Lesson 10 – Importance of digging deep for truth
Read Hebrews 5 - www.bible.com/bible/59/heb.5.esv

In our last lesson we saw how Jesus is the perfect High Priest – but God didn’t use Aaron, the first High Priest for Israel’s Tabernacle, as the example of Christ’s priesthood. He used a man named Melchizedek whose story is found in Genesis 14:17-20. We find here a man who was both king of his city and a priest of the Most High God. When Abraham returned from defeating another king who had stolen the possessions of a city and kidnapped Abraham’s nephew and family, this priest came out of his city to greet and bless Abraham.

But God made this encounter something more when He used it in a prophecy in Psalm 110:4. He said the Messiah who would come would be a “priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.” The difference between Aaron and Melchizedek was that Aaron was not a king. God said His Messiah would be both king and High Priest.


But our verses we’re studying today in the last part of chapter 5 give us a reminder that we need to pay close attention to this information. It may be hard to understand, but the lessons God wants to teach here are important to us.

We as Christians should seek to understand not just the basics of the salvation God has provided, but also the deeper things of God. In our verses, we are urged not to be dull in hearing. The example of the people of the Old Testament was that they had not understood the deeper things God had given them in such things as the Law, the Tabernacle itself, and the prophecies about the Messiah to come.

In our Christian lives we can either grow in our knowledge of God and become mature, or we can be like adults who go back to being babies and need baby food to survive. In Galatians 3:23-24 we are told that the law was like a children’s tutor to teach us the letters so we could begin to read. But in the New Testament we are told that after Christ came to show us the things of God, we are no longer in need of a tutor. We should now be grown up enough to see in Christ the things God was wanting to teach in the Old Testament. The letters of the alphabet have been replaced with the words of God’s revelation. We should no longer rely on picture books because now we can read the words of truth – the truth that has been revealed by the coming of Jesus, the Son and perfect image of God Himself.

 What does it mean to be a mature Christian? The last verse says that we are mature when we have our powers of discernment trained by constant practice to tell the difference between good and evil. It takes practice to tell the difference, and it takes understanding of God and His plans for our lives to train our minds. And to understand God’s plans, we need to read His word and meditate on it every day.