Cursed is the ground because of you;

In toil you will eat of it

All the days of your life….

By the sweat of your face

You will eat bread,

Till you return to the ground,

Because from it you were taken;

For you are dust,

And to dust you shall return.

—Genesis 3:17b,19

Blessed be Abram of God Most High,

Possessor of heaven and earth;

And blessed be God Most High,

Who has delivered your enemies into your hand.

—Genesis 14:19b-20a

One of the difficult things about studying the Bible is how easy it can be to miss important details because of cultural differences. Oftentimes, what may have stood out to people living in the culture in which that book was written, seems like a small, random detail inserted into the text for no discernable reason to those of us reading today.

That can often be the case with our last prophetic model of Jesus––Melchizedek, the priest-king—because he only appears in a few short verses. Abram has just returned from rescuing Lot from the kings who conquered Sodom, and he meets both the king of Sodom and Melchizedek, the king of Salem, in the King’s Valley.

First, we discover that Melchizedek is both king and priest, which was very rare but directly points to Christ, who is both our Ruler and our High Priest. The ruler part isn’t a surprise. Joseph and David were also rulers, so all three men point to the Messiah as a ruling figure. But the priest part is a little different.

The priests had many duties, including things like performing sacrifices and leading the people in worship and the study of the Scriptures. They were the ones given access to the presence of God and one of their main purposes was to intercede on behalf of the people. Put simply, they were the tether that kept Israel connected to God, and Melchizedek is no exception.

When Melchizedek meets Abram, he brings a couple of important things with him. First, he brings bread and wine—two things that not only offer refreshment and nourishment for Abram and those following him but also foreshadow the Last Supper and Jesus’s sacrifice. And when Melchizedek has provided for Abram’s physical needs, he offers him a blessing.

That might not seem like a big deal, but when we look just a few chapters earlier in Genesis, it becomes a lot more significant. Only eleven chapters before, Adam and Even found themselves in sin and God pronounced the curse on the world and humanity. The curse was that humanity got exactly what we wanted—for God to step back and allow us the opportunity to rule and provide for ourselves, even if that meant we had to endure difficulty and pain as a natural result of the distance between us.

That’s why Melchizedek’s status as a priest and the blessing he brings are so crucial—because they point to Jesus’s future reversal of the curse. If the curse was all the natural consequences of being separated from God because of our own rebellion, the blessing of Melchizedek is the opposite because He’s welcoming God back into the equation.

According to Melchizedek, Abram is blessed because of his relationship with God Most High, and his success in battle was guaranteed by the work of God. Where the pronouncement in Genesis three begins with a curse and reveals the difficulty of trying to do life without God, what Melchizedek speaks over Abram begins with blessing and reveals God’s work in the victory. 

It’s a complete reversal, and that’s exactly what Jesus came to do—reverse the curse. He died on a tree because the first sin was committed using a tree. He wore a crown of thorns because they were the result of the separation of God in the curse. He even reversed death through His resurrection.

Even though Melchizedek only appears for a few verses in the Bible, he points to Jesus’s mission to endure all the pain of sin for the purpose of reversing the curse and ushering us back into the presence of God. 

This is our Jesus. This is our Messiah. Come and behold Him!