Priest, King, Prophet

A Biblical Pattern

The pattern of priest, king and prophet is oft-cited by teachers from all sorts of varieties of Christianity. Something that often happens in their quotation of this pattern, however, is that they get something wrong. The pattern will sometimes be laid out as prophet, priest, king, as opposed to priest, king prophet. There is a sense in which the prophet, priest, king pattern is not wrong, but for the purposes of this article we will briefly overview the pattern as laid out by James B. Jordan, Seraphim Hamilton and many others. In Genesis 2:15 man is given two tasks explicitly, and one task implicitly. Man is told to “guard and cultivate the earth”. The two tasks explicitly mentioned are those of guarding (which we will discover is the priestly task) and cultivating (the kingly task). These two are relatively easy to demonstrate in their symbolic correlations, it is when we get to the prophetic that we really have to take a deeper look into what’s really being said here. The symbolism at play here can be easily explored through the lens of the ordination of the priests in Exodus 20, which is recapitulated in the cleansing of lepers in Leviticus 14. Moses, in Exodus 20 was told to ordain the priests by anointing them with the blood of a ram, once on the ear, once on the hand and once on the foot. In a symbolic sense, the ordination of the priesthood under Moses can be seen as a re-adam-izing of humanity. The tabernacle is created as the new garden of Eden and the priests are ordained as the guardians of this garden. Of course the garden could not be fully re-entered before Christ passed through the flaming sword of the cherubim; but we see a bridge from the old Adam to the new Adam in the priestly cutting and burning of the sacrifices at the gate of their temporary garden-sanctuary. These three anointings of the priests correspond to man’s task as priest, king and prophet. The ear is priestly, it's about hearing the word of God; the hand is kingly, performing the word of God; and the foot is prophetic, it's all about motion. 

James B. Jordan rightfully claims that the role of priests is to “guard the throne room of God”. The  priestly task is that of listening to God, and obeying – recognizing that which is Holy unto the Lord (this is the very title given to high priests under Mosaic law). We see the priestly task in Adam’s commission to guard the garden of Eden. God sanctified the tree of knowledge of good and evil unto Himself, which is not to say he was hiding it from Adam – Adam very well may have eaten of it had he passed the test of the serpent. The serpent was the enemy from which Adam was meant to guard the garden. Adam was meant to listen to, and obey the word of the Lord that commanded him not to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Adam (spoiler alert) failed at this and listened instead to the serpent. The priestly task is one of ritual, one of directing attention towards God, and the priestly task of Adam was to direct his attention beyond the false idols of pride and self-divinization presented by the serpent, and instead serve the one true God – the only one worth listening to and obeying. 

 The knowledge of good and evil is the knowledge of kings. The task of a king is to know what his land is good for and not good (evil) for, in order that it may be structured accordingly and most suitably for the communion between God and men. While priests listen and obey, kings act in accordance with the wisdom of obedience, and branch out into the world. This is exactly what we do with our hands. Our hands are what we use to shape the world around us – by grabbing, moving and building. There is also a connection to be made between the five/ten fingers on a hand and the organisation of military (militaries are run by kings) structures in the bible by ranks of fives and tens. The task of cultivating the earth is the same as man’s task to establish dominion over it. The word used for dominion in Hebrew in Genesis 1 is also used in military contexts throughout the bible, and that is because there is an analogy between the establishment of kingly rule over the untamed nations through military force and the more primordial task of taming the wild earth as kings over creation. The kingly task is what naturally follows the priestly task. Had Adam listened to God and acted as true priest, guarding the garden, he would have known that instead of eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, trying to seize kingship for himself, he should have gone out into the world and accomplished the task he was created for. Man was meant to fill the shrubless and grainless earth of Genesis 2:5, following in the footsteps of the God he was created in the image of who filled the formless and void earth of Genesis 1 throughout the six creation days. Because man tried to seize kingship for himself, however, we see from the faulty priestly interaction of Adam a faulty king as the next story in Genesis. It is from the failure of Adam, as priest, to listen and obey that the false city built by Cain springs forth. Cain names his false city after his son, Enoch. There is another character in the bible named Enoch, who was said to “walk with the gods,” which is precisely what the prophetic task is.

The priestly task is to listen and obey, the kingly task is to act out this obedience in the world. What, then, is prophethood? Prophethood is contained in the acting out of the priestly and kingly task in conjunction. It is the third which is the means by which the two are joined. Prophethood is all about intercession – bridging a gap. This is where we get the symbolic association with the foot from. Movement is all about going from one place to another. This can be either one place in space or one place in time to another. Seraphim Hamilton often says that prophethood is the position of being on the divine council. The divine council are the friends of God whom He shares His glory and creativity with. When God creates something, or when God moves something in creation, He is not just moving something from spatiotemporal point A to spatiotemporal point B. What happens when God acts in creation is that He acts out of eternity, into time, and ushers that which is in time into the eternal telos towards which it is moving. To be on the divine council, as a prophet, is to share in this creative task. Prophecy is a breakthrough of the divine into creation, a breakthrough of eternity into time. Prophecy is bridging the gap between what something is at this moment and what something will be in eternity. Prophecy is the retroactive imposition of meaning by the fullness of eternity onto the plane of history. Prophecy is a movement of history into eternity. Prophecy contains and joins both the priestly and the kingly, because it is that which towards both the obedience of the priest and the wisdom of the king are directed towards. In the sense that prophecy is a coming down of eternity into time, there is a sense in which the priestly and kingly tasks also contain prophethood. The priest listens to God with the end of becoming His friend in mind; and the king goes out to conquer the world with the end of creating alongside God in mind. In Genesis 20:7 Abimelech is told to ask Abraham to pray for him, “because he is a prophet”. It was the prophetic task of Abraham at this time to bridge the gap between Abimelech as he was at that time and Abimelech as he was meant to exist in eternity, which is in the fullness of God’s glory. Similarly, Job intercedes for his friends after his being exalted onto the divine council in Job 40. Job was ushering the communion with God of eternity into the state of his persecutors at the time.

With this in mind, reconsider the order of this threefold pattern as what I pointed out as wrong in the beginning. This pattern is not actually wrong, it just needed to be justified, and my saying it is wrong is actually a case of the point I am trying to make here. If we understand prophethood as that which retroactively infuses the priestly and the kingly with meaning, there is a sense in which we can say that prophethood is what caused the priestly and the kingly in the first place, as the seed of faith, planted from eternity into time, constantly ushering forward towards the goal of flourishing in the fulness of eternity. To progress towards prophethood you need to recognize that neither the priestly or the kingly are in themselves not prophethood. But, there is a flip that happens upon the imposition of prophecy, which retroactively goes back and illumines how prophecy has been guiding you the entire time towards the end of eternity. The union between God and man, between eternity and time is precisely that which reaches back even unto the beginning, revealing that all things happened out of this eternal fate, from the beginning unto the end. The eternal joy of the union between God and man stretches back out of eternity before the age of time itself.