The short answer
Hebrews calls Jesus our high priest because God swore in Psalm 110:4, “Thou art a priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek.” Jesus came from Judah, so his priesthood could not rest on descent from Aaron. Hebrews says it rests on “the power of an endless life” (Hebrews 7:16). Because death could not hold him, he entered heaven by his own blood, sat down at God’s right hand, and “ever liveth to make intercession” for his people.
A High Priest From the Tribe of Judah
Hebrews is the one book of the New Testament that calls Jesus a high priest and explains his work in the language of Israel’s priesthood. To its first readers the title raised an obvious problem. Under the law of Moses the priests came from the tribe of Levi, and the high priests from the family of Aaron. Jesus was a son of David, from the tribe of Judah. The writer says so himself:
For it is evident that our Lord sprang out of Juda; of which tribe Moses spake nothing concerning priesthood.
Hebrews 7:14
No one from Judah ever served at the altar (Hebrews 7:13). If Jesus is a high priest, his priesthood has to rest on something other than his family line. Hebrews finds that ground in a psalm of David, which names another order of priests.
Psalm 110: A Priest for Ever
When Hebrews explains how Jesus became a high priest, it quotes an oath from Psalm 110:
The LORD hath sworn, and will not repent, Thou art a priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek.
Psalm 110:4
The writer quotes this verse three times (Hebrews 5:6; 7:17, 21) and refers to it several more. Two parts of it carry his argument. This priest is appointed by God’s oath, and he is a priest “for ever.” The sons of Aaron were made priests by birth into the right family, and each one served until he died. Hebrews contrasts the two: the law made men high priests who had weaknesses, but the word of the oath “maketh the Son, who is consecrated for evermore” (Hebrews 7:28).
The psalm names the order after Melchizedek, a man who appears in Genesis in three verses. He comes out to meet Abraham after a battle, brings bread and wine, blesses him, and receives a tenth of the spoil. Genesis calls him “the priest of the most high God” (Genesis 14:18). He was a priest long before there was a tribe of Levi.
Who Was Melchizedek?
Genesis records the fathers, the births, and the deaths of a great many people. It gives no account of where Melchizedek came from or of his death. Hebrews reads that silence closely:
Without father, without mother, without descent, having neither beginning of days, nor end of life; but made like unto the Son of God; abideth a priest continually.
Hebrews 7:3
A few verses later the writer comes back to it. The Levites who received tithes were “men that die,” but Abraham gave his tithe to one “of whom it is witnessed that he liveth” (Hebrews 7:8).
Christians have long disagreed about who Melchizedek was. Some scholars, David Moffitt among them, read Hebrews 7 as describing an immortal, heavenly priest. Others read the writer as using the silence of Genesis as a picture: Scripture gives Melchizedek no recorded ancestry and no death, so he stands for a priest who lives on. How Atonement Works leaves that question open.
On either reading, Hebrews draws out the same point. Melchizedek stands in Scripture as a priest with no recorded end of life, who “abideth a priest continually.” His priesthood rests on life. Aaron’s rested on descent. And Hebrews says that Melchizedek was “made like unto the Son of God.” The life without end belongs first to the Son, and Melchizedek is the picture of it.
The Power of an Endless Life
Hebrews names what qualifies Jesus for this priesthood:
And it is yet far more evident: for that after the similitude of Melchisedec there ariseth another priest, Who is made, not after the law of a carnal commandment, but after the power of an endless life.
Hebrews 7:15–16
The priests of Aaron’s line were made priests by a commandment about their bodies: who their fathers were. Jesus was made a priest by the life he has.
The Greek word translated “endless” means a life that cannot be destroyed or dissolved, and this is its only use in the New Testament. Its root verb is the word for tearing something down. At Jesus’ trial the witnesses used it: “This fellow said, I am able to destroy the temple of God, and to build it in three days” (Matthew 26:61). John explains that Jesus “spake of the temple of his body” (John 2:21). Chris White draws the words together: men could destroy the temple of his body, but the life in it could not be destroyed.
On the day of Pentecost Peter said that God raised Jesus up, “because it was not possible that he should be holden of it” (Acts 2:24). He gave the reason from a psalm of David: “thou wilt not leave my soul in hell, neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption” (Acts 2:27). When Hebrews describes the priest we needed, it uses the same Greek word for “holy”:
For such an high priest became us, who is holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners, and made higher than the heavens.
Hebrews 7:26
The book proposes a reason death could not keep him. Sin leads to death: “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23). Jesus had no sin. On the night before he died he said, “the prince of this world cometh, and hath nothing in me” (John 14:30). His death was real, but nothing in him gave death a claim on him.
A life received, or a life he always had?
Scholars have asked whether “the power of an endless life” means a life Jesus received at his resurrection or a life he always had. David Moffitt argues for the first. Before his death Jesus’ human life was mortal, and at the resurrection his body was raised to a life that can never die again. Hebrews does place the priesthood after the suffering: Jesus was “made perfect” and then “became the author of eternal salvation” (Hebrews 5:9).
Chris White reads the life itself as the life the Son always had. “As the Father hath life in himself; so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself” (John 5:26). Jesus said of his life, “I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again” (John 10:18). The two readings are close. The life he laid down at the cross was his human life, poured out in his blood. At the resurrection that human life was taken up into the life that was in him from the beginning: “Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more; death hath no more dominion over him” (Romans 6:9).
The high priest is one part of a larger account. How Atonement Works traces the whole Day of Atonement through the work of Christ: the blood, the high priest in heaven, the scapegoat that carried sins away, and the defeat of the devil.
Get the Paperback on AmazonA Priest Who Can Stay in God’s Presence
The endless life explains why this priest can do in heaven what Aaron could never do on earth. The law of the Day of Atonement begins with the death of two of Aaron’s sons, who came before the LORD with strange fire, and it warns Aaron not to come into the holy place at all times, “that he die not” (Leviticus 16:1–2). He went in once a year. He had to offer a bull for his own sin first. He took coals and incense through the veil, and the cloud of incense covered the lid of the Ark so that he would not die (Leviticus 16:12–13). When he had put the blood on the lid, he came out.
Hebrews sets the new priest against that picture:
And they truly were many priests, because they were not suffered to continue by reason of death: But this man, because he continueth ever, hath an unchangeable priesthood.
Hebrews 7:23–24
The next verse is the one many Christians know best: he is able to save “to the uttermost” those who come to God by him, “seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them” (Hebrews 7:25). Aaron was mortal and sinful, so he could enter God’s presence only briefly and only with something standing between him and death. Christ is holy and his life cannot be destroyed, so he needs no offering for himself and nothing to shield him. As Chris White reads Hebrews, Christ can stay in the presence of God because he lives and is holy, and his staying there is what Hebrews calls his intercession. Paul rests the believer’s safety on the same living Christ, “who is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us” (Romans 8:34).
Was His Priestly Offering Made on the Cross or in Heaven?
Many Christians are taught that Christ’s priestly work was completed on the cross. On that view he was both priest and sacrifice at Calvary, offering himself to God in his death, and his words “It is finished” (John 19:30) mark the end of the atoning work. His ministry in heaven is then his intercession, which rests on a sacrifice already complete. This is the ordinary teaching of many churches, and it holds firmly to something Hebrews says plainly: the sacrifice was made once and is never repeated.
Hebrews also says some things that view does not easily explain. It says that the tabernacle Moses built was a copy of “the true tabernacle, which the Lord pitched, and not man” (Hebrews 8:2). It says that every high priest must offer something, so “it is of necessity that this man have somewhat also to offer,” and that “if he were on earth, he should not be a priest” (Hebrews 8:3–4). Then it describes the offering in the terms of the Day of Atonement:
But Christ being come an high priest of good things to come, by a greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made with hands, that is to say, not of this building; Neither by the blood of goats and calves, but by his own blood he entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us.
Hebrews 9:11–12
Christ entered “into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God for us” (Hebrews 9:24). That entrance came after his resurrection and ascension. How Atonement Works argues that Hebrews counts it as part of how the atonement was made. In Leviticus the high priest killed the goat at the altar and then made the atonement inside, with its blood. The death supplied the blood. Without Christ’s death there would have been no blood, no life laid down, and nothing to offer.
Leviticus says “the life of the flesh is in the blood,” and that the blood atones because of the life in it (Leviticus 17:11). What Christ brought into God’s presence was his own life. He laid it down at the cross, took it up again, and brought it before God in his own person. He “through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God” (Hebrews 9:14).
This is where the high priesthood and the resurrection meet. A dead Christ could not have been that priest. Paul says that if Christ is not raised, “ye are yet in your sins” (1 Corinthians 15:17). The article on the resurrection and forgiveness follows that verse through Romans and Hebrews.
Once for All, and Seated at the Throne of Grace
Hebrews contrasts Christ’s posture with that of Aaron’s sons:
And every priest standeth daily ministering and offering oftentimes the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins: But this man, after he had offered one sacrifice for sins for ever, sat down on the right hand of God.
Hebrews 10:11–12
The law set the priests apart “to stand before the LORD to minister unto him” (Deuteronomy 10:8), and their work was never done. Christ sat down. Hebrews says the same in its first sentence about him: “when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high” (Hebrews 1:3). The high priest went in every year and came out every year. Christ entered once and has not come out. He died once, he rose once and does not die again, and he entered once and remains.
Hebrews also says where he sat: “on the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in the heavens” (Hebrews 8:1). In God’s earthly house the place of his throne was the lid of the Ark, where God was pictured as enthroned between the cherubim and where the blood was put on the Day of Atonement. Chris White proposes that the throne at whose right hand Christ sat down is the true counterpart of that lid. Hebrews calls it “the throne of grace” (Hebrews 4:16). John, looking into heaven, saw “in the midst of the throne . . . a Lamb as it had been slain” (Revelation 5:6).
For Christians today, the title means that our high priest is alive and in the presence of God now. He entered as the forerunner “for us” (Hebrews 6:20). He appears in the presence of God “for us” (Hebrews 9:24). Because he is there, his people are invited to come to the throne of grace themselves, and he is able to save them “to the uttermost” (Hebrews 7:25).
Where This Understanding Comes From
The reading of Hebrews on this page draws on a long line of scholarship. David M. Moffitt’s work, especially Atonement and the Logic of Resurrection in the Epistle to the Hebrews (2011) and Rethinking the Atonement (2022), argues that Jesus’ resurrection and ascension belong to his saving work and that Hebrews places his offering at his entrance into heaven. Michael Kibbe has written on the meaning of the indestructible life in Hebrews 7:16 and on when Christ became priest. Jacob Milgrom’s study of Leviticus explains how sacrificial blood cleansed the sanctuary so that God could keep dwelling with his people. Early Christian writers who affirmed Christ’s full deity also understood his offering to include his presentation in heaven. How Atonement Works builds on this work and credits it.