³ Without father, without mother, without genealogy, having neither beginning of days nor end of life, but made like the Son of God, he remains a priest perpetually.

Melchizedek was certainly an enigmatic individual. Otherwise obscure in the biblical record, the book of Hebrews raises his profile to the heights of eternity. God is like that, isn’t He? Out of seeming nowhere He extracts great things. Think of a lone individual summoned out of an idolatrous, pagan worshipping place, Ur of Chaldeans (Josh 24:2). A baby boy floating in a basket in the Nile River. A shepherd boy, the eighth of eight sons (1 Sam 16:10-11). Or who can fail to see that God takes obscurity in the form of a baby born to peasants in a small village, and provides salvation from sin? Yes, in Melchizedek, God follows His frequent pattern of exalting that which we see as small and insignificant.

This individual is further interpreted to us in our passage today. While the Old Testament record does not even hint at this, the writer of Hebrews is inspired, so we have here a divine commentary that brings out the real significance of this King of Salem (see vs. 2). He was (or we should say, is) “without father or mother, without genealogy.” Tracing one’s ancestry was important to the Jewish people, for it determined one’s heritage, land possession and tribe (descendants of the 12 sons of Jacob) to which he belonged. That provided a sense of identity within the nation as a whole, to know which tribe and which family one belonged to. But here we have an individual that has no genealogy, and as stated, no father or mother. Now one could expend considerable ink dissecting the literary aspects of this statement in such a way as to render it somewhat meaningless, but the idea is clear. Melchizedek simply appears in the record, with no connection to the past or to the future. He had no ancestors before him and no descendants after him.

This is more than is stated for Enoch, who “… walked with God; and he was not, for God took him” (Gen 5:24) – a simple reference to the fact that Enoch did not die a natural death, but was taken directly into God’s presence, because of righteousness. But Melchizedek is described as “like the Son of God.” And more to the point, “he remains a priest perpetually.” Remember, we have already been told that Jesus is a priest, but not a Levitical priest. He is one in the order of Melchizedek. So, unlike other priests, Jesus’ priesthood is eternal, never ending, like Melchizedek. And it seems, as it were, that membership in this priesthood requires a person of eternal dimensions.

Lord, thank You for being the living priest who has eternally taken my sins away.