Jesus in the OT: Jesus in Prophecy - Sermon for CATM - November 25, 2018
So we’ve been looking in some depth at Jesus in the Old Testament - Jesus in Creation, Jesus in the Law and Jesus Incognito (His cloaked appearances or theophanies) and today we are looking at Jesus in Old Testament prophecy. This is to help us get a grounding in what Advent, the incarnation of God in the Christ Child, is all about. Advent starts next Sunday!
And today we look at Jesus in prophecy, Jesus as He appears in the Old Testament as His coming to earth is anticipated and predicted.
What is prophecy? The foretelling or prediction of what is to come, inspired by God. The Bible defines a prophet as an ordinary person who reveals information from God that is otherwise unknown.
We’re going to look at just a few key passages in the old Testament and explore what they say about Jesus.
Jesus Will Destroy the Work of the Enemy of Our Souls
Read Genesis 3:1-15 (vv. 14-15)
I read the whole section so that we can place the key verse in its context.
Vv. 14-15
14 So the Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this, “Cursed are you above all livestock and all wild animals! You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life. 15 And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.”
What in the world does this have to do with Jesus, you may ask, as I did when I first heard of a connection, when I first heard that this was the earliest prophecy of Christ.
This passage is the record of Satan’s first deception. He confuses, misleads and ultimately greatly harms the first man and the first woman.
And this deception, and how extremely easily Adam and Eve were deceived and then rebelled against God’s command, is what has led to the chaos in the world since, and the chaos in the human heart since.
It’s a powerful narrative, a true story of what happened to the human race after God’s original blessing of creation.
But here, even here in this saddest of passages that foreshadows such human suffering that would follow for millennia, we see the first hint of redemption. We see the first prophecy of Jesus.
Where is it?
15 And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.”
God speaks of the woman, Eve. The mother of all human life. The matriarch of humankind, and of womankind in particular.
And to her, who here represents all womankind, God says that the ‘offspring’ of the woman will be in a battle with Satan himself.
The result is that the ‘offspring’ who is male in this case, will be struck by Satan in the heel.
That’s a wound. That’s a real wound. Feels horrible to have any part of your body attacked, struck.
But here in this passage, though the offspring of the woman is struck in the heel, a wound from which He can emerge and recover from, Satan will have...what will happen to Satan?
The offspring of the woman will crush his head. Satan will be ultimately destroyed, defeated. Done for. And this...this is what happened at the cross of Jesus.
The offspring of the woman would eventually crush the serpent’s head, a promise fulfilled in Christ’s victory over Satan—a victory in which all believers will share:
Romans 16:20 says: “The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet. The grace of our Lord Jesus be with you”.
This is an early hint of God’s plan of salvation through the cross.
So this is the first prophecy of Jesus. The first hint of what is to come.
A second Old Testament prophecy about Jesus
Jesus Will Be The Mighty God, The Everlasting Father
Isaiah 9:6-7 says this: “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. 7 Of the greatness of his government and peace there will be no end. He will reign on David’s throne and over his kingdom, establishing and upholding it with justice and righteousness from that time on and forever. The zeal of the Lord Almighty will accomplish this”.
This is a remarkable passage from the prophetic book of Isaiah. What it says very plainly is that a child, a son will be born who will have great authority and power.
The Son will have many titles, and in those titles reflect the very nature of God the Trinity.
1. Wonderful Counsellor
2. Mighty God
3. Everlasting Father
4. Prince of Peace
The letter to the Colossians helps to frame our understanding of this as it speaks about Jesus:
“For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form,” Colossians? ?2:9??
Jesus Will Be the Suffering Servant
And later on in the book of the prophet Isaiah, there is this description of the Messiah to come.
53 Who has believed our message and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
Isaiah asks who? Who will believe, who will trust the prophecy. It will be the person that God has revealed it to; God has revealed the truth and the hearer has not rejected the truth.
2 He grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground.
This speaks of Jesus infancy and childhood, the tenderness of youth. He grew us as one of us.
He grew up without status, in a low condition. And in a way not agreeable to the ideas that those waiting for the Messiah had.
They thought He should come in pomp, in power, as a mighty warrior. Instead of that, he grew up as a plant, silently.
He had nothing of the glory which one might have thought to meet with him.
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
Far from the standard depiction of Jesus being a blond, blue-eyed white guy from Wisconsin, the Messiah will look like an ordinary person from the culture of His day.
There won’t be superficial reasons for noticing His greatness.
3 He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.
So ordinary would the Messiah be, that He will be personally familiar with the pain and suffering that others of His day endured.
He would not be spared nor would He seek relief from the suffering that is life. But unique to the Messiah would be His general rejection.
Rejected by His people. Rejected by those He came to save.
Despised, loathed enough that people would give false testimony in order to incriminate Him.
So not only was the manner of Jesus coming unimpressive to those awaiting a mighty deliverer, He was, in the end, hated and turned down by those He came to save.
He was despised by the Pharisees who looked at the display of His power in His miracles, and who heard the wisdom of His teaching - He was hated so much that their best thinking was that He needed to die.
So rejected was He that He was plotted against. That’s a pretty active rejection, not a mere turning of the back to someone.
And Jesus was a man of sorrows. He was looked down on and passed over, a man who suffered, who knew pain firsthand. In fact he was the taunted one.
The bullied one.
We ended up hating him. Our Saviour knew what it was like to have people turn away, hide their faces. To Say “no!”.
To say “I will follow you wherever you go”, only to be followed up in the next breath by “I swear I never knew the man!” To say “Hosanna” in one breath and “Crucify him!” in another.
No one has suffered pain like Jesus suffered, no one has been more rejected, abused, neglected, despised than Jesus was and it was the world who rejected him. That means me. That means you. That’s the point.
Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.
Far from being hailed the long-awaited Messiah, He would be poorly regarded by His own people.
4 Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering,
The Messiah will take my pain upon Himself. The penalty for my sin, He will bear Himself.
yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted.
On the cross the leaders of His people, the very people who put Him there, would assume that the judgment He suffered was from God’s hand, when it was actually their own doing. They assumed the judgment that was on Him was for His own sin.
5 But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed.
But in truth He Who knew no sin was punished for our sins. He Who had led the only perfect life on this planet would be crushed, destroyed due to OUR sins.
Our iniquities, our wicked acts. But not for no reason.
Somehow His suffering for our sakes would bring us peace, peace within ourselves and peace with God. His wounding would bind our wounds.
Our Saviour has offered us an unspeakable gift. By his own choice, when he didn’t need to, when he was seated at the right hand of God the Father, he came to us.
And he came to us with an attitude - with an attitude worth considering:
“Being in very nature God, (Jesus) did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, 7 but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death—even death on a cross!”
Do not ever forget that even before he came to heal us, he came to suffer with us. Think about that.
As we think about the healing that we each need most deeply, we need to remember that Jesus did not come firstly to put an end to suffering, but rather to fill it with His presence.
6 We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the Lord has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.
Humans share a common choice. We have rejected God, We have walked out of the light of His grace, we have done our own thing, asserted our independence, our desire to be our own god.
And because of this God put on the Messiah the sins of us all. As a lamb would be sacrificed and the sins of the people pronounced over that lamb, God has laid all our sins on the Messiah.
So...the Scripture here puts all of us on the same level. All of us us, without exception, have gone off track, we’ve gone astray.
In going astray, in not living for God, we’ve turned to our own way.
But here is the amazing thing. Although it is we, me, us that have gone astray,
that have sinned against God, that have offended Him in our treatment of Him and our treatment of others, it is not we who pay the price.
God put on Jesus all of our sin.
He laid it all on Him. What I earned, my wages for sin, which is death, Jesus paid those wages.
He was led as a lamb goes to His slaughter.
That phrase is no accident, and it can remind us of God plan from the beginning. Revelation speaks of “the Lamb who was slain from the creation of the world”. (Rev 13:8 KJV)
7 He was oppressed and afflicted,
yet he did not open his mouth;
he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.
The Messiah would offer no self-defense. He would not try to vindicate Himself, He did not serve as His own lawyer trying to reduce His sentence.
Again, as a lamb He was led to the slaughter. To the cross He was led.
8 By oppression and judgment he was taken away. Yet who of his generation protested? For he was cut off from the land of the living; for the transgression of my people he was punished.
9 He was assigned a grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death,
though he had done no violence,
nor was any deceit in his mouth.
So much more could obviously be said. But here we have a prophecy about Jesus, written 750 years before He was born as a babe in Bethlehem:
10 Yet it was the Lord’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer, and though the Lord makes his life an offering for sin, he will see his offspring and prolong his days, and the will of the Lord will prosper in his hand.
The Messiah would be the suffering servant, wrongfully led to His death with no voice defending Him.
And here’s the thing. This was God’s plan all along. It was the will of God, God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, that Jesus would be made an offering for sin.
11 After he has suffered, he will see the light of life and be satisfied; by his knowledge my righteous servant will justify many, and he will bear their iniquities.
All of this was on Jesus. The penalty for sins not His own. Rather, the sins of humanity were what He paid for on the cross. But this was all for a reason.
It was so that you and I could be the recipient of his grace. The love of God will be revealed to us most profoundly as we come to a knowledge of the saving work of Jesus.
The result of knowing about the saving work of Jesus would be for many, not all, but many, that we would be justified. And that means that God would see us just as if we never sinned.
Jesus willingly bears our iniquities, all of our sins without exception.
He is the flawless, perfect Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, as John the Baptist sad when he first saw Jesus, when Jesus came to him to be baptized.
12 Therefore I will give him a portion among the great and he will divide the spoils with the strong, because he poured out his life unto death, and was numbered with the transgressors.
For he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.
It seems fairly clear to me that all of this requires some kind of response. I know this, because as an atheist when I first heard the gospel, it was clear to me that I had to give some kind of response. And that response involved a choice.
And that choice was to either reject the gift of God's grace, to reject in its entirety gospel that I had heard, or to have a very different response.
And I believe because God had been working in my life for many months before I first heard the gospel, I choose to say Yes.
Yes to the Love of God. Yes to the grace of God. Yes to the power of God at work through Jesus on the cross.
And also, something that I began to struggle with almost right away, I was choosing to say yes to a very different way of viewing myself.
No longer would I live as though my life does not matter.
No longer would I have to question the meaning of life, which had long been a frustrating preoccupation for me.
No longer would I have to trudge through what I truly had come to believe was an objectively meaningless life.
Instead, all my yeses to God, like all your yeses to God have resulted in a completely different life than I would’ve had.
Not an easy life. If anyone’s ever suggest to you that being a Christian is easy, they are not being honest with you.
Every good thing that is in my life as a direct result of Jesus working to turn I heart of stone into a heart of flesh, working in me to believe and continue believing.
All of this was God’s will. It was God’s plan, for Jesus to bear my sins, to stand in my place in judgment.
If you are not impacted by this, I feel confident to say that you do not, actually, really, understand this.
If you have trouble believing this, then you're in the good company of all who have considered the gospel,
everyone who has wondered at the power of the gospel story, who has struggled to imagine and come to terms with not only the details of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.
But you’re also in the company of those who have struggled with the even more difficult idea behind the gospel: that you are loved so powerfully, so extravagantly by God,
that to God you are so valuable and objectively your life matters so much to the Creator of the universe, that He would do all that He did in the gospel for you.
Even if much of what I've said today is hard to grasp, or if it's just really new to you, much harder is letting it in, letting it into your life.
I learned that far from my feeling before I believed, that my life didn't have any particular value or meaning, the opposite was true. I learned that God had a purpose for my life, and it wasn't to just scrape by.
I wasn't to just exist until I died. I learned that in Jesus Christ, the Suffering Servant, my life was intended BY GOD to matter.
He would give me the power to overcome trials in a very important way. He would place His Holy Spirit in me.
And He would give me the power to grow through suffering rather than being destroyed by it. God would now use my trials, my temptations, my sufferings to refine me to be more and more like Jesus.
Today we’ve been looking at Jesus in the Old Testament, and in particular Jesus in prophesy.
I hope that as we’ve explored this together, even over these past weeks, we’ve been able to grasp how big and how wide God’s love is,
and the extent to which God has gone to reveal Himself, reveal His glory and love, even as He has revealed the activity and place of Jesus the Christ in the Old Testament.
May we embrace the God who draws near to us in Jesus Christ, Who whispers to us that He has the power to deliver us from whatever bondages we face, and from the slavery to sin that so robs us of all the joy God intends for us.
May we look to Him who bore our sufferings on the cruel cross, sufferings predicted long before they happened, and suffering willingly entered into by Jesus, who loved each of us before the world began.
Let us pray.
