Jesus our Forerunner

Which hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast, and which entereth into that within the veil; whither the forerunner is for us entered, even Jesus, made an high priest for ever after the order of Melchisedec. Heb. 6:19-20

The following is an excerpt from Philip Edgcumbe Hughes, A Commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews (Eerdmans, 1977), p. 236-237.

"Notice that it is Jesus who is our forerunner into the heavenly sanctuary. The New Testament knows nothing of the distinction, fashionable in our day, between the 'historic Jesus' and 'the risen Christ,' with its implication that the cross marked the end of the former and that Easter and the ascension relate only to the latter. It is a distinction which leaves us with a docetic Christ. The apostles, however, consistently proclaim, without embarrassment, that it was Jesus who was raised from the dead (Acts 2:32), who ascended into heaven (Acts 1:9), who has been exalted and glorified (Phil. 2:9), and who is coming again (Acts 1:11), and this teaching is amply confirmed in our epistle, in which it is Jesus who after the humiliation passed through the heavens (4:14), to whom as our victorious and exalted Savior we, the runners of the Christian race, are urged to look (12:1f; cf. 3:1), to whom as the living mediator of the new covenant we have come (13:24), who as the risen shepherd of the sheep continues to tend his flock (13:20f.), and who, in short, is the same yesterday and today and forever (13:8). If it were not one and the same Jesus, then all that is said and written about resurrection, ascension, glorification, and return is no more than empty words. Here, then, it is Jesus who has gone before us into the glory of the divine presence as our pioneer, our fellow, and our merciful and faithful high priest (2:10-17)."