There's a famous picture of President Kennedy sitting in the Oval Office, the most powerful

man in the world, ordinarily inaccessible to the average person on the street.

And yet, there they are. Two small children, a boy and a girl right in front of his desk.

And the president isn't shoeing them away.

He's smiling at them, clapping as they happily dance on the carpet in front of him.

Because, of course, these are his children.

What people wouldn't give for that kind of access to the world's most powerful person?

What if we had that kind of access to God? The word priest is used

throughout the Old Testament to describe a person who enters God's presence on behalf of the people

of God. They were mediators, go-betweens. Priests essentially performed two roles on behalf of

God's people. They interceded for them, meaning they spoke to God on behalf of God's people,

and they made sacrifices for them to deal with their sin. As we saw in another episode of simply put, the one about

the offices of Christ, Jesus Christ is also a priest. But he's described in the New Testament as

the great high priest. That's because he too combines those two priestly roles of interceding and sacrificing, but in an infinitely greater way than any Old Testament priest ever did.

Romans chapter 8 says that Christ now sits at God's right hand, interceding for God's people, which is something that could never

be said of any previous priest, and he can do this because he has offered the ultimate sacrifice.

In fact, it's not merely that he offers a sacrifice on behalf of his people. He himself is the sacrifice for the sins of his people.

He's both the offering and the offerer. And unlike the sacrifices that had to be made year after

year by the Old Testament priests, precisely because they could not actually atone for sin,

Jesus' sacrifice of himself was made once

and for all time, because it really does fully and finally atone for the sin of his people.

As a result of Jesus' work as our great high priest, all believers are now priests.

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