Priest, King and Prophet

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Run-of-the-mill triperspectivalism not only misses the progression inherent in the three roles of prophet, priest and king, it gets the order wrong. Well, kind of…

James Jordan writes:

We can begin with the phrase “prophet, priest, and king.” This is the order normally heard from preachers and theologians. But it is not really the Biblical order. The age of priests ran from Moses to Saul, the age of kings from Saul to the end of the Kingdom, and the age of prophets from Elijah to Jesus. If we believe in any kind of development and maturation of the kingdom of God in history, we shall have to admit that king is more than priest, and prophet more than king. Since, however, the prophetic function is associated with predicting the future, it has often been abstracted from its historical context and placed at the beginning. At the same time, as we shall see below, the prophet does come at the beginning as well as at the end, to close one period and begin a new one, so that usual ordering of these terms is not so much erroneous as incomplete.

Article continues here.

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See also Great Prophets.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, September 4th, 2011 at 10:08 amand is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

2 Responses to “Priest, King and Prophet”

  • Jared Says:
    September 4th, 2011 at 12:23 pm

    We see that prophets consistently have more authority and influence than kings all throughout Scripture. Bringing the word of the Lord has its perks, though there are plenty of not so nice times as well. It’s interesting that we tend to primarily focus on Jesus as king, almost relegating his roles as priest and prophet exclusively to his pre-crucifixion work.

  • Mike Bull Says:
    September 4th, 2011 at 2:40 pm

    Yes, He still intercedes, and He still speaks. His ministry is a combination of all roles because it is a process.