“ONLY ONE IS PERSONAL AND PERPETUAL!”

OPENING COMMENT by Robert

Seventy years have passed since I began my quest to discover who the fourth person King Nebuchadnezzar saw standing in the fiery furnace with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego. It was not that I was unfamiliar or did not believe it was our Saviour Yeshua who saved these individuals, but in the mind of a five-year-old, I wanted to understand how?

Over the years of searching, to answer that youngster’s question, there have been many discoveries and many new questions answered. Each teaching a new revelation from the Holy Spirit leading me closer to discovering and understanding the how.

Our heavenly Father, lead me to Hebrews 7 and those verses related how that miracle which Yeshua performed, has been since His ascension, repeated every day since that time.

He disclosed a way out of the clutches of Satan’s furnace seen as the world in which multitudes are trapped and will be destroyed as a result of being separated from the Father, must be opened.

The following was revealed: This must not be understood according to the letter but the scripture has chosen to set him forth as an extraordinary person, without giving us his genealogy, that he might be a fitter type of Christ, who as a man was without father, as God without mother whose priesthood is without descent, did not descend to him from another, nor from him to another, but is personal and perpetual.

Melchisedec as a king met Abraham returning from the slaughter of the kings and blessed him. The incident is recorded in Genesis 14:18. He brought forth bread and wine to refresh Abraham and his servants when they were weary he gave as a king and blessed as a priest.

Thus our Lord Jesus meets his people in their spiritual conflicts, refreshes them, renews their strength, and blesses them. That Abraham gave him a tenth part of all (Hebrews 7:2), that is, as the apostle explains it, of all the spoils and this Abraham did as an expression of his gratitude for what Melchisedec had done for him, or as a testimony of his homage and subjection to him as a king, or as an offering vowed and dedicated to God, to be presented by his priest.

And thus are we obliged to make all possible returns of love and gratitude to the Lord Jesus for all the rich and royal favours we receive from him, to pay our homage and subjection to him as our King, and to put all our offerings into his hands, to be presented by him to the Father in the incense of his own sacrifice. 

And now by this argument of persons doing things that are matters of right or injury in the loins of their predecessors we have an illustration of how we may be said to have sinned in Adam, and fallen with him in his first transgression.

We were in Adam’s loins when he sinned, and the guilt and depravity contracted by the human nature when it was in our first parents are equitably imputed and derived to the same nature as it is in all other persons naturally descended from them.

They justly adhere to the nature, and it must be by an act of grace if ever they are taken away. From this must not be understood according to the letter but the scripture has chosen to set him forth as an extraordinary person, without giving us his genealogy, that he might be a fitter type of Christ, who as a man was without father, as God without mother whose priesthood is without descent, did not descend to him from another, nor from him to another, but is personal and perpetual.