Please turn in your Bibles to Hebrews chapter one. Hebrews chapter one. What gets you excited? What is it that when this subject comes up, you're all ears, you love to talk about it, you think about it, it determines the people you follow on Twitter, what excites you? You're in Hebrews one, let's begin by reading the first two verses. God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in times past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds. I have two young children. Lillian is nine months old, and probably the three things in the world that excite her the most are seeing her mom's face, playing peek-a-boo and eating her baby oatmeal. In fact, when I start getting her baby oatmeal ready for her to eat, I'm almost worried that she's going to hyperventilate. She starts squeezing her hands together and taking really deep breaths and breathing in and out and doing those sort of motor lips, if you know what I mean, kind of the... She's just so excited to get that oatmeal. In fact, I have to be careful that I don't get it too close to her mouth while she's doing the motor mouth thing or it will end up all over my shirt. She gets excited about that. Shepard just recently turned two. There's lots of things that excite Shepard. He loves splashing in puddles and doing sidewalk chalk. And he loves these stories that I tell him. And I'm very original in my names. We have a good giraffe named Goody and a bad giraffe named Batty and a red hippo named Flippo and things like that. And he loves all these different stories with make-believe animals. Uh, he loves having tickle wars with Abigail. He loves wrestling on the bed. He loves going to grandma and grandpa's house. He loves catching snails and hugging his baby sister. And he loves going down in the woods behind our house. We have some trails and he's always on the lookout for lions and wolves and giants. We've never found any yet. We just find rabbits and squirrels and birds, but he's on the lookout for them. He loves lots of different things. He enjoys, just about every morning when I go in to wake him up, he stretches and he comes to the side of his crib and he gives me a hug and he says, morning now. He's been doing this since he could talk. Morning now. He even says that when he gets up from a nap, even though it's not the morning, he says, morning now. In fact, a couple weeks ago, we were at Faculty Body, and we were sitting way back there in the balcony in the very last row, and we had Shepard and Lillianne with us, and the lights would go down for a video or a skit, and when the house lights would come back up, Shepard would shoot his arms up in the air and say, morning now! Kylie, who works as one of the workers in his room at school, has told us that he's actually got his whole class of two-year-olds doing that when they get up from their nap time, and those little two-year-olds get off their cots and they open up the windows, they all follow Shepard and say, morning now! Like Lillian, Shepard enjoys eating. He loves it when we take him to what he calls the Diamond Common. And in the Diamond Common, he's always looking. He wants to see the assortment of cookies and brownies and so on. And he actually likes the cereal almost like a dessert, particularly Lucky Charms. That's his all-time favorite. He actually calls Lucky Charms marshmallows because in Shepard's mind, there's two components of Lucky Charms. There's marshmallows and there's the yuckies. The other day we were sitting there and we were sitting by Cody, a student here, and it looked to me at first like Shepard was being generous with his lucky charms, but I realized what he was doing. He was going through and he'd pick out a marshmallow and he'd say, for Shepard, and eat it, and then he'd pick out a yucky and say, for Cody, and give it to Cody. For Shepard, for Cody. Shepard is certainly not a vegetarian. We're struggling with him right now with eating vegetables from some friend of his or something. He picked up this idea. He'll look at a vegetable he doesn't want, like green beans, and he'll say, green beans make you sick. So now when he asks us for candy, we say, candy makes you sick. But he loves meat. He can tell the difference between chicken and fish and beef. He calls that cow. But probably his favorite meat is pork. A couple weeks ago we had pulled pork for dinner, he really enjoyed it, he really liked it. Two days later we're at the playground and I'm playing with Shepard and I look and I realize that there was a fresh layer of mulch, nice brown mulch around the trees there and Shepard sees it about the same time I do and he goes running over to it and he says, daddy, daddy, pork, pork. He thought that God had rained down pork from heaven like manna. So if you ever see my son on campus eating mulch, you'll know why, right? Okay, what is it that excites you? It's probably not mulch. It's probably not baby oatmeal. I doubt any of you wake your roommates up in the morning saying, morning now. But we have things that we get excited about, right? Maybe it's March Madness for you. Maybe it's your boyfriend or girlfriend or that guy or girl you wish were your boyfriend or girlfriend. Maybe it's your new iPhone. Have you ever gotten excited about this? that we have an advocate with the Father, even Jesus Christ, the righteous, that you have a mediator in heaven who intercedes for you. I'd like to preach to you this morning about Jesus Christ, our perfect mediator. In a book like Hebrews, we see that Jesus Christ is our perfect prophet, priest, and king. And very simply, what I wanna show you from scripture today is that Christ is your perfect prophet. Listen to him. Christ is the perfect priest. Run to him. And Christ is the perfect king. Obey him. For sake of time, as I've been working on this message, I realize that I'll just be able to cover those first two points today. Lord willing, sometime future at chapel, I'll cover Christ, our perfect king. But today I want to focus on Christ, our prophet, and our priest. Look again at Hebrews 1. God who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in times past. He's saying in Old Testament times in many and various ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets. Think of all those times that a prophet stands up in the Old Testament and says, thus saith the Lord. But look at verse two, hath in these last days God spoken unto us by his son. whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the world, who, being the brightness of the Father's glory, the expressed image of his person, upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high." And he's going to go on in this chapter to describe that not only is Christ better than the prophets, but he's actually better than the angels. In verses 5 through 14, he's going to quote seven Old Testament passages. Psalm 2 and 2 Samuel 7 and Deuteronomy 32 and Psalm 104 and Psalm 45 and Psalm 102 and Psalm 110. He's just saying, I want to show you from the Bible, from the Old Testament, that Christ is better than any angel. The Old Testament had three primary mediators, right? They had prophets, priests, and king. And how is a prophet, a mediator, a go-between? Well, he would take a word from God and he would deliver it to men. He would say, thus saith the Lord. You could think of an arrow coming from heaven to mankind through a prophet. A priest would take the sacrifices from men and offer them up to God. You could think of an arrow coming from earth back to heaven. And a king was supposed to rule in the way that God would rule. These were the mediators. Christ is the ultimate prophet. I remember several years ago, my wife and I were at the Grand Opry Land Hotel in Nashville. Many of you have probably been there before. It's one of the biggest hotels in the world. It has over 20 different restaurants in the hotel, lots of different shops, nearly 3,000 guest rooms, over 100,000 square feet of ballroom space, over 300,000 square feet of event space. One of the atriums there, it's called the Delta Atrium, is huge. It's about five acres. This is all indoors, just that one atrium. It has a man-made river in it. You can take boat rides on that river. There are man-made waterfalls. The ceiling of that atrium is 150 feet high. By way of comparison, I checked with Chris Godwin, the FMA from aisle seven to the top is 60 feet high. So you're talking about a room almost three times the height of this building. And we're there, and Abigail wanted to show me this musical fountain. She'd been there several years earlier before we were married. She was at an event there. And so we go there, and it's one of these fountains that there's classical music playing, and there's hundreds of little streams of water, and they're shooting up in timing with the music, and it's really cool. And there's little kids in swimsuits running around and getting wet in the fountains, and we're sitting there watching it for maybe 10 minutes, and I'm like, okay, I think I'm ready to go now. And she says, no, wait. We didn't get to the finale yet. And I said, well, how will we know when it's the finale? And she said, well, there's this huge jet of water that comes spraying up. And I said, well, we've, we've seen some like 25, 30 feet. How do we know those weren't the finale? And she said, just wait. So I'm looking around and I'm trying to figure where this huge jet of water is coming from. And I asked her and she points to this big hole there and she says, I think it comes out of that. And as much as I trusted my wife, I was kind of doubting that. I thought the amount of water it would take to shoot up out of that big hole would be just amazing. And the longer we went, I think she was maybe doubting herself a little bit. It had been a couple years, and we'd see it, you know, 20, 30 feet in the air. And I'm like, sure that's not the finale? I don't think so. We're there like probably 20, 25 minutes. And all of a sudden, the music reaches a crescendo. And all those other fountains die down. And luckily, there were no children standing over that hole, because from that big hole in the ground, there shoots out this geyser. It didn't, I don't think it, it certainly didn't touch the ceiling, but it was probably 100 to 120 feet in the air, something like twice the height of this building. I mean, everyone, there were hundreds of people in that Delta Atrium, and it's like everyone stopped and held their breath because of the noise and the size of that, and it's kind of like, whoa. Those other fountains, they were good. They were great. Oh, look at that one over there. And it's like God is saying, yeah, there were great Old Testament prophets, and you have Moses, and you have Elijah. But when you look at Jesus Christ, there's no comparison. He is far better. You think about the transfiguration. And here's Peter, James, and John. And they see Elijah, and they see Moses. And Peter says, let's build three tents here. And God the Father speaks from heaven and he says, this is my beloved son in whom I'm well pleased. Hear him, listen to your ultimate prophet as he speaks to you through his word. Do you do that? Do you listen to God's word? I'm gonna mention anonymously several different students that I've had interaction with this semester and I've talked to all of them ahead of time and made sure I had their permission. But several weeks ago I was in hermeneutics class and I was talking about how scripture, there are parts of it that are supernaturally understood. And I was in Stratton Hall and I was talking about how you could have a professor of religion, an unsaved person, and they know Greek and they know Hebrew, but they don't get the Bible. Why? Because the natural man receives not the things of the Spirit of God, neither can he know them. They're spiritually discerned, 1 Corinthians 2.14. And I gave this illustration. I said, you know what this is like. Some of you have been at the wilds, or you've been in chapel, or you've been at your local church, and the preacher is preaching on a passage you've heard dozens of times before. But on that day, It's like it's an arrow straight from God to you. It's like there's this spotlight and it's... And the passage opens up or you realize that you need to live out that passage. Or I said sometimes it's like you're sitting with your Bible in the morning and you're drinking coffee or hot chocolate and it's perhaps a passage you've even memorized before, but on that day, it clicks. The lights come on. You get it. The Holy Spirit is illumining your mind towards that. There's an aspect of scripture that's supernaturally understood. Well, after class there were five or six students at the front of Stratton Hall waiting with Bible questions. I love that part of class. And so I went and I was answering these questions. I noticed one young lady kept letting the other men and women in front of her and she said her question was a little bit longer. I answered the first four or five questions and I was talking to her and I said, let's walk towards my office. As we were walking, she said, Mr. Crockett, you know when you explain that illustration about sometimes the lights turning on? She said, when you were talking about that, I looked at the other students around me and a lot of them were nodding, like they got what you were talking about. But she said, that's never happened for me. I've never experienced that while I'm listening to preaching or while I'm reading God's word. It's never happened. And I said, well, when did you come to know Christ? And she explained how she'd grown up in a godly home. Her parents were faculty staff here. And she told me that in her local church one time when she was young, she heard a message on hell. She got really scared. She repeated a prayer after someone. By that point, we were at my office. And I said, this might sound odd to you, but would you mind if I just take you through 1 John and show you proofs of how you can know whether you're a believer or not? And she said, that would be great. I'd love that. So I did that. I looked through all these tests of 1 John and afterwards with absolutely no pressure at all. I said, what do you think? And she said, it's not what I think, it's what I know. And I said, well, what do you know? And she said, I know I'm not saved. I was kind of surprised. I said, really? And she said, yeah, each one of those tests, I end up on the wrong side of the equation. I have no desire for God's word. I hate listening to preaching. I don't enjoy being around Christians. I would just as much be around unsafe people. And I said, well, this actually sounds kind of weird for me to say this, knowing you've grown up here on campus, but would you mind, even though you've probably heard it a hundred times before, if I take you to the book of Romans and just walk you through the gospel of Jesus Christ? And she said, I would love that. So I did that. At the end, we'd probably been in my office for 45 minutes at that point. And I called her by name and I said, what do you think? And she started tearing up. And she said, it was so weird. I've heard those passages so many times before, but for the first time in my life, I got it. It's like I understood them. It clicked for me, and she actually, I think, used these words. She said, I feel like the Holy Spirit's drawing me right now. That young lady accepted Christ in my office a few weeks ago. My wife's been discipling her every week since then. Talked to a guy two days ago. He talked about how much he loved Bible conference. He said this is the first Bible conference in several years that he sat through as a believer. He got saved 11 weeks ago. In that 11 weeks, he's already read the whole New Testament. He has all kinds of Bible questions for me all the time. What happened? He listened to his prophet. Day before yesterday, I was on Facebook trying to see how I could better pray for the herbsters during their time of loss. And I saw a message posted by a friend of mine, a guy I went to high school with, a guy who graduated from Bob Jones, a guy who for years taught in a fundamental Christian school, and he said he'd just gotten saved. He said he'd been living a lie. For some of you, it may well be the reason you find it so hard to live the Christian life is because you're not a Christian. You need to listen to Christ, your prophet, but secondly, you need to run to Christ, your priest. I'm going to take you to several passages in Hebrews, and we're going to see two primary themes about Christ's high priesthood. For one, the superiority of Jesus Christ, that he's greater than any human high priest. And the key word here is the word better. It occurs 13 times in this book. And secondly, we're going to see the finality of Jesus Christ, that he was the once for all sacrifice, his superiority, his finality. Even in the outline of the book, we see his superiority. For instance, in the first two verses, he's better than the prophets. The rest of Chapter 1, all of Chapter 2, he's better than the angels. Chapter 3, he's better than Moses. Chapter 4, he's better than Joshua. The end of Chapter 4 all the way through Chapter 7, he's better than Aaron. In Chapter 8, he gives us better promises. First part of Chapter 9, he offers a better sanctuary. Last part of Chapter 9, he offered the better sacrifice. Chapter 10, he gives us better results. Better, better, better, better. Now please turn to Hebrews 7.27, and we're going to look quickly at six passages, but please follow me. Get your eyes on the text here. And I think you're going to see very clearly his superiority and his finality. Look at Hebrews 7.27. Christ needeth not daily as those high priests to offer up sacrifice first for his own sins and then for the people's. For this he did once. when he offered up himself. Look at down a few verses, chapter 8, verse 1. Now of the things which we have spoken, this is the sum. We have such an high priest who is set on the right hand of the throne of the majesty in the heavens. Look at chapter 9, verse 11. But Christ, being come in 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, see the superiority here, verse 12, 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. Look at 9.26. For then must he have suffered since the foundation of the world, but now once in the end of the world hath he appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself. And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment, verse 28, so Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many. Notice at the end of verse 26, it says the sacrifice of himself. Christ was not only the perfect priest, he was the perfect sacrifice. Can you imagine an Old Testament priest after sacrificing a bull or a goat or a lamb climbing up on the altar himself to be sacrificed? Turn to Hebrews 10. And while you turn there, I want to remind you of something from October of 2012, a powerful message that Dr. Talbert preached on the day of prayer on the Lord blessing us out of Zion. And you remember that Dr. Talbert went into details about the priests and how they were constantly busy. They were always working. They didn't have any place to sit down. They were always standing and working and offering the same sacrifices over and over and over and over and over again. And look at the contrast here. Hebrews 10, verse 10. By the which will we are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all. And every priest standeth daily ministering and offering oftentimes the same sacrifices which can never take away sins, hundreds and thousands and hundreds of thousands of dead animals sacrificed, but verse 12, but this man. after he had offered one sacrifice for sins forever, sat down on the right hand of God. Look at verse 14, for by one offering, he had perfected for them forever that are sanctified. Jesus Christ is your perfect priest, run to him. A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I had the privilege with a few others from the University of being out West representing the school on friendship dinners, seven different cities on the West Coast. We had half a day off in San Francisco, so we took a ferry to the city. We were on a trolley there, and we went to see Pastor Ennis' church there. And across the street from his church, we had a few minutes before we had to catch the trolley to get back to the ferry. And we went at something of a tourist attraction there, St. Mary's Cathedral. And this is a majestic-looking Catholic church that many people visit. We walked in there, and it's 245 feet tall. Again, this building's 60 feet tall, four times the height of this building. You're looking up. at this structure. We walked past an organ that had 4,000 pipes in it. And while we were there in that hushed silence with a few people sitting and pews sniffling and really the darkness that pervades a setting like that, we walked by some confessional booths. And I talked to Abigail about it and I thought about this afterward. I thought about some of you that perhaps have been saved from a Roman Catholic background. And perhaps there are actually times when you almost miss that. You so much want to unburden your heart to someone. You're so loaded down with cares that you actually almost long to get into a confessional booth and make the sign of the cross and say, forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. But what a privilege that if you know Jesus Christ, you don't have to confess your sins to a fellow sinner in a confessional booth. Because we have a great high priest. I mean, don't you love Chris Anderson's text? I run to Christ when chased by fear and find a refuge sure. Believe in me, his voice I hear, his words and wounds secure. Or this, I run to Christ when vexed by hell and find a mighty arm. The devil flees, the scriptures tell. He roars but cannot harm. Have you felt this one before? I run to Christ when stalked by sin. and find a sure escape. Deliver me, I cry to him. Temptation yields to grace. I run to Christ when plagued by shame and find my one defense. I bore God's wrath, he pleads my case. My advocate and friend, do you run to your perfect high priest? Please turn to Hebrews chapter four, verse 14. This will be the last passage we'll look at on Christ's high priesthood. While you're turning there, I want to ask you this question. Do students and faculty and staff at Bob Jones University have burdens? Of course we do. Earlier this semester, I was sitting across the lunch table from a friend of mine. He's a graduate student here, and we were praying for his sister-in-law. She was at death's door, a young mother. In fact, a few days after we were praying for her, she would be with the Lord, leaving behind her husband and children. While we were there talking about that and praying about that, we actually had a student of mine who's a freshman ask if he could join us. He's in New Testament Messages. I noticed while we were talking and talking to him that about every 30 seconds he would check his phone. And I just asked him if something was going on, was something wrong? Why was he so interested in checking his phone? And he said he was waiting for a text. He has a teenage brother who was born with a major disability. That brother's been through more than 70 major surgeries. He was only expected to live a few more months unless they performed a very drastic surgery. He had gone into that drastic surgery which was supposed to last six hours that morning. He was currently in there while we were eating lunch and he only had a 50% chance of survival. And this freshman student was looking at his phone to see if his brother had lived. I got an email from him later that day that his brother came through the surgery. Two days ago I got an email that his brother's again taking a turn for worse and is losing weight right now and we need to be praying for him. When I left lunch and those two young men had to go to class and I was headed to my office for a class I teach, I saw a girl who's not one of my students this semester but has been in the past and I talked to her about her battle with cancer. Then I went and I taught. Are there people here with burdens? You bet there are. John Stott in his book, The Cross of Christ, pictures a scene on a great vast open plain with billions of people seated before the throne of God. And he says that some of those people shrank back with fear. But he pictures a few of those sinners coming to the front, and they come with defiance, and they raise angry voices. And we realize, again, this is hypothetical, because Romans 3 says that in the judgment, every mouth will be stopped before God. But Stott pictures a group of people who come, and they say, can God judge us? And one woman rips back her sleeve, and it shows the tattoo number from her Nazi concentration camp. And she says, what does God know of suffering? Another comes forward who'd been decimated by an atomic bomb. Someone else who suffered abuse from the time they were a child. And these people lodge their complaints against the God of heaven, and they say, what does God know of weeping or hunger or hatred? He lives such a sheltered life up here in heaven. And people who were born deformed, and in every other condition you can imagine, they come and they get a leader. And this leader, as it were in Stott's book, pronounces a sentence against God. And he says, let God come and live on earth and experience suffering. Let him be born a Jew. Let the legitimacy of his birth be doubted. Let his close friends betray him. Let him face false charges. Let a prejudiced jury try him and a cowardly judge convict him. Let him be tortured. Let him be utterly, entirely alone, and then bloody and forsaken. Let him die. And in that vast plane of billions of people sitting before the judgment seat, there was a hushed silence that fell over all of them as it finally dawned on them that God had already served his sentence. There's a lot of people that can't believe that God would create a world in which people suffer so much. But isn't it more remarkable that God would create a world in which nobody would suffer more than he did? Hebrews 4, 14 through 16, seeing then that we have such a great high priest that has passed into the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast our profession. For we have not in high priest, which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities, but he was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore come boldly under the throne of grace that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need. We have a high priest who knows what we've been through, who can relate to us in our suffering. And in closing, let me just ask you this. You've been there, haven't you? You know what it's like to feel like you were going to burst with your pent up bitterness. You know what it's like to feel like your knees were going to buckle under the oppressive weight of the burden that you've been called on to bear. You know what it's like to feel that the guilt of your sin will come gushing forth from the very pores of your body. There are times that you have felt so bitter, or so lonely, or so burdened, or so guilty that you just need somebody to turn to. And I think you've lived long enough to realize that in times like that, no roommate, no professor, no friend, no parent, no boyfriend or girlfriend, and not even the best spouse in the world is entirely sufficient. You need Christ. There are some of you today and the crying need of your life right now is to realize that Jesus Christ is your prophet and you need to listen to him. You need to get serious about this word from God. I didn't take the time this morning, but you can look at John 14 and John 16 when Christ leaves the Holy Spirit and see that there's a very real sense in which this is the word of Christ to us, that the Holy Spirit guided the apostles as they wrote to say the very words of Christ. You could read Troy Manning's dissertation about this in the library if you want to see that fleshed out through the Bible. Some of you this morning, what you need to do is you need to listen to your prophet as he speaks in his word. And for some of you, that means coming to Christ for salvation. And I'm sure there are many, many others who feel an incredible burden and you really don't know how you can bear it. And what you need to do today is realize that you can't in your own strength. And you need to realize that Jesus Christ is a perfect priest and you today need to run to him in prayer. Let's pray. Father, we are so grateful that before the throne of God above, I have a strong and perfect plea a great high priest whose name is love, whoever lives and pleads for me. And Father, our heart's desire and our goal and our burden and the passion of our lives this morning would simply be that we would understand that Christ is our prophet. So we would listen to him as he speaks to us through his word. And we would look to you as our perfect priest. And when overwhelming burdens come, or a guilt that's too deep for us to deal with, that we would run to our perfect priest and find forgiveness every time. We pray these things in Christ's name. Amen.