Come and study the Holy Scriptures with us as Father Stephen DeYoung teaches verse by verse on the podcast, The Whole Council of God.

Father Stephen holds a Ph.D. in biblical studies, and it's an Orthodox priest serving at Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church in Lafayette, Louisiana.

Okay, we'll go ahead and get started.

And when we get started here in just a moment, we will pick up at the beginning of St. Paul's

epistle to the Hebrews chapter 8.

And so last time, I'm definitely not going to reiterate everything from last time but

last time we were focused on in chapter 7 we sort of finally after St. Paul had digressed a little

gotten back to talking about Melchizedek.

That was the thrust.

And talking about connecting the priesthood of Melchizedek in Genesis and in Psalm 110, which St.

Paul's Epistle to the Hebrews is really sort of a homily on, connecting that to Christ's

priesthood, and then contrasting that with the Levitical priesthood of the Torah, which was a particular priesthood for a particular window of time,

right? And the Levitical priesthood obviously did not precede Levi. It didn't even precede Moses,

right? Until you get the Torah, there is no Levittical priesthood. And then it also has an end,

as he's pointing out, whereas this priesthood of Malkisadec, as it's spoken of in Psalm 110, and as we see in the story of Malkisadet himself, is something that supersedes that.

Right.

And so that's why Christ's priesthood supersedes the Levitical priesthood of the Old Covenant, and Psalm 110 by referring to it as his priesthood as being a priesthood after the

order of Malkisadac was saying that Christ's priesthood was going to supersede it.

And by supersede, that doesn't mean that's the old thing and this replaces it.

It means that Christ's priesthood does what that priesthood did, but does it fully and completely,

whereas the Levitical priesthood was doing that same thing,

but doing it limitedly and provisionally, right? And so now that the fullness is here,

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