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Christ in the Old Testament A
Divine Watermark
The Lord Jesus Christ is the central character of the New Testament scriptures. The opening words of the first gospel account, by Matthew, can be applied to the whole of the New Testament: "The book of the generation of Jesus Christ" (Matthew 1:1). The four gospels are followed by the account of the preaching of Christ's apostles, and by the letters they wrote to believers in him throughout the Roman world in the first century AD. But information about
Jesus Christ is not confined to the New Testament. His
coming was anticipated by men and women who lived before
the New Testament books were written: "The people
were in expectation, and all men mused in their hearts of
John (the Baptist), whether he were the Christ, or not"
(Luke 3:15). It must be a matter of
regret that all this information about Christ, revealed
by the inspiration of God to His servants the prophets
right from the dawn of human history, is so neglected.
For Jesus himself, these scriptures explained the reason
for his birth, the work he was to accomplish, and the
glory in store for him, and for all who come to God
through him. Our understanding of Christ will be
diminished if we do not take account of the information
presented about him in the Old Testament scriptures. Messiah was the Great
Deliverer for whom faithful Jews waited and longed. They
and some of their neighbours talked about "when
Messiah comes". One of the earliest disciples, after
he had met Jesus. told a friend, "We have found
Messiah", and the gospel writer who recorded the
incident added a word of explanation, "which is,
being interpreted, the Christ" (John 1:41). They
were exciting times. Faithful Jews had been craning their
necks to catch a glimpse of Messiah's time. They were
constantly on the watch, yearning for the day. Messiah
was the kernel of all Jewish hopes, the very essence of
the great promises made by God as set down in the Old
Testament. Jesus was that Messiah. The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in 1947, some of them pre-dating the birth of Jesus by over 200 years contain, for example, copies of the prophet Isaiah with exactly the same prophecies as are known to us from our English Bible. The same is true of the Greek translations of the Old Testament: they too were made two or three centuries before Christ and are known to us by various manuscripts now in museums in different parts of the world. Thus the prophecies were known in Hebrew and Greek long before Jesus came. Therefore, it would simply be flying in the face of incontestable facts to say that these prophecies were 'inserted' after Jesus was born. In any case, we must
remember that the Jewish nation is not Christian. and
they would never have allowed their Bible, the Old
Testament, to be tampered with by Christian hands. To try
to plead, as some have done, that the prophecies were
added at a later date is only to admit how good they are!
The only Bible available to Jesus was the one we know as
the Old Testament. Josephus, the Jewish historian of the
first century AD, lists the books in the Jewish Bible in
his day and they are exactly the ones we have in our Old
Testament. The Old Testament without doubt predates the
time of Jesus. These are important and significant words. Jesus took the apostles back to the three constituent parts of the Old Testament - the books of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms. He said that in those scriptures there were things about himself which were being fulfilled in his own life-story. "In all the scriptures" is how Jesus summed up the evidence. Describing some of these prophecies, Jesus said: "Moses wrote of me" (John 5:46). Moses lived about fifteen hundred years before Jesus! After his resurrection,
Jesus commanded the apostles to go out as his witnesses
to preach the gospel every where. As part of their
preaching of the gospel, they used as evidence those same
Messianic prophecies: the history of Jesus written before
it happened! And those same prophecies of the Old
Testament were in use in the synagogues throughout the
Mediterranean region. "I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away." (Revelation 21:3,4) Jesus Christ is the bridge
between Eden and the promised, glorious End. He is the
means whereby God accomplishes His mission of mercy and
salvation. The Old Testament prophecies about Jesus are
part of that story God's Grand Plan of Redemption. The
prophecies were revelations of how God would work out His
saving will. Let us follow the steps in the Grand Plan,
revealed long before Jesus was born. "And when thy days be fulfilled, and thou (David) shalt sleep with thy fathers, I will set up thy seed after thee, which shall proceed out of thy bowels, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build an house for my name, and I will stablish the throne of his kingdom for ever." (2 Samuel 7:12,13) "But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel: whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting." (Micah 5:2) These are promises of an
illustrious son of David who would be born in Bethlehem.
Solomon was the immediate successor - son of David, but
he was not born in Bethlehem. He certainly built a temple
for God, but his throne was not established for ever.
Moreover, Micah's prophecy, about Messiah being born in
Bethlehem, was written some two or three hundred years
after the death of David. Messiah had still not come.
About seven hundred years later Jesus was born in the
little town of Bethlehem a few miles from Jerusalem in
the land of Judah. "Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel." (Isaiah 7:14) "I will be his father, and he shall be my son." (1 Chronicles 17:13) "He shall cry unto me, Thou art my father, my God, and the rock of my salvation. Also I will make him my firstborn, higher than the kings of the earth." (Psalm 89:26,27) "I will declare the decree: the LORD hath said unto me, Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee." (Psalm 2:7) Therefore Messiah would be a descendant of David but not of a Jewish father. As the New Testament later tells us, he had a virgin mother but no human father. "Now all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us." (Matthew 1:22.23) "Concerning his Son Jesus Christ our Lord, which was made of the seed of David according to the flesh." (Romans 1:3) Surprisingly, the very first promise of the virgin birth (Genesis 3:15) calls the promised Deliverer: "the seed of the woman", not the seed of the man. It was God, not man, who would provide the Redeemer: nevertheless, he would be born of a woman: "But
when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his
Son, made of a woman ..." (Galatians 4:4) "The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God." (Isaiah 40:3) "Behold, I will send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way before me." (Malachi 3:1) The message of John Baptist stirred the hearts of thousands of Jews to repentance and preparation. John told them to get ready for Messiah, and when Jesus came to the River Jordan where John was preaching and baptizing, one of John's disciples said: "We
have found him, of whom Moses in the law, and the
prophets, did write, Jesus of Nazareth ..." (John 1:45)
"The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me: because the LORD hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound; to proclaim the acceptable year of the LORD." (Isaiah 61:1-2) "The Lord God hath given me the tongue of the learned, that I should know how to speak a word in season to him that is weary: he wakeneth morning by morning, he wakeneth mine ear to hear as the learned." (Isaiah 50:4) No wonder the gospel is
called "glad tidings". People who had been
locked in dead formalism and made afraid by their
teachers and rulers found release and joy and hope - just
as the prophets had promised. They caught the meaning of
all this, and sick people repeatedly called Jesus, "the
son of David", the one promised to David by God. He
was their Messiah. "Strengthen ye the weak hands, and confirm the feeble knees. Say to them that are of a fearful heart, Be strong, fear not: behold, your God will come with vengeance, even God with a recompence: he will come and save you. Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped. Then shall the lame man leap as an hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing: for in the wilderness shall waters break out. and streams in the desert." (Isaiah 35:3-6) The people said they believed that his words and miracles proved that Jesus was the promised Messiah: "Then
was brought unto him one possessed with a devil, blind
and dumb: and he healed him, insomuch that the blind and
dumb both spake and saw. And all the people were amazed,
and said, Is not this the son of David?" (Matthew 12:22,23)
"He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not." (Isaiah 53:3) "Thus saith the LORD, the Redeemer of Israel, and his Holy One, to him whom man despiseth, to him whom the nation abhorreth ..." (Isaiah 49:7) "I gave my back to the smiters, and my cheeks to them that plucked off the hair: I hid not my face from shame and spitting." (Isaiah 50:6) "Thou
hast known my reproach, and my shame, and my dishonour:
mine adversaries are all before thee. Reproach hath
broken my heart: and I am full of heaviness: and I looked
for some to take pity, but there was none; and for
comforters, but I found none." (Psalm 69:19,20) "For dogs have compassed me: the assembly of the wicked have inclosed me: they pierced my hands and my feet. I may tell all my bones: they look and stare upon me." (Psalm 22:16,17) Even the sharing of his clothes - which the New Testament describes as having been carried out by the soldiers - is clearly described: "They part my garments among them, and cast lots upon my vesture." (Psalm 22:18) The mockery, scorn and biting derision of his enemies, and Christ's uncomplaining submission were prophesied: "But I am a worm, and no man; a reproach of men, and despised of the people. All they that see me laugh me to scorn: they shoot out the lip, they shake the head." (Psalm 22:6,7) "He was oppressed. and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth." (Isaiah 53:7) There are no more poignant
words in the Bible than these which were written up to a
thousand years before the event they describe. Their
complete fulfilment in Christ is evidence that he was
Messiah and that prophecies were the word of God. They
could not be the word of anyone else. "Surely he hath borne our griefs. and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions. he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him: and with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all." (Isaiah 53:4-6) These things were not
amazing coincidences or chance happenings; they were part
of the Great Plan of God, of which Christ is the pivotal
centre. This is a most unlikely possibility. In any case, such an argument collapses completely in the light of his resurrection from the dead. This wonderful miracle was entirely out of his hands and, moreover, was not expected by his disciples. His resurrection - the final miracle which crowned everything that had gone before - came to them as a joyful surprise. And it too was foretold in the Old Testament: "Therefore I will look unto the LORD: I will wait for the God of my salvation: my God will hear me. Rejoice not against me, 0 mine enemy: when I fall, I shall arise; when I sit in darkness. the LORD shall be a light unto me. (Micah 7:7,8) "For thou wilt not leave my soul in hell: neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption. Thou wilt shew me the path of life: in thy presence is fulness of joy; at thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore." (Psalm 16:10,11) The words "soul" and "hell" are the usual Hebrew words for 'a person' and 'the grave'. Not only was Messiah to be raised from the dead, his body would not be contaminated by corruption during the time he was in the grave! This evidence from the Psalms forms the cornerstone of the preaching of the apostles. It could not apply to anyone other than the Lord Jesus Christ. Speaking of the about words from Psalm 16, as quoted above, the apostle Peter on Pentecost day said: "Men
and brethren, let me freely speak unto you of the
patriarch David, that he is both dead and buried, and his
sepulchre is with us unto this day. Therefore being a
prophet, and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to
him, that of the fruit of his loins, according to the
flesh, he would raise up Christ to sit on his throne; he
seeing this before spake of the resurrection of Christ,
that his soul was not left in hell, neither his flesh did
see corruption. This Jesus hath God raised up, whereof we
all are witnesses." (Acts 2:29-32) "Thou wilt shew me the path of life: in thy presence is fulness of joy; at thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore. (Psalm 16:11) "The LORD said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool." (Psalm 110:1) This was the crowning
glory of the evidence. It completes the Old Testament
trail that led to Jesus of Nazareth. It both sealed the
certainty that Jesus was Son of God and it proved the Old
Testament scripture to be the totally reliable word of
God. That Jesus had ascended to heaven and was seated at
God's right hand: that was the final evidence that Christ
was Messiah. "Thou wilt shew me the path of life: in thy presence is fulness of joy; at thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore." (Psalm 16:11) This we have read; but there is an added promise in the other verse we quoted: "The LORD said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool." The Psalmist goes on to say: "The LORD shall send the rod of thy strength out of Zion: rule thou in the midst of thine enemies." (Psalm 110:2) No wonder that Psalm 110:1 is the most quoted verse from the Old Testament to appear in the New! Read how this verse was applied by the apostle Peter: "Whom (Jesus) the heaven must receive until the times of restitution of all things, which God hath spoken by the mouth of all his holy prophets since the world began." (Acts 3:21) The Jesus who ascended to
heaven is the Christ who is coming to reign on earth as
King of kings and Lord of lords. He who wore the crown of
thorns will wear the crown of glory. He will reign as
King over all the earth. This is beyond doubt. Those
promises will be fulfilled as surely as the prophecies
about his first coming were fulfilled in him. To them this was incredible and quite unthinkable. Yet, it happened. The Romans besieged the city and finally known over-ran it in AD 70. The havoc and carnage were terrible. Despite the Roman general's command that the temple should not be violated, his soldiers set it ablaze and left it in ruins. God's words are always
fulfilled. The gospel has now reached all parts of the
earth. Christ has become a light to the Gentiles. as the
Old Testament declared would be the case. It is for us in
Gentile lands to answer the question of Pilate, the Roman
governor. and to meet its challenge: "What shall I
do with Jesus which is called Christ?" He is the
promised Saviour of mankind. and the coming King. There
is no hope for any of us or for the world without him.
Wise men from a Gentile country came to Jesus when he was
born. Wise men have come to him ever since. Will you be
one of them? "Hear the word of the LORD, O ye nations, and declare it in the isles afar off, and say, He that scattered Israel will gather him, and keep him, as a shepherd doth his flock." (Jeremiah 31:10) "For, lo, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will bring again the captivity of my people Israel and Judah, saith the LORD: and I will cause them to return to the land that I gave to their fathers, and they shall possess it." (Jeremiah 30:3) Those prophecies are as clear and unambiguous as those about Christ. We all are witnesses to their truth. Everyone knows about the Jews as a nation in their own land. The Bible foretold it and God has fulfilled it. Therefore, it is absolutely certain that Christ will come back to be King on earth. Look at what the Old Testament has promised: "For
unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the
government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall
be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The
everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace. Of the increase
of his government and peace there shall be no end, upon
the throne of David, and upon his kingdom, to order it,
and to establish it with judgment and with justice from
henceforth even for ever. The zeal of the LORD of hosts
will perform this." (Isaiah 9:6,7) Surely, this is worth believing. And it is true! HARRY TENNANT Reproduced by courtesy of the Christadelphian Magazine and Publishing Association by whom all rights are reserved. |
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