Timothy to Hebrews - The Preterist Archive

Hebrews VII. 1-3. 449
corded in the Pentateuch, and therefore David could not refer to it
in the 110th psalm. It is of importance to the author that nothing
is recorded of Melchisedec's birth and death. As he has explained
without father and without mother by the term without genealogy, so
now he explains having neither beginning of days nor end of life bj
d(pMfioio)fj,evog, etc. Calvin has already observed with reason that the
author does not say Sfiolog. Melchisedec was not like to Christ, but
was represented in a manner like to Christ. But that nothing is recorded
in the Pentateuch of the beginning and end of Melchisedec's
life, and that, notwithstanding, Melchisedec is acknowledged as a
priest of God, and that this his priesthood—without predecessors
and successors—was set forth by David as a type of the future Messianic
priesthood—this, again, has properly for our author a positive
significance. This is to be explained by the antithesis to the Levitical
priesthood ; for all these characteristic features of the priesthood of
Melchisedec are adduced as bearing on the comparison with the
Levitical priesthood, and in proof of the inferiority of the latter.
The Levitical priest or highpriest became a priest by his birth, and left
the priesthood at his death to his son ; his oflSce was, from the nature
of him who held it, not a continuing one, but one that moved
onwards from member to member, and this succession was expressly
'prescribed and regulated in tlie law. When therefore the Psalmist
will describe the priestly glory of the promised seed^ and seeks to
concentrate this in a corresponding type, he selects not that of a
ritual Levitical high priest—one of those high priests who, from
generation to generation, ceased from their office and gave place to
each other—but that of Melchisedec who, a, was a priest not by
formal, legal investment, but because his internal character, his
qualities of righteousness and p)eace impelled him to bring sacrifices
to God, and to consecrate the power of the king by the internal
qualities of the priest ; who, b, was a priest not by descent but
in himself ; and who therefore, c, was not a link in a chain of predecessors
and successors, but is represented as alone in his order,
and thus far as one who continues a priest (yields up his priesthood
to no one).
It is therefore truly no play upon words or artifice of ingenuity,
but the Divine wisdom and illumination of the Holy Spirit, by
which our author obtains the inferences which he builds on those
particulars in the form under which Melchisedec is represented to
us. The vindication of his procedure lies in this, that Melchisedec
does not appear as in himself (Gen. xiv.) a type of Christ, but is
first stamped as a type of Christ by David in Ps. ex., who in this
could not certainly refer to all that Melchisedec was, but only to the
little that was recorded of him in Gen. xiv.—Seeing then that David
when he would describe in its highest form the glory of the seed
Vol. VI—29.