1. In the days of Abraham, Chedorlaomer, king of Elam, with three confederate kings, took and plundered Sodom and led the inhabitants away captive, among them Lot and his family. The tidings of what had befallen his nephew came to Abraham where he dwelt in his tent under the oaks of Mamre. He at once led forth his trained servants, three hundred and eighteen, and pursued the conquerors, and “brought back all the goods, and also brought again his brother Lot, and his goods, and the women also, and the people. The king of Sodom went out to meet him, after his return from the slaughter of Chedorlaomer and the kings that were with him, at the vale of Shaveh (the same is the King's Vale).” The king of Sodom went forth in gratitude, doubtless, to offer thanks to his deliverer. But a more remarkable personage than the king of Sodom appeared upon the scene. “And Melchizedek,” we read, “king of Salem, brought forth bread and wine; and he was priest of God Most High. And he blessed him, and said, Blessed be Abram of God Most High, possessor of heaven and earth; and blessed be God Most High, which hath delivered thine enemies into thy hand. And he gave him”-that is, Abraham gave Melchizedek-“a tenth of all.” Then straightway Melchizedek falls back into the obscurity out of which he had thus suddenly emerged, and nothing more is said of him in that history.
2. Melchizedek is generally recognized as the most mysterious and unaccountable of historical personages; appearing here in the King's Vale no one knows whence, and disappearing no one knows whither, but coming with his hands full of substantial gifts for the wearied household of Abraham and the captive women that were with him. Of each of the patriarchs we can tell the paternity, the date of his birth, and the date of his death; but this man stands with none to claim him, he forms no part of any series of links by which the oldest and the present times are connected.
Melchizedek (as we are reminded in Hebrews) means “The King of righteousness”; which, according to the Hebrew idiom, would mean emphatically “The Righteous King”-a title which he may have won for himself by the purity and justice of his life in the midst of a land where such men were few. If this is not a personal name, it is at least a description of character which enables us to understand what sort of man he was in the estimation of others. His other title was derived from his dominion-“King of Salem, which is, King of peace.” Of course the kings of those early days in Canaan were rather chiefs over small places-the gathering, perhaps, of a few tents. A king might be a man in Abraham's own position, able to muster three hundred and eighteen men of war; only this one was perhaps a man hating all the arts of conquest and seeking to maintain his position by equity and character rather than by spear and sword, and so loved to be called “The King of peace.”
“The King of peace”-it is a title which has not often been appropriated. We are told, says Lord Avebury, that each nation must protect its own interests; but the greatest interest of every country is-Peace. In thinking of war we are too apt to remember only the pomp and ceremony, the cheerful music, brilliant uniforms and arms glittering in the sunshine, and to forget the bayonets dripping with blood. The carnage and suffering which war entails are terrible to contemplate. Moreover, all wars are unsuccessful. The only question is which of the combatants suffers most. “Nothing,” said the Duke of Wellington, “except a battle lost, can be half so melancholy as a battle won.” Nothing is so ruinous to a country as a successful war, excepting, of course, one that is unsuccessful. Victor Cousin, in his introduction to the History of Philosophy, designates war as the terrible, indeed, but necessary instrument of civilization, which he says is founded on two rocks-“le champ de bataille ou la solitude du cabinet.” Surely it would be more correct to say that the horrors of war are continually counteracting the blessings of peace and thought. Victory is only defeat in disguise. Milton says:
Who overcomes
By force hath overcome but half his foe.
And, to quote a great German writer, Schiller justly tells us that “the enemy who is overturned will rise again, but he who is reconciled is truly vanquished.”
Are there not troubles and dangers and anxieties enough in life without creating others for ourselves? The poor we have always with us; bad seasons and poor harvests we must expect; changes of climate, failure of mines, new discoveries, fluctuations of commerce, even changes of fashion, may involve heavy losses and much suffering, but the worst misfortunes of all are those which nations bring on themselves.
We talk of foreign nations, but in fact there are no really foreign countries. The interests of nations are so interwoven, we are bound together by such strong, if sometimes almost invisible, threads, that if one suffers all suffer; if one flourishes it is good for the rest.
Lord Derby (the 15th Earl) once said that the greatest of British interests was peace. And so it is; not merely that we should be at peace ourselves, but that other countries should be at peace also. It is not, however, only our greatest interest, it is the greatest interest of every country. After all we ought not to forget that we are a Christian country. If the so-called Christian nations were nations of Christians there would be no wars. The present state of Europe is a disgrace to us not only as men of common sense, but as being altogether inconsistent with any form of religious conviction.1 [Note: Lord Avebury, Peace and Happiness, 369.]
3. Melchizedek was a king and also a priest. He was the king of the city Salem, but it is also noted specially in the narrative that he was a priest-and that not at some heathen shrine of Moloch or Malcom-but of “God Most High.” We are told very distinctly that Melchizedek blessed Abraham and prayed the blessing of God Most High upon him, at the same time blessing God for the deliverance of Abraham. This solitary figure of the king thus standing between God and Abraham is very striking, and shows that true religion was still possible and actual outside the Abrahamic relation to God. And Abraham's attitude of immediate willingness to receive blessing is a striking testimony to his consciousness of the spiritual position and power of Melchizedek. By payment of the tithe, Abraham acknowledges the legitimacy of Melchizedek's priesthood and the religious bond of a common monotheism uniting them.
Though possessed of the knowledge of the Most High God, Melchizedek's name is not found in any of those genealogies which show us how that knowledge passed from father to son. This king-priest rises up out of the darkness, does one act, and straightway falls back into the darkness, a solitary form; nothing is known of him in the way of origin, and nothing in the way of departure; no birth is recorded and no death; he took his priesthood through no human intervention, and resigned it to no human successor, holding the office and not yielding it.
Here is the greatest man of the time, a man before whom Abraham, the father of the faithful, the honoured of all nations, bowed and paid tithes; and yet he appears and passes away like a vision of the night. A royal priest he is, without predecessor or successor that we hear of, yet honoured to stand and minister between even Abraham and his God, commissioned to bless the man in whom rested by Divine decree the promised blessing for all mankind, and offer back to Heaven the first-fruits of the land of promise.
This strange king is lost sight of for one thousand years till David says of Christ in Psa_110:1-7, “Thou art a priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek.” He disappears again for another thousand years, and is then fully introduced to us in the Epistle to the Hebrews. The Jews would make him Enoch, or a survivor of the Flood, or Shem, or an angel, or the Holy Ghost, or Christ. But these are idle guesses. The Pentateuch gives us his history; in that history the Psalmist finds a mystery or a hidden spiritual meaning; in the Epistle to the Hebrews the veil is lifted and the mystery is “made manifest.” The story of the Pentateuch is the nutshell in which the Psalmist tells us there is a rare kernel, the Epistle to the Hebrews opens the shell and presents us with the kernel.
Thrice bless'd are they, who feel their loneliness;
To whom nor voice of friends nor pleasant scene
Brings aught on which the sadden'd heart can lean;
Yea, the rich earth, garb'd in her daintiest dress
Of light and joy, doth but the more oppress,
Claiming responsive smiles and rapture high;
Till, sick at heart, beyond the veil they fly,
Seeking His Presence, who alone can bless.
Such, in strange days, the weapons of Heaven's grace;
When, passing o'er the high-born Hebrew line,
He moulds the vessel of His vast design;
Fatherless, homeless, rest of age and place,
Sever'd from earth, and careless of its wreck,
Born through long woe His rare Melchizedek.1 [Note: J. H. Newman, Verses on Various Occasions.]
