Q23. What offices doth Christ execute as our Redeemer?
A. Christ, as our Redeemer, executeth the offices of a prophet, of a priest, and of a king, both in his estate of humiliation and exaltation.
This answer is an overview of the cross-section between the Person of Christ and the work of Christ. It speaks of “offices” and “estates,” perhaps not the first things we think of when thinking of Jesus. And yet when the Bible starts to get specific into how Jesus reconciles us to God, such language is unavoidable.
The Three Offices of Christ
What is an office? The word is used in this context as a position or a role. We will recall the title “Messiah” from the Hebrew for that word, for which the Greek is Christ. This means the One who is anointed. Brakel speaks of the anointing of the Old Testament office holders, and what the fragrant oil represented. There are two main things that were conveyed by such a ceremony: “foreordination and qualification,” that is, “such persons were foreordained and called to this office by God … [and] that the Lord would qualify such persons for that office.”1 So, that Christ is called “the mediator of a new covenant” (Heb. 12:24) means that he was made the ultimate fulfillment of these offices. In Israel of the old covenant, these officers were types and shadows of the One to come. Moses, Samuel, Elijah, and Jeremiah as prophets; Aaron, Eleazar, or Zadok as priests; and David, Solomon, Hezekiah, and Josiah as kings. The good ones and the bad ones all fell short of what Christ was to be, and so all pointed forward even by their failures.
Jesus was the PROPHET that God has promised back in Deuteronomy 18:15. Some even recognized him as such: “When the people saw the sign that he had done, they said, ‘This is indeed the Prophet who is to come into the world!’” (Jn. 6:14).
“that he may send the Christ appointed for you, Jesus, whom heaven must receive until the time for restoring all the things about which God spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets long ago. Moses said, ‘The Lord God will raise up for you a prophet like me from your brothers. You shall listen to him in whatever he tells you’” (Acts 3:20-22).
To hear the voice of this ultimate Prophet is to receive the word from the One who is the Word (Jn. 1:1), and so he is not merely speaking of ultimate things beyond himself, but he himself is that which is ultimate. He says of himself, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (Jn. 14:6); and “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father” (Jn. 14:9).
He was made a PRIEST for us. There is the classic passage that is quoted in several places in the New Testament: “The LORD has sworn and will not change his mind, ‘You are a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek’”(Ps. 110:4). So the author of Hebrews unpacks that. He “was made a priest with an oath by the one who said to him: ‘The Lord has sworn and will not change his mind, ‘You are a priest forever’” (Heb. 7:25). Since to be a mediator at all is to stand in between two warring parties, it is the priestly office especially that comes into sharpest focus in the gospel. As Watson said, “Nor is Christ a Mediator of reconciliation only, but of intercession.”2 The author of Hebrews shows how Christ does this in the ultimate way—in a way that the Old Covenant priests were a type and shadow of: “For Christ has entered, not into holy places made with hands, which are copies of the true things, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf” (Heb. 9:24). We will see how this covers those two elements mentioned by Watson—reconciliation and intercession. But Hodge well expresses what is at stake in this doctrine, given the controversy with Rome.
“The Romish Church regards priests, and saints, and angels, and especially the Virgin Mary, as mediators, not only in the sense of intercessors, but as peace-makers without whose intervention reconciliation with God cannot be attained. This arises from two erroneous principles involved in the theology of the Church of Rome. The first concerns the office of the priesthood. Romanists teach that the benefits of redemption can be obtained only through the intervention of the priests. Those benefits flow through the sacraments. The sacraments to be available must be administered by men canonically ordained. The priests offer sacrifices and grant absolution. They are as truly mediators, although in a subordinate station, as Christ himself. No man can come to God except through them. And this is the main idea in mediation in the Scriptural sense of the word. The other principle is involved in the doctrine of merit as held by Romanists …”3
That latter principle, we will return to in the section on the application of redemption. The whole of John 17 is called the High Priestly Prayer of Jesus and it introduces us to the heart of what it means for Jesus alone to be in this role for us.
He was also made KING over all things: “As for me, I have set my King on Zion, my holy hill” (Ps. 2:6; cf. 110:1-3, 5-7). The same language is used in the Gospel when he enters the city: “Say to the daughter of Zion, ‘Behold, your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a beast of burden’” (Mat. 21:5).
“Of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end, on the throne of David and over his kingdom, to establish it and to uphold it with justice and with righteousness from this time forth and forevermore” (Isa. 9:7).
This was the unfolding of the promise to Abraham that “kings will come from you” (Gen. 17:6), which is what grounds the later promise to David:
“I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever” (2 Sam. 7:12-13).
In other words, the Davidic Covenant is another unfolding of the Abrahamic Covenant or the Covenant of Grace. It is the royal component to it.
The three offices of Christ are not simply a profound contribution of the Reformed tradition to the doctrine of Christ. These three offices answer to three basic needs of human beings who have fallen away from God. We need to know God, so that his light can rescue us from our darkness. We need forgiveness from God, so that his peace can put away the offense of sin. And we need protection from God, so that every last danger may be put away and our security guaranteed in a kingdom that never ends. Watson points out that as Mediator, Christ “has perfection in every grace … Grace in Christ is communicative … The saints have not grace to bestow on others.”4 “For from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace” (Jn. 1:16). It is not our burden to “prove” to Romanists that the saints are not to be looked to for grace, when Jesus has the fullness of grace already in himself.
Turretin’s analysis of the two natures of Christ being both necessary in each of the three offices, is worth our consideration along these same lines:
“Therefore he ought to be between both and like Jacob’s ladder join heaven and earth by participation of the nature of both. As a Prophet, he ought as man to be taken from his brethren that he might become familiar with men and we might approach freely to him. But as God, he ought to send the Spirit into our hearts and write the law upon our minds to make us taught of God (theodidaktous). As Priest, he should be man because every high priest is taken from among men (Heb. 5:1) as he who sanctifies and they who are sanctified are all of one (Heb. 2:11); but as God to reconcile man to God, satisfy divine justice, abolish sin and bring in an everlasting righteousness, which no mortal could do. Also, the victim to be offered ought not to be angelic because it could not die, nor a brute, but rational and human; yea, more than human and celestial who should offer himself through the eternal Spirit and add an infinite weight and merit to the truth of his sufferings. As King, he ought to take humanity from us to become united to us; but this was to be united to divinity, by which he should exercise dominion, not over bodies only, but also over souls; not for a time, but forever; not over one nation only, but over the whole world.”5
The Two States of Christ
Theologians will speak of two states of Christ—namely, his humiliation and his exaltation. These refer to the unfolding of the design of the Incarnation all the way to the Ascension. So the HUMILIATION is that “phase” of his human nature where he came, as Paul said, “in the likeness of sinful flesh” (Rom. 8:3). It was his time of suffering, of taking on a weakened form. For example, “In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears” (Heb. 5:7). The classic passage for this can be found in Philippians 2:5-8.
“Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.”
Now I say that this passage in Philippians 2 is the classic text for the humiliation of Christ, but it is also a perfect launching off point, so to speak, for understanding that second state: the EXALTATION of Christ. How does Paul continue?
“Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (vv. 9-11).
Notice Paul’s use of the word “therefore.” In other words, the humiliation is the grounding for the exaltation. Because he became lowly, therefore God has exalted him. Because he underwent suffering, therefore he was prepared for glory. We saw that connection in the Matthew 21:5 passage. He is the King, but he first arrives in a lowly form—you might even say, in disguise. It said, “your king is coming to you, humble,” which is the whole point about the choice of a donkey to ride in on. But the exalation of Christ is initiated in his ascension. Now there is the first appearance of the glorified body of Christ after the resurrection; but central to the idea of the exalted Christ is that “having been exalted to the right hand of God” (Acts 2:33), his reign and rule is no longer merely announced, but has commenced—not consummated—but nevertheless commenced, or in another word “inaugurated.”
“But from now on the Son of Man shall be seated at the right hand of the power of God” (Lk. 22:69).
Here is where different eschatologies can already be working on different threads of Christology. They can also reveal that they are motivated by vastly different ethical visions. The Westminster West conception of “two kingdoms”—commonly referred to as Radical Two Kingdom (or R2K) theology—divides the church’s stance toward the world by the two states of Christ, and that according to the two phases of his kingdom. So in other words, the church follows the humiliation of Christ while the kingdom has been inaugurated, and only in the consummation of the kingdom do we in any sense follow the exaltation of Christ. There is a word used for when the church lifts its head too high to see above culture and speak down to it. That word is “triumphalism.”
There are several problems with this; but one is that the two phases of the kingdom and the two states of Christ do not exactly match without overlapping other concepts. If there were total symmetry, then Christ’s exaltation would await not the ascension, but the Second Coming. But that is not the case. He is exalted at the ascension and so is exalted now. All parties agree to that fact. But then this R2K view has to explain where they derive the notion that the church in no sense reigns and rules with Christ exalted in the present. Unfortunately, the brand of amillennialism that the past two generations of Reformed churches have had presented to them is motivated by the overall R2K ethic and so the most negative effect may be to turn many away from aspects of that humiliation of Christ that are perfectly orthodox and crucial to gospel witness.
But if that represents one wrong way to think about the connection between the first state and the second state, is there nothing to emulate from Christ’s two states? That would be an hasty conclusion. For example, there is that prophetic order of how Jesus in his state of humiliation announced judgment and mercy, and how at the end of his exalted state, he executes judgment and mercy. Have you never wondered how to reconcile Jesus’ statements about having all judgment given to him (Jn. 5:22, 27) and yet how he has not come into the world to judge it but to save it (Jn. 3:17)? We can be assured there is no contradiction here. We understand this in light of these two estates.
Note as one last point that the Catechism answer is claiming that all three offices are executed in both states. So he was the Prophet in his First Advent on earth, but he remains the Prophet who speaks his word through the church. So, for example, in both states, he warns all mankind until the end: “For if they did not escape when they refused him who warned them on earth, much less will we escape if we reject him who warns from heaven” (Heb. 12:25). For anyone who wants to reply that those “who warned them on earth,” only refers to the prophets and apostles, in the prooftext section we see this Hebrews text linked to 2 Corinthians 13:3 where Paul says, “since you seek proof that Christ is speaking in me.” In other words, Christ is always the primary Speaker behind the ministry of the word. All preachers are heralds of the King’s authoritative proclamations. This is a bit more obvious in his office as a Priest, since it consists of both the offering of himself as sacrifice, and the intercession in heaven. As King it is clear that he has ascended to his throne, but perhaps not as clear how he was manifested as King during his earthly ministry. But just think of those first announcements of John the Baptist preparing his way: “the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Mat. 3:2; 4:17; cf. Mk. 1:3, 15).
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1. Brakel, The Christian’s Reasonable Service, I:518.
2. Watson, A Body of Divinity, 162.
3. Hodge, Systematic Theology, II:456.
4. Watson, A Body of Divinity, 164.
5. Turretin, Institutes, II.13.3.20.
