The Mediator
In this module we’re looking at the way in which God works through his people to make his presence known. This culminates in Jesus opening up the way to a new creation free from suffering, sin, and death. We’re approaching this through the lens of five keys figures in the biblical story. We started by looking at the originals, then we looked at the patriarch, and in this lesson we’re looking at the mediator.
Now, the word “mediator” can mean different things to different people, so it’s worth clarifying what we mean by it here. When you hear the word you might instinctively think of a negotiator, someone who tries to help two parties compromise enough so that they can reach some sort of middleground. This is not the sort of mediator we’ll be looking at in this lesson. The sort of mediator we’re interested in is a mediator between God and man, who helps God establish a covenant with sinful humans without compromising his holiness. This mediator is the means through which God makes himself accessible to the world, despite our sinfulness. If that job description makes you think of Jesus, then you’re not wrong. But in order to understand him in the context, we need to start earlier in the biblical story.
Moses
Without a doubt, the gold standard for mediators before Jesus was Moses. Deuteronomy closes with these words, summarizing his significance:
… there has not arisen a prophet since in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face, none like him for all the signs and the wonders that the Lord sent him to do in the land of Egypt… and for all the mighty power and all the great deeds of terror that Moses did in the sight of all Israel. (Deuteronomy 34:10–12)
From the first time he stepped into Pharaoh’s chambers to the moment he died overlooking the promised land, Moses played a crucial part in enacting and sustaining the covenant God wanted to make with Israel.
He began his job as mediator right at the beginning, when he called Pharaoh to let God’s people go from slavery in Egypt; he was the spokesman for God before each of the plagues; God did miracles through him; and once the people escaped Egypt he was the person through whom God commanded them and provided for them. When Israel came to Mount Sinai, Moses was the middleman between God and Israel as he laid out the covenant for them. God never spoke directly with Israel, but did all things through Moses.
As you read through Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy you realize that mediating this relationship between God and his people could not have been an easy task. On more than one occasion the people of Israel completely rejected God, first by creating and worshipping a golden calf idol (Exodus 32–33), and later by refusing to trust in God to give them the promised land after all the mighty works they’d seen him do (Numbers 14). In both cases, their rejection was so serious that God threatened to destroy Israel and start over with just Moses and his descendants, and in both cases Moses interceded on behalf of the people by appealing to God for mercy. In other words, if it weren’t for his mediation, our Old Testaments would be about the nation of Moses rather than the nation of Israel.
Of course, Israel sinned many more times than just these two cases. In fact, they sinned so often that at one point Moses cried out to God about the burden of leading these people. He asked God:
Why have you dealt ill with your servant? And why have I not found favor in your sight, that you lay the burden of all this people on me? Did I conceive all this people? Did I give them birth, that you should say to me, “Carry them in your bosom, as a nurse carries a nursing child,” to the land that you swore to give their fathers?… I am not able to carry all this people alone; the burden is too heavy for me. (Numbers 11:11–14)
This burden for Moses existed because he was the mediator of the complicated relationship that exists when a holy God tries to live among sinful people. But it’s because this relationship is so complicated that mediators were needed in the first place.
Notice I say mediators, plural—and that’s because Moses wasn’t the only mediator of the covenant with Israel. He was the first and most important mediator, but if he were all there was then the covenant wouldn’t have lasted much longer after he died. A holy God living with sinful people is not a stable situation, and so unless you have constant mediation it’s not going to last. As I see it, after Moses it was up to the prophets and the priests to mediate the covenant—very roughly, we could say that the prophets were God’s representatives to his people, while the priests were his people’s representatives to God. Together the prophets and the priests filled the mediator-shaped hole left by Moses.
Now, while it’s natural to think of Moses as a prophet, I suspect we may find it a bit more difficult to think of him as a priest. After all, Aaron was the first high priest of Israel, and he was around the same time as Moses. But I think it can be helpful to think of Moses as a kind of proto-high priest, the priest before the priests who set the precedent for them to follow just as he did for the prophets. To motivate this a little before we get into the details, note that every high priest is anointed and given the garments of the previous high priest, and that the first high priest, Aaron, was anointed and given the garments by Moses (Exodus 29, Leviticus 18–20). In other words, to get the priesthood going in the first place Moses needed to act like a high priest for them. And in other ways, the role Moses played for Israel anticipated the formal role that the priests would play going forward.
Because of time constraints, and because I think more people will be familiar with prophets than with priests, the mediators we’re going to be focusing on are the priests, with only the occasional mention of prophets as we go.
The Levitical priesthood
The priesthood in Israel is called the “Levitical” priesthood, because all of the priests or helpers of the priests came from the tribe of Levi. The main function of the Levitical priesthood was to maintain the holy zone that God had created in the world when he started living within the nation of Israel. The problem—as we’ve said—is that God is holy and humans are sinful, and holiness destroys sinfulness. Thus, with God living among Israel there is a delicate balance that needs to be maintained in order to ensure that God can stick around without destroying his people, and the job of the priests is to maintain this balance.
To start thinking about how the priests mediated this relationship, it’s worth reflecting on the layout of the original Israelite camp in the wilderness. We can think of the camp as being broken down into concentric layers of holiness, with the most holy things at the center and the least holy things on the outskirts. Since God is what makes things holy, the inner chamber of the tabernacle where he dwells is at the center of this layout, and is called the “Most Holy Place” or the “Holy of Holies”. Moving outward we have the outer chamber of the tabernacle, called the “Holy Place” or often just the “tent of meeting”. Moving outward again we have the court of the tabernacle and the camps of the Levites, which we’ve said includes the priests and those who serve the priests in their daily duties. Outside of these camps are the camps of the other tribes of Israel. And finally, on the outskirts of the Israelite camp is the place where the specific kinds of unclean people would live, so as not to spread their uncleannesses throughout the camp.
The reason these distinctions needed to be made was because if something unclean ever came into contact with something holy, the unclean thing would be destroyed. And since normal life is full of different kinds of uncleanness, whether they be unintentional sins or forms of ritual uncleanness, delineating the camp into these sections meant that the Israelites didn’t have to constantly be in fear of dying. They only had to be careful when moving inward from their layer, as they approached God at the tabernacle.
This brings us to the first task of the priests as covenant mediators. In order to worship God at the tabernacle or bring him offerings, the people needed to move inward towards the tabernacle, and it was the priests’ job to teach the people of Israel how to distinguish between the holy and common, and between the clean and the unclean. In fact, very early on, two of Aaron’s own sons died for approaching God improperly, which prompted God to articulate this responsibility:
And the Lord spoke to Aaron, saying, “... You are to distinguish between the holy and the common, and between the unclean and the clean, and you are to teach the people of Israel all the statutes that the Lord has spoken to them by Moses.” (Leviticus 10:10–11)
We unpacked these categories in our lesson on sanctification in our first module, so we’re just going to give a brief overview here. Something becomes holy by being set apart for God in some way, and the things left behind are common. Israel is holy relative to the other nations, and within Israel priests are holy relative to common people. Clean and unclean, on the other hand, have to do with our individual condition, or our purity. The basic purity laws that apply to anyone are given in Leviticus 11–15 and 18–20; there are two sets of laws because they serve different purposes, and if you’re a priest or some play some other role in Israel then additional laws will apply to you. Thankfully, all these details aren’t important to us here.
What is important is how the holy and common relate to the clean and unclean: if you are common then you can be clean or unclean without any problem, but if you want to approach something holy or become holy in some way then you need to first be clean. If an unclean thing touches a holy thing, then it profanes or defiles it, and in most cases this results in someone dying. Thus, the priests had to teach the people of Israel about these categories, so that they knew when they could safely move from a more common place (like the outer areas of the camp) to a more holy place (like the court of the tabernacle).
The second responsibility of the priests was to facilitate all offerings that people brought to God (Leviticus 1–7). Every offering was performed by a priest on behalf of the offerer, and never directly by the offerer themselves. This means that the priests played an integral role in the relationship between God and humans. We don’t always appreciate how important the priests were because of this, so consider the fellowship offering as an example. In these offerings, the best parts of the meat were burned on the altar for God, and the other parts were divided between the priest and the offerer to eat. So, in fellowship offerings, the priest effectively facilitates a meal between God and the offerer. Jay Sklar explains the significance of this as follows:
Israelites often confirmed a covenant relationship by sharing a meal with other covenant partners. The fellowship offering functioned as a type of meal serving as a celebration of the covenant relationship and a rededication to covenant responsibilities.
Now, you can only come to the tabernacle and make these sorts of offerings if you’re clean, so the third responsibility of the priests was to make it possible for unclean people to become clean again through the process of atonement. Typically, if someone was unclean, they would wait some amount of time and then come to the tabernacle and make offerings for atonement. These would involve some combination of a sin offering, guilt offering, and burnt offering, which the priest would facilitate and thereby make atonement for the person. In extreme cases, the priest might have to go outside the camp and make atonement for the person out there (Leviticus 13–14), but the same general principles applied. Once people had been atoned, they were free to make other offerings to celebrate their communion with God.
This is atonement on an individual level, but once a year the high priest would also make atonement for the nation as a whole, on the “Day of Atonement” (Leviticus 16). This is the only day of the year when anyone could go into the Most Holy Place, and even then the high priest had to be extremely careful. Before he went in he had to make atonement for himself, and then he would throw up a sort of smoke screen in order to avoid directly looking at God (16:11–13). On the Day of Atonement, the high priest atoned for the collective uncleanness of the people of Israel, so that God could continue to live among them and make himself available to them and the nations around them.
The fourth responsibility of the priests was to make regular offerings to God on behalf of the people, without the people necessarily bringing them anything. For example:
Every Sabbath day Aaron shall arrange [the bread of the tabernacle] before the Lord regularly; it is from the people of Israel as a covenant forever. (Leviticus 24:8)
And fifth, the priests and the other Levites were to keep guard of the tabernacle, to prevent anyone from touching it or entering it, at which point they would probably die.
As mediators, the priests were following part of the precedent set by Moses: as Moses had brought Israel to God at Mount Sinai, so the priests enabled them to approach God at the tabernacle; as Moses pleaded for God’s mercy, so the priests made atonement for the people; as Moses spoke to God in the original tent of meeting (Exodus 32:7–11), so the priests ministered at the tent of meeting; and as Moses taught Israel how to live with God, so the priests taught Israel how to separate the unclean from the holy that they might continue live with God.
As long as the priests did their job as covenant mediators, Israel and the nations would have access to God and experience the blessings God had promised to Abraham. As God said in Numbers:
Speak to Aaron and his sons, saying, Thus you shall bless the people of Israel: you shall say to them,
‘The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.’
So shall they put my name upon the people of Israel, and I will bless them. (Numbers 6:22–27)
God’s priests before Israel
Before we take a look at how all of this develops, it’s worth looking back at the priests of God that came before Israel. Perhaps the most enigmatic priest before the time of Israel was Melchizedek. He first shows up briefly, seemingly out of nowhere in the story of Genesis. Abraham had just saved his nephew Lot from a group of kings, and while meeting up with one of his allies we see Melchizedek mentioned for the first and last time in Genesis:
And Melchizedek, king of Salem brought out bread and wine. (He was priest of God Most High.) And he blessed [Abram] and said, “Blessed be Abram by God Most High, Possessor of heaven and earth; and blessed be God Most High, who has delivered your enemies into your hand!” And Abram gave him a tenth of everything he had. (Genesis 14:18–19)
Just as with the Levitical priests in Israel, here we see Melchizedek bless Abraham and Abraham pay him a tithe. Despite this being the only time we encounter him, for some reason he is highly esteemed by David in Psalm 110. You will likely have heard the beginning of this Psalm before:
The Lord says to my Lord: “Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool.”
And then a few verses later he goes on to say this:
The Lord has sworn and will not change his mind, “You are a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.” (Psalm 110:1, 4)
Why would David mention Melchizedek here, if he’s only around for two verses in Genesis? The author of Hebrews argues that Melchizedek is important because he was a priest to Abraham; and since Abraham is the father of all Israel, Melchizedek was therefore in some sense the priest to all Israel, including the Levitical priests themselves. Thus, Melchizedek’s priesthood must have been better than the Levitical priesthood. We’ll return to Hebrews shortly, but for now we mention Melchizedek as an interesting precursor to God’s priests in Israel.
And depending on who you ask, there is even a precursor to this precursor. Even though Melchizedek is the first person called a priest, some scholars have suggested that Adam and Eve were truly the first priests in the biblical story. On this proposal, the garden of Eden is understood as a better version of the temple in Israel, a version which granted direct access to God. But if we had direct access to God, we might wonder, why would Eden need priests? Part of the answer comes when we look at the reason God placed humans in the garden in the first place:
The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. (Genesis 2:15)
The idea of “keeping” is very broad, but when it’s applied to a particular thing, it usually involves both taking care of that thing and protecting it from outside interference. For instance, a shepherd keeps their flock, and the priests were told to keep guard or keep charge of the tabernacle (Numbers 18, Ezekiel 44). Now, working and keeping a garden would involve some gardening, but when that garden is also the holy place where God lives then we can start to see why Adam and Eve might also be called priests.
If this is right, then part of keeping the garden would have involved keeping out uncleanness or anything else that might have interfered with its holiness. And this is precisely what Adam and Eve failed to do: they listened to the serpent, and made themselves unclean, leading them to be excluded from the garden they were meant to keep. In other words, they failed as priests and in doing so doomed humanity to life without God.
Exile and return
This is why we needed the Levitical priesthood at all, to restore something of what Adam and Eve had lost. This is also why such a delicate balance needed to be maintained by the Levitical priests, because of the tension between God’s holiness and human sinfulness. Unfortunately, the priests of Israel followed the example of Adam and Eve, and failed to be the mediators Israel—and the world—needed. Consider God’s indictment of them through Ezekiel:
[Israel’s] priests have done violence to my law and have profaned my holy things. They have made no distinction between the holy and the common, neither have they taught the difference between the unclean and the clean, and they have disregarded my Sabbaths, so that I am profaned among them. (Ezekiel 22:26)
This is a serious situation. The priests were supposed to teach the people, but they didn’t; they were supposed to make regular offerings on the Sabbath, but they didn’t; they were supposed to keep the temple from being profaned, but they didn’t. Without its mediators, the Levitical system was bound to fall apart, which is exactly what happened in Ezekiel’s day, when God left his temple and sent Israel into exile throughout the nations.
Israel eventually returned from exile and rebuilt the temple, but God never returned with them. Despite the fact that they were exiled because of their sin, Israel never really repented from it, and so he never returned to live among them like he had before.
The heavenly priesthood
When he did eventually return, it wasn’t as some unapproachable presence hidden in the inner chamber of the temple, but as the man Jesus who walked freely among the uncleanness of his people. When Jesus died on the cross, Matthew, Mark, and Luke tell us that the curtain in the temple, which separated the Holy of Holies from the outside world, was torn in two, clearly indicating the dawn of a new era. With Jesus, God established the new covenant he had promised earlier through the prophets, a covenant that wouldn’t be subject to the same weaknesses of the old covenant with Israel. And with the introduction of a new covenant comes the need for a new mediator, a new “Moses” to meditate between God and humanity.
Out of the whole New Testament, the most explicit discussion of Jesus as the mediator of a new covenant comes in the book of Hebrews, which opens by contrasting Jesus to the prophets who had come before:
Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son… (Hebrews 1:1–2)
The author was of course aware of the prophets that existed in the early church after Jesus’s ascension. The prophets he’s referring to here are those whom God used to progressively reveal his plans to his people, and because Jesus is the culmination of those plans, he is also the capstone of God’s revelation to his people. Thus, while Moses may have been the first and paradigm prophet of Israel, Jesus was the final and greatest prophet of all. The author doesn’t mention Moses explicitly in these opening verses, but he does a few chapters later, and argues that Jesus is greater than Moses just as a son is more important in his father’s house than a faithful servant (3:1–6).
If Jesus is greater than Moses, and Moses was both prophet and priest, then we should expect that Jesus is not only the greatest prophet but also the greatest priest. And sure enough, the book of Hebrews dedicates a large chunk of it’s remaining time to arguing that Jesus is the great high priest of the new covenant (Hebrews 4:14–10:39). If you’ve read through Hebrews before, you might have been a little confused that the author would spend so much time unpacking the priesthood of Jesus, but having looked at the role of priests as covenant mediators we can begin to see why this is so important. We’ve said that priests are responsible for maintaining the covenant set up by the initial mediator, by maintaining the balance between God’s holiness and his people’s sinfulness. Priests are representatives of humanity to God, approaching him on their behalf to make offerings and atonement for them.
Now, when it comes to thinking about how this works itself out in the new covenant, it’s best to think of it as a fulfillment of the Levitical system of the old covenant. Not fulfillment in the sense of doing what was previously promised, but fulfillment in the sense of establishing a more perfect or “fully-filled-out” version of what came before. In this way, we can appreciate both the continuity and the discontinuity that exists between the Levitical priesthood of the old covenant and Jesus’s priesthood in the new covenant—the new covenant still has a priesthood, it’s just better than what came before. The best way to see this is to look at how different aspects in the old and new covenants compare to one another:
In the old covenant the priests ministered in an earthly temple built according to the pattern shown by God (Exodus 25:24); in the new covenant Jesus has ascended to God the Father himself and ministers in the heavenly temple that the pattern was based on (Hebrews 8:1–7).
In the old covenant the temple itself needed to be cleansed with offerings because it could get tainted by being near the uncleannesses of humanity—this is what the sin and guilt offerings were for (cf. Leviticus 16:12–16); in the new covenant the temple where Jesus ministers does not get tainted ever (Hebrews 9:23–24).
In the old covenant the high priest could only approach God in the Holy of Holies once a year on behalf of the people (Leviticus 16:28–34, 23:26–32); in the new covenant Jesus is always at the right hand of God constantly interceding on our behalf (Hebrews 9:6–14, Romans 8:34).
In the old covenant offerings and sacrifices had to be given repeatedly, every day, week, and year because they never truly removed sin from the offerers (Hebrews 10:1–4); in the new covenant Jesus offered himself as a perfect sacrifice on our behalf, once-for-all to bring true atonement and forgiveness of sins (Hebrews 10:11–14).
In the old covenant the responsibility of the high priest was passed on as the previous high priest died (Numbers 20:22–29); in the new covenant our high priest has risen from the dead and ascended to heaven never to die again (Hebrews 7:23–25).
This last point brings us back to the enigmatic figure of Melchizedek that we saw earlier. Recall that he showed up for a few verses in Genesis, where he blessed Abraham, and then again in a Psalm by David, where he says the following:
The Lord has sworn and will not change his mind, “You are a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.” (Psalm 110:4)
In the old covenant, all priests were in the order of Aaron, which required them to be Levites descended from the first high priest Aaron. Since Jesus is neither a Levite nor a descendant of Aaron, it raises the question about what order of priests he belongs to. The author of Hebrews picks up on what David says in the Psalm to explain that Jesus was a priest in the order of Melchizedek (Hebrews 7). Melchizedek belongs to no genealogy and has no genealogy of his own, so descendancy doesn’t seem as important for his order. Rather, the Psalm states that the way someone enters the order of Melchizedek is by being a priest forever—unlike the Levitical priests who die, the Melchizedekian priests are everlasting. Thus, the author of Hebrews says that Jesus is a priest…
… in the likeness of Melchizedek… not on the basis of a legal requirement concerning bodily descent, but by the power of an indestructible life. (Hebrews 7:15–16)
This provides yet another reason for thinking that Jesus’s priesthood is greater than that of the old covenant. As we saw earlier, the order of Melchizedek ministered to Abraham himself, and is therefore the priesthood to Abraham and his descendants, including the Levitical priesthood (Hebrews 7:4–10). So, these are six ways in which the new covenant provides a fully-filled-out version of the priesthood we see in the old covenant—six ways in which we now have a better mediator and therefore a closer relationship with God.
An important implication of this is that we don’t need to fear that our mediator will fail like the old mediators did. They failed by succumbing to sin, but our mediator Jesus defeated sin on the cross, and now sits with God in heaven, constantly interceding on our behalf. Because of this, we have a confidence in our relationship with God that was impossible before, and this confidence in Jesus should spur us on to the end, as we wait for the day when he returns:
Therefore, brothers and sisters, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus… and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful. And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near. (Hebrews 10:19–25)