00:00 Why started the Old Testament?

00:02 Well, I think a good answer to that is because the Old Testament is the Bible that Jesus read.

00:08 For Jesus and for the earliest believers, when they referred to the Scriptures, they were referring to the Old Testament.

00:14 And the Old Testament, as they saw it, was a book that was all about Christ.

00:19 From beginning to end, in one way or another, from Genesis all the way to Malachi, we have story upon story that tells us who the Messiah is

00:30 So when we read the Old Testament, we're reading a book

00:33 that's about Christ.

00:36 So I hope that you'll join me, Chad Bird,

00:38 in this lecture series through 1517 Academy,

00:41 Christ in the Old Testament,

00:42 as we investigate all the beautiful Christology

00:47 that we find in the Old Testament scriptures.

I hope you enjoyed the first session.

In this second session, we will cover the Christophanies, or appearances of Christ in the Old Testament. As we “walk backward to Bethlehem” together–and I’ll explain what I mean by that in the lecture–we’ll see that the Old Testament Scriptures are not only full of prophecies of the Messiah, but also the presence of the Messiah, as he reveals himself to His people in manifold ways.

Christ always desires to be among His people - I hope you find great comfort in that as you watch this lecture.

- Chad

00:00 (upbeat music)

00:15 - Welcome to the second lecture

00:16 in Christ and the Old Testament.

00:18 On this particular lecture,

00:20 we're going to be talking about

00:23 what I like to phrase walking backward to Bethlehem.

00:26 Or to use a fancier word,

00:28 we're gonna be talking about Christophanes,

00:30 appearances of Christ in the Old Testament.

00:33 Now let me explain a little bit about both of these ways

00:35 of viewing the name of this lecture, Christophanes,

00:38 and then walking back to Bethlehem.

00:40 First of all, Christophanes.

00:41 A Christophany, someone's called a Theophany,

00:45 either way it's an appearance of God

00:46 or the appearance of Christ.

00:48 So these are Old Testament manifestations of God

00:53 in some sort of visual, tangible way.

01:00 visual ways, whether it's a cloud or fire or an angel or a man.

01:08 There's all different ways that these Christophanes or Theophanes happen.

01:13 So that's one way of viewing these.

01:15 And we're going to look at several examples of those.

01:17 But when I phrase it, walking backward to Bethlehem,

01:21 I actually like that way of thinking of this way in which God appears better.

01:30 When you're walking in a Hebrew sort of way, you're walking with the past in front of you

01:41 and the future behind you.

01:43 So the Hebrew word for past is also the word for in front of you, ketam.

01:50 So when I talk about ketam as a Hebrew, it's either I'm talking about the past or I'm talking

01:54 about something that is directly in front of you.

02:00 They use the word for behind.

02:02 The word for behind is a hahr,

02:04 which then becomes future as a hahrit.

02:08 This actually makes sense,

02:10 even though this is not the way that we in English

02:12 describe going into the future or thinking about the past.

02:15 Because when we talk about going into the future,

02:18 we say that we are facing the future.

02:20 We're walking forward into the future

02:23 and we're leaving the past behind us.

02:27 Now, when you think about that,

02:28 it really makes no sense.

02:30 because you can't see the future,

02:32 but you can see the past.

02:34 You know what's happened.

02:36 You can look at yesterday or last week or last year

02:40 because you've already experienced it, right?

02:41 So it's like right there in front of you.

02:45 But you don't know what's coming in the future.

02:47 It's behind you.

02:48 You can't see it because you haven't experienced it yet.

02:51 So the Hebrew way of thinking about past and future

02:54 actually makes a whole lot more sense

02:56 than our way of thinking about it.

03:00 when you're thinking about past and future.

03:03 Now, how does this fit with walking backward to Bethlehem?

03:06 Well, when you're walking backward

03:07 through the Old Testament with a past in front of you

03:11 and the future behind you, what happens?

03:14 Boy, you walk backward a little bit from Genesis 1

03:16 and you realize that in the beginning,

03:18 God created Adam and Eve in his own limit,

03:21 image in his own likeness.

03:24 That's interesting.

03:26 And then you walk a little bit further backward

03:28 through the Old Testament

03:30 chapter 16, you realize that there's this angel of the war that appears to Hagar, but

03:36 he doesn't really talk like an angel.

03:39 He talks as if he's God himself.

03:42 And then you walk a little further backward through the Old Testament, and you come to

03:48 the giving of the Ten Commandments, and you hear how the Israelites are not to make any

03:52 graven images, because there's never supposed to be an image of God that's visible to the

03:58 Israelites.

04:00 or unlike any of the other ancient peoples,

04:03 the other ancient peoples, they all had images, right?

04:06 They had their statues of stone or wood.

04:09 And so when you entered into their temple,

04:11 of course you were gonna see an image of their God.

04:14 Well, if you were to walk into the holy,

04:16 if holy is the Israelites,

04:17 you were to see empty space, no image.

04:22 Why is that?

04:24 Well, let's keep walking backward and maybe we'll realize.

04:27 And you walk a little bit back farther backward,

04:30 Chapter three, or Joshua, the opening chapters of Joshua,

04:34 and you have this other appearance of this warrior type figure,

04:39 a man who was also an angel.

04:41 You have this really strange fiery appearance of God

04:46 in a burning bush, but it's also called an angel,

04:50 but also called Yahweh.

04:54 So as you're walking backward to Bethlehem,

04:56 as you're walking backward through the Old Testament,

05:00 more of these divine manifestations or these divine hints about how God is going to reveal

05:09 Himself to the world.

05:11 Well, by the time you've walked backward all the way from Genesis to the little town

05:17 of Bethlehem and you look and in that manger is a human being who is the Son of God, then

05:26 you're prepared.

05:30 backward all the way through the Old Testament to Bethlehem is actually prepared you for the

05:35 incarnation. So it doesn't really come as a shock when the Word becomes flesh and dwells among us

05:43 because as it turns out throughout the Old Testament, the Word has been becoming flesh. That is to say

05:50 he has been readying the world from the very beginning for his visible, tangible, physical

06:00 one of us. And that partly explains why when you read the New Testament and you have people

06:07 like Thomas calling Jesus my Lord and my God and being amazed at these divine works

06:14 that a human being does, it's not as if this is a complete shock that God would come and

06:20 visit as people because he's been doing that throughout Israelite history. So Christophanes

06:30 communicate what we're going to be talking about in this lecture, that from the beginning,

06:35 God is preparing us for his ultimate epiphany, its ultimate revelation in his incarnation and

06:42 him taking on human flesh because we have example, after example in the Old Testament,

06:48 of the Son of God coming down from heaven and appearing to people and talking with them

07:00 this is laying the groundwork for the incarnation and all of it is also manifesting the fact

07:07 that Christ has always desired to be amongst His people. It wasn't as if Jesus until December 25th

07:18 or whatever day He was actually born on, it wasn't like as if Jesus was sitting up in heaven,

07:23 twiddling His thumbs, just waiting for the day when He could finally come down and be with His

07:30 in a whole variety of ways.

07:32 And so what we're gonna do is look at these variety of ways.

07:37 We're gonna begin with Genesis chapter one,

07:39 as we talked about in lecture one,

07:41 the Torah, the first five books,

07:43 they are not only the foundation of the scriptures,

07:45 but they are also the Bible within the Bible.

07:49 And so everything after them is nothing more

07:51 than a drawing out and an interpretation

07:54 and application of that.

07:55 So we're gonna start with Genesis one

07:57 and we're gonna look first of all

08:00 God. Nothing's actually quite remarkable as you're reading through the creation account.

08:05 And God makes this and he makes that he divides this and that heavens above earth below. He makes

08:11 the animals. And the gradual unfolding creation is amazing in and of itself, but then you get

08:16 diverse 26 and 27 and it really gets shocking because as it turns out, all of this work that God

08:30 getting everything ready for is the creation of the king and queen of creation, so that

08:36 they can rule over it, so that they can be the ones who subdue it, so that they can

08:42 be the ones who are His royal images on earth that reflect who He is.

08:48 And the reason we know that is because when God makes Adam and Eve, He makes them in

09:00 and eat, both of them reflect on earth who God is.

09:07 Now that is remarkable.

09:10 Because what that indicates already,

09:12 that when you know, when you wanna know what God is like,

09:16 and when you wanna know what God looks like,

09:19 you look at Adam and Eve,

09:21 you look at those who are created in the image of God,

09:24 because they are the ones who are the visible,

09:30 They are His vice regents.

09:31 They are the ones who stand on earth as He stands in heaven.

09:36 Rule on earth as He rules in heavens in the heavens.

09:40 And they are those who are entrusted with the responsibility

09:43 of subduing creation of, as we'll talk about in a later lecture,

09:47 of expanding Eden until it finally encompasses the entire creation,

09:52 of course, a task at which they miserably failed.

09:55 But that was the goal from the beginning.

10:00 about God making Adam and Eve his own image and you're walking backward through these scriptures.

10:05 You already see from the beginning that there's a hint of

10:09 exactly what God is going to do.

10:12 Luther in his Genesis commentary talks about how when

10:16 God created an Adam and Eve in his own image, he was already

10:21 winking as it were about his coming incarnation.

10:25 Luther has this to say.

10:27 He says that in

10:30 the image of God, Moses wanted to intimate dimly to hint that God was to become incarnate.

10:39 Because he was created in the image of the invisible God, that statement is a dim

10:42 intimation that God was to reveal himself to the world in the man Christ.

10:50 These seeds, as it were, Luther writes, these seeds of very important facts the prophets have

11:00 So you kind of had this picture that Luther gives us of the prophets reading Moses.

11:08 They're studying the Bible just like we studied the Bible.

11:11 Preaching on the Bible just like we preach in the Bible.

11:13 Teaching it to people just like we teach the Bible, except their Bible is a whole lot

11:16 shorter than ours.

11:17 But they're reading Moses and they're contemplating the fact that Moses writes about God creating

11:23 Adam and Eve in the image of God and they're dwelling on that, reflecting on that and wondering

11:30 about the Messiah Himself. So these are seeds that are growing and growing in the prophetic

11:38 imagination and these seeds finally come into full flower in the incarnation itself. But already

11:44 there in Genesis chapter 1 we have as it were a prophecy of the incarnation in the very fact

11:52 that when God wanted someone to be His image He made human beings. The image that He Himself

12:00 assume. In fact, the proper way of saying is that Adam and Eve were made in the image

12:05 of God, and Jesus is the image of God. That's the way that the church father spoke. So we're

12:11 made in the image of God, but Christ is the image of God, as the book of Colossians says.

12:17 So Adam and Eve were made in the image of the one who is the image, and in the word becoming

12:30 God is now man and man is now God because the God man Jesus has united these natures

12:36 inextricably in his incarnation.

12:40 There's also another indication, one of these dim intimations of Luther might call it, of

12:45 the incarnation in a prohibition of all places.

12:50 If you look at Acts in chapter 20 or Deuteronomy chapter 5 and you're reading through the 10

12:54 commandments, what some Christian traditions call the second commandment, what other traditions

13:00 into the first commandment, is this prohibition against making graven images, which I mentioned

13:05 earlier in the lecture. Now why is that? Why is there not supposed to be an image of God

13:11 in the tabernacle or later in the holy of holies in the temple? I mean, why was God

13:16 as it were withholding this from his people? Why can they just come up with some sort of

13:21 statue or some sort of sacred stone or some kind of artistic work that represented God?

13:30 The tabernacle and temple were artistic wonders.

13:33 I mean, just amazing the artistry that went into these structures.

13:39 So it wasn't as if they were somehow incapable of making a beautiful, awesome image of God,

13:45 but God says, no.

13:47 No divine images, completely prohibited.

13:50 Well, why is that?

13:52 Wait a restingly, in that very prohibition is the gospel, hint of that.

14:00 You can't make an image of me because in the fullness of time, I am going to give you

14:05 the image of myself.

14:09 So there is, as it were, a prophecy of the incarnation and the very prohibition of the

14:14 making of divine images in the Old Testament.

14:17 God was saying, \"Just going to have to wait.

14:20 I don't want an image right now, but I'm going to give you my image when I give you

14:23 my son.

14:30 the image of God, not of wood and stone, but of flesh and blood. So it's quite amazing

14:36 that within this commandment is actually snuck in a prophecy of the gospel, a prophecy of the

14:44 image of God becoming one of us. So when we look at these manifestations of God in the Old

14:54 Testament, or as I like to put it, these manifestations of Christ in the Old Testament,

15:00 You can kind of think of it as a different way that God is dealing with time.

15:09 Sometimes two different ways of viewing time are described in these words.

15:13 One is chronos and one is chyros.

15:17 So chronos is what we usually think of when we think about time.

15:21 It's chronos.

15:23 That's the word that's in chronological, of course just like a series of dominoes that

15:27 fall one right after the other.

15:30 and it follows a minute hour after hour, day after day.

15:32 So it's chronological.

15:34 This is the way that we ordinarily think about time.

15:37 There's a beginning and there's an end

15:39 and there's a whole lot of moments of time

15:42 in between past, present and future.

15:44 That's chronological time.

15:46 That's Kronos time.

15:48 But there's also a sort of God time, if you will,

15:51 that's Chiaros.

15:53 And Chiaros time means that God is,

16:00 time on occasion in a chiral's moment, in a day of salvation, in a way of appearing that

16:08 defies our ordinary understanding of time. This is the theological background behind

16:15 these statements about this is the day of salvation. This is the today of God's desire

16:23 to save us. That's chiral's time. It's a different way of time. Now, as it relates

16:30 In the book of Revelation John writes that Christ is the lamb who slain from the foundation

16:36 of the world.

16:37 Now when you think about that according to chronological time it makes absolutely no

16:40 sense.

16:41 It's like no, we know when Christ was crucified and it wasn't from the foundation of the world

16:47 it was in the first century.

16:49 So how could that be?

16:50 How could it be the lamb slain from the foundation of the world?

16:52 Well chronologically he's not but in Chairos time he is because in Chairos time in God's

17:00 for us chronologically happens for him everlastingly.

17:03 So God is not bound as it were to view the sacrifice of Christ as just having

17:10 effects after it happens in chronological time. Because as it turns out,

17:15 everyone from the first person to the last person, Christ died for them, and His

17:21 sacrifice, even though it happened at a point in time, covers them from the

17:30 This then also relates to what I think what I call these Christophanes.

17:34 What God is doing in Christophanes is he is taking the chronological moment of the incarnation

17:42 and he's pulling it into Cairo's time and then he's putting it down in various places

17:47 throughout the Old Testament. So even though chronologically Christ was yet to become a human being,

17:52 in Cairo's time he manifested himself as a human being several different places in the Old Testament.

18:00 into our chronological time of God's chyros time.

18:05 So when we see Christ appearing as a man or as an angel

18:08 or into these other ways, what we're seeing

18:10 is God taking the fact of the incarnation

18:12 and revealing it throughout these manifestations

18:16 in the Old Testament.

18:17 And it's those that I wanna get to what I wanna get to now.

18:22 So the very first of these is gonna happen

18:30 narrative. And most of these that we're going to look at are in one way or another going to

18:36 revolve around this figure that is known as the Malach Yahweh in Hebrew, or usually translated

18:44 the angel of the Lord. Now before we get to Genesis 16, let me explain a little bit

18:50 about what we mean by the Malach Yahweh. It's really a, it's a regrettable translation

19:00 as angel because when we think about angels, we think about celestial beings that are servants

19:10 of God and that in one way or another serve Him, worship Him, appear on earth or there

19:17 at the birth of Christ. These are created beings but the celestial beings. Maybe they

19:23 have six wings, maybe they have two wings, whatever it is, these are what we think of

19:30 The word \"malloc\" is used, which is usually translated as angel.

19:35 The reason I say it's a regrettable translation is because a malloc can be all sorts of things.

19:41 It can be what we think it was an angel.

19:43 It also can be just a regular human being who in one way or another is a messenger, or

19:50 it can be a divine messenger.

19:54 Someone who brings the very word of God because the word itself malloc just means the one who

20:00 The one who gives a message.

20:03 So it can be a human messenger,

20:04 it can be an angelic messenger,

20:05 or it can be a divine messenger.

20:08 It's the same with the Greek word \"angulos.\"

20:10 Usually translated angel,

20:11 but can also mean just a human messenger.

20:14 So when you hear angel of the Lord,

20:17 don't think angel.

20:19 Just in your own mind, do a quick translation.

20:22 When you hear angel of the Lord,

20:24 when you read that in your Old Testament,

20:26 just translate that as word of the Father.

20:30 messenger of the Father or messenger of Yahweh, because that's really what it means.

20:36 The molecule is the messenger of Yahweh.

20:39 Now what's fascinating about this angel of the Lord or this messenger of Yahweh or this

20:42 word of the Father is that when he appears, he always appears as one who speaks with full

20:51 divine authority, who acts with full divine authority, is even called God and called Yahweh.

21:00 that somehow is also distinct from God or distinct from Yahweh.

21:06 So it's kind of hard to work it out in the text

21:10 unless you view it in the broader perspective

21:12 of the scripture, exactly what's going on.

21:13 Well, is this an angel or is it God?

21:17 Yes, is the one who is a messenger to speak

21:20 for the divine authority or God speaking with the divine

21:22 authority?

21:23 Well, yes, both, it's both of those because as we see

21:28 walking backward to Bethlehem,

21:30 walking through all of these texts,

21:32 even though we believe in monotheism,

21:33 even though God is one,

21:35 there's also this built-in distinction within God,

21:39 which of course later we're going to call the Trinity.

21:43 But art in the Old Testament,

21:44 you have more than a hint of this

21:47 because you have this word of the thought

21:48 of this messenger from Yahweh who speaks and acts

21:52 and deals with people as God himself,

21:56 even though he is distinct from the one who sends him.

22:00 So we're going to see plenty examples of that.

22:02 Let's jump into this one in Genesis chapter 16.

22:04 You may recall the story of Abraham and Sarah in Hagar

22:08 when Abraham and Sarah couldn't have children

22:10 because they're old age.

22:11 They decided to go with Plan B.

22:13 And Sarah gave Hagar to Abraham.

22:17 And according to the laws of the day,

22:19 if Hagar had a child with Abraham,

22:22 then it would legally be Sarah's.

22:24 God was working a little bit too slow for them,

22:26 so they took matters into their own hands.

22:30 Hagar conceives and

22:33 Hagar is is given to Abraham and then it's like Sarah changes her mind and she gets really upset with Hagar

22:39 and she begins to treat her harshly and so in Genesis chapter 16 Hagar runs away

22:46 She runs into the wilderness. She's trying to get away from her

22:50 from her

22:52 from her boss from Sarah

22:54 And while she's out there here's what happens. This is Genesis chapter 16 verse 7

23:00 Now the angel of the Lord found her, found Hagar by a spring of water in the wilderness

23:07 by the spring on the way to sure.

23:10 And then verse 9, \"Then the angel of the Lord said to her, 'Return to your mistress

23:15 and submit to her authority.'\"

23:18 Verse 10, \"Moreover the angel of the Lord said to her,\"

23:22 Now notice the language it's about to be used.

23:24 \"The angel of the Lord said to her, 'I will greatly multiply your descendants so that

23:30 they shall be too numerous to count.

23:33 They ain't until the Lord doesn't say,

23:35 God will greatly multiply your descendants.

23:37 He says, I will greatly multiply your descendants.

23:42 And then he goes on to tell him

23:43 that she is going to bear a child

23:45 and she'll call his name Ishmael.

23:48 And then after all this happens, verse 13,

23:51 Hagar called the name of the Lord

23:54 who spoke to her, thou art a God who sees.

24:00 Now this whole story is amazing because first of all you think, \"Okay, this is an angel. He's going

24:05 to speak to Hagar and he does, but he speaks as if he himself is God.\" And Hagar's understanding

24:13 is that this angel that speaks to her is also Yahweh himself. Now this is just the first of

24:21 these occurrences of the Malachiwe, of the angel of the Lord. But here walking back to

24:30 He wants to appear to His people.

24:33 He sends someone to do that.

24:36 When God wants to speak to His people,

24:38 He sends someone to speak.

24:40 And this one who speaks, this one who appears does so,

24:43 not just a simply a created messenger,

24:47 like a regular angel,

24:49 but as one who bears complete,

24:52 divine authority to speak and to promise

25:00 Now let's jump from there a few chapters to Genesis chapter 22.

25:05 The well-known account of Abraham taking Isaac up onto the mountain to offer him as a sacrifice,

25:12 just as God had commanded him.

25:14 The story is well-known.

25:16 Abraham and Isaac, they go to the mountain, and they have everything ready for the sacrifice,

25:21 and Isaac is bound and he's placed upon the altar.

25:25 And as you're reading through the story, it seems as if it's really going to happen.

25:30 He's really going to sacrifice his son, the son that he'd been waiting on for so long.

25:35 In fact, it says he stretched out his hand and he actually took the knife to kill his

25:41 son.

25:43 And then, verse 11, \"The angel of the Lord called to him from heaven and said, 'Abraham, Abraham,

25:49 Abraham.'

25:50 And he said, 'Here I am.'\"

25:53 Now notice the language once again, verse 12.

26:00 for now I know that you fear God,

26:03 since you have not withheld your son,

26:05 your only son from me.\"

26:10 He doesn't say you have withheld,

26:12 haven't withheld your only son from God, but from me.

26:16 So once more, the angel of the Lord,

26:18 this messenger of the Father,

26:20 appears, speaks, and self identifies as God Himself.

26:30 \"After Abraham calls the name of that place, the Lord will provide.\"

26:34 Verse 15, \"The angel of the Lord called to Abraham a second time from heaven and said,

26:39 'By myself I have sworn,' declares the Lord, 'because you have done this thing and have not

26:46 withheld your son from me that I will greatly bless you and multiply your seed as the stars of

26:53 heaven.'\" So Genesis 16, \"The angel of the Lord appears to Hagar.\"

27:00 The Lord appears to Abraham in both of these cases.

27:05 What you have is this messenger of the Father, acting and speaking with complete divine authority

27:11 and identifying himself as God.

27:16 Now I want to skip ahead to probably the most well-known appearance of the angel of

27:21 the Lord, and this is in Exodus chapter 3.

27:25 Again we're walking back through the Scriptures.

27:30 at the past which is behind us, and the past is pregnant with the future.

27:37 The past is going to determine what the future is.

27:40 So we need to look carefully at the past because the past is itself prophetic.

27:45 The past is laying out before us everything that's behind us.

27:50 So God is preparing us for what He is to do by inviting us to contemplate on what

27:57 He has already done.

28:00 getting very strong hints along the way exactly what he is going to do.

28:05 Noxon chapter 3 is the story of the burning bush.

28:09 Of course at this point in Moses' life he's 80 years old.

28:12 He spent the first 40 years in Egypt.

28:15 The next 40 years he was in the desert because he had to run away from Egypt after murdering

28:19 in Egyptian.

28:21 And he's taken care of his father-in-law sheep.

28:24 When all of a sudden he sees this bush and it catches his eye because it's not only is

28:28 it on fire but it's not being burned up.

28:30 just enveloped in flame.

28:32 And so he goes a little bit closer.

28:35 Verse two says, \"The angel of the Lord,

28:39 same Hebrew every time this occurs, the Malak Yahweh,

28:43 the angel of the Lord appeared to him

28:45 in a blazing fire in the midst of the bush.\"

28:47 And Moses is amazed because the bush is burning

28:50 but it's not consumed.

28:52 Verse four, \"When the Lord Yahweh,

28:56 when the Lord saw that he turned aside to look,

29:00 called to him from the midst of the bush.

29:03 Now listen, this is phenomenal.

29:05 There's an angel, the Lord and the bush,

29:07 and the Lord sees, he turns aside,

29:10 and God calls to him from the midst of the bush.

29:12 So, who are we talking, I mean, is this the angel,

29:14 or this God, or is this the Lord?

29:17 Well, as it turns out, it's all three.

29:21 God calls him from the midst of the bush,

29:23 verse four, and says, \"Moses, Moses, Moses,\"

29:25 Moses says, \"Here I am.\"

29:27 Verse five, then he says, \"Don't come near,

29:30 for the place in which you're standing is holy ground.

29:33 And then God says this,

29:34 \"I am the God of your Father,

29:36 \"the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac,

29:38 \"and the God of Jacob.\"

29:39 And Moses hid his face because he was afraid

29:41 to look at God.

29:42 So if you ever wonder who this angel of the Lord is,

29:45 look no further.

29:47 It's God, it's Yahweh.

29:49 And yet it's an angel of the Lord,

29:51 and so it's sent from God.

29:54 This is this beautiful way that God reveals some of this

30:00 himself art in the Old Testament as a Trinity.

30:04 He's three persons, one God.

30:07 So what's really happening here in Trinitarian language is the Father sees Moses and so

30:11 he sends the Son.

30:13 And the Son, breaking in this chyros moment that we talked about earlier, comes into

30:18 the bush and the bush is enveloped with fire and yet is not being consumed.

30:22 So this is Jesus.

30:24 This is the Son of God, the Word of the Father revealing himself in fire and speaking as

30:30 who is not just a messenger, but the one who is actually God himself.

30:37 So this is the way that the Old Testament talks about the Trinity.

30:44 We have the Apostles Creed, we have the Nicene Creed, we have the Athanasian Creed,

30:49 we have all different kinds of confessions which lay out for us in quite intricate detail,

30:55 all the various ways of speaking about the Trinity.

31:00 speaking about the Trinity. This is the Father sending his son into a bush. He's manifesting

31:07 himself as fire and he's speaking and he's telling Moses who he is and what he wants him

31:15 to do. And he is saying to Moses, \"I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the

31:20 God of Jacob.\" So when you think about the Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of

31:30 to receive His name. So this is the Son of God coming down from heaven, just like He

31:37 will come down in finality in His incarnation, and temporarily revealing Himself in a visible

31:46 form, preparing us, laying the groundwork for His coming incarnation when He will permanently

32:00 Now, only look at one more example and look at Exodus before we leave this book.

32:03 If you look at Exodus 23, we have an extremely significant verse that tells us about the

32:10 divine authority that this angel of the Lord has.

32:16 This is God speaking to the Israelites, chapter 23 of Exodus beginning at verse 20.

32:22 God says to the Israelites, \"Behold, I'm going to send an angel,\" that is a messenger,

32:30 So this messenger is sent by God and guards the Israelites.

32:34 And he's going to bring you into the place which I prepared.

32:37 So this is, this angel is going to be Israel's companion,

32:41 guarding them, guiding them,

32:43 going to bring them to the promised land.

32:46 Verse 21, \"Be on your guard before Him and obey His voice.

32:49 Don't be rebellious toward Him, for He will not pardon your transgression.\"

32:54 So this angel, this messenger who guards, who guides,

33:00 forgiveness, which is phenomenal because the only person in the Old Testament who can

33:04 forgive is God himself.

33:07 The Hebrew word for forgive, the one that describes God's activities only used of God.

33:13 In every single one of us is current, as God alone is a subject.

33:16 He's the only one who forgives, which is of course the background of that incident in

33:20 the gospels where the Pharisees are upset with Jesus and they say, \"Who can forgive

33:24 sins but God alone?\"

33:25 Well, the answer is you're right.

33:28 God alone can forgive sins.

33:30 And when this messenger is given the divine authority to forgive sins, that tells you automatically

33:37 who he is.

33:38 But we haven't gotten to the best part yet.

33:40 The best part is the end of verse 21.

33:43 Right after God says that about parting transgressions, he says this, \"Since my name is in him.\"

33:52 Period, full stop.

33:54 That says it all.

33:55 When God puts his name in something, when God puts his name in someone, this isn't him

34:00 YHWH on the outside of something. For God to put His name in something, for God to put

34:06 His name in someone is for Him to invest all of who He is in that particular person.

34:13 So, when we think of a name, we think of just kind of a, you know, it's something that

34:18 we tag people with or tag something with. That's not the way that the Scriptures talk

34:23 about someone's name. To have the names, to have access, to have the names, to have authority.

34:30 this messenger is for God to basically say to use language that was later to become Credo,

34:37 that God is of one essence with this messenger. He is as the nice thing Credo put it, homo oucius,

34:44 of one nature, of one essence with this messenger, because his name is in him. So we begin here with

34:54 with the image of God in Genesis 1 and then we encounter this angel of the Lord,

35:00 Father in Genesis 16 with Hagar and Genesis 22 with Abraham here in Exodus 3, as well

35:07 as in Exodus 23 with the Israelites.

35:11 And it goes on from there.

35:14 There are many other occurrences of the angel of the Lord, and each time he appears, he is

35:20 one who speaks and acts and decides and judges with full divine authority.

35:30 of the Israelites, showing them that he is the one who bears the word of the Father.

35:35 He is the one who the Father sends to guard them, to protect them, to guide them, to forgive

35:40 them, to be with them throughout their journeys.

35:44 Now this is just actually one example of the various ways in which Christ appears in

35:49 the Old Testament.

35:50 And they just very briefly run through two or three more examples of the different ways

35:55 that Christ appears.

36:00 When we think about the word of the Lord coming to a prophet, or in Genesis 15, the

36:04 word of the Lord coming to Abraham, usually we think in abstract terms and we make a

36:09 mistake when we do that.

36:10 It's not as if the prophets, when the word of the Lord came to them were hold up in some

36:15 cave with a scroll and a quill and they're just waiting for this word to come to them

36:21 and give them exactly what they are to preach.

36:24 That's a completely wrong image.

36:30 He said to himself to that prophet.

36:31 So when the word comes, this is a visible word, a tangible word, who's appearing to

36:36 the prophets and speaking to them.

36:38 We also have an example in the opening chapter of Jeremiah where the word comes to him and

36:43 this word is not something that is simply an audible word but it's a visible word.

36:50 These appearances of the word in the Old Testament are preparing the way for the word

37:00 There's also, as we talked about in Lecture 1, the wisdom of the Father.

37:06 Proverbs 8 is the best chapter to go to for this.

37:10 Wisdom there is personified.

37:12 Wisdom is not just, as I said in that lecture, an intellectual capacity, being smart or being

37:17 wise, but wisdom is a person.

37:20 Wisdom is beside the Father.

37:22 Wisdom is participating in creation and rejoicing in creation.

37:26 This wisdom is Christ Himself.

37:30 says that Christ has become for us wisdom from God.

37:34 He is incarnate wisdom.

37:36 And so walking backward through these scriptures,

37:39 now we see the angel, now we see the word,

37:44 now we see wisdom.

37:45 In other places we see God appearing as glory,

37:49 a visible, tangible glory.

37:52 And then, probably most amazing of all,

37:55 look at the beginning of Ezekiel's prophetic vision.

38:00 the throne of God, one with the appearance of a man.

38:06 Now that ought to blow you away

38:08 because God looking like a man on the throne.

38:13 This is remarkable in the Old Testament

38:17 that you think of a man being on the throne.

38:22 And yet it's not that remarkable

38:25 because when you pull all these stories together

38:30 image of God, to the prohibition of divine images,

38:33 to the angel, to the word, to glory.

38:36 All of these are preparing us for this.

38:39 So when we see a man on the throne of God,

38:41 we're like, yes, it makes sense.

38:45 This is what God has been telling us all along,

38:49 and now all of a sudden it becomes clear.

38:51 Of course there's a man on the throne

38:52 because God made man in its own image.

38:55 And so the image of God must be a man,

38:58 and so for God to appear as a man

39:00 makes perfect biblical sense.

39:02 This is what God is ready us for.

39:04 And that one who is on the throne that Ezekiel sees

39:07 is the anointed one of God, is the Son of God.

39:12 So all of these stories, beginning in Genesis,

39:16 through the rest of the Old Testament,

39:17 all of these are the Word becoming flesh.

39:20 These are the way that God is preparing us

39:23 for His incarnation.

39:25 So anytime you read these Old Testament stories

39:30 In any way manifesting himself, walking with his people,

39:34 speaking to his people, he is the Son of God.

39:40 This is Jesus, this is Christ,

39:43 already interacting with the people that he loves,

39:46 just like he will walk among them,

39:49 just like he will welcome them to himself in the gospels.

39:53 So he's walking among them

39:55 and he's welcoming them to himself

39:57 in the Old Testament as well.

40:00 read these stories as you walk backward through these stories,

40:04 as you work your way toward Bethlehem.

40:08 What you're seeing in each of them

40:10 is a foretaste of the incarnation,

40:13 a big divine wink about what is going to happen

40:16 when the word finally becomes flesh in time

40:20 and becomes one of us.

40:22 So that's one more way in which we see Christ

40:24 in the Old Testament.

40:30 always abide with us, to give himself to us, to speak to us in a tangible, physical way,

40:38 because that's the kind of God he is.

40:39 He's the kind of God who is Emmanuel, who is with us, and who always desires to be with

40:44 his people.

40:45 We'll see you in the next lecture.

I hope you enjoyed our last discussion about Christophanies.  

This week we're going to take a look at the 'pencil sketches' of Christ in the Old Testament. As we explore this topic, keep in mind that these aren't actual appearances of Christ. Rather, these types foreshadow the person and work of the coming Christ. Specifically, we'll look at:

1. Typological Interpretation in the OT
2. The Connection Between Adam, Noah, Abraham
3. The Messianic Priest, Melchizedek
4. Joshua as the OT Jesus
5. David as the foreshadowing of the Messiah

Let's get started!

- Chad

00:00 (upbeat music)

00:16 - Welcome back to Christ in the Old Testament.

00:18 This is Lecture 3, and we're gonna be talking

00:21 in this lecture about how various individuals

00:24 in the Old Testament provide us with what I like to call

00:30 that he is going to fill in and full color in his life and ministry.

00:36 This is sometimes what's called typology or foreshadowing.

00:41 And most of the time when we think about typology or foreshadowing,

00:44 we immediately jump to the New Testament because we have a lot of examples there

00:48 of how an individual from the Old Testament or an event from the Old Testament

00:52 is referenced as a shadow or as a type of what is to come in Christ.

01:00 And the most well-known of these is Adam himself,

01:03 because Christ is called the second Adam,

01:06 or the last Adam.

01:07 So it's kind of a negative type, you might say.

01:10 So just as Adam fell into sin and brought all death

01:14 and all the horrible things about sin into the world,

01:17 so Christ brings us life, brings us righteousness.

01:21 So he is the opposite of the first Adam.

01:25 And there's also the examples, for instance,

01:30 instructed by God to make the bronze serpent

01:34 and put it up on a pole.

01:35 And everyone who looks at the bronze serpent

01:38 will be healed of their snakebites.

01:41 Christ says in John chapter three

01:43 that just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness,

01:46 even so must the son of man be lifted up.

01:49 So we see that particular account in the book of Numbers

01:52 as a type, as a foreshadowing of the saving,

02:00 And there's all sorts of other types that are in the Old Testament that are mentioned in the New Testament.

02:06 Now what I want to talk about, especially in this lecture, is not so much those types in the New Testament that are mentioned,

02:15 but the types that actually grow out of the Old Testament itself.

02:21 What I mean by that is usually when we think about typology, we think of it as sort of a New Testament innovation.

02:30 When Christ came and began teaching,

02:33 when the apostles began writing,

02:35 and they were communicating exactly what Christ was doing,

02:41 they often came up with these correspondences,

02:44 these analogies from the Old Testament,

02:47 and they related those to Jesus.

02:49 So there was a first Adam, and now there's a second Adam.

02:53 There was a bronze serpent,

02:54 and now there's the crucified Christ.

03:00 Jesus, three days in the belly of the earth.

03:03 So we tend to think of this typological approach to the Old Testament as something which originated in the New Testament.

03:13 Now what I'm going to do in this lecture is completely debunk that, to destroy that misconception.

03:19 What we're going to see is that when Jesus and the apostles related him to all these events,

03:30 were doing was continuing an age-old practice that actually began already in the book of

03:38 Genesis and then proceeded from there where there is a correspondence and analogy between

03:46 past individuals and present individuals.

03:49 So that one individual when he's spoken of or she's spoken of is compared to an earlier

04:00 And we'll look at some examples of those in the lecture.

04:04 But we're going to see, as I mentioned in that earlier lecture about the layering.

04:08 So this is a kind of a typological layering that happens in the Old Testament, where individuals

04:16 are going to foreshadow other individuals within the Old Testament.

04:20 And then these individuals sometimes foreshadow even more individuals.

04:22 So by the time you get to the Old Testament, you have this whole collection of individuals

04:30 reflecting how God interacts with His people.

04:34 And now He uses people to bring about salvation or rescue or victory for His people Israel.

04:44 So we're going to dive into the Old Testament and we're going to see how this practice of

04:50 analogy or foreshadowing has its deep, deep roots there.

05:00 kind of distinguish the Bible's way of comparing one person to Christ from our more typical way of

05:08 analogical kind of thinking. So if you listen to the way that we speak, we're engaged in

05:13 analogy all the time when it compares to when it comes to people. So I might say, oh,

05:18 that representative is just a typical politician.

05:23 So in other words, he fits the mold of what I perceive other

05:30 be like, whether that's positive or negative.

05:32 Or I might say, if someone, well, that's just

05:34 the type of woman that she is.

05:37 Meaning that there's some sort of mold or type

05:40 that this particular individual woman fits.

05:43 So she's like these other women,

05:46 just like that politician is like these other politicians.

05:48 So we use this language of type or typical all the time.

05:53 What we're doing is we're comparing groups or individuals

05:56 to something else.

05:57 We're using analogy.

06:00 Scriptures use analogy, they're doing that but they're doing something far more.

06:07 Because when you look at a type of foreshadowing, an individual in the Old Testament who is foreshadowing,

06:15 someone who is to come, there's always a very forward-looking nature to that.

06:21 It's what we call teleological.

06:23 Telos in Greek means the end.

06:30 And so when you have Adam, for instance, or you have Noah, or you have Joshua, or David,

06:36 or Melchizedek, or Moses, when they are a type of what is to come, they're not just

06:42 an analogy, but in and of themselves, they're pointing toward that one who is the telos,

06:47 who is the end, who's going to bring their life and their doings to its divinely planned

06:54 consummation.

07:00 And another difference is when we're reading through these stories, maybe it's a story of Noah, or maybe it's a story of Joshua.

07:09 We're not only interpreting the actions in which they were engaged and seeing how these are analogies to what Christ is going to do,

07:16 but we're also paying attention to the very words that are used to describe what these people do.

07:30 certain verbs or certain nouns or certain phrases or certain images as the way in which

07:38 he is inviting the reader to connect this person to an earlier person or to connect this

07:45 person to someone who is to come.

07:48 So unlike in our everyday speech where we compare one person to another person, when we're

07:51 reading the Bible and reading a text by the paid very close attention to the language

08:00 this person and another person.

08:02 And we're gonna see an example of that right away

08:04 in the case of Adam and Noah.

08:06 So we'll be able to illustrate that.

08:10 Now let me say one more thing

08:11 before we jump into the text itself.

08:12 And that is that when Jesus and the apostles

08:16 continued this practice of typological interpretation

08:20 of connecting him to earlier individuals,

08:24 they were also doing that,

08:25 which was firmly established within the Jewish tradition.

08:30 that really summed up exactly how this works.

08:34 They said, \"Mase abot simon loviniim,\"

08:38 which translated to something like,

08:40 \"The deeds of the fathers are assigned for the sons.\"

08:43 Mase abot simon loviniim,

08:45 \"The deeds of the fathers are assigned for the sons.\"

08:48 But what they meant by that

08:50 is that when you wanna know what the sons are gonna do,

08:53 you look to the patriarchs, you look to the fathers.

08:57 \"The deeds of the fathers,

09:00 a divine sign for the sun.

09:03 What they meant by that is when you look at the lives of the patriarchs,

09:07 when you see what they did and where they went and the conflicts in which they were engaged

09:11 and how God brought them out of that and how He led them and blessed them.

09:15 Everything that's happening to the patriarchs is divinely designed to provide the blueprint

09:22 for what's going to happen to Israel.

09:25 We're going to look at one example of this, either in this lecture or in the next lecture.

09:30 briefly thought out there now to give me an illustration what I mean. When Abraham

09:35 went down to Egypt because of a famine and got in trouble with Pharaoh and got

09:43 kicked out of Egypt and left laden with all this rich, all these riches from

09:49 Pharaoh and then came back to the Promised Land, the deeds of Abraham were

09:54 assigned for the Son. That is the deeds that Abraham did, this exodus in which he

10:00 involved was a sign for what was going to happen to Israel. So Abraham laid out the blueprint

10:06 for what was going to happen later to Israel. And then as we'll see in the prophets, what Israel

10:11 experienced then provided the blueprint for what the Messiah was going to do. And what the Messiah

10:17 did then provides the blueprint for exactly how He brings us out of our own slavery into freedom.

10:30 to pull it all together, to understand how all these various individuals and the deeds

10:35 in which they were engaged come together in order to give us a bigger picture of who Christ

10:41 is and what he does, what he does for us.

10:44 So we're going to begin to look at some examples now of exactly how the deeds of the fathers

10:50 are signed for the sons and how you have this typological approach to the scriptures

10:55 growing throughout the Old Testament.

11:00 Once again, we're beginning in the Torah, we're beginning in this Bible within the Bible

11:06 because it's from there that the rest of the Scriptures are going to grow.

11:12 Now this is pretty amazing.

11:15 It turns out, if you look carefully at the story of Noah, that Noah was the second Adam.

11:24 Just think about the connections between those two.

11:30 wife Eve, and then from them comes the human family. And then what happens in the flood?

11:35 Well, God basically wipes out all of humanity except one man and one woman and their children.

11:43 So, in and of itself, just if you look at those two particular narratives, you can

11:48 already begin to see some connections between them, right? From Adam, God started. And then

12:00 about the significance of Noah and his connection to Adam and how Noah was the correspondence to

12:07 the anti-type to Adam himself. For instance, if you look at the genealogy in Genesis chapter 5,

12:16 I know everybody loves genealogies. That's the first place you should go to when you open the

12:20 scriptures. But there's actually a lot of theology that's embedded within these genealogies. Let me

12:30 five, so-and-so to get, so-and-so. He lived so many years. He died, and here's his son,

12:34 who lived so many years, and he died. Well, if you look at when Adam lived and when he died

12:41 in that genealogy, Noah is the very first child born after the death of Adam. That in and of itself

12:48 ought to be significant. So Adam, the first man, finally dies. The very first birth recorded after

13:00 10 generations from Adam to Noah.

13:04 Noah's right in the middle.

13:05 And then 10 generations from Noah to Abraham.

13:10 That in and of itself is also a way in which the text

13:13 is pointing to the significance of Noah.

13:16 And it also illustrates why the father of Noah

13:21 was so excited when Noah was born.

13:25 Listen to what he says.

13:26 This is Genesis chapter five verse 29.

13:30 or Lamek, have you want to pronounce his name, the father of Noah? It says he called his name,

13:34 he called his son's name Noah, and here's the explanation that he gives. \"Out of the ground

13:42 that the Lord has cursed, this one shall bring us relief from our work and from the

13:49 painful toil of our hands.\" When Luther was talking about this particular chapter in this

14:00 was the Messiah. He was fully convinced that this promised seed that we heard about back in Genesis

14:07 chapter 3.15 was now in his arms. Noah, he thought, was the promised seed. He was the one who was

14:13 going to come and rescue the human race. Of course, he was terribly mistaken, but at least he

14:20 got kind of close in the sense that Noah did end up being a figure of the Messiah. It's also

14:30 language from Genesis chapter three. This is what I was talking about earlier.

14:34 You can't just look at the action but you have to look at the words that are

14:38 used to describe sometimes what these people are doing. So what I mean by that

14:43 is this. So the father speaking calls this name Noah because he says, \"Out of the

14:48 ground, Ha-Adama in Hebrew, Adam means Adam is the dirt man.\" He comes from

15:00 that the Lord has cursed, the word Hebrew word for cursed

15:03 is arur.

15:06 This one shall bring us relief from our work

15:09 and from the painful toil that Hebrew is atzav

15:13 of our hands.

15:15 Three Hebrew words, the ha-at-am-ah, the ground,

15:19 cursed arur and toil atzav.

15:24 All three occur in Genesis 5, 29.

15:30 All three of those same Hebrew words occur when God is speaking to Adam about what is going to be the effects of the fall.

15:38 Genesis 3.17 says, \"Cursed arer is the ground ha-at-a-ma because of you.\"

15:46 In toil, at-sav, you shall eat of it all the days of your life.

15:50 So what's going on here?

16:00 From God cursing Adam to now turn it around and apply it to his son and basically say

16:06 Finally God gave us the child that's going to reverse

16:10 All the bad stuff that came into the world as a result of Adam so he has high hopes for for Noah

16:17 So we already now begin to see how Adam is a foreshadowing of Noah and Noah is a second Adam

16:30 after the flood.

16:33 Genesis chapter nine.

16:35 God starts out saying,

16:37 God starts out blessing Noah and his sons

16:40 and says to them,

16:41 now pay careful attention to this.

16:44 He says, be fruitful and multiply

16:46 and fill the earth.

16:47 Now, wherever you heard that before,

16:49 of course, that was the command

16:50 that was given to Adam and Eve, right?

16:51 That takes us right back to Genesis chapter one,

16:53 verse 28, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.

16:58 And then he goes on to say,

17:00 shall be on every beast of the field, the birds of the sky, everything that creeps on the ground,

17:04 the fish of the sea, so on and so forth. So just like he made Adam, the king of all creation,

17:10 the king of the animals. So Adam is now going to step into that place. Now listen further. Verse

17:17 three, every moving thing that is alive shall be food for you. I give all to you as I gave

17:30 it's one letter which means as or like that one little or that one little

17:36 as pulls us from Genesis 9 back into Genesis chapter 1 that that simile that

17:44 as is God comparing where Noah is now with where Adam was before. So here we are

17:53 it's seemingly a brand new creation a fresh start here we have animals

18:00 We have a cleansed earth. We have a man and a woman with their family and everything is just the way

18:07 that it should be. Of course until you get to the very next chapter when Noah plans to be

18:14 near and gets drunk and falls asleep naked in his tent and his son goes in and finds him there

18:19 and ends up having his grandson cursed and we basically have Genesis 3 all over again where

18:24 once again creation falls apart because of human, human sin. But there for a moment

18:30 we have a glimpse of what God has in mind.

18:33 He's going to bring about a new creation through water.

18:37 And there's going to be a new atom

18:39 who's going to reign over this new creation with his family.

18:42 And everything will be harmonious

18:44 in just the way that God intends it to be.

18:46 And then it falls apart, but we have a glimpse.

18:50 So we go from Adam.

18:52 Let me go to the second Adam to Noah.

18:56 And there's, I guess what we would call a third Adam as well,

19:00 We can't stop there.

19:02 We have a building of the typology.

19:04 It starts with Adam, goes to Noah,

19:06 and now we jump ahead and we look at exactly how Christ

19:11 Himself and the apostles use these two stories

19:16 to describe the work of the Messiah.

19:19 Jesus Himself compares His second coming

19:22 to the days of Noah.

19:24 This is in the days of Noah.

19:25 These things were happening.

19:27 So it's going to be at the coming of the Son of Man.

19:30 in his teaching, he pulls himself back into the story in Genesis 6 through 9 and says,

19:36 \"more or less, hey, when you read these chapters, keep me in mind. When you read about Noah,

19:42 this isn't just about Noah, this is about Adam and about Noah and about me. It's all being

19:49 presented ahead of time.\" Peter as well in the second epistle says that just as the original

20:00 So at the end of time, there's going to be the destruction of the heavens and the earth

20:04 by fire and God is going to make a new creation.

20:08 Peter points back to the time when God destroyed the earth by water and says, \"Okay, what

20:12 you see happening there?

20:14 That's a foreshadowing.

20:15 What God is going to do at the end of time is knowing to be with water, it's going to

20:18 be with fire.\"

20:20 And just like you had Noah back then, who's raining over this new creation, so you're

20:24 going to have a new Noah who is a sort of third Adam who is going to be with the earth.

20:30 re-reaning over the new creation.

20:32 And then the best verse that kind of pulls all this together

20:36 isn't actually in first Peter chapter three,

20:39 where Peter connects baptism back to the flood

20:44 and the ark and to Noah and says,

20:46 just like there were eight people saved in the ark,

20:49 through the water.

20:50 So now baptism saves you.

20:54 Now, you could go for hours upon hours,

21:00 Peter has actually done there.

21:01 He has brought it all together for us.

21:05 So there's Adam, new creation, Noah, new creation,

21:12 through water.

21:14 And now there's Jesus who brings about a new creation.

21:18 And how does he bring about that new creation?

21:20 He does it through water, which saves us,

21:24 which brings us into the ark of salvation,

21:30 stand in the true new creation beside Adam where there is harmony and concord in everything

21:36 that God desires us to have.

21:39 And it all starts in Genesis 1.

21:42 And then the story picks up in Genesis 6 through 9 and finally comes to its crescendo

21:47 in the ministry of Christ.

21:49 So when we study, for instance, the flood in Noah and the ark in Sunday school, we stay

22:00 But it's of incredible depth

22:03 when we begin to make the connections between Noah

22:07 and who came before him and Noah who came after him.

22:11 This is the way in which we see this scriptural

22:16 analogical kind of approach,

22:19 having its genesis in Genesis itself.

22:24 And we're gonna see plenty of other illustrations of that

22:26 as we go along.

22:30 is one that I referred to earlier.

22:32 And this is the example of Abraham.

22:35 So this is especially what the rabbis were referring to

22:38 when they said, \"Mazte'a, Boseim, O'elam, and Eim,\"

22:40 the deeds of the fathers are assigned for the sons.

22:42 The deeds of Abraham, especially,

22:44 is a sign for what has to happen to his descendants.

22:48 So if you look at Genesis chapter 12,

22:51 right after the story of Abraham begins, God calls him.

22:55 He says, \"I'm going to make you a blessing

23:00 out of your country from your relatives,

23:02 and I'm going to take you to a place

23:03 which I'm going to go to show you.

23:06 But it doesn't say that very long

23:08 because what happens is there's a famine in the land

23:11 that forces Abraham and Sarah and their whole family,

23:15 the group with them, to go down into Egypt.

23:20 Now you remember the story,

23:21 what happens when they get down into Egypt?

23:22 Well basically, Abraham completely makes up a story

23:26 about his wife.

23:28 He lies about Sarah.

23:30 She's my sister because he was afraid that if he admitted that she was his wife, the Egyptians

23:36 would be attracted to her and they would end up killing him and taking Sarah from

23:41 him.

23:42 So they concoct this elaborate ruse in which they say that Sarah is Abraham's sister.

23:47 So Sarah ends up being actually still taken from Abraham into Pharaoh's household.

24:00 household. And finally, Pharaoh figures out what's going on that she's actually the

24:05 wife of Abraham. But in the meantime, he's given Abraham all these riches. He's given

24:10 him wealth beyond description. And then when he gives him back, Sarah, he doesn't ask for

24:15 the wealth back. He just basically says, get out of dodge, leave, go back to where you

24:20 came from. And so Abraham and Sarah leave with all these riches from Egypt back to the

24:30 referred to as the first Exodus.

24:33 This is the people of God because of famine going down to Egypt,

24:37 getting into trouble with Pharaoh,

24:40 Pharaoh enriching them, and then they leave,

24:44 laden with the wealth of Egypt to come back to the promised land.

24:48 What Abraham and Sarah are doing, they are blazing the trail

24:53 from the promised land to Egypt and then back again.

25:00 This is a type of foreshadowing of what Israel herself was going to experience when because of famine

25:09 Jacob sends his sons into Egypt where Joseph has already gone and

25:14 they eventually all end up down in Egypt and what happens? Well, they get into trouble with Pharaoh and

25:21 Eventually they leave from there because God plagues the Egyptians

25:30 And they make that same journey that Abraham and Sarah made back to the promised land.

25:36 Now what do we see just happening there?

25:39 We see within the Old Testament itself, within two books, Genesis and Exodus, a type and

25:46 an anti-type, a foreshadowing and a completion, two events that are joined together so that

25:54 you really can't understand one without the other.

26:00 through A. These two together provide us with a glimpse of how God is active to rescue

26:07 His people and to bring them back home again. But, and we're going to flesh this out even

26:14 more in one of the other lectures, it doesn't stop there because this particular exodus

26:20 of Abraham and Sarah and then of all the Israelites becomes the paradigmatic way in

26:30 describe the coming Messianic salvation.

26:34 So this exodus becomes the way in which the true and ultimate

26:39 exodus of the Messiah is foreshadowed.

26:43 I don't want to steal too much of my own thunder at this point.

26:45 I'll wait and we can cover that more in a forthcoming lecture.

26:49 But we see here how already in the Old Testament

26:52 you have topology, you have foreshadowing, you have completion.

26:56 So that by the time we get to the New Testament,

27:00 over the place because it actually was all over the place in the Old Testament as well.

27:05 Let's look at another example.

27:08 This one is the figure of Belchizedek.

27:10 Melchizedek is one of the most fascinating people from the Old Testament for a variety

27:16 of reasons.

27:17 Now, if all we had was the account in Genesis, we might not be that fascinated by Him because

27:26 I mean, it's a fairly straightforward account.

27:28 Here's what happens.

27:30 14. A lot who is the nephew of Abraham, he's living where he shouldn't have lived, close

27:36 to Sodom and Gomorrah, and a bunch of foreign kings come in and they ravage the cities and

27:42 they take away all these prisoners of war among whom is lot in his family. Well, Abraham

27:46 hears about what happens and he's got a huge group with him. He's got like at least 318

27:52 warriors. So he gathers these warriors, they pursue these foreign kings, they end up defeating

28:00 the battle back to Sodom and Gomorrah and the other cities on the plane. There's also

28:07 a place there that's called Salem, which shorthand or an earlier name for what we call

28:13 Jerusalem. And there happened to be in Salem, this guy who was both a priest as well as

28:19 a king, which is an unusual combination, and his name was Melchizedek. So Abraham is

28:30 He has gifts, he has bread and he has wine.

28:34 And he blesses Abraham.

28:37 And then Abraham turns around and gives him a tenth

28:40 of the spoils of the war.

28:43 And that's it, end of story.

28:46 Like I said, if that's all we had was Genesis 14,

28:48 I might think, oh, that was kind of interesting.

28:50 This guy's priest king, he brings bread and wine,

28:52 he blesses, end of story.

28:56 But it just so happens that as you keep reading

29:00 You get to a very, very important Psalm, Psalm 110.

29:04 And lo and behold, somebody's name pops up in that Psalm,

29:08 the name Melchizedek.

29:09 Now Psalm 110, the importance of that Psalm,

29:12 cannot be overestimated.

29:14 I was looking at this just the other day.

29:16 In the New Testament, if you look at the biblical quotations

29:20 from the Old Testament in the New Testament,

29:22 the book that is quoted most in the New Testament

29:25 is the book of Psalms.

29:30 In the whole New Testament, by far, is from Psalm 110.

29:35 Psalm 110 begins this way, \"The Lord said to my Lord,

29:37 \"sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstill

29:40 \"for your feet that occurs over and over in the New Testament.\"

29:43 And it's in Psalm 110 that Melchizedek comes up again.

29:48 And here's how he comes up.

29:50 It says that the Messiah is going to have a priesthood

29:56 in the order of Melchizedek.

30:00 Now when you first read that you're like, wow, where did that come from?

30:03 Well, it comes from Genesis obviously, but how so?

30:07 What's the connection between Genesis 14, Melchizedek there?

30:11 And this Messiah who's going to be in the order of Melchizedek, a priest in the order

30:16 of Melchizedek that Psalm 110 talks about.

30:19 And then it gets even crazier when you jump from Genesis to Psalms to the book of Hebrews,

30:25 especially Chapter 7, where Melchizedek basically fills up the whole chapter and you have some

30:30 really remarkable things that are said about him in those opening verses of chapter 7. But the main

30:36 thrust is that Melchizedek, which means king of righteousness and king of Salem, which means king

30:45 of peace, that he is like the Messiah. He is the one who establishes the pattern by his very

31:00 I mean, a priest who is not from the tribe of Levi.

31:04 In fact, he's a Gentile.

31:06 He's not an Israelite at all.

31:08 He's a Gentile priest, a Gentile king,

31:11 that he who is superior even to Abraham,

31:16 he is the one who provides the pattern,

31:19 the priestly pattern, as well as the kingly pattern

31:22 that the Messiah is going to fill.

31:30 that Christ now colors in in his incarnation so that he is like Melchizedek.

31:36 And Melchizedek was like him. And this is one more example we see of how typology grows

31:43 within the Old Testament. It started in Genesis. It built up in the Psalms, and then it finally

31:49 comes to its head in chapter 7 of Hebrews. And as it turns out, although we don't have enough

31:54 time to go into it now, there was a lot of Jewish speculation about Melchizedek in the first

32:00 reasons why Hebrews include him in his argument because Melchizedek was often thought to be

32:05 an angel type figure or a heavenly redeemer type figure or even the Messiah.

32:11 So it makes sense with all the speculation about Melchizedek going on for the author of

32:15 Hebrews to include him and to avoid going too far filled with all his speculation instead

32:22 connecting him to the Messiah and saying, \"You want to know what kind of priest Jesus

32:30 because He is the priest who brings bread and wine to us.

32:34 The priest of peace and the king of peace

32:36 and the king of righteousness who blesses us

32:40 with a priesthood that is far superior to that of Levi.

32:45 So that's one more example.

32:47 Let's look at one other one.

32:49 This one I love, it's the typology,

32:52 it's the foreshadowing that Joshua gives to us.

33:00 correspondence to the Greek name Jesus.

33:04 So if you were to be reading through the Old Testament

33:08 in the Greek translation,

33:10 anytime you came to the name Joshua,

33:12 what you would read there is Jesus.

33:15 So anything that Joshua did in the Old Testament

33:17 in your Greek mind and in your Greek eyes,

33:20 you're seeing the name Jesus,

33:22 which in and of itself ought to alert you

33:25 to the fact that there's a correspondence

33:26 between these two.

33:27 And there certainly is.

33:28 And we see this especially in a relationship

33:30 Moses and Joshua.

33:33 So of course, Moses brings the people out of slavery.

33:36 He leads them through the wilderness for 40 years.

33:38 And they're right there at the border of the promised land.

33:41 But Moses is not going to be able to lead the Israelites

33:43 across because of a sin he committed in relationship

33:46 to in reference to bringing water out of the rock.

33:50 He's going to die.

33:51 Moses, who gave the law, can't bring Israel

33:55 into the promised land.

33:56 He's going to die outside the promise.

34:00 The lawgiver has to die before the people of Israel can be brought into the land of rest

34:06 Who's going to bring them there?

34:08 Moses actually asked God to to appoint a successor in his place

34:13 one upon whom the spirit rests and

34:17 God says I will I will appoint Joshua

34:21 Slash Jesus this Old Testament Jesus. I'm going to point him and he who is like you but different from you

34:30 over the leadership of Israel,

34:32 and he's gonna bring them where you can't take them.

34:34 He's gonna bring them through the Jordan River

34:37 and into the promised land.

34:40 Now we have examples all over the writings

34:43 of the early church where they connected Joshua and Jesus.

34:48 And it's obvious why, because what Joshua does

34:51 is he provides us what's more with the blueprint

34:53 that Jesus is to fulfill.

34:55 Their names are the same.

34:57 The law was given through Moses.

35:00 grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.

35:02 Moses can't bring us into the promised land.

35:05 He gives the law and he the lawgiver dies outside the promised land.

35:09 The only one who could bring us into the promised land is our new and greater Joshua.

35:14 And how does he do it?

35:15 Well, he brings us through the same Jordan River that Joshua brought the Israelites through.

35:20 That is why Jesus was baptized in the Jordan River.

35:23 He couldn't be baptized anywhere else.

35:30 that God brought Israel finally into the land of rest flowing with milk and honey.

35:37 So Jesus goes to the Jordan River to be baptized because He is the new Joshua.

35:41 He is there to put Himself into the Jordan River as the one who now ushers us

35:47 out of captivity and death, which is the only place the law can take us,

35:51 across the river of our own baptism into Him, now into the land of rest

36:00 in Him. So we see how important geography is. We see how important names are. We see how important

36:06 actions are because the whole story of Joshua and the crossing of the Jordan is preparing us

36:14 informing us much more about who Christ is. So when we read Joshua, we're not just reading a story

36:20 about a guy who succeeded Moses and he was a great war and he brought Israel into this land

36:30 or to Christ. He was the Old Testament Jesus who prepares us for the New Testament Jesus.

36:38 And let me give you one more example in the time that we have left. And he is in many ways

36:44 the king, not just the king of Israel, but the king of foreshadowing, and I'm talking about David.

36:51 Almost every aspect of David's life, from beginning to end, in one way or another, prepares us

37:00 of the badness of the Old Testament in the sense that he prepares the way because by

37:04 his reigning over Israel, by his destruction of the enemies of God, by his singing the psalms

37:13 and writing the songs of Israel in all this variety of ways, David himself was the Old

37:19 Testament image of who the Christ was to be. In fact, we have these amazing verses in

37:30 not the son of David, but David himself.

37:34 Ezekiel chapter 34, verses 23 and 24 says,

37:39 God is speaking.

37:40 He says, I will set up over them one shepherd,

37:43 my servant David, and he shall feed them.

37:46 He shall feed them and be their shepherd,

37:48 and I the Lord will be their God,

37:49 and my servant David will be prince among them.

37:53 I am the Lord, I have spoken.

37:56 We also have the same language used

38:00 in verse 24 and verse 25 where God says, \"My servant David shall be king over them,

38:08 and they shall have one shepherd.\" This is unprecedented in the Old Testament. We

38:15 have lots of types and foreshadowings of the Messiah, but never is the Messiah

38:19 given the name of a historical person. These historical people prepare the way

38:30 But the Messiah is actually called David.

38:34 So when you read 1st and 2nd Samuel,

38:35 when you're reading through the Psalms of David,

38:38 what are you looking at?

38:39 Well, you're looking at the life of Jesus

38:42 that is presented to us in black and white

38:46 so that when Christ comes,

38:48 He can fill that in in color and say,

38:50 \"I'm like David and David is like me.\"

38:52 So when you read the stories of David,

38:53 you're reading the stories that prepare you

38:55 for understanding who I am to be.

39:00 sense that God would use individuals in the Old Testament to teach us

39:07 Christology. He would use human beings to teach us Christology because human

39:12 beings are created in the image and likeness of God. God Himself becomes a

39:18 human being in the incarnation. So if you want to know what the ministry of

39:23 Jesus will be like, you look at what various individuals in the Old

39:26 Testament did, how God used them, the offices in which He placed them, maybe

39:30 prophet, may be priest, may be king. And in each of these, God was teaching us about

39:37 how he desires to interact with his people. And so as we read through these stories, we're

39:44 not looking for heroes, we're not looking for moral examples, and we're not looking

39:48 for immoral examples of what to avoid. We're looking for Christ. And in every page, he presents

39:54 himself to us. That's really what we should write on top of every page in the Old Testament.

40:00 look for Jesus, because that's exactly what he wants us to do.

40:04 And we see Him, presented beforehand, in all these various foreshadowings and types,

40:09 and they build up over time until finally we get to the New Testament,

40:13 and we find that that's exactly what Jesus and the apostles do, too.

40:16 They help us to understand who the Messiah is by joining Him to these Old Testament people

40:24 as foreshadowings of who He is.

40:30 lecture.

I want to thank you for going on this journey with me through the Old Testament - I hope you've enjoyed it so far.

Believe it or not, we're over halfway through the course... In our fourth lesson, we're going to take a closer look at the thematic layering of the Old Testament, with special emphasis on two themes: Creation and Exodus.

There are numerous \"creations\" and \"exoduses\" throughout the Old and New Testament, which is of course by divine design. God intentionally structured the story of our salvation around these themes, and once we see them clearly, we'll again find that the Old Testament is continually pointing us to the coming Christ. 

- Chad

00:00 (upbeat music)

00:16 - Welcome back to Christ in the Old Testament.

00:18 This is lecture four, and in this lecture,

00:21 we're gonna talk about some of the themes

00:23 that we've already begun to develop

00:25 in the first three lectures.

00:27 Especially we're gonna focus on

00:30 of creation and the Exodus.

00:33 We've touched on the Exodus.

00:34 We've touched on the creation, but what we're going to do

00:36 is more than just touch on them this time,

00:38 we're going to build them up and we're going to see,

00:41 especially how the prophets in Isaiah is at the head of the

00:46 prophets as far as the ones who do this, but also Jeremiah,

00:49 and Ezekiel, and Hosea, how each of them,

00:53 when they read Genesis 1 and 2, and when they read the book

01:00 this amazing portrait of exactly what the Messiah is going to do.

01:06 And so when they address the people of their own day,

01:09 what they do is they preach sermons,

01:12 prophetic sermons, that are based upon these earlier scriptures.

01:16 And it's like you can kind of think of them as an artist.

01:19 And they're pending this portrait of Messianic salvation,

01:23 but as they do so, they're dipping their paintbrush

01:30 of the Exodus and they're using that, that pain of creation, that pain of the Exodus to

01:36 paint this beautiful prophetic portrait of what's going to happen in the end of days,

01:42 that the latter days, as they call it, when the Messiah comes and when He recreates us

01:47 and He re-exitises us in His saving work. So that's where we're going with this. But

01:54 before we do that, I want to remind you that when we think about Old Testament and creation,

02:00 We have to be specific about which creation we're talking about and which

02:04 Exodus we're talking about because as it turns out, if you look from,

02:07 well, especially if you include the New Testament, if you look all the way

02:11 from Genesis to Revelation, there are a multiplicity of creations and a

02:16 multiplicity of Exoduses throughout the scriptures.

02:20 And that, of course, is by design, by divine design.

02:23 This is the way that God structured the story of salvation.

02:27 So just for instance, of course,

02:30 you have creation the way we usually think of it in Genesis 1 and 2, but as we talked about

02:36 in a lecture or two ago, you also have the new creation that occurs in Noah who's like

02:41 a second Adam, but then you also have the new creation that Christ Himself brings,

02:48 and then you have the new creation that we experience in baptism, and you have the new creation that

03:00 by fire and a new heavens and a new earth will be made,

03:03 and we will be resurrected to live in this new earth,

03:06 this new creation forever.

03:07 So there's a whole lot of creations in the scriptures.

03:11 But there's a whole lot of Exodus as well.

03:13 We talked about one of those in the last lecture

03:15 that of Abraham and Sarah as they went down into Egypt

03:18 and then came forth blazing the trail

03:20 for their descendants.

03:21 But I didn't mention that in some ways you could call

03:25 what Abraham and Sarah went through as the second Exodus,

03:30 If you think of it in terms of exile, who got kicked out of the Holy Land, the Holy Garden,

03:37 Adam and Eve did.

03:39 They were driven out because of sin.

03:40 They were exiled.

03:43 And they are brought back in.

03:46 They are re-exidists, re-patriated into the promised land with all of us in the work of

03:54 Christ.

03:55 So the angels who stood at the entrance to the gate of paradise with flaming swords, they

04:00 those swords in the death and resurrection of Christ. And we, in Adam and in Eve, all of us are

04:07 brought back into paradise. We are repatriated, so we leave exile and we're brought back in. So

04:13 that's really what you could call the first Exodus and the neighbor Ham and Sarah. And then

04:17 of course what we usually think of as the Exodus, the book of Exodus describes that with the Israelites.

04:23 But there was also another exile in 586 BC after centuries of God sending prophet after

04:30 morning Israel, morning Judah to repent,

04:33 he exiles them to the land of Babylon.

04:37 And there is realized the northern tribes earlier

04:40 to the land of Assyria.

04:42 Well, the ones who went to Assyria,

04:44 most of them never came back.

04:45 We don't know what happened to those lost tribes,

04:47 but we know that those who went to Babylon,

04:50 they were exiled to 586 BC.

04:52 They were brought back.

04:53 They were repatriated.

04:55 So they returned from exile.

05:00 we also have a new Exodus that's promised when the Messiah comes.

05:05 And Jesus himself actually uses that terminology.

05:09 It looks at the kind of the transfiguration.

05:11 You remember that Jesus takes Peter, James and John up with them to the mountain,

05:15 and he prays, and you have God appearing, and there's Moses and Elijah.

05:19 And what are they going to talk about?

05:21 When you put Jesus and Moses and Elijah together,

05:24 what topic of conversation is going to come up between them?

05:30 If you could have been there in eavesdropping, you would have heard, because we're told

05:34 in Luke chapter 9, they were talking about his exodus that he was to accomplish at Jerusalem.

05:43 Moses was standing there who himself had, of course, experienced his exodus, and he's

05:48 talking with Jesus about his exodus.

05:51 And there's Elijah, who was sort of a mosaic kind of figure, and he's talking also with

05:56 Jesus about his exodus.

06:00 during Holy Week, in which not just the Jewish people, but all people are going to be brought

06:08 out of exile and back to the promised land of salvation in the work of the Messiah. So there's

06:15 a whole lot of exorcists and there's a whole lot of creations in the Old Testament and the New

06:20 Testament. And that's for a reason because these portray to us in intricate detail exactly how

06:30 active in our world through Christ to bring about creation and then to bring about a new creation

06:37 after exile and he does it all by speaking his life-giving powerful saving word to bring us out

06:45 of captivity, out of slavery, and then back to himself and to the place of Sabbath rest.

06:52 Now, before we jump into a few of the texts, especially from the prophets where they talk about

07:00 is to bring about. We have to remind ourselves that when we're reading the Old Testament,

07:06 we have to pay very careful attention to the words that are used. And we can't just simply read

07:14 from Genesis to Malachi one time and assume, hey, we read it, we've got it, no problem.

07:20 Just like you have to watch, there's some movies you know that you watch over and over,

07:30 So when you get together with them,

07:32 you can just kind of quote lines upon lines

07:35 and everybody knows the story and everybody knows the lines.

07:37 You can throw out a line and say something like,

07:40 yeah, well, you know, that's just like your opinion, man.

07:43 Well, you say that.

07:45 And if you've never watched the big Lebowski,

07:47 you're not going to get it.

07:48 But if you have, well, then you know the scene

07:51 where that occurs.

07:53 If an outsider heard you say, yeah, well, you know,

07:56 that's just like your opinion, man.

07:58 They're not going to get it

08:00 the movie and therefore they don't know the line and so they can't make the connection.

08:04 They're like they don't get the joke. They're outside the story. Or if I say something

08:10 like, \"Well I'm not dead yet,\" and you've never seen the search for the Holy Grail,

08:16 you don't know the context in which that line is thrown out there. And so you're not

08:20 going to get the joke because you don't know the story. So there's a necessity of immersing

08:30 and watching it over and over again

08:32 and listening to its lines so that

08:35 when we hear certain words or phrases

08:37 or images that are used,

08:39 we make the connection between that

08:42 and its original context.

08:44 Otherwise, we're gonna completely miss the illusion.

08:47 We're gonna completely miss how this quote

08:52 is taking us back to another context

08:55 and through that context opening up a whole world

09:00 and exactly what the transpiring later on.

09:03 The technical term for this is called \"metilepsis,\"

09:06 which is a fancy way of saying,

09:08 I see what you did there.

09:10 So this word or this phrase is used,

09:14 and metilepsis says, this is lifted from somewhere else,

09:18 and when we plug it into this earlier narrative,

09:21 we see how these are connected together.

09:23 Now, the reason I bring it up now

09:25 is because we're gonna see instances of this

09:30 Unless you're immersed in the story of creation, immersed in the story of the Exodus, when the prophets use certain language, you're going to completely miss it because you don't see how they are using metilepsis.

09:42 Not going to see what's going on there with the prophets.

09:45 But if you are immersed in these stories, then you're going to pick up on that and you're going to have your understanding of Christ in the Old Testament greatly enriched.

10:00 examples of how it becomes the paradigm by which later writers, both in the Old Testament

10:09 and the New Testament, use this language of creation to talk about how Christ is the

10:16 completion of creation and the bringer about of a new creation. We're just going to look

10:20 at a couple examples of these before we move on to talk about the Exodus as also a work

10:30 want to look at are actually from the gospels.

10:33 It's amazing to me how every single one of the gospel writers and one way or another

10:42 are like tapping us on the shoulder and saying, \"Hey, if you want to understand my gospel,

10:48 go back and read Genesis.

10:49 Go back to Genesis chapter 1 because if you don't, you're going to miss the point of

10:53 what's going on here.\"

11:00 with two words that are the exact same words by which Genesis 1 1 and the Greek begin.

11:08 So Genesis 1 1 and the Greek begins in RK, in RK a poisson hothelos, in the beginning God created.

11:17 John begins as gospel the same way, in RK, in the beginning.

11:22 Well, anyone who knew the Greek Old Testament, when they hear John's gospel beginning in RK

11:30 I see what you did there.

11:32 They make the connection.

11:32 They're saying, oh, to understand what John is saying,

11:36 I need to read Genesis because Genesis is going to help me

11:38 understand John because and John goes on to say in the

11:41 beginning was the word that where was with God and the

11:43 word was God.

11:44 And the word was the one through whom God made all things.

11:48 So you got to read Genesis 1 1 and John 1 1 together in RK

11:53 links these two together.

11:54 But John isn't the only one.

11:56 Listen to how Matthew, the very beginning of the New

12:00 Matthew 1 1 starts. He says, \"The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ.\"

12:07 Well, that's the way it's usually translated, but in the Greek it's Biblos

12:11 Ganesios. Ganesios could be translated as Genesis, as beginning. So this is the book of the Genesis

12:21 of Jesus Christ. Now again, if you know the Greek Old Testament and you're reading the very

12:30 chapter one. And of course, he goes on to basically summarize a whole Old Testament. If you're,

12:38 it is down to me that the New Testament begins the way it does because unless you're plugged into

12:44 the Old Testament and you start reading the New Testament from the very beginning, you're

12:47 going to think, oh, what in the world? Why would they put a genealogy at the very beginning of the

12:52 New Testament? This makes no sense. Nobody likes genealogies. They're dull and dry and boring.

13:00 people are. The reason Matthew begins his gospel with the genealogy is this is, this is

13:05 the way not of hinting, but it basically shouting to us, \"Hey, the whole Old Testament,\" which is

13:11 the story of all these people have just included this genealogy. All this is leading up to this

13:16 guy I'm just about to write about, Jesus of Nazareth. So he does two things. He uses the book of Genesis

13:30 It's the same with Mark chapter 1 verse 1.

13:35 Mark chapter 1 begins this way.

13:38 The RK, the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

13:43 Once more Genesis 1-1 starts out in RK at Poisson Hothaos.

13:48 In RK, in the beginning, Mark 1-1, the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

13:53 This is Mark's way of using metaleptus.

14:00 Old Testament.

14:02 And then Luke does things a little bit differently.

14:03 He starts out as gospel.

14:05 You have two or three chapters.

14:06 And then all of a sudden,

14:08 Luke includes a genealogy as well.

14:10 And that genealogy ends with reference

14:14 to the son of Adam.

14:17 So we go all the way back to Adam,

14:19 who is the son of God,

14:21 that is the first child of God.

14:24 And then, let me throw this out as well.

14:27 If you look at Luke's gospel right after he says that,

14:30 to Jesus being baptized and taken into the wilderness.

14:34 So we jump from a creation image to an Exodus image.

14:40 And that's a great segue to what I wanna talk about

14:43 in the rest of the lecture,

14:45 because we see that creation and exodus

14:50 are not really two separate events,

14:52 but they're two sides of the same coin.

14:55 They're two ways of saying how God interacts

15:00 world. So how does God bring everything into being? Well, he speaks his word. He creates

15:09 ex nihalo. He creates out of nothing by the power of his word. That's how he creates

15:17 the heavens and the earth and everything that's in them. Now the Exodus, that's different,

15:22 right? No, it's not. How does God bring order out of chaos and death out of life? And

15:30 liberation out of captivity. He speaks his word. You see, the way that God is always interacting

15:38 with us in our lives, in the life of the church, just like he did in the life of Israel, is he speaks

15:44 his word and through that word, he accomplishes that which he desires for us and his desire for us

15:51 is always to bring us out of darkness into light, out of Egypt, to the promised land, out of captivity,

16:00 of what the Old Testament calls,

16:02 Tohu Bevohu, formlessness and void,

16:05 where our lives are in shambles and in chaos

16:08 and there's no order, everything is disintegrating,

16:10 we're like uncreated, if you will,

16:12 we're in this state, we're a mess,

16:15 it's kind of state of uncreation.

16:17 God speaks His word and transforms that

16:20 from Tohu Bevohu, from formlessness and void

16:23 to structure, to form, to us being the way He wants us

16:30 children. So the way that God works in creation, the way that God works in the Exodus, is exactly the same.

16:37 And we see this affirmed in the book of Exodus itself, because if you read the story from the very beginning, from the start of Exodus 1,

16:46 what you're going to see is God using various elements of creation in the Exodus of his people.

17:00 Israel was in Egypt that they were fruitful and multiplied and increased greatly and became

17:09 exceedingly mighty.

17:10 This is the case where you're going to pay attention.

17:14 Chapter 1 verse 7, \"The sons of Israel were fruitful, increased greatly, and multiplied.\"

17:20 Well, where have we heard that language before?

17:22 Well, we heard it in Genesis.

17:24 Chapter 1, we heard it in the case of the second Adam, Noah, where his family was to

17:30 And now we're here in the case of the Israelites.

17:32 So that language directly points us back to Genesis again.

17:37 That's not the only place.

17:39 What happens in Genesis one?

17:40 You have water everywhere in the spirit of God is hovering over the surface

17:44 of the water and he's bringing order out of this liquid chaos.

17:48 He's bringing about creation as he wants it to be out of this watery mass.

17:54 How does that actually start out?

17:56 Where does where does order begin?

18:00 when a child is taken out of the water,

18:04 who will grow up to be the Redeemer,

18:06 the one through whom God brings about liberation

18:10 for the Israelites.

18:11 So God using water at the beginning,

18:14 God using water in the Exodus,

18:16 is his way of using the elements of creation

18:20 to bless his people.

18:21 And then you get to the 10 plagues.

18:23 The 10 plagues were not just God punishing Pharaoh

18:26 in the Egyptian, the 10 plagues,

18:30 of the Egyptians because in Egypt,

18:33 all the various elements of creation

18:34 was the Nile River to the frogs,

18:36 to everything that God used in the plagues.

18:38 All of these runners stood to be various manifestations

18:41 of the Egyptian deities.

18:42 The Nile, for instance, was an icon of the Egyptian gods.

18:47 And so what does God do?

18:49 He basically says, \"All right, you think the Nile is a god?\"

18:52 Well, I'm gonna show you that the Nile is a false god

18:54 because I'm gonna turn its water into blood.

19:00 So this is God's way of saying, listen, I'm the one who's in charge of creation.

19:04 I'm the Creator, not all the false gods of the Egyptians, and I'm going to use these

19:08 elements of creation not only to speak a word of judgment against those who keep my

19:13 people in captivity, but also to speak a word of grace to the Israelites and to bring

19:18 them out of this bondage into liberty.

19:22 And we see the same theme continued throughout Exodus where when the Israelites are in the

19:30 What does God do?

19:31 He speaks his word and water comes out of nothing.

19:35 Water comes out of a rock.

19:38 So water comes from that from which it should not come.

19:42 And how does it happen?

19:43 Because God speaks his word.

19:45 His people are hungry.

19:46 And so what does God do?

19:48 He speaks his word and manifolds so that they have food

19:52 to eat over and over.

19:56 Throughout their journey through the wilderness,

20:00 As he is creator, so he is also Redeemer, and he's using the elements of creation to bring about this redemption for his people.

20:10 The reason this is so significant is because Exodus and creation become conjoined.

20:20 They are glued together as a single story throughout the rest of the Old Testament.

20:30 Creation Part Two.

20:32 Because what you're gonna see in the Psalms,

20:35 what you're gonna see in the prophets,

20:37 is that when they are proclaiming the work of the Messiah,

20:42 they weave these two stories together.

20:45 So if the Exodus and creation are not understood

20:48 to be two separate events,

20:49 but they both bring together this one saving story

20:56 of what God is going to do for us in the Messiah.

21:00 So what I want to do now is look at some examples of how this takes place in the Psalms

21:07 as well as in the prophets to show how they read Genesis and Exodus as the prophecy embedded

21:19 in narrative of who the Messiah was to be and what he was to effect for his people.

21:25 The first example that I want to look at is from a couple of different Psalms and actually

21:30 and 136.

21:31 And what we see in these two Psalms is how when Israel was singing hymns, they wove together

21:39 the story of creation and the story of the Exodus into one unified message about the

21:45 God who cares about them, who liberates them, who recreates them.

21:50 So for instance, Psalm 135 starts out with a pretty typical beginning to a praise psalm,

22:00 then it goes on with language like this for the first four verses.

22:04 And then in verse 5 it shifts to talking about creation.

22:08 \"The Lord is great, He's above all gods.

22:10 Whatever the Lord pleases He does, He causes vapors to ascend from the ends of the earth.

22:14 He makes lightnings for the rain, He brings forth the wind from His treasury.

22:19 So there's this language of creation.

22:21 God, the Creator, doing all this wonderful, powerful work.

22:26 And then what seems like an abrupt shift happens.

22:30 from verse 7 to verse 8, he goes from who brings forth the wind from his

22:34 treasuries, he smote the firstborn of Egypt.

22:38 Like wow that was a jarring transition. Well actually it's not

22:41 theologically. For them to move from creation to the Exodus is quite

22:47 natural because that's the way Old Testament theology works because as I

22:51 mentioned earlier these are just two sides of the same coin. Then it goes on in

23:00 people from Israel. And then in the last three verses, it shifts back to kind of a general praise

23:07 and blessing of the Lord. It's the same in the next Psalm. So on 136, you might know this one,

23:14 it's the one with that ongoing refrain. Thanks to the Lord for His loving kindness,

23:20 His everlasting, Kilolam, Hosto, and Hebrew, that phrase occurs over and over throughout the Psalm.

23:30 say, \"Kilalom Hosto for his loving kindness is everlasting.\"

23:34 And it starts out talking about creation.

23:37 God did this.

23:39 He made the great lights.

23:40 He made the sun to rule by day and the moon and stars

23:43 to rule by night.

23:45 Kilalom Hosto for his loving kindness is everlasting.

23:48 And then verse 10, again, we have what seemed

23:51 to be an abrupt shift.

23:52 It goes right into the story of the Exodus.

23:55 To him who smoked the Egyptians in their firstborn

23:57 and brought Israel out from their midst.

24:00 all the way to verse 22, talking about what God did for Israel in the Exodus.

24:04 So we go from creation to the Exodus and then it wraps up in a very interesting way,

24:11 last four verses who remembered us in our lowest state, for his loving kindness is everlasting,

24:17 and his rescued us from our adversaries, for his loving kindness is everlasting,

24:22 who gives food to all flesh, for his loving kindness is everlasting.

24:30 adversaries and it gives food to all flesh. Exodus, creation. Creation, Exodus. These two are not

24:39 again understood as two separate stories, but they are understood to be the one story of how God

24:45 works to save us. And we sing about this in Psalms like 135 and 136. Now let's turn from that

25:00 rescue and work of the Messiah. And this is just amazing stuff. There's so many

25:07 examples that we could look at in Isaiah. We're gonna have to just force ourselves

25:11 to look at at only two or three of them because we could spend literally hours

25:16 upon hours going over all the ways that Isaiah picks up creation and exodus

25:22 themes and brings these together into this message of the work of the Messiah.

25:30 with chapter 35.

25:33 It begins this way.

25:35 He's been talking about,

25:36 we've been talking about in the previous chapter

25:39 of how basically creation has gone into this turmoil

25:44 because of, he's describing the rebellion of the Israelites

25:48 and what is happening because of their continued idolatry.

25:53 And he uses actually the language of Tohu B'Vohu

25:56 that I mentioned earlier, this formalist and void,

26:00 uses both of those words from Genesis chapter one.

26:03 So this is like, it's like everything has gone into reverse.

26:07 Everything is so bad that creation has gone all the way back

26:10 to this formalist and void.

26:12 And so what is needed?

26:14 Well, we need a new creation.

26:16 We need God to come down and to make everything new

26:20 and to transform this formalist and void into a kind of creation

26:24 that can rejoice, that can be just like God wants it to be.

26:28 And that's what we have.

26:30 in chapter 35. It says, \"The wilderness and the desert will be glad, and the arabah,\"

26:38 that's the arabah is the desert at the southern part of Israel. The arabah will rejoice and blossom

26:45 like the crocus. It will blossom profusely and rejoice with rejoicing in shot for glory.

26:53 Automatically, our ears ought to perk at these words because there's a transformation that

27:00 The desert is not supposed to just break out in song and in life and in flowers.

27:06 That's not what happens in the desert. The desert is where things die.

27:09 The desert is where there's dryness. The desert is not where there's joy.

27:14 But that's what Isaiah sees. He sees kind of like creation has become this vast,

27:19 lifeless desert and all of a sudden because of the work of this coming Messiah, it's going to be

27:24 something completely different. Where formerly there was death, now there's life.

27:30 Now there's rejoicing.

27:33 But then listen to this, he goes on, verse three,

27:36 \"Encourage the exhausted and strengthened the feeble.

27:39 Say to those with anxious heart, take courage.

27:41 Fear not. Behold, your God will come with vengeance.

27:44 The recompense of God will come and he will save you.\"

27:50 How is this going to look, you might ask.

27:52 God's going to come and he's going to somehow bring about a transformation.

28:00 Rejoicing, and the exhausted one no longer be exhausted,

28:03 and the feeble will now be strong.

28:05 How this is gonna happen?

28:06 What's gonna be the sign of this, you might ask?

28:09 Listen to these words.

28:10 This is verse five.

28:11 \"Then the eyes of the blind will be opened,

28:15 \"and the ears of the death will be unstopped.

28:17 \"Then the lame will leap like a deer,

28:19 \"and the tongue of the dumb will shout for joy.\"

28:26 Now, put on your New Testament ears for a minute,

28:30 Remember, when John the Baptist is put in prison and he sends disciples to Jesus to say,

28:38 \"More or less what's going on. Are you the one that we were supposed to expect or should we look

28:47 for somebody else?\" Because things don't seem to be going the way that we plan them to go.

28:51 I mean, John the Baptist is now in prison. Of course, he's soon to be beheaded and his

29:00 What's going on here that it doesn't seem to fit.

29:03 And what does Jesus say?

29:04 He says, well, he heals a bunch of people.

29:07 And then he says, go back and tell John what you see

29:10 and what you hear.

29:11 The blind receive their sight.

29:13 The mute are now able to speak.

29:15 The deaf are now able to hear and the poor

29:17 have the gospel preached.

29:19 And then what is Jesus saying?

29:20 He's saying, go back and tell John to open up his Bible

29:26 to the book of Isaiah and see in chapter 35

29:30 There in the days of the Messiah and then tell him what you just saw me doing in other words

29:36 I have come and I am now fulfilling what Isaiah talked about I

29:42 Am opening the eyes of the blind and opening the ears of the deaf. I'm opening the mouth of the mute

29:47 I'm bringing courage to those who were exhausted. I'm bringing strength to those who are feeble in other words. I am

30:00 And you're going to see this transformation take place throughout my ministry so much so that even the dead are

30:08 resurrected as we see in the case of Lazarus.

30:13 So we see these creation motifs all over the place in Isaiah 35. We're not done yet

30:19 because as it goes on to talk about how

30:22 this desert land is transforming into this new creation. It also says verse 8 a highway will be there a

30:30 You know, we call it the highway of holiness.

30:34 The unclean will not travel on it, but it will be for him who walks that way.

30:39 And there will be many lions there, or there will be many vicious beasts who are there.

30:44 And the rancend that said, \"Shall come to Zion with joyful shouting.\"

30:50 And what has Isaiah just done?

30:53 Well, he's moved from creation to the Exodus.

31:00 In new creation, springy forth, there's also a highway, a holy highway, a God highway,

31:06 and this highway is going to lead straight back to the promised land.

31:09 It can lead straight design.

31:13 This is Isaiah preaching the gospel.

31:16 Now, it might not sound like the gospel to us, but that's because most of us, when

31:20 we think about the gospel, I have all these New Testament images floating around in our

31:23 mind.

31:24 But for Isaiah, this is how he preached the gospel to the Israelites.

31:30 in this wilderness where you saw death everywhere,

31:33 it's gonna spring forth with life.

31:35 In fact, now there's gonna be a holy highway there,

31:38 no vicious beast around, no predators.

31:40 God is gonna bring us back design

31:42 and restore us to where he wants us to be.

31:45 So Isaiah, when he wants to talk about the work in Messiah,

31:49 he reads Genesis.

31:52 He reads Exodus and says,

31:55 I'm gonna use these two books to talk about Christ.

32:00 nothing more than giving us a model by which we can talk about Christ.

32:04 We don't have to go to the New Testament, nothing wrong with that, but we can go to Genesis.

32:08 We can go to Exodus. We can emulate Isaiah in drawing from these deep wells of beautiful,

32:16 divine imagery to describe how it is that God affects salvation and peace and transformation,

32:22 a new creation and a new exodus for us. But let's keep moving. So that was Isaiah 35.

32:30 you turn a few chapters to almost the end of Isaiah,

32:35 chapter 65, he's at it again.

32:39 Chapter 65 verse 17, very significant verse.

32:43 God is speaking, he says, \"Behold, I create new heavens

32:46 \"and a new earth, and the former things shall not be remembered

32:50 \"or come to mind, but be glad and rejoice forever

32:52 \"and what I create, for behold I create Jerusalem

33:00 Let me pause there for a second.

33:03 He says, \"I create a new heavens and a new earth.\"

33:05 And then immediately he says,

33:06 \"I create Jerusalem for rejoicing.\"

33:08 Now, if you go from Isaiah 65 to the very end of the Bible

33:12 to almost the very end of Revelation chapter 21,

33:15 and look at those first two verses,

33:16 you'll see that he does nothing more than pick up

33:19 what Isaiah said.

33:20 Isaiah said, and more or less quote him,

33:23 because there it says,

33:24 there's gonna be a new heavens

33:24 and a new earth coming down from heaven

33:26 and the new Jerusalem also coming down from heaven.

33:30 and Jerusalem. In Revelation, New Heavens New Earth, Jerusalem.

33:35 So you see how John is picking up on what Isaiah said in bringing this new

33:40 Heaven and New Earth imagery to describe the work of Christ. But he goes on,

33:46 \"Mascip down a few verses in Isaiah 65 toward the end.\" Verse 23, verse 22

34:00 \"The living them, and it says that their day shall be like the lifetime of a tree.\"

34:06 The Greek translation, by the way, adds, \"Their life span shall be like the life of

34:12 the tree of life.\"

34:14 So that pushes us all the way back to Genesis chapter 2.

34:19 \"And they shall not labor in vain or be of children for calamity, for they are the offspring

34:24 of those that are blessed by the Lord.\"

34:30 \"The lion shall eat straw like the ox,

34:32 \"and dust shall be the serpent's food.

34:36 \"They shall do no evil or harm in all my holy mountain.\"

34:40 When you hear about dust and the serpent's food,

34:42 your mind automatically jumps back through metilepsis,

34:45 through this, I see what you did there,

34:47 the Genesis chapter three.

34:49 When you hear about there no longer being death,

34:53 your mind goes back to Genesis chapter three.

34:55 This is Isaiah, forming in our minds,

35:00 Messiah by going back to creation as well as the Exodus to describe what it will be like

35:08 in the work of the Messiah. Let me give you a couple more, one more example, and then

35:14 I want to kind of bring all this together in its New Testament adoption as the way of

35:21 speaking of the work of the Messiah. And this example comes from Ezekiel chapter 36.

35:30 the language of creation, the language of the Exodus, as well as the language of

35:36 the tabernacle to talk about what the Messiah is going to do for us. Ezekiel

35:42 chapter 36 says that God will sprinkle clean water on you and you will be clean.

35:49 This is the language of the tabernacle where water was used for cleansing for

35:54 sanctification. So in the work of the Messiah, God is going to sprinkle this

36:00 which is what happens in the waters of baptism.

36:05 And then he goes on, verse 35,

36:08 to say that in that day they will say this desolate land

36:13 has become like the garden of Eden

36:16 and the waste, desolate and ruined cities are fortified and inhabited.

36:23 So when Ezekiel's mind, when Messiah comes,

36:30 to a relationship with God pictured here as land in which everything will be right and it's going

36:37 to be like the Garden of Eden. So once more, not only Isaiah but Ezekiel is drawing from creation,

36:43 he's drawing from Exodus and he's pulling these together to describe the kind of saving,

37:00 look at in your own time, look at Isaiah chapter 11 in particular because there

37:05 Isaiah brings together the story of the Exodus and pictures the work of the

37:11 Messiah as a second Exodus. Let me kind of bring all this together and show how

37:17 it worked its way out in the New Testament. What happens in the New Testament?

37:22 Christ comes as the one who brings about a new creation. He is the Word made flesh.

37:30 He's with God, He is God, and He brings about this work of creation by doing what the church

37:38 father, Erenaeus, called a recapitulation.

37:41 He doesn't just redo what happened in the Old Testament.

37:45 It doesn't just kind of go through, again, what happened in the Old Testament.

37:49 He does that, and then He transforms it into something greater and better.

37:55 Christ retraces the steps of the Israelites.

38:00 and that he's brought back from Egypt.

38:03 So he undergoes his own exodus.

38:05 He's doing what Israel did before him,

38:08 what Abraham and Sarah did before him.

38:11 And he's doing it not just to go through these same steps

38:15 again, but to do it in such a way

38:17 that what he does brings perfection.

38:20 The exodus of Abraham and Sarah wasn't enough.

38:23 The exodus of the Israelites wasn't enough

38:24 because it didn't bring salvation,

38:26 but Christ brings salvation in his exodus.

38:30 In the desert, the Israelites failed all the temptations to which they were subjected.

38:36 Christ goes into the wilderness for 40 days to be tempted by the devil, and each time

38:41 he rejects the temptation of the devil so that he might lead the righteous life of obedience

38:46 that we do not lead.

38:48 And thus, he not only goes through these temptations that the Israelites went through, but he does

38:54 so in order that he might win salvation for us.

39:00 you have the image of the Exodus that describes who Christ is. John says, \"Behold, the Lamb of God,

39:07 who takes away the sin of the world.\" Christ is crucified during Passover, which of course

39:13 began in the Exodus. I mentioned earlier that when he's talking with Moses in Elijah,

39:18 on the amount of transfiguration, they're talking about his upcoming Exodus that he's going to

39:22 accomplish in Jerusalem. Paul, in 1 Corinthians chapter 10, said that the life of the church is

39:30 of Israel, just like Moses, all the people of Israel were baptized into Moses in the

39:35 cloud and in the sea and all ate the same spiritual food and all ate the same spiritual

39:40 drink.

39:41 So also we were baptized into one greater than Moses in our own Red Sea of baptism.

39:47 And we have spiritual food and spiritual drink in the Lord's Supper.

39:51 So Paul is saying, Hey, you're like the Israelites.

39:55 They had their, they had their holy food.

39:57 They had their holy drink.

40:00 we do too. So when you read these stories, read them as the picture of what the church is and how

40:07 God gives His gifts to the church over and over in the New Testament. Without the Exodus,

40:14 without creation in mind, we're going to underread these stories. We're not going to read the full,

40:30 reading the prophets, pay careful attention, watch for those words, those images, those

40:35 phrases which point us back to Exodus, back to creation and pay attention to what the

40:41 prophet is doing there or what the New Testament writer is doing there.

40:46 Because chances are if there's some word or some phrase or some image that reminds you

40:50 of Genesis or Exodus, they're up to something.

40:53 They're wanting to remind us that this word made flesh, this Yahweh who's now become one

41:00 to recreate, to repatriate, and to do all of this in fulfillment of everything that led up

41:08 to his life and ministry in the Old Testament. So that's the beauty of the Exodus, that's a

41:15 beauty of creation as it informs us about who the Messiah is. And we'll be back for our next lecture,

41:30 (upbeat music)