5. connection between Melchizedek and Jesus

 Chapter 6:5 

Five, the connection between Melchizedek and Jesus.

At the heart of Christianity lies a colossal legal problem. 

By the Bible's own laws, Jesus could not be our high priest. 

He didn't belong to the right tribe. 

He lacked the proper lineage. 

Did God break His own rules? 

Think about it for a moment. 

In ancient Israel, there was a strict separation of powers. 

If you were from the tribe of Judah, you could be a king, but never a priest. 

If you were from the tribe of Levi, you could be a priest, but never a king. 

Blending the two offices was illegal and could cost you your life. 

And Jesus is from the tribe of Judah, the tribe of  King David.   

He can be king without question, but he cannot be priest. 

His genealogy disqualifies him. 

The Pharisees technically had solid grounds for doubt. 

The answer has been hiding in plain sight for millennia in the brief appearance of one of scriptures most mysterious figures. 

A seeming glitch in the system that was in fact the keystone of the whole plan. 

Picture it. 

Abraham, the great patriarch, has just won an impossible war against four kings to rescue his nephew, Lot.

 He heads home victorious, laden with the spoils of war. 

Out of nowhere, right in the middle of the road, a mysterious man appears. 

Scripture introduces him plainly without beating around the bush. 

Then Melchizedek, king of Salem and priest of God Most High, brought out bread and wine. 

This man blesses Abraham. 

Blessed be Abram by God Most High, maker of heaven and earth. 

In return, Abraham gives him a tenth of everything he had gained. 

And then Melchizedek simply disappears. 

End of the story. 

But wait a second. 

Who is this figure? 

The text gives us two crucial details. 

He's king of a city called Salem, meaning peace. 

And he's a priest of the very same God as Abraham, God Most High. 

That's where things start to get strange. 

Why would Abraham, the man chosen by God, the father of faith, bow before a total stranger? 

Not only that, he gives him a tithe, an act that acknowledges a higher spiritual authority. 

By doing this, Abraham is admitting that Melchizedek is greater than he is. 

Who could be greater than Abraham at that moment in history? 

And here comes the most perplexing detail of all. 

In Genesis, a book obsessed with genealogies, with who fathered whom,  nothing is said about Melchizedek. 

No father, no mother, no lineage, no record of his birth, no account of his death. 

Genesis runs on page after page of family lists. Adam, Seth, Noah. 

For an Israelite, your identity is your family. 

Why would the Bible so careful with family trees leave a gap this suspicious? 

That mystery hung in the air for more than a thousand years. 

Now, fast forward to the New Testament, where the problem looms large. 

The law of Moses is uncompromising. 

Only the descendants of Levi from Aaron's family can be priests. 

It's a calling passed down by blood. 

And here's where the tension rises for the first Christians. 

Jesus is the Messiah, the long awaited king. 

But to save humanity, he must also be the high priest, the one who offers the final sacrifice for sin. 

So, how can Jesus be our high priest, the one who intercedes for us before God if legally he doesn't meet the most basic requirement? 

Is it a fraud? 

Has God's own law been broken to make him fit? 

The answer is Melchizedek. 

God doesn't improvise. 

A thousand years after Abraham, King David writes a startling prophecy. 

The Lord has sworn and will not change his mind.

 You are a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek. 

And this is where the author of Hebrews plays the ace he's been holding up his sleeve of Melchizedek. 

He says, "Without father, without mother, without genealogy, having neither beginning of days nor end of life, but made like the Son of God, he remains a priest forever." 

Jesus, he explains, is not a priest according to the order of Levi, which is temporary and based on human inheritance. 

Jesus is a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek, a superior priesthood established by direct divine decree. 

Think about it. 

Everything lines up with precision. 

Melchizedek was both king and priest. 

Jesus is king and priest. 

The name Melchizedek means king of righteousness and he was king of Salem which means peace. 

Jesus is our king of righteousness and our prince of peace. 

Melchizedek offered bread and wine to Abraham. 

Jesus instituted the Lord's supper with bread and wine. 

And  tradition says Salem was the ancient name for Jerusalem. 

Coincidence? 

Not a chance. 

And now the detail that changes everything. 

He has no recorded genealogy. 

Was that an oversight by the writer of Genesis? 

No. 

It was the message. 

The fact that Melchizedek enters the narrative with no beginning or end on record makes him the perfect type of Christ. 

That figure who appeared and disappeared was a shadow, a foreshadowing that pointed to Jesus establishing a precedent for an eternal priesthood, not based on bloodline or human heritage, but on the very nature of God. 

The superiority of this priesthood was demonstrated from the start when Abraham himself, the ancestor of the Levitical priests, gave him a tenth. 

And scripture is clear, the lesser always honours the greater. 

That brief encounter on the road wasn't a throwaway anecdote. 

It was the divine plot twist that makes it possible for Jesus to be our high priest legitimately and forever. 

Chapter 7: 6 ( Click here to continue )