“Advance Notice”
Luke 24:13-49
January 17, 2010
Judas of Galilee…Theudas…Simon bar Kokhba…Menahem ben Judah…Moses Botarel…Asher Kay…David Reubeni…Solomon Molcho… Mordecai Mokiakh…Jacob Querido…Judah ben Shalom…and the recently deceased Menachem Mendel Schneerson…ever heard of any of these cats? But they belong on a list with Jesus, because they all, along with a list about three times as long, share this in common: they claimed to be the Messiah of Israel. And then there is “Daddy”.
MIAMI, Florida (CNN) -- The minister has the number 666 tattooed on his arm. But Jose Luis de Jesus Miranda is not your typical minister. De Jesus, or "Daddy" as his thousands of followers call him, does not merely pray to God: He says he is God. "The spirit that is in me is the same spirit that was in Jesus of Nazareth," de Jesus says. O—KAY! The question for today is, out of all of the would-be claimants to the title “Messiah”, how do we know that Jesus fits?
TossUp
If someone asked, “what sets your Jesus apart from other religious leaders”, how would you answer?
Boy, did Brit Hume step in it! He recently was commenting on Tiger Woods’ troubles, and what it would take for Woods to get a grip on his life, and Hume, who went through a bad divorce and the suicide of his son, and then found salvation in Jesus, dared to suggest, as a Christian, that Woods’ professed Buddhism wouldn’t serve him nearly as well as a conversion to faith in Christ. That sure ignited a firestorm. Buddhism doesn’t offer forgiveness of sin in the same sense that Christian faith does, and it’s pretty obvious that Woods is a pretty good sinner, right? Of course, we all are—and we all need, not enlightenment, but forgiveness—but Brit Hume’s ideas didn’t go over real well with the powers that be in the mainstream media, to put it mildly! Hume was excoriated by some for daring to suggest that Christian faith offers something that no other does: forgiveness.
Is Christian faith superior to other faiths? Indeed, is Jesus superior to other so-called “religious leaders”? Or is Jesus just one among many, and Christian faith, as some would suggest, just one other option in the cafeteria of faiths, as it were? How do we know that Jesus is the Messiah, that He is set apart from all other would-be deliverers? Here’s the Big Idea for this morning: “Jesus is seen in the Old Testament in many ways, confirming the fact that He is Israel’s Messiah.”
I. Jesus Present in the Old Testament
“Come again, Pastor? Jesus present in the Old Testament? Wait…didn’t He come on the scene in the New Testament? After all, we just finished Christmas, and I’m pretty sure the stories about His birth are in books like Luke and Matthew. What do you mean, Jesus is present in the Old Testament?” That’s exactly what I mean. And I mean it in more than the sense that Jesus is the storyline of the Bible, more than in the sense that we can find prophecies about Him (we’ll get to that in a minute). I mean that Jesus appears in the Old Testament—and He does so on many occasions! Follow me on this. The “Angel of the Lord” is the terminology and the term used in Hebrew, mal’ ak, means
“Angel” means “sent one” or “messenger”.
When we think of “angel”, certain images are conjured up in our minds—perhaps some that aren’t Biblical; what we ought to think of is God’s messengers. And we can name some of the angels, Gabriel and Michael coming to mind, but in the Old Testament, roughly 1/3 of the 214 usages of this term in the Old Testament refer to Christ.
The term we use is “Christophany”.
A “Christophany” is a pre-incarnate appearance of Jesus in the Old Testament. “Pre-incarnate” means “prior to Jesus taking on flesh permanently as the man Jesus.” So what we’re talking about is Jesus being seen and referred to in the Old Testament as something other than Jesus, and the term is “Angel of the Lord”. Notice:
The “Angel of the Lord” is
o Divine
When people encounter the angel of the Lord—we’ll note some of those instances in a minute—they often identify this Him as divine. In fact, He is often referred to as “LORD”, and as “God”; He speaks and acts as the LORD, and He accepts worship. Question, class: if this were an angel, and he accepted worship, would he be an angel? No, if he accepted worship due only to God, he’d be a blasphemer! But something else is critical:
o Distinct from another Person (“God”)
We see this happening clearly in some of the passages I’ll mention.
o Deputed to reveal God & His salvation
The task of the angel of the Lord is to reveal God and God’s salvation to men. And so notice some of the instances in which this happens:
• The Angel of the Lord appears to Hagar (Gen. 16).
The Angel of the Lord—Christ—declares that He has heard Hagar’s misery, and is then identified by Hagar who says, “You are the God Who sees me; I have now seen the One Who sees me.”
• The Angel of the Lord appears to Abraham when he went to sacrifice Isaac on Mount Moriah (Gen. 22).
The Angel of the Lord says, “Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son, from Me.” The Angel speaks of God as being other than Himself, but then uses first person—“you have not withheld your son from Me.”
• The Angel of the Lord wrestles with Jacob (Gen. 32).
Jacob wrestled with this Angel of the Lord, and said, “I have seen God face-to-face”. Doesn’t sound like an ordinary angel to me!
• The Angel of the Lord is invoked by Jacob when he blesses his grandsons (Gen. 48).
• The Angel of the Lord appears to Moses at the burning bush (Exodus 3).
Turn there; you have got to see this! Who’s in the bush (verse 2)? It’s the “angel”! Who’s in the bush (verse 4)? God! The great I AM of Israel speaks to Moses (:14); in John 8, Jesus earns the scorn of the religious leaders because of what they perceive as blasphemy, for Jesus said, “Before Abraham was, I AM.” He wasn’t merely saying, “My name is the same as God’s”; He was saying, “that was Me in the bush speaking—and I exist from before the time of Abraham as well!”
• The Angel of the Lord went ahead of Israel in pillars of cloud and fire (Exodus 13, 14).
• The Angel of the Lord claims credit for delivering Israel (Judges 2).
• The Angel of the Lord appears to Gideon (Judges 6).
Now, I want you to see something neat: remember the definition of “angel” (a sent one, a messenger)?
• 40 times, in the book of John, Jesus is called “the One sent from God.”
Here’s the point: Jesus, the “Angel of God”, was present often in the Old Testament. Question: if He were a mere man, how could He be? Further question: any other religious leaders you know of who were alive before they were born? John Calvin wrote, “The orthodox doctors of the Church have correctly and wisely expounded, that the Word of God was the supreme angel, who then began, as it were by anticipation, to perform the office of Mediator. For though he were not clothed with flesh, yet he descended as in an intermediate form, that he might have more familiar access to the faithful. This closer intercourse procured for him the name of the Angel; still, however, he retained the character which justly belonged to him – that of the God of ineffable glory” (Calvin, Institute xiii.10). Jesus was present in the Old Testament. Second,
II. Jesus Predicted in the Old Testament
What we call the “Old Testament”, the Hebrew Scriptures, was written by over 20 different authors over a period of over 1000 years. Remarkably, though, the message of the Old Testament is self-consistent, and it points to Jesus. Jesus told the religious leaders of His day that they had studied their Scriptures all of their lives, and yet now that the fulfillment of those Scriptures, the very events they pointed toward, had come to pass, they were oblivious to them!
Faith in God is faith in Christ. God willed that the Jews should be so instructed by these prophecies that they might turn their eyes directly to Christ in order to seek deliverance…apart from Christ the saving knowledge of God does not stand. From the beginning of the world he had consequently been set before all the elect that they should look upon him and put their trust in him… God is comprehended in Christ alone… John Calvin
There are many more prophecies than I will mention, but here is a sampling of some of the most significant prophecies of the Messiah:
A. His Birth
Having just recently celebrated Christ’s coming to earth as the baby of Bethlehem, some of these prophecies will be fresh in our minds:
• A microcosm of the gospel of Christ (Genesis 3:15; fulfilled in Galatians 4:4).
• Abraham’s seed to bless all on earth (Genesis 12:3), specifically through Isaac (Genesis 17:19), Jacob (Numbers 24:17), Judah (Genesis 49:30). Fulfilled in Matthew 1:1-2.
• Born of a virgin (Isaiah 7:14; fulfilled in Matthew 1:18-23).
• Born in Bethlehem (Micah 5:2; fulfilled in Luke 2:1-7).
B. His Life
We tend to skip from His birth to His death/resurrection, almost treating Jesus’ life as an afterthought—a mistake I don’t intend to make in this series—but aspects of His life were predicted:
• Sinless (Isaiah 53:9, fulfilled in I Peter 2:21-22).
• A forerunner to Jesus (Isaiah 40:3, fulfilled in John Baptist, Matthew 3:1-3).
• A miraculous healer (Isaiah 35:5-6, fulfilled many places).
• Ride into Jerusalem on a donkey (Zechariah 9:9, fulfilled in Luke 19:28, 35-38).
Further, elements surrounding
C. His Death
All of the following prophecies were fulfilled in Matthew 26 & 27, Luke 23, and John 19:
• Betrayed by a friend (Psalm 41:9).
• Mocked, beaten, spit upon (Isaiah 50:6).
• Lots cast for the Messiah’s clothing (Psalm 22:18).
• Would not defend Himself (Isaiah 53:7).
• Crucifixion alluded to—hundreds of years prior to crucifixion (Psalm 22:16).
• Killed alongside sinners (Isaiah 53:12).
• No bones broken (Exodus 12:46; Psalm 34:20).
• Forsaken while dying (Psalm 22:1).
• Buried in a tomb given by a rich man (Isaiah 53:9).
D. His Resurrection – Psalm 16:30, Isaiah 53:10-11
Not only are there allusions to the resurrection of Christ in these Old Testament passages, but the resurrection is the signal proof that Paul offers for the authenticity of Christ. It all comes down to whether or not Jesus did something that only Jesus had the ability to do: rise bodily from the grave after being dead and in the ground for a period of time encompassing three days. Paul makes this clear in I Corinthians 15, that if Jesus is not raised from the dead—and not some phony-baloney, Jehovah’s Witnesses “he raised spiritually, but not physically” nonsense, but a real, out of the grave walking/talking/breathing body—if that body isn’t raised from the grave, then we are miserable fools. Those are the stakes: we are not just nice people doing something harmless here: we are either people who are onto the greatest thing that has ever taken place in human history, or we’re a collection of silly deluded Bozos who deserved to be pitied or laughed at or a little of both.
I helped an atheist out one time; I was having an online discussion with him, and he was raising the question of whether Jesus Christ had ever lived. I suggested to him that he was fighting a losing proposition there, that the evidence for the existence of Jesus was pretty overwhelming, but that if he really wanted to undermine our faith, he ought to focus on the resurrection, that Paul had written, and I wholeheartedly concur, that everything about our faith hinges on the resurrection. Disprove that, I said, and you win. Of course, if my atheist friend Anthony were to try to debunk the resurrection, and came to the conclusion that it was instead true, he wouldn’t be the first atheist to do so! Jesus predicted;
III. Jesus Presaged in the Old Testament
What do we mean by “presaged”? Simply this: there are things that took place in the Old Testament that pointed to Christ! Many could be named, but let’s consider several and focus briefly on one:
Several examples (among many):
• The blood sacrifices (Hebrews 9:12)
The entire sacrificial system of the Old Testament was designed to point to the fact that “without the shedding of blood, there is no remission of sins”, but also to the One Who would be Himself the once-for-all sacrifice for sin, Jesus. But when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things that have come…He entered once for all into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves but by means of His own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption (Hebrews 9:11,12).
• The serpent on the pole (Numbers 21:4-9; John 3:14)
The people of Israel were grumbling in the wilderness, and God sent fiery serpents among them; many were bitten and died. To remedy this, God instructed Moses to fashion a brass serpent and lift it high upon a pole, and those who would but look at the serpent on the pole would live. Jesus says in John 3 that as Moses lifted up the serpent on a pole in the wilderness, so He must be lifted up, that whoever believes in Him may have eternal life. Serpent reminds us of sin/curse that sin brings. Brass is a symbol of judgment, and the pole reminds us of the cross of Christ. Moses lifting up the serpent on the pole in the wilderness, and the people being saved by trusting God and looking at the pole, is emblematic of salvation by faith in Christ. The whole story isn’t simply a story of how things took place, a fanciful but random idea, but rather designed by God to teach a powerful spiritual truth, to presage the coming of Jesus Christ.
• Jonah
Jesus, in Matthew 16, responded to the religious leaders who sought a sign by saying that He would only give them the “sign of Jonah”, that as Jonah was three days/nights in the belly of the whale, so Jesus would be in the earth—and then rise again. The story of Jonah wasn’t just a story of a man and a big fish, and it didn’t all happen by accident; God was foreshadowing the resurrection of Christ in the release of Jonah from the belly of the fish!
• Passover (I Corinthians 5:7)
Here is perhaps the pre-eminent foreshadowing of the work of Christ.
The people of Israel groaned under bondage to the Egyptians. And the more they groaned, the more Pharaoh piled it on. And so Israel cried out for a deliverer, and God raised up the reluctant Moses to be His man of the hour, to boldly approach Pharaoh with the demand that the Israelites be allowed to leave Egyptian bondage. But his God-hardened heart caused Pharaoh to reject Moses’ demands again and again, despite God sending terrible plagues upon the people of Egypt. Finally, God told Moses to tell Pharaoh that He would go among the entire nation of Egypt during the middle of the night, and the firstborn from every household would die. Only those who by faith in God’s Word placed the sign of the blood of a spotless lamb on the doorposts of their dwellings would be spared such a fate; God would “pass over” these homes, and their children would be spared. It was through the death of a lamb, and the application of that lamb’s blood by faith to their own circumstances, that the people were delivered from death and freed from Egyptian bondage. A yearly memorial called “Passover” was established by God, to be observed by His covenant people, remembering for all time God’s deliverance of His people from bondage when He “passed over” those who responded in faith with the blood on their doorposts.
Fast-forward to the night that Jesus was betrayed. He gathered with His apprentices there in an upper room to observe together the Passover meal just as pious Jews had for centuries. Everything was done just as the custom designated, but Jesus added a new significance to the Passover meal, for when He stood up, He said, “this is My body, which is broken for you. And this cup is My blood; do this in remembrance of Me.” No longer would those disciples look back exclusively to the deliverance of Israel from Egyptian bondage; they would remember Jesus, and the deliverance He brings through His own sacrificial death on the cross, the shedding of His blood for us. I Corinthians 5 names Christ “our Passover Lamb”. And it is in this way that the Passover mentioned in Exodus wasn’t merely the way God decided to randomly deliver His people from Egyptian bondage; it was His divine object lesson which pointed to Jesus’ work on the cross to once-for-all deliver people, not from human bondage, but from their bondage to sin!
Just as the people of Israel by faith applied the blood of a spotless lamb to themselves and were delivered, and just as the people of Israel, tormented by the fiery serpents in the wilderness, could live by simply turning to look at the serpent lifted up on the pole, so we, when we look to the Lamb Who was slain—and resurrected from the grave—we live as well, eternally, forgiveness of sins accomplished and new life imparted!
And so as we look at the Old Testament, we find that Jesus is not only present there in many places, and predicted in dozens and dozens of prophecies made hundreds of years before He was born in Bethlehem, but also that in a variety of places, God did things as He did them in order that they might presage the coming of Jesus.
So what does all of this mean? Let’s wrap up with several thoughts: First, Christian faith is just that: faith. To pretend otherwise is to make a mistake not warranted in Scripture; according to the Bible, it is faith that God is looking for, faith that God rewards. We need not blanche at that at all; we need not take a back seat to those who claim to be followers of objective science, for there is no dichotomy; the only issue is the trustworthiness of the Object of our faith, and the Object of our faith is Jesus. We are called to trust Jesus, to serve Jesus, to love Jesus.
To love Jesus, we have to know Jesus. To know Jesus, we have to know His Word. And a significant part of His Word—one which we tend to overlook to our own hurt—is what we call the Old Testament. And the Old Testament, while of course not naming Jesus by name, points to Him in approximately 300 different prophecies, of these 60 are major prophecies; the New Testament writers cite these prophecies over 130 times—and so these prophecies mattered significantly to them—as they ought to us!
Now…it could be that all of these things are coincidence. And of course, certain of the fulfilled prophecies were fulfilled by Jesus precisely because He knew what the Scripture taught that the Messiah would do…but consider the fact that many of the fulfilled prophecies about Jesus were not fulfilled by Him, but by others, including those who were betraying and crucifying Him! But what are the chances of these prophecies being fulfilled in one person? Astronomer and mathematician Peter Stoner, in his book Science Speaks, offers a mathematical analysis showing that it is impossible that the precise statements about the One to come could be fulfilled in a single person by mere coincidence.
The chance of only eight of these dozens of prophecies being fulfilled in the life of one man has been estimated at 1 in 10 to the 17th power. That would be 1 chance in 100,000,000,000,000,000. How can we put this in terms we can comprehend? Dr. Stoner illustrates the odds with this scenario: "Take 1017 silver dollars and lay them on the face of Texas [with its approximate land area of 262,000 square miles]. They will cover all of the state two feet deep. Now mark one of these silver dollars and stir the whole mass thoroughly, all over the state. Blindfold a man and tell him that he can travel as far as he wishes, but he must pick up one silver dollar and say that this is the right one.
"What chance would he have of getting the right one? Just the same chance that the prophets would have had of writing these eight prophecies and having them all come true in any one man."
What a wonderful Savior, the promised One of Israel, Who still comes to longing hearts today!
TalkAbout
Revisit the TossUp question: “what sets Jesus apart from other leaders?” Would your answer change in any way? How?
Was anything “new” to you today? How does knowing these things increase your love for the Lord?
