Who was Melchizedek?

when we look at Melchizedek he's an interesting figure in the Bible and Christians have had different interpretations as to who was Melchizedek some Christians have thought of him as a historical figure a Canaanite King priest who was living at the time of Abraham other Christians have interpreted milk as a tech just as a type and other people have interpreted milk is a tech as a as an appearance of Christ a pre incarnate appearance of Christ which which we would call a christophany in Genesis 14 we have an interesting passage which talks about four kings these

kings from the east had subjected the people of Canaan and were expecting the people of Canaan to pay tribute and they didn't pay the tribute so the next year the kings from the east came to beat up the Canaanite Kings and subdue them and force them to pay tribute and this is where Abraham enters the into the story because lot his nephew was living in one of these cities so when these four kings captured the five cities south of the Dead Sea they took lot and his family into captivity so Abraham gathers all the men

that were all of his slaves all of the men that were in his household that he had trained for war 318 men and he surprises the four kings and conquers them and recovers recovers his nephew lot and and his family when he comes back all of a sudden we have this person called Melchizedek who's described as the king of Salem which is obviously connected with Jerusalem and he's presented as a king and priest so he's the king of Salem he's the priest of the Most High God the Creator God it says in the text he

says blessed be God or ale creator of heaven and earth and he calls him the Most High God so here we have a Canaanite king priest who is a worshipper of the one true creator God and we shouldn't be surprised by that just because Abraham was a worshipper of the one true God it doesn't mean he was the only worshipper of the one true God there were other people who worshiped the one true God job for example Melchizedek for example other people at that point in history were still worshiping one Supreme Being as the creator

and God over everything and had not abandoned and fallen into polytheism these things are actually have actually been clarified by archaeology in the last 100 years in the 1920s archeologists were excavating a site called Raja Mara which turned out to be the ancient city of ugarit and this city of ugarit flourished in the 12th century BC and the archeologists uncovered hundreds and thousands of tablets that describe every area of Canaanite life including their religions so we have many hundreds of tablets that describe the the worship of bail or Baal the Canaanites worshipped Baal he is

the god of lightning and thunder he's the the West Semitic storm deity he is the one who brings the rain and he's the one who brings fertility to the land what we see from these tablets is that there is a an evolution or maybe I should call it a devolution to Canaanite religion so what they show us is that at an earlier period the Canaanites worshiped one true creator God they would not necessary early have known him as Yahweh or had a relationship with him like the people of Israel in the Old Testament but they

did worship one supreme transcendent being and in the period of time between Abraham and the 12th century BC their religion degenerated and they abandoned the worship of one supreme god and began to worship many gods and so these texts that we have from Ogura to actually show us that the Creator God who's called ale who's called the Most High has faded into the background and the chief God ruling all of the other gods is bought all the rain God so this fits perfectly with the data that we have in the Bible because in the Bible

in Genesis we have a Canaanite king priest who is a worshipper of the one true Creator God and what we see then in the next from the period of Abraham from from maybe 2,000 BC down to the 12th century BC the Canaanites degenerate from worshiping one true creator gone into worshipping all the forces of nature particularly the rain God many people have not understood what the author to the Hebrews was trying to do the author to the Hebrews as well as David himself in Psalm 110 see Melchizedek as a model or pattern of the Messiah

and the question is why is that simply because he's both a king and a priest in Psalm 110 the psalm is divided into two stanzas in the first stanza a divine declaration creates a king in the second stanza a divine oath creates a priest the king and the priest are the same person and both stanzas show this coming Cendant of david this coming king priest as defeating and conquering the nation's in the book of hebrews the author is seeing Melchizedek as a model or pattern of the coming Messiah so for example in the book of

Genesis everybody has a genealogy except Melchizedek so he's presented as if he just doesn't have any father or mother and he's presented as if he's almost like an eternal person and so it's not that Melchizedek was an eternal person it's the way the author of Genesis presents him it makes it feasible for him to be a model or pattern of the coming Messiah and he is not a christophany he's not a pre incarnate appearance of Christ he's an actual historical individual or person he was a king of a city in Canaan probably around 2000 BC

and he was both King and priests because Christians didn't have very much information about the ancient Near Eastern background they didn't have very much information about the development of Canaanite religion and because of the statements in the book of Hebrews they misunderstood the author of the book of Hebrews to be suggesting that Melchizedek was a pre incarnate appearance of Christ which is not what the author to the Hebrews is actually saying and what's important about Melchizedek is that he is the earliest figure that we have in the in the biblical history of someone who is

both King and priest and so according to Psalm 110 and Hebrews chapter 7 he is a model or pattern for the coming deliverer that finds that finds ultimate fulfillment in Jesus Christ thanks for watching honest answers don't forget to subscribe [Music] you