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 16 – The Mindset of New Testament Believers
With its many messianic prophecies, the Old Testament prepared 1st-century Jews for the coming of their Messiah. What they were not prepared for was the way He would come. For one thing, they did not anticipate that Messiah would come twice: once in suffering, and then again in glory.
After Messiah’s resurrection, first-generation believers in Him found themselves living between those two comings. That meant that they were living by revelations that came with His first coming, while waiting on more revelation that would come with His second coming.
The Second Coming did not come until after all the New Testament texts had been written. Therefore, what we know about the Second Coming, we know by prophecy, not history. We’ll cover those later in this book.
Here again are the major New Testament revelations identified in the previous chapter.
- Messiah was more than a mere man.
- He was crucified and killed before He was enthroned as king.
- He was raised from the dead and seated at the right hand of God.
- Before the creation of the world, Messiah had been created by God.
- After God created Messiah, Messiah created everyone and everything else.
One or more of these bullet points may be new to you, but they were all new to 1st-century Jews. So also was the close-up “picture” of God with Christ working at His side, creating and managing the world. However, by the time the New Testament texts began to be written – roughly 15-20 years after Jesus sat down at the right hand of the Father – the New Testament church had become thoroughly familiar, and comfortable, with these revelations. And that these believers were growing in their understanding of the those truths.
How do we know that New Testament believers fully understood and embraced these revelations? Because of the way these revelations are written about in the New Testament – not as news flashes that needed to be explained, nor as controversies that needed to be argued.
Let me elaborate on how these revelations were addressed in the New Testament. I’ve already described the popularity of the Old Testament’s Psalm 110:1 as a beginning and unifying rallying cry.
Psalm 110:1 The LORD says to my Lord:
“Sit at My right hand
Until I make Your enemies a footstool for Your feet.”
As for the period of pre-creation, which had not been disclosed in Old Testament times, there are minimal but sufficient New Testament passages to support and explain it. I have been showing them to you one by one. (The core passages are John 1:1-18, 1 Corinthians 8:6, Colossians 1:15-17, and Hebrews 1:1-2:4, 13:8, 20-21.)
If you were to read each of these these core texts in context, you would see that they speak as reminders to the churches – not as fresh material to be considered for adoption. In fact, none of these revelations is presented as a new subject that has to be broken down in detail. Or as a controversial subject that needed to be defended. And remember, there were controversies in the first church that the apostles had to tamp down. It’s just that these revelations I’ve described to you were not among them.
In addition, almost all of the New Testament’s letters had a greeting (called a “salutation” by scholars) that called to mind Psalm 110:1 and supporting verses, as well as the pre-creation period. I’ll show them to you in an upcoming chapter.
Based on all this evidence, we can know that the earliest churches had settled and commonly-understood convictions about these revelations by the time the New Testament texts were being written. Thus the New Testament mindset we read was united.
We’ll now dig deeper into these revelations about God and Christ so that we’ll be fully prepared when it’s time to tackle the Second Coming revelations.
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