LORD says to my Lord:

‘Sit at my right hand,

until I make your enemies your footstool.’ …

The Lord has sworn

and will not change his mind,

‘You are a priest forever

after the order of Melchizedek.’

The first place we find these words is in each of the first three gospels. They come up in the course of one of those nitpicking encounters between Jesus and the religious authorities. We hear them, not on the lips of Jesus, but from his opponents. They use them to try to debunk what people are beginning to say about Jesus: that he is the promised Messiah. Clearly, they recognized these verses as a messianic prophecy.

The next time we come across them is when they are quoted by Peter. They are to be found in the middle of his sermon on the day of Pentecost. He was addressing the large crowd who had gathered in the street when they heard Jesus’ followers praising God in what they recognized as their own languages. And after citing these same verses, Peter proclaimed, “Let all the house of Israel know for certain that God has made this Jesus whom you crucified both Lord and Messiah.” (Acts 2:34-36)

This in turn brings us to the Letter to the Hebrews, which we have been following now since the beginning of the year. So I will forgive you if you don’t remember way back in chapter 1, where this text is quoted once again. There, pointing to Jesus, the author asks the question, “To which of the angels has God ever said, ‘Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet’”? (Hebrews 1:13)

Finally we come to the verse immediately preceding the passage before us this morning: Hebrews 6:20. There the author writes of Jesus as “having become a high priest forever after the order of Melchizedek”.

When I was scratching my head early last week trying to come up with a title for this sermon, I thought of calling it “Who the heck was Melchizedek?” And perhaps that’s exactly the question you’re asking yourself right now! Well, the answer comes in the three verses which make up this morning’s passage from Hebrews.

The author takes us far back into the mists of history—in fact, to chapter 14 in the book of Genesis. Now here’s the scene: The rulers of Sodom and Gomorrah had been trounced in battle by the rulers of some of the neighbouring settlements. Among those whom they took as captives was Abraham’s nephew Lot. When Abraham found out about it, he pulled together his armed men and staged an overnight raid on the two rulers and their forces. The result was that Lot was made a free man once again and Abraham forged a treaty with the ruler of Sodom. And that is where Melchizedek enters the scene.

He appears to come to Abraham out of nowhere. He is the king of Salem (later to become Jerusalem) and the scene takes place in the nearby Valley of Shaveh. Melchizedek brings with him bread and wine and pronounces a blessing on Abraham. In response, Abraham returns to him a tenth of all his possessions. Then, as mysteriously as he appeared, Melchizedek disappears into the mists of time.

Now I have to say that this scene is one of a few in the Old Testament that never fail to bring shivers down my spine. It is up there with the three mysterious visitors who later came out of the blue to visit Abraham as he stood at the entry of his tent. And with the fourth man who stood amid the flames with Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego inside King Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace. I ask myself: Could it be that what those men witnessed—and what Abraham witnessed that day in the Valley of Shaveh—was a foreshadowing of the eternal Word, Jesus, who was with God and who was God from the beginning? I’ll leave it to you to come to your own conclusion.

King of righteousness

But back to Melchizedek. Our passage this morning tells us three things about him. The first is a translation of his name. It is a combination of the two Hebrew words melek, which means “king”, and tsedeq, which means “righteousness”. Put them together and Melchizedek’s name means “king of righteousness”—and as such he points directly to Jesus.