MELCHIZEDEK by Lyman Abbott

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Dec 2, 1880

MELCHIZEDEK.

By Lyman Abbott

MANY are the traditions which have gathered about his name, and among the theories which have been propounded some ancient traditions pronounce him to be a survivor of the deluge, the patriarch Shem; a notion which has had such distinguished defenders in later times as Luther, Melancthon and Lightfoot. Others, especially among the Christian Fathers, counted him an angel appearing in the guise of man; still others, a manifestation of God himself, either the Holy Ghost or the Son of God appearing in human guise. This legend we may pass by without any further notice, as consistent neither with the narrative nor with the spirit of Scripture, which gives us but three suggestive hints respecting the character of this extraordinary man. He was a priest of the most high God; but a priest, says the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, "without father, without mother, without descent, having neither beginning of days, nor end of life;" that is to say, he belonged to no priestly order; he was simply a man, who, in a large community always given over to idolatry, stood as a witness to, and servant of, one God, and who ministered in some rude way undesignated in the narrative as a priest of that one God. He was the one light that shone out in the almost universal darkness; this priesthood belonged to him not by virtue of any official position, but by virtue of personal character. He was a man of singular uprightness, so that he bore the name of King of Righteousness; and we may safely add that it was this uprightness of character which gave him recognition among his contemporaries as a true priest of the living God. And he was also King of Peace. His piety and his practical righteousness gave him a position among all tribes round about as a kind of arbiter; they looked to him as a minister of justice between God and man. As in the earlier ages the rude barbaric Christians looked to the Church as represented in its bishops and popes, so this King of Peace became by virtue of his character rather than by virtue of his official authority, a kind of master mind in all the region round about.—Lyman Abbott, in Christian Union.