Hebrews – To Ascend the Holy Mount

Hebrews – To Ascend the Holy Mount is an extract of a chapter from Temples of the Ancient World: Ritual and Symbolism.¹ This past weekend, Carrie and I had the opportunity to meet with a small group of people to renew friendships and remind us of the ties that bind people together. As I reflected upon that experience, I was reminded of this testimony:

Hebrews is, to use Paul’s² words, “strong meat” (Hebrews 5:14). Paul wants to preach strong meat, but he addresses members who will not digest it (see Hebrews 5:12). Nevertheless, he broaches doctrines that deal with the upper reaches of spiritual experience and Melchizedek Priesthood temple ordinances. My purpose will be to identify several passages that have relevance to temple ordinances. Paul’s letter might be divided into two main ideas: the promise of the temple and the price exacted to obtain the promise. At several points I will add the Prophet Joseph Smith’s commentary, without which much of the temple significance of the apostle’s remarks in Hebrews would elude us.

The Promise

Paul urges the Hebrews, “Let us go on unto perfection; not laying again the foundation of repentance…and of faith” (Hebrews 6:1–2; italics added). They had tarried too long in the foothills of spiritual experience. Having “tasted of the heavenly gift, …the good word of God, and the powers of the world to come” (Hebrews 6:4–6), they could no longer delay resuming the climb lest they lose the promise. Paul warns, “Be not slothful, but followers of them who through faith and patience inherit [or, are inheriting] the promises” (Hebrews 6:12).

The promise that Paul refers to repeatedly is that same promise explained in Doctrine and Covenants 88:68–69: “Therefore, sanctify yourselves that your minds become single to God, and the days will come that you shall see him; for he will unveil his face unto you, and it shall be in his own time, and in his own way, and according to his own will. Remember the great and last promise which I have made unto you” (italics added). Paul uses several different terms in Hebrews for the experiences associated with this promise: for example, obtaining a good report (11:39), entering into the Lord’s rest (4:3, 10), going on to perfection (6:1), entering into the holiest (10:19), being made a high priest forever (7:17), knowing the Lord (8:11; D&C 84:98), pleasing God (Hebrews 11:5), obtaining a witness of being righteous (11:4), and having the law written in the heart (8:10; 10:16; Jeremiah 31:31–34). He speaks of boldly pursuing the fulfillment of the promise: Grasp, he says, the hope that is set before you, which enters behind the veil, where Jesus, as a forerunner, has already entered (see Hebrews 6:18–20, NIV).

Paul compares these Israelites to their ancestors of twelve hundred years earlier. He refers to the early Israelites’ rejection of God’s invitation to enter into his rest as the “provocation”; that is, Israel provoked God by refusing to enter his presence. Paul quotes from Psalm 95:8–11: “Harden not your hearts, as in the provocation, in the day of temptation in the wilderness: When your fathers tempted me, proved me, and saw my works forty years. Wherefore I was grieved with that generation, and said…they have not known my ways. So I sware in my wrath, They shall not enter into my rest” (Hebrews 3:8–11; italics added).

In this Exodus account to which Paul alludes, the children of Israel gazed at the quaking, smoking, fiery mount and refused to exercise the faith to go up. The upper reaches of the mount are, to be sure, not for the faint-hearted. The frightened Israelites foolishly told Moses to go on their behalf (see Exodus 20:18–21). The Lord, referring to the Melchizedek Priesthood as the key to God’s presence, explains in modern revelation what it was that Israel rejected: “For without this [priesthood] no man can see the face of God, even the Father, and live. Now this Moses plainly taught to the children of Israel in the wilderness, and sought diligently to sanctify his people that they might behold the face of God; but they hardened their hearts and could not endure his presence; therefore, the Lord…swore that they should not enter into his rest while in the wilderness, which rest is the fulness of his glory. Therefore, he took Moses out of their midst, and the Holy Priesthood also” (D&C 84:22–26; italics added).

We can’t escape the insight here that it was unnecessary for the Israelites to wander in the wilderness for forty years. Had they exercised faith in Jehovah, who is mighty to deliver, they might have abbreviated those trials and entered speedily into the promised land and into a Zion, even a translated society like Enoch’s or Melchizedek’s (see D&C 105:2–6). But, Paul laments, the early Israelites refused to enter because of unbelief (see Hebrews 3:19). He says, “Let us therefore fear, lest, a promise…of entering into his rest, any of you should…come short of… For we which have believed do enter into rest” (Hebrews 4:1, 3; italics added). Among Paul’s fellows were those who were even then entering into the Lord’s rest.

The Joseph Smith Translation of Exodus 34 increases our vocabulary for what it was that Israel rejected: “I will take away the priesthood out of their midst; therefore my holy order, and the ordinances thereof, shall not go before them; for my presence shall not go up in their midst” (JST Exodus 34:1–2; italics added). The Prophet Joseph remarked on Israel’s rejection using yet another term for the loss, that is, the term last law:

“God cursed the children of Israel because they would not receive the last law from Moses. When God offers a blessing or knowledge to a man, and he refuses to receive it, he will be damned. The Israelites prayed that God would speak to Moses and not to them; in consequence of which he cursed them with a carnal law… [But] the law revealed to Moses in Horeb never was revealed to the children of Israel as a nation.”³

When God gives the Saints the Melchizedek Priesthood, which is the power and authority to ascend into the presence of God through temple ordinances, they must come or be damned.

After briefly discussing the role of heavenly intermediaries in the history of Israel and early Christianity, Dr. Thomas points to the supreme examples of Melchizedek and Christ.

In attempting to persuade the Hebrew members of the superiority of the Melchizedek law over the Aaronic, Paul implies that an order of holy beings prevails in the eternal worlds that the Saints are called to enter. Christ belongs to this order as did Melchizedek. Paul deals in three places with Melchizedek: chapters 5, 7, and, without naming him, in chapter 11. Though man is created a little lower than the angels here on earth, yet his destiny is to put all in subjection under him, as Christ did, who brings “many sons unto glory” (Hebrews 2:7–10). “Salvation is nothing more or less than to triumph over all our enemies and put them under our feet and when we have power to put all enemies under our feet in this world and a knowledge to triumph over all evil spirits in the world to come, then we are saved, as in the case of Jesus.”⁴ Alma teaches that “many, exceedingly great many,” have entered into this holy order, Melchizedek being prototypical of them (see Alma 13:12, 17).⁵

Paul maintains that the Levitical law never could have brought its adherents into the Holy of Holies (e.g., Hebrews 7:11). Under the Levitical law only the high priest entered there, and that once a year. Therefore, so long as the Levitical or Mosaic law still stood, the way into the sanctuary necessarily remained veiled (see Hebrews 9:8). Christ rent the veil to the Holy of Holies to make entrance behind the veil possible, not for just one high priest, but for a whole kingdom of high priests (see Hebrews 10:20; Exodus 19:6).

Paul alludes to three levels of priesthood power. The Levitical, which could never make anyone perfect; Abraham’s patriarchal power, which embraces eternal marriage; and Melchizedek’s, which was a power greater still than Abraham’s, “even power of an endless life, of which [order] was our Lord Jesus Christ, which [order] also Abraham [later] obtained by the offering of his son Isaac. [Abraham’s] power [was not that] of a prophet nor apostle nor patriarch only, but of king and priest to God, to open the windows of Heaven and pour out the peace and law of endless life to man, and no man can attain to the joint heirship with Jesus Christ without being administered to by one having the same power and authority of Melchizedek”⁶ (see JST Genesis 14:40; also Hebrews 7:6, 17). “If a man gets the fulness of God he has to get it in the same way that Jesus Christ obtained it and that was by keeping all the ordinances of the house of the Lord.”⁷ Thus, through obedience to Melchizedek Priesthood temple ordinances, fallen man and woman may develop into the order of Melchizedek, Abraham, and Christ.

But Paul perceives that his flock could not digest the full truth about Melchizedek’s priesthood power (see Hebrews 5:11), so he alludes obliquely to him in Hebrews 11:33–34. That the allusion is to Melchizedek is clear from the Joseph Smith Translation of Genesis 14, which describes Melchizedek in nearly identical wording, saying that Melchizedek had the priesthood power of translation by which many of the citizens of his city obtained translation. Paul mentioned earlier in this chapter (see Hebrews 11:8–10) that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob also sought an inheritance in this heavenly city of translated beings [e.g. The Eternal City – Ed.]; that is, they sought to be translated and to join the city of Enoch, as had those who became Saints “during the nearly 700 years from the translation of Enoch to the flood of Noah.”⁸

M. Catherine Thomas then goes on to explain the price exacted of those who would attain to such blessings, the necessity of sacrifice and suffering⁹, and the role of translation. She concludes:

The urge to know the mysteries of godliness is no idle curiosity; rather, it is a divine drive to acquire that level of godly power modeled by Christ and others of his holy order. It is in addition the means of increasing one’s power to bring others to Christ: “And if thou wilt inquire, thou shalt know mysteries which are great and marvelous…that thou mayest bring many to the knowledge of the truth” (D&C 6:11; see also Alma 26:22).

The insight lying interlinearly in Hebrews and in the Prophet Joseph’s remarks suggests that men and women may do what Christ did by learning and applying eternal law, entering by conscious knowledge and power into their exaltation. This life, Paul seems to say, as does Amulek, is the time for men to prepare to meet God (see Alma 34:32). We may have “boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus” (Hebrews 10:19). This achievement requires a faith that seems to border on audacity. But he reassures his readers that, as the Savior is so abundantly able to succor his people, we may “therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need” (Hebrews 4:16). . . .

Many Saints in the Church hunger and thirst after greater righteousness and spiritual experience, just as our father Abraham did (see Abraham 1:2). The hunger is our birthright. Nevertheless, it is common to discourage such people out of fear that they will go off the track somehow in their pursuit, and of course that danger continuously presents itself. Old Scratch, as one of my friends calls the adversary; is always lurking behind a tree.

But the opposite risk is that members will straggle in the foothills of spiritual experience as Israel has repeatedly done. So Paul says, “Exhorting one another: and so much the more, as ye see the day approaching” (Hebrews 10:25); “for ye have need of patience, that, after ye have done the will of God, ye might receive the promise. For yet a little while, and he that shall come will come, and will not tarry” (Hebrews 10:36–37). Paul’s letter is a powerful call to pay the price, to obtain the promise in spite of earth or hell, and to come all the way up the holy mount to the Lord Jesus Christ.

Sources:

1. Thomas, M. Catherine. Temples of the Ancient World: Ritual and Symbolism. Salt Lake City: Deseret Book and the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, 1994. Please be aware I have omitted one or two footnotes and have inserted links where appropriate – Ed.↩
2. The basic premise in this paper is that the apostle Paul is the author of Hebrews, a fact that the Prophet Joseph Smith acknowledged on several occasions.↩
3. Smith, Joseph. The Words of Joseph Smith: The Contemporary Accounts of the Nauvoo Discourses of the Prophet Joseph. Comp. Andrew F. Ehat and Lyndon W. Cook. Orem, Utah: Grandin Book, 1991. 244; italics added.↩
4. Ibid. 200.↩
5. See Millet, Robert L. “The Holy Order of God (Alma 13)”. The Book of Mormon: Alma, the Testimony of the Word. ed. Monte S. Nyman and Charles D. Tate, Jr., ed. Provo, Utah: BYU Religious Studies Center, 1992.↩
6. Smith, Joseph. The Words of Joseph Smith: The Contemporary Accounts of the Nauvoo Discourses of the Prophet Joseph. Comp. Andrew F. Ehat and Lyndon W. Cook. Orem, Utah: Grandin Book, 1991. 245↩
7. Ibid. 213.↩
8. McConkie, Bruce R. Doctrinal New Testament Commentary. 3 vols. Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1974. 3:202.↩
9. For a recent example, see Elder Jeffrey R. Holland’s talk Lessons from Liberty Jail.↩

Related posts

• Brother of Jared at the Veil
• What is an Endowment?
• Temple Endowment
• Holy Order in the Book of Mormon
• Spiritual Knowledge