Kingdom of Priests: Melchizedek, Church Membership, and Understanding Your Place in God’s Story
July 31, 2026
July 31, 2026
Abstract: Sam Emadi traces the theme of humanity’s role as a priest-king across the storyline of the Bible to show how God’s original purposes in creation relate to the privileges and responsibilities of church membership under the New Covenant. Because believers belong to Jesus, the priest-king who was perfectly faithful, they now serve as a royal priesthood in and through their local church. And every Christian has a part to play.
Editor’s Note: This article is an adapted excerpt from an address titled “Kingdom of Priests: Melchizedek, Church Membership and Understanding Your Place in God’s Story” given at First Baptist Church in Boynton Beach, Florida.
C. S. Lewis once said, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” Biblical theology does something similar for us as it traces God’s unfolding plan of redemption across the storyline of Scripture. It not only helps us see what’s in Scripture, but it also helps us see the world and our lives in light of Scripture.
This is particularly helpful when it comes to a topic like church membership that, on the surface, seems detached from the central themes of Scripture. But since all Scripture points us to Jesus, and since the church is his body, that means all Scripture has something to say about Christ and his people. United to Christ by faith, his people become part of his story, which means we participate in the fulfillment of Old Covenant promises and shadows.
I want to show you how all this relates to church membership by focusing on the theme of priest-kings as it unfolds across major “movements” of the storyline of Scripture. Then we’ll consider what it means to embrace the role God has given you as a member of your local church.
Why did God create humanity? To glorify him and enjoy him forever.1 But what does that look like? To answer that we need to look at the story of creation. Genesis 1 records the rhythmic repetition of the first six days: “God said . . . God made . . . God saw that it was good.” That’s the pattern. But then the pattern is interrupted. It’s as if God steps back to hold counsel with himself to prepare for his greatest work—the climax of his creative genius. God creates man in his own image (Gen. 1:26–27).
In the ancient Near East, only kings and pharaohs were said to be in the image of God. Bearing God’s image meant that you were a descendant of the gods—a son of God. Yet God creates Adam as his image, which is to say Adam is God’s own royal son. And as Jonathan Leeman has put it: like every good father, God wants Adam to get a job. So God gives Adam a job, the job of a priest-king.
First, God makes Adam a king. He commissions him to rule and gives him dominion over all creation (Gen. 1:28). Adam is the “boots-on-the-ground” king on earth who represents God’s life-giving rule in heaven. Just as God uses his authority to generate flourishing, prosperity, and life, Adam must do the same. He must fill the earth with life.
That’s why God commissions Adam and Eve to “multiply” (Gen. 1:28). In an ancient Near Eastern context, when a king or a pharaoh conquered a land, he would go into the town square and set up an image—a statue—of himself. This image would signify to everyone that he was the rightful ruler of that land—the king to whom everyone owed allegiance. It’s as if God is doing the same thing with humanity. He wants Adam and Eve to extend the boundaries of Eden and fill the earth with image-bearers so that these servant kings would draw attention to the Lord of all creation.
So God made Adam a king, but he also gave him another responsibility. He made him a priest. When God put Adam in the garden, he told him to “work it and keep it” (Gen. 2:15). These two words, “work” and “keep,” are used as a word-pair only a few other times in the Bible, and each time they refer to the work of the priests in the tabernacle or the temple. In other words, Adam is the prototype for Israel’s priests.
This helps us see that the garden isn’t just an ordinary garden. It’s a temple. Have you ever wondered why all the features of the tabernacle are described as having almonds and pomegranates? (Exod. 25–40) That’s because the tabernacle and the temple were miniaturized recreations of the original garden-temple.
So what was Adam supposed to do in this garden-temple? First, he was supposed to “work it,” which refers to inside-the-garden work. Adam was supposed to cultivate and nurture the garden. He was to make sure the trees were bearing fruit, the bushes were trimmed, and the land was well-irrigated. Second, Adam was supposed to “keep it.” That is, he was supposed to guard this garden-temple by keeping out anything unclean and impure—like a talking snake (Gen. 3:1–7). This was the job of the priests. They protected the temple by regulating what came in and out, by declaring what was clean and unclean, holy and unholy.
This commission is God’s creation project. It’s why Adam was created. It’s how God gets glory for himself: he makes his image-bearers to rule over his world as kings and serve in his temple as priests.
Christian, this is what we were made for—to be priest-kings serving in God’s temple. This cosmic employment unites the biggest realities of heaven with the dust of this earthly creation.
Sadly, Adam didn’t fulfill his commission as priest-king. He allowed the serpent to pollute the purity of God’s temple, so God cast Adam out of the garden. It’s as if God fired Adam from his job. Yet in that moment, God promised to raise up from the line of Eve a seed of the woman who would crush the serpent’s head (Gen. 3:15). In other words, this coming seed, or offspring, would do what Adam failed to do. He would be a new Adam. He would rule over the earth and guard God’s temple.
The seed of the woman would be a faithful priest-king.
The story of the Old Testament is the story of a sequence of priest-kings who perpetuate and pervert the work God established with Adam. Take Noah, for example. He sacrifices clean animals, he judges between clean and unclean animals, and then he’s given the same dominion mandate as Adam (Gen. 7–9). He’s a new priest-king.
But he’s another failed one. At the end of Noah’s story, he’s in a vineyard—a garden—drunk, naked, and ashamed, just like his father Adam, another unfaithful priest-king.
Abraham is also described as both a king and a priest. And Israel as a nation has both priests and kings. In fact, God calls his people “a kingdom of priests” (Exod. 19:5).
As Israel obeyed God’s voice and kept his covenant, they would image God rightly.
But Noah, Abraham, and Israel—as well as David and a whole series of priest-kings in the Old Testament—all failed to do what Adam was supposed to do. They didn’t protect the temple or the land given to them. They defiled it with paganism and idolatry. And so the story of the Old Testament ends where it began—with the temple in ruins and Israel in exile, just as Adam was exiled from the garden.
The only exception to this pattern of priest-king failures is an enigmatic figure named Melchizedek in Genesis 14. He is so great that he even blesses Abraham and, through Abraham, all Israel. This is why David’s prophecy about the coming Messiah in Psalm 110 says that he will be both a king from the line of David and a priest from the order of Melchizedek. That’s humanity’s hope: a faithful priest-king who is greater than Abraham and David and who will do what Adam failed to do.
When Jesus arrives on the scene, he does so as a faithful priest-king. He is introduced as the son of David (Matt. 1:1), the promised royal king (2 Sam. 7:12–14). Then he ends his earthly ministry by declaring, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me” (Matt. 28:18).
And then Jesus goes around healing people of infirmities and restoring withered hands and cleansing lepers and healing women who have been bleeding for twelve years and raising the dead. He even declares people’s sins forgiven! In other words, Jesus is a priest unlike any other. He doesn’t just declare what’s clean and unclean; he makes unclean people clean. He takes defiled bodies and cleanses them; even more amazing, he takes defiled hearts and cleanses them. And as a priest, he offers himself as a sacrifice for sins.
Jesus is a priest-king after the order of Melchizedek (Heb. 5–7). He is the final installment in a pattern as old as Adam—a priest-king who has come to rule over creation, represent God’s holiness, and mediate the presence of God without fail. He is the true and faithful priest-king.
Therefore, if we want access to the presence of God; if we want back in the garden; if we want our sins forgiven and our hearts cleansed; if we want to fellowship with God and live under his gracious reign; and if we want to be saved from death, then we need to go to the true priest-king, Jesus, for forgiveness and cleansing and fellowship and life.
But we don’t go to him by doing something for him. We come to him by faith (Eph. 2:8–9). Faith is an empty hand that lays hold of Christ. And Paul says over and over again that when we lay hold of Christ by faith, we become united to him. We are “in him” (Eph. 1:7). This is crucial to understanding our role in the story.
Because we are in Christ—united to him by faith—everything that is true about him becomes true of us. He is righteous, so we are righteous. He is holy, so we are holy. He is a priest-king, so we become priest-kings. Or as Peter put it, a “royal priesthood” (1 Pet. 2:9).
Our responsibility—a priestly responsibility—is to “proclaim the excellencies of him who called us out of darkness into his marvelous light” (1 Pet. 2:9).
When you come to Christ, you get installed into the very job Adam was fired from. You’ve been given the authority to represent Christ’s righteous judgments and the power from his Spirit to do the priestly work of mediating or proclaiming the excellencies of God to the nations!
But remember, when Peter refers to us as a royal priesthood, he’s speaking corporately. The church is a royal priesthood. So what tabernacle do we serve? What garden are we cultivating? What temple are we protecting? The temple upon which God has poured out his Spirit. The New Covenant temple is the local church gathered to worship God. As Jesus says, “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there (in the gathering) I am among them” (Matt. 18:20). Likewise, Paul says that we are “God’s temple” and that his Spirit dwells in us (1 Cor. 3:16).
So how do we do “work” and “keep” this temple? By doing what Adam was supposed to do. We keep it holy by cultivating our holiness and the holiness of other church members. Your ultimate ambition in life isn’t merely to see how devoted to the Lord you can be. You are to labor for other people’s devotion to the Lord as much as you labor for your own, because you’re maintaining the purity of God’s New Covenant temple. That’s what it means to be a member of a church.
Based on everything we’ve seen so far, it should be evident that church membership isn’t about getting a few privileges and attending some church programs. It’s about committing to do the work of a priest-king to build up God’s cosmic temple. So what does this look like practically? Here are several suggestions:
These are just a few examples of priest-king work. It’s focused on edifying and encouraging the saints—the messed-up, often annoying, sinful, sometimes offensive, glorious saints—who are God’s own garden-sanctuary.
On a corporate level, living as priest-kings means that a church should practice meaningful membership. That’s why you do membership interviews—to ensure that people understand the gospel and show evidence of true conversion. Only those purified by the blood of Christ should be brought into the church’s membership. This is also why church discipline exists. When people want to live for sin more than they do for Christ, a congregation of priest-kings should guard the purity of God’s temple and remove what is unholy.
Finally, this is why we cannot tolerate anti-gospel teaching in the church. Unlike Adam, we must not allow snakes to pervert what God has plainly said.
God made us to be priest-kings serving his cosmic temple. And by union with Christ, you, Christian, have been restored to the office originally given to Adam. The stakes and responsibilities, as well as the joys and blessings, of this work could not be higher. This is what God is doing in the world, and it has cosmic significance.