A New Old Order

Psalm 110:1 A Psalm of David. The  Lord said to my Lord, "Sit at My right hand, Till I make Your enemies Your footstool." 2 The Lord shall send the rod of Your strength out of Zion. Rule in the midst of Your enemies! 3 Your people shall be volunteers In the day of Your power; In the beauties of holiness, from the womb of the morning, You have the dew of Your youth. 4 The Lord has sworn And will not relent, "You are a priest forever According to the order of Melchizedek." 5 The Lord is at Your right hand; He shall execute kings in the day of His wrath. 6 He shall judge among the nations, He shall fill the places with dead bodies, He shall execute the heads of many countries. 7 He shall drink of the brook by the wayside; Therefore He shall lift up the head.

The history of the Jewish people is a very interesting thing to behold. The Jewish people themselves look to their own history as their reason d’etre, (their reason for being.)

How fascinating and rewarding it must be to be able to trace the lineage of their priesthood all the way back to ‘father’ Abraham, and to know that all of the priests who have ever served in the Temple have been direct descendants of the great patriarch of the faith. What a sense of the gravity of the faith that must provide, and of the roots of the system of their faith. It must, therefore, have been uncorrupted. Wouldn’t that be a logical assumption?

But there was a problem, and it came in this area: pride. There can be a sense of overwhelming pride established in those who have a strong sense of traditional heritage, as they have something no one else has. Simply put, you cannot be truly Jewish unless you are born into the faith – and you cannot be a priest unless you are born into a certain tribe and family within that faith. What a heritage, but also what a threat to understanding and the true faith God would seek to author in their hearts pertaining to The Messiah. God’s Anointed One.

And so along the way in His Word, God has dropped some hints to the Jewish people that they may not be blinded by their pride in whom they are and how they are superior to others by their religious practice and genealogical lineage.

One of those hints comes in Psalm 110, and it must be very puzzling to the Jews in regard to their heritage and genealogy to discover THEIR Messiah would be “According to the order of Melchizedek.” The question is: would they take the hint? And…what does it mean anyway? Melchizedek, only seen mysteriously in Genesis 14, is a contemporary of Abraham – and he is clearly not a Levite, because Levi, (Abraham’s son,) had not been born yet. Hmmm…what does it all mean?

Could it be Messiah, Our Great High Priest, could be of the tribe of Judah – and NOT of the order of the Levites? (Only if you are reading God’s Word, and seeing what it says along the way.) Oh yes, this is a VERY important Psalm!

-  Pastor Bill