Week 14 – Christ in the OT, Day 5

   Today we will ask the question, “If Christ was so thoroughly predicted in the Old Testament, why did the people of His day not recognize Him faster? Why instead would they crucify Him?
    The short answer is that some of the primary things He came to do were not explicitly foretold in the OT. As we saw, He had to deal with a narrow or skewed expectation in many people. But there were some things that no one was expecting from the Messiah at all.
    For one thing, no one was expecting a Messiah who would suffer and die. The Messiah was to be an exalted figure, successful at unifying and leading the people. This was implied by the prophecies of a victorious king, a “Son of Man” ruling a kingdom. Jesus knew better: “the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45). The exalted kingship would have to wait. But in the meantime, this element of messianic expectation would become the theme of painful mocking (Mark 15:17, 26).
    A second thing that no one was expecting from the Messiah was that He Himself would become the source of saving life. The a general assumption was that the Messiah would help usher in a new golden age of Israel, urging everyone to accomplish finally the good works God required of them. Again, Jesus knew better. He understood the standing problem was sin, with its depths and its tenacity. Only as He became the “ransom for many” would the situation improve, and grace could flow. Only as He became the actual Savior of others would they truly live before God.
    Third, no one would have tolerated the idea that the Messiah could be God Himself. The idea would have sounded blasphemous to a person of the day. Even the fact that Jesus “called God His own Father” enraged some of his listeners for this very reason (John 5:18). Again, Jesus knew better. He knew “that He had come from God and was going back to God;” He knew “that before Abraham was, I AM” (John 13:3; 8:58). He knew that “I am with you always, even to the ends of the earth” (Matt 28:20).
    God’s plan was to send His own divine Son to die, to sacrifice Himself for the sins of the world, to break the power of sin and death once for all, and to become Himself the source of eternal salvation for all who believe. Stated in this way, this is New Testament revelation, not spelled out with this clarity in the OT. But none of it can be appreciated in its proper depth without the OT. For that reason Jesus, in our passage from Luke, could affirm that it was “necessary for the Christ to suffer,” and could argue His case “beginning with Moses and with all the prophets” (Luke 24:26-27; see also v.44).
    If we reject Jesus’ offer of life, as so many of His listeners did, it will be because we deny that the situation is this dire: sin doesn’t need such a radical fix. On the other hand if we have come to know the depth of the hold of evil in this world, we will accept with deepest joy and gladness the sure salvation that Jesus brings.

Respond:
To know the story of the divine Messiah is to have the key of life. But we need to use the key in our own lives, unlocking our own hearts and opening to the Lord. And we need to be ready to share the key with others, for Christ is the Savior of the world.

Pray:
“Let all who seek Thee rejoice and be glad in Thee. And let those who love Thy salvation say continually, ‘Let God be magnified.’” (Psalm 70:4)

D.D.

Week 14 – Christ in the OT, Day 4

   In looking at “Christ in the Old Testament,” we’ve seen how many OT passages prophesied the coming of an anointed leader, and how Jesus added to the list of Messianic passages from His more perfect understanding. Today we note that the earliest Christians, who wrote the books of the New Testament, found dozens of other OT passages that illumined details of the life and ministry of Jesus.
    One author particularly adept at searching the OT for such references was the Gospel writer Matthew. It is he who found a story in Isaiah about a “young girl” bearing a son, and calling him “Emmanuel.” And even though the situation in Isaiah was quite different, Matthew intuited this as a prophecy about a “virgin” miraculously bearing a son whom we would recognize as “God with us” (Matt 1:23). Similarly Mary and Joseph’s sojourn in Bethlehem, their flight to Egypt, and even Jesus’ temporary stay in Capernaum, are all found to be foretold by the OT (2:6; 2:15; 4:13-16). It was the Gospel writers, and not apparently Jesus, who first drew attention to the prophetic dimensions of His entrance into Jerusalem on a donkey, on Palm Sunday (21:5, 9). And details of the crucifixion were noted later to have strong biblical resonance: the thirty pieces of silver (27:9), the offer of wine on the Cross (27:34), the casting of lots for His garments (27:35), and even the taunts of the bystanders, who quote Scripture unawares (27:43).
    None of this, we can well understand, was on anyone’s master list of Messianic prophecy. No one had a “Do You Want to Be the Messiah?” check sheet in hand, nor would have agreed with anyone else on what should be included. Rather, in Matthew and other writers we hear the wonder, and see the miracle, that Jesus was so thoroughly biblical in all He did, that He couldn’t help but walk in the path of the Scriptures wherever He went, whether He was trying to or not, whether it was He or others that were controlling the situation. Rather than see Him as attempting to fulfill dozens of prescribed prerequisites to establish Himself as Messiah, we are offered the picture of Jesus as the very living and breathing heart of the OT, so that even His unthinkable and unforeseeable death on the Cross reveals itself as richly biblical and prophetic – after He had gone through with it.
 Our passage in 1 Corinthians demonstrates Paul’s confidence that the OT was all about Jesus, though this was not evident to Israel at the time, and indeed requires a personal experience of Christ today to understand it fully. Paul looks back to the days of Israel in the wilderness, and he invokes probably the most shameful moment of that whole 40 years: the people grumbling, and Moses violently hitting the rock in anger. But what Paul sees at the heart of this mess is spiritual presence, spiritual nurture, spiritual redemption: and His name was Jesus Christ.
    So in addition to the obvious OT passages, and the further passages indicated by Jesus, the Apostles delightedly found a fresh flood of astonishing references to “Christ in the Old Testament.” (Look at today’s Psalm, verses 4a, 9a, 21.) It was a powerful result of their personal, intimate, intuitive knowledge of their Savior and Lord.

Respond:
As we learn to know Jesus, we find that we can recognize Him in many areas of life. Or not. “I was a stranger, and you gave Me nothing to eat” (Matt 25:42). The key to our life as Christians is our growing relation with Him, and allowing Him to lead us in the paths He knows and loves.

Pray:
Dear Lord, Thank you for the chance to know You and to walk with You. Open the Scriptures to me this day, as I open my heart to You.

- D.D.

Week 14 – Christ in the OT, Day 3

   When Jesus began to preach in Galilee and Judea, He raised expectations immediately about who He was and what He was doing. But it seems from the Gospel accounts that He encountered more misunderstanding than comprehension. This was so particularly when He spoke with people representing the various groups within the Judaism of the day.
    We have a certain tendency to regard the Judaism of Jesus’ day as unified in thought and practice, but the Gospels soon dispel that impression. The Pharisees were most prominent in opposition to Jesus, they who understood strict adherence to the Law as the way to be most “Jewish.” For them, of course, the Messiah had to be a strict follower of the letter of the Law. On the other hand, the Zealots looked for military deliverance, and a military Messiah. For the monastic community at Qumran, the Messiah would be primarily a spiritual leader, reclaiming the purity inherent in the tradition. To the Sadducees, who brokered political and religious power with the Romans, the idea of a Messiah was more of a nuisance than a necessity. And the common folk, the greatest proportion of the population, who had no time for strict adherence to one philosophy or another, had sincere hopes but no clear concepts (Matt 16:13-14). No wonder Jesus’ preaching stirred up a hornet’s nest of controversy even among His own people.
    This situation helps us see that Jesus as Messiah had a two-fold task. Most fundamentally, He had the astonishing work to accomplish that the Father had given Him: to provide for the salvation of the world. But alongside this task He had a teaching role: to instruct the straying and warring factions of Israel in the truth about who God was, what His plan was, and what the Messiah was supposed to do. How would Jesus accomplish this second goal? His main method was to speak to them from the Scripture they held in common, to demonstrate His deeper knowledge and grasp of the tradition, and to show from the Old Testament that His mission was the very one that God had planned for centuries. Today’s passage from Matthew shows Him doing this in two instances. First, an off-the-wall test question from the Sadducees is used for an opportunity to talk about the very nature of God. In the second, Jesus puts His finger on the summary teaching of the whole OT – and it is love, not law. Jesus is also Lord, among other things, of the OT itself.
    Thus, Jesus often brought out Messianic implications from the OT that were not obvious in the text itself: Look at Luke 20:17 citing Psalm 118:22, or Matthew 26:31 citing Zechariah 13:7. A special instance for us during Holy Week is Jesus’ quotation on the Cross, of Psalm 22:1: “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” (Matt 27:46). No one prior to Jesus ever considered this passage to be Messianic, probably because it represented such pain and suffering. If as we saw yesterday the OT seems sometimes to prophecy too much about the Messiah for anyone to have put it all together, Jesus saw the problem in another way: no one had yet seen the vast scope of the Messiah’s role and task. Jesus revealed Himself to be “in the Old Testament” in places and ways that had not yet crossed anyone else’s mind.

Respond:
As the deliverer of Israel, God addressed political and social issues, but He also had to address their deliverance from sin. It is often the case that God, in responding to our prayers, has deeper work to do than we realize. When He acts to help us, it often requires changes not only in our circumstances but in our heart as well. This is the depth of His love for us.

Pray:
“Blessed be the Lord, who daily bears our burdens, the God who is our salvation. God to us is a God of deliverances.” Psalm 68:19-20

- D.D.

Week 14 – Christ in the OT, Day 2

   As we consider “Christ in the Old Testament,” we will look now at the way certain OT passages prophesy a future Messianic figure. Tomorrow we will explore the way Jesus’ own understanding adds to this, and then how the first Christians found even more to write about. But first there are the clear prophecies in the OT of an exceptional leader to come.
    Daniel 7:13-14 is a notable example. It appears in the heart of a longer prophecy of Daniel, which is apocalyptic by nature. Apocalyptic is a wild sort of prophecy (Daniel is the main OT example, and Revelation the main NT example) which addresses the very end of history as we know it, when all of reality will be negotiable and up for grabs. The promise is that God will triumph, evil will be trounced, and God’s people will be vindicated in blessing and peace. Our “Son of Man” passage heralds the ruler of this blessed age which is at or beyond the edge of history as we know it: he is a heavenly figure “like a son of man” to whom will be given an eternal kingdom. If we were to try to identify this figure with someone historical, there is really not much to go by in the passage itself. The context seems to be the world rather than national Israel, and the figure seems to trail traces of a supernatural identity: he comes with the clouds of heaven, and is like a son of man. Jewish interpreters have seen here a promise of the restoration of the ancient kingdom of David, even if the language seems to promise almost too much for that. Is this Christ in the OT? If so (and I would say so), then it is only a glimpse of one aspect of Christ, leaving us wanting more information, more clarity, and more definition.
    Well, but this is our point. Wherever Christ is seen in the OT, it is a partial, promissory glimpse. We had opportunity to mention some weeks ago that the coming Christ is generally anticipated along three lines: the coming king (as we see in Daniel), the coming prophet (as in Deut 18:18-19), and the coming priest (e.g., Zech 13:1). Each of these is an “anointed” role, that is, a role expressing the work of the Lord Himself among His people: the ruling of the kings, the relationship fostered by the priests, and the righteousness cultivated by the prophets. The Coming One will certainly be “anointed” to do the work of the Lord (“anointed” in Hebrew gives us “Messiah,” in Greek “Christ”).
 But it is also important to remember this: in the writings of the OT it remains an uncoordinated, unsystematized expectation. No one before the time of Jesus was able to weave all these strands into one clear concept. There was no agreed answer to the question, “Who do people say the Son of Man is?” (Matt 16:13). It all seemed to say too much; indeed, it all seemed to promise too much. But One was coming who would be able to draw all of these threads of the hopes of Israel to Himself, and hold them all confidently in His hand.

Respond:
Mahalia Jackson used to sing a spiritual with the great refrain, “He may not come when you want Him, but He’s right on time.” As Israel had to learn, God’s blessings for us come in His timing. But when fresh blessings come, they bring new knowledge and love as well. None of this can be short-circuited. Yet we remain impatient. Is there an area of your life today that would benefit from a reaffirmation that the timing is His?

Pray:
“God, be gracious unto us and bless us, and cause Your face to shine upon us, that Thy way may be known on the earth, and Thy salvation among all nations.” Psalm 67:1

- D.D.

Week 14 – Christ in the OT, Day 1

   This week, Easter week, we will look at a figure whose appearance throughout the Old Testament is for Christians very obvious, but who for others is not. We will explore the ways in which Jesus Christ is present in events, relationships, and themes in the centuries before His birth at Bethlehem.
    What is the relationship between the Testaments? The Old Testament, written before Jesus’ career on earth, constitutes the Hebrew Scriptures, and the documents of the New Testament were written after His ministry, death, and resurrection. But Christianity understands our Christian Scriptures to be both the Old and the New (not just the New), since we understand that each is inseparably connected with the other. There are a number of ways of envisioning that connection, some more helpful than others. At times some groups have thought that the OT was no longer relevant, since the New has come. Some have assumed that the OT has less valuable ideas than the NT, and can be safely skipped. To my mind, that is easy to disprove with a rereading of Psalm 23 or Isaiah 40. More widely accepted is the idea that the OT lays down truths which remain undeniable and valuable, but which have found a certain advancement in light of Christ. Thus human waywardness remains at the center of the spiritual challenge, as we have seen in the “grumbling” of the people under Moses. And the solution is the faithfulness of God’s offer of relationship, reiterated again and again in the OT stories. But for Christians the climactic confrontation of sin and grace is foreshadowed but withheld in the OT. Thus many describe the relation between the Testaments as one of “promise and fulfillment.”
    The passage from Jeremiah is a good example of this. In it the Lord laments that even though He offered Israel all the benefits of the closest of relationships, He was rejected. But this does not lead the Lord to declare His own rejection in turn of Israel. Rather, He promises to instill a whole new dimension of understanding in the very hearts of His people, accompanied by some sort of final resolution of the problem of sin. Together these will fulfill the purposes He has had since He called Abraham: finally “I will be their God and they will be My people.” We do not see this prophecy fulfilled anywhere in the OT.
    But Christians can easily see how the coming of Jesus brought fulfillment to it. Jesus’ sacrifice on the Cross offers the full forgiveness of our sins and ongoing cleansing (1 John 1:8). The promise of being born again in the Spirit brings the promise of full knowledge and love of God (1 John 5:20). For Christians, then, the OT sets up a certain understanding of what the problems are and where the solutions lie. The NT is needed to complete the uncompleted story of the OT, and to proclaim the fullness of the fulfilled promise. We will suggest in the next days that this pattern of promise and fulfillment is a rich way of getting at the truth of “Christ in the Old Testament.”

Respond:
The great sweep of God’s plan for us as addressed in Jeremiah has many dimensions, including neighborly relationships, national welfare, global history, and even individual love and care. This individual care is real, and is the focus of devotional practices such as this. As we are refreshed and empowered, however, our wider relationships and responsibilities also await God’s transforming love.

 Pray:
“Come and hear, all who fear the Lord, and I will tell of what He has done for my soul . . .  Blessed be God, Who has not turned away my prayer, nor His lovingkindness from me.” Psalm 66:16, 20

 - D.D.