Finding Jesus in the Bible…So We Can Follow Him in Life
Bible Reading Plans
- Plan One: New Testament Only
- Plan Two: New Testament + Psalms
- Plan Three: New Testament + History
- Plan Four: The Entire Bible – Year 1 of 3, Year 2 of 3, Year 3 of 3
Don’t know which plan? Go to A Christ-Centered Bible Reading Plan: Quick Start.
Extras
Verse of the Day, Audio Capsule, and Video Minute
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Christ Is God
Chapter 3 – Christ and God in the Old Testament
In Old Testament times, messiah was merely a hope. And a distant one at that. God worked patiently over 4,000 years to paint a vast word picture of who and what christ would be.
(Notice that I’m using the words “messiah” and “christ” interchangeably – just as the Bible does. And this is just as I explained in the previous chapter. I’m also putting these words in lower case to help us remember how people of that time thought of this promised figure. Keep in mind also that upper and lower case letters have only been by post-biblical readers. This is because all letters were of uniform size in biblical times.)
Right after Adam and Eve sinned in the garden of Eden, God pronounced judgment. Here’s part of what He said to the serpent (Satan, the devil):
Genesis 3:15 And I will put enmity
Between you and the woman,
And between your seed and her seed;
He shall bruise you on the head,
And you shall bruise him on the heel.”
In this verse, it’s messiah that God is speaking about. But He doesn’t use that title or give him a name.
A few chapters later, Genesis says this.
Genesis 5:28 Lamech lived one hundred and eighty-two years, and became the father of a son.
Genesis 5:29 Now he called his name Noah, saying, “This one will give us rest from our work and from the toil of our hands arising from the ground which the LORD has cursed.”
In this case, God is using Noah as an example of what messiah would be like. This way of presenting messiah was more subtle. Messiah was often foreshadowed by various Old Testament heroes.
Moses was one of those foreshadowings. He also says himself that messiah would be a prophet – meaning messiah would speak for God.
Deuteronomy 18:15 “The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your countrymen, you shall listen to him.”
Our last example of an Old Testament reference to messiah comes from the promise God made through the prophet Nathan to King David. God was promising that one of David’s descendants would be king – an even greater king than David had been.
2 Samuel 7:12 “When your days are complete and you lie down with your fathers, I will raise up your descendant after you, who will come forth from you, and I will establish his kingdom.
In this chapter, I have given you four examples of what are called “messianic prophecies” in the Old Testament. There are literally hundreds of them in total. In an English translation, only one or two have the literal word “messiah” in them. The rest refer to messiah in the wide variety of ways you see demonstrated in the four verses above.
The vast verbal portrait of messiah that took the whole Old Testament to paint, was the accumulation of hundreds of verbal brush strokes – each one conveying some specific facet of messiah and what he would do. God used the Old Testament to portray that messiah would be a man. And He used the New Testament to portray that messiah would be more than a man.
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