Hebrews 3:1 Therefore, [a]holy brethren, partakers of the heavenly vocation, consider the[b]Apostle and high Priest of our [c]profession Christ Jesus:
“What strikes me by this adjective, ‘holy,’ is that under the Old Testament you weren’t always necessarily holy. There was a kind of covenantal holiness which referred to membership, but in terms of Leviticus and Numbers only the priests were holy. The people were not. And he just has told us that Jesus is our high priest who’s the one who sanctifies and we are the ones being sanctified in chapter two and now [Christ] has made this propitiation. To say ‘holy brothers’ is granting them a new covenant status that you could not attain in the Old Testament, unless you were a priest. And so, he really honors them with this and really builds upon this idea that Christ is this high priest who’s made this propitiation, and now…. ‘holy brothers’.”
– Zach Keele, OPC minister
From the White Horse Inn radio broadcast
Commenting on Hebrews 3:1
Just a few observations
1.) The OT seems to contradict Rev. Keele about the Old Testament saints being holy.
Leviticus 11:44-45 For I am the Lord your God. Consecrate yourselves therefore, and be holy, for I am holy. You shall not defile yourselves with any swarming thing that crawls on the ground.45 For I am the Lord who brought you up out of the land of Egypt to be your God. You shall therefore be holy, for I am holy.”
Leviticus 19:2 Speak unto all the Congregation of the children of Israel, and say unto them,Ye shall be [a]holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.
2.) If the Old Testament saints weren’t holy then could they have been saved? And if they were saved, how were they saved without being holy and without the Lord Christ.
3.) It has always been a Reformed staple that the OT saints were saved the same way the NT saints were saved, and that was by the propitiatory work of the Lord Christ. The OT saints saw that from afar through the sacrifices while we, as NT saints had the reality that was *proleptic and promissory for the OT saints. Still, if the OT saints were saved (and they were) then the only way they were saved was by their looking forward to the finished work of Christ that proleptic to them.
4.) Remember that “Holy” simply means “set apart for a unique usage.” Are we really being told that Israel and the Israel of Israel were not a set apart people? This is not well thought out by Rev. Keele.
5.) Hence the statement above is a significant departure from Reformed theology in favor of some kind of Baptist / Dispensational / R2K hermeneutic where the standard Reformed hermeneutic of continuity has been replaced in favor of a hermeneutic of discontinuity. This quote does extreme violence to what it means to be Reformed.
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* proleptic — the assigning of a person, event, etc., to a period earlier than the actual one; the representation of something in the future as if it already existed or had occurred;
