Happy birthday, America!

So marriage is awesome, and sanctifying. I've learned a lot about God through my relationship with my wife, and I'm learning and growing every day. One thing I noticed is that in my relationship with Chowon, sometimes we tell each other things, hoping (of course) that the other person will hear and understand what we are saying at face value, but also secretly hoping that the other person will learn the underlying pattern of thought behind what we're asking. An easy example could be when one of us asks something like, "would you take out the trash?". The question carries a hope that the other will see the wisdom in what is being asked, so that our desires will be unified and we will mutually care for the same important issues (for example, "the trash stinks, and it's better to not live in a house that stinks"). That's kindof a silly example, but I think that kind of communication is really common in any relationship. (for the record, me and Chowon are pretty well unified around the idea that taking out the trash is my job lol).

This is a pretty abstract connection, but the reason I brought it up here is because I've been going through Hebrews lately, and I think that this hope, that a person will not just get the information but will also get the underlying principle, is present in Hebrews. The author of Hebrews famously writes, (I'm paraphrasing), "Let's stop eating baby food, going over the basic messages about Jesus's death and resurrection over and over. Let's graduate to eating meat, and learn the deeper parts of God's message to us."

So then the author of Hebrews (I think it was Paul) talks about this relatively insignificant character in the OT: Melchizedek. He's mentioned like 2 or 3 times in the entire OT, and we know almost nothing about him. He's a non-jew (gentile?) king and priest of God, who lived before the priesthood was established, before Israel was a nation, who blessed Abraham, and who received a tithe from Abraham. His name means King of Righteousness, and his kingdom's name means Peace. He is not recorded in any of the carefully documented genealogies of the OT. We read neither about his birth nor his death. Without a word-searching tool, Paul seems to just know every mention of him in the Bible, and he extracts everything we know about the person. As we know, Hebrews proceeds to compare various aspects of Melchizedek's life to Jesus's life, really drawing out the meat of scripture from those few details available about Melchizedek. 

The information itself (about Melchizedek and his symbolic ties to Christ) is very beneficial, and without a doubt the writer of Hebrews wanted to deliver that information to us. However, I think there is a deeper message here. Why choose Melchizedek over all other OT details he could have explored? He later indicates that he has a lot of other things to say about the temple and Levitical practices, but chooses not to tell them in this book (Heb 9:5). Why spend so much time on this obscure reference? Besides the obvious answer, which is for the sake of the information itself, I think it's because the author of Hebrews is demonstrating to us a pattern of thinking that he hopes for us to employ when we read the Old Testament. He was able to draw so much meat out of an information-starved character like Melchizedek; how much more meat should we be able to pull from the other characters in scripture, about whom much more is known? Every character mentioned in the Old Testament (and the Bible at large) is a feast waiting to be eaten!  

When Paul tells us, "Let's graduate to eating meat", I am sure he didn't mean, "Let's graduate to me spoon-feeding you meat", and I'm sure he didn't mean, "Let's graduate to my letters being your only source of meat". I'm sure he meant, "Go hunting! The scripture is a rich forest, full of fat game" (and notice, the scripture he references is the OT).

So let's not neglect the OT. I look at the state of Christian knowledge about OT Jesus, and it seems we've left God's redemptive stories to be interpreted by Atheists. How in the world did the OT, which is FULL of declarations about how God is loving and gracious (Psalm 145:8, and Exodus 34:6-7 to name two off the top of my head), become known as a description of a wrathful and uncompassionate God, as opposed to the somehow-different NT God, despite our frequent reiterations that God is unchanging? I submit that it's because Christians have neglected to teach the OT in church, and they do not discuss it in their small groups, and thereby they have handed God's word over to to the world for abusive misinterpretations. The Bible is alive, and the Holy Spirit makes it known to the masses. If Christians who love God don't preach it, then Atheists who hate God will.

"...having become as much superior to the angels as the name he inherited is more excellent than theirs."