00:00 (upbeat music)
\n00:15 - Hi and welcome to the course Christ in the Old Testament.
\n00:18 My name is Chad Bird, and I am a scholar and residence
\n00:21 at 1517, and I'll be the one who's guiding you
\n00:24 through the Old Testament.
\n00:26 So welcome to the course, welcome to this subject.
\n00:30 to dive in and tell you all about Christ and the Old Testament.
\n00:35 To kind of get us in that direction though.
\n00:37 I want to first of all tell you about a trip that I took just in fact this past summer
\n00:41 with my son.
\n00:43 My son's name is Luke and he and I decided we were going to go on this back country camping
\n00:49 trip to the Smoky Mountains.
\n00:52 And he had done it before I had never done it so it was new experience for me.
\n00:55 We went to the Smoky Mountains.
\n00:56 We camped out for about four or five days.
\n01:00 We swam in the river, we had all these great experiences, and we had a few laughs along
\n01:06 the way, we had a few cuts along the way, all the stuff that kind of goes with a camping
\n01:10 trip.
\n01:12 And I had all of these memories from this week built up over these four or five days,
\n01:18 and I couldn't wait to get back and tell the rest of my family about them.
\n01:21 We didn't have any cell service, so we couldn't communicate, so I had all of these experiences.
\n01:30 I was excited about it.
\n01:31 I couldn't wait to get back until my wife and my friends,
\n01:35 the rest of my family about everything
\n01:36 that we had experienced together.
\n01:39 The reason I tell you that is because
\n01:42 when I go into the Old Testament,
\n01:44 it's kind of like I'm going on a trip,
\n01:46 on a journey, on an exploration every single time.
\n01:50 And it gets me excited because I always discover something new.
\n01:55 I always discover something I didn't see there before.
\n02:00 or maybe it's how a couple of stories are connected in a way that I didn't realize they were connected before.
\n02:05 Whatever it is, I discover something new as I take this trip into the Old Testament.
\n02:11 And when I get out, I can't wait to tell others about it.
\n02:15 And so whether I'm teaching or whether I'm writing, whatever I'm doing,
\n02:19 I'm always excited about telling others, teaching others about what really the Lord has shown to me in the Old Testament.
\n02:30 I'm looking forward to telling you all about these experiences and these discoveries and
\n02:35 these insights and everything else that we're going to be covering over these next
\n02:40 few lectures.
\n02:43 Now how did I get into the Old Testament?
\n02:46 What was it that kind of sent me on that first trip into these Old Testament scriptures?
\n02:51 I grew up as a church kid.
\n02:54 We were in church every Sunday morning, every Sunday night, a lot of Wednesday evenings,
\n03:00 So it felt like I was always in church.
\n03:02 And so I was learning all these stories.
\n03:05 And a lot of those were from the Old Testament.
\n03:07 So I'd go to Sunday school when we learned about,
\n03:09 of course, Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden.
\n03:10 We learned about Noah and the floating zoo of the ark.
\n03:15 We learned about Daniel and the lion's den.
\n03:16 All of these great stories that are just captivated
\n03:21 generations of people.
\n03:23 But the story that I love the most,
\n03:27 the character that I love the most,
\n03:30 kept coming back to that just I couldn't get away from was David.
\n03:37 Of course, if you know anything about David's life,
\n03:39 you know that David had all kinds of both good and bad experiences.
\n03:45 He did a lot of great things.
\n03:46 He did some terrible things.
\n03:47 So he's a very interesting and complicated figure.
\n03:51 But the story, when I was a kid,
\n03:53 the story that really captivated my attention was the story that David is known best for.
\n04:00 of when he marched out to meet the giant Goliath. If you remember the story, everybody
\n04:07 else was afraid to go, and he shows up. He's just a young kid. In fact, he's just visiting
\n04:11 his brothers who were soldiers, bringing them supplies, and nobody else will go out
\n04:17 and face the giant Philistine. But David does. And when he did, armed only with a sling,
\n04:30 Now as a kid you can imagine that kind of heroic act really captivated my
\n04:37 attention and so I wanted to grow up and be like David. In the sense of being
\n04:44 someone who's not afraid to take on a giant, someone who's not afraid to step
\n04:48 forward and to do what needs to be done, someone who's courageous and bold. In
\n05:00 In fact, I've got it right here.
\n05:02 So when I was a kid, this was what my granddaddy made for me.
\n05:07 It's made from the fork of a mesquite tree that he found near Jelena, Mexico, which was
\n05:12 my home.
\n05:13 I burned my name into it with a magnifying glass when I was a kid.
\n05:17 Of course, it had rubber bands then, and it had a leather pouch made from an old chutang.
\n05:22 And with this, I kind of terrorized the rodents and birds of my neighborhood growing up.
\n05:30 old now. It's one of the momentos from my childhood that I really do treasure. And in
\n05:36 many ways, that slingshot, because it connected me with David, kind of became an emblem of
\n05:43 how I read the story of David. And not just the story of David, but the story of a lot
\n05:48 of the other Old Testament characters as well. I want to read about Noah. I want to
\n06:00 himself. I was reading these stories as if, reading these stories as if they were basically
\n06:09 modeling for me how I should be. In other words, I read them as sort of a, what you might call,
\n06:14 a moralistic tale. So what morals, what good things can I learn from the life of David,
\n06:20 where the life of Moses, or the life of Jeremiah, or any of these other Old Testament characters?
\n06:30 this moralistic reading of the Old Testament.
\n06:35 Well, I grew up.
\n06:37 I was no longer a kid.
\n06:38 Now I graduated from high school.
\n06:40 So what was I going to do?
\n06:42 Well, I decided I was going to go on to university
\n06:44 and I was going to focus my studies upon the Bible.
\n06:49 So that's what I did.
\n06:49 In fact, I began to focus more and more on the Old Testament.
\n06:52 I learned Greek, I learned Hebrew,
\n06:55 and then I went on to the seminary
\n07:00 deeper into biblical and theological studies, but that the Old Testament kept calling my name.
\n07:06 And so I studied more and more about the theology of the Old Testament, the history of the Old
\n07:11 Testament, the archaeology of the Old Testament. But really in Old Testament studies, what
\n07:16 captivated me the most was Christ in the Old Testament. So how is this figure that we usually
\n07:23 associate with a New Testament, Jesus of Nazareth, how is he talked about in the Old Testament?
\n07:30 He's sometimes calling the Christ or the Messiah.
\n07:33 Those are both titles that are rooted in the Old Testament Scriptures.
\n07:37 So how does the Old Testament talk about the Messiah or the Christ?
\n07:42 He's prophesied there.
\n07:43 Yes, all Christians agree on that.
\n07:45 Is he also present?
\n07:46 Does he make appearances?
\n07:48 Well as I've began to discover, yes, he certainly did.
\n07:52 He's present there in the Old Testament.
\n07:54 He's foreshadowed in the Old Testament.
\n07:56 He is prophesied in the Old Testament.
\n08:00 as we go through the course, but that is what really drew my attention.
\n08:06 So that's what all my studies begin to focus on.
\n08:09 I finished seminary as a pastor for a while, and then I went on to teach it a seminary
\n08:14 for a while.
\n08:15 I studied with Jewish scholars at Hebrew Union College, and through this whole time,
\n08:22 the Old Testament began to be that place to which I returned on a more and more frequent
\n08:28 basis.
\n08:30 my home. So that is kind of all a background, the background of who I am and
\n08:37 and why I do what I do. And what I'm hoping over the course of these next few
\n08:44 lectures that you're going to get that same desire to learn more about the
\n08:50 scriptures. And primarily I hope you're going to get a desire to learn about how
\n08:54 the Messiah is foretold, is foreshadowed, and is present in these old
\n09:00 scriptures because eventually kind of at the end or hopefully even before the end of this course,
\n09:06 what you're going to realize is that it's not just the New Testament that talks about Christ,
\n09:10 the Old Testament. In a myriad of ways, also is going to talk to us about who Jesus is.
\n09:18 And not just that, but everything that He has come to accomplish for us. So just like the Old
\n09:23 Testament focuses on Jesus and the good news of His life, death, and resurrection. So the Old
\n09:30 talks about the Son of God.
\n09:32 And he's described in various ways,
\n09:35 but it's all talking about who he is
\n09:36 and the forgiveness and the life and the salvation
\n09:39 that we have in him.
\n09:43 So my job now is basically to take the Scriptures
\n09:48 and to study them from back to front and from front to back
\n09:52 and to see the treasures that we have there in Christ Jesus.
\n10:00 like to quote a first century rabbi along these lines.
\n10:04 He had a funny name.
\n10:05 It was a rabbi, Ben Bogbog.
\n10:07 And not many sayings were preserved by him,
\n10:12 but there are a couple of kind of proverbial sayings.
\n10:14 And one of these, it's real short in Hebrew,
\n10:16 it is Ha'fokbab, Ha'fokbab, Da'kolava,
\n10:20 which means turn it and turn it again
\n10:23 for everything is in it.
\n10:26 And what he means, he's talking about the Torah.
\n10:30 He's like turn it and then turn it again
\n10:33 Because things are going to keep falling out of it. That's the idea no matter how many times you shake the Old Testament and
\n10:39 Turn it over and shake it again more comes out and more comes out
\n10:44 So that's kind of become almost my proverbial
\n10:48 Maxim if you will for how I approach the Old Testament no matter how many times I shake it more Jesus falls out
\n10:53 I turn it over shake it again more Jesus falls out because he's there
\n11:00 sorts of ways. But I do have to say this and they kind of go back to what I was
\n11:06 talking about earlier with David in the whole slingshot. This approach to the
\n11:09 Old Testament is not universally accepted. In fact, if you look at how
\n11:17 the Old Testament and really you could say the Bible in general, but we'll focus
\n11:21 on the Old Testament. If you look at how the Old Testament is used in a lot of
\n11:25 classrooms and a lot of pulpits in a lot of sunny school rooms and Bible
\n11:30 you're going to discover that it's used in some different sorts of ways.
\n11:36 And if not in those specific locations, certainly just kind of the way that people think about the Old Testament.
\n11:43 And I like to summarize these in four different kind of images, if you will.
\n11:49 I think that some people view the Old Testament kind of like it's a museum.
\n12:00 and you have all kinds of historical artifacts at museums.
\n12:04 And so, you know, whether it's a civil war museum or museum about ancient history or whatever it is,
\n12:10 it's always interesting to me. So you walk in the door and maybe you're going to go through
\n12:14 the whole thing. Maybe you're going to find a part that really interests you and you go up to
\n12:18 the artifacts or whatever it is and you read about it and you kind of visually soak in this 100, 200,
\n12:30 might be, it's interesting, it's intellectually stimulating to go to a museum and to learn
\n12:37 about all these things that happened in the past.
\n12:41 However, I've never left a museum, walked out the door, and thought to myself, \"That
\n12:51 was a life-changing experience.\"
\n12:54 It hasn't happened.
\n13:00 But it didn't radically change my understanding of who I am and the world and God and all
\n13:05 of these big sorts of things.
\n13:08 It just was an interesting, insightful way to spend the afternoon.
\n13:13 And I think sometimes that's the way the Old Testament is treated.
\n13:15 It's kind of like this vast literary museum.
\n13:18 You walk into the Old Testament and there's some really cool things to see.
\n13:21 There's some really interesting aspects of history that are there.
\n13:26 But when you leave, if you're only approaching a nice museum, when you leave, you're really
\n13:30 changed. You don't think, you know, this is a life-changing book. This completely
\n13:35 altered my understanding of who I am and who God is and how I relate to the
\n13:40 world. If you treat the Old Testament as more or less kind of this intellectual
\n13:45 depository of knowledge that you can learn things about, facts about, then
\n13:52 you're really approaching the Old Testament in a way that is not in
\n14:00 describes itself. So you're treating the Old Testament as if it's a museum, whereas the Old Testament,
\n14:07 as we'll be talking about, the Old Testament is the witness about Christ, who does change our life,
\n14:15 who does change how we understand who we are, who does change how we understand how we relate to
\n14:19 the world, and most importantly, how we relate to God. So the museum approach is one approach.
\n14:25 The other approach is kind of like treating the Old Testament, and this is very popular.
\n14:30 Like it's sort of a a spiritual gym
\n14:34 Now I go to the gym three or four times a week. I try and stay healthy. So I'll do some weights
\n14:40 I'll do some I'll do some cardio. I'll try and stay in staying shape and that's a good thing
\n14:46 I go to the gym. I have my workout. I feel stronger. I feel healthier than I leave
\n14:51 When the Old Testament Street is a gym
\n15:00 David. They view the Old Testament as if it's this place where they can become morally stronger
\n15:08 by emulation of the people that are in the Old Testament. So to use my example, I wanted to be
\n15:15 like David. So I wanted to kind of become strong and courageous and bold like David was.
\n15:22 Now I ignored the fact, or maybe I was just ignorant as a child, that David went on to commit
\n15:30 practices. So I missed out on that particular part of David's life. But you could do the
\n15:36 same thing with other characters. The Old Testament is often used as a gem of the sense
\n15:39 that people are using it as if it's nothing more than a collection of role models. It's
\n15:45 not. It's not a place. The Scriptures are not a place where we go simply to learn what's
\n15:49 good and what's bad. Who to model in a positive way and who to not model because they portray
\n16:00 are to be used.
\n16:01 And that kind of moralizing of the scriptures
\n16:04 is so widespread in the church today
\n16:07 that it needs to be spoken against,
\n16:09 because what it leads to basically is people despairing,
\n16:13 because after a while they realize,
\n16:14 hey, I can't live up to this.
\n16:17 I can't live up to this life.
\n16:19 Or they become kind of pharisaical.
\n16:21 They think, oh, I'm so much better than other people
\n16:23 because I think that I've modeled my life
\n16:26 after these Old Testament characters.
\n16:28 So just like the museum approach,
\n16:30 which is also a misuse of the Scriptures.
\n16:33 The Scriptures are there to point us
\n16:35 to the life, death, and resurrection of Christ.
\n16:38 Another popular way that the Old Testament is used
\n16:42 is to treat it kind of like,
\n16:46 it's this vast desert.
\n16:49 It's a vast biblical desert with a few oases
\n16:52 scattered here and there.
\n16:55 So you got a lot of sand and a little bit of Christ.
\n17:00 You got a lot of stuff in the Old Testament that just isn't really useful.
\n17:04 It's dry.
\n17:05 It's dead.
\n17:06 It's just no longer applicable to us.
\n17:08 But on occasion, you'll stumble upon a prophecy of the Messiah.
\n17:13 And that's your oasis.
\n17:14 And so you stop there.
\n17:15 You drink deeply.
\n17:16 You get refreshed and then you got to move on.
\n17:19 So you step into that hot, dry sand again and you keep marching away to the Old
\n17:23 Testament until you come upon another prophecy of the Messiah.
\n17:30 Old Testament is if you could pretty much dispose of 95% of it, but just keep this 5%
\n17:37 of the oasis that are scattered here and there.
\n17:40 Another misuse of the Old Testament, because, as we'll see shortly, when Peter preaches about
\n17:46 the Old Testament, when Paul talks about the Old Testament, when Jesus himself talks about
\n17:51 the Old Testament, none of them say there's a few parts of the Old Testament that are about
\n17:56 the Messiah.
\n18:00 is about the Messiah. Every single one of them, from Jesus down through His apostles,
\n18:05 what they proclaim is that all the Scriptures, all the prophets talked about who Christ is.
\n18:13 So, the Oasis approach is right out, as is the Jim approach, as is the Museum approach.
\n18:20 So, what are we left with? Well, we're left with what the Scriptures themselves say of
\n18:30 Christ is and of course this witness as we shall see over these next few lectures is so rich and
\n18:38 So diverse that you you never know exactly how the scriptures are going to talk about
\n18:42 Salvation how they're going to talk about the kingdom of God how they're going to talk about the Sun is he
\n18:48 described as the son of God or a servant or a messenger or a king or warrior or priest
\n18:54 I mean there's all sorts of different ways of approaching who the son of God is
\n19:00 That's what the Old Testament is about.
\n19:03 And so that is how we are going to approach this during these lectures.
\n19:08 You know, the Old Testament, you can kind of think of it this way.
\n19:12 The Old Testament is one long, beautiful, textured, multilayered story.
\n19:23 And you kind of get the main theme of the story, which is about the salvation that
\n19:30 is going to bring to us in the Messiah. That's the main story. And just like with any main,
\n19:36 just like with any story, for example, a novel, yeah, you kind of got your main story,
\n19:41 your main characters, but then what else do you have? We got a lot of side stories, right?
\n19:46 You got a lot of other minor characters, but take a novel, take a novel by Dickens,
\n19:52 or take a novel by Dostoevsky, or take any novel, and no matter how minor the character is,
\n20:00 they are in one way or another filtering into the story, right?
\n20:05 So maybe sometimes they're introduced early on
\n20:08 and they're seemingly thrown in for color,
\n20:11 they're a minor character.
\n20:13 Well, you find out later on, no, they had an influential role
\n20:16 in the big plot of the story.
\n20:18 And you might not realize that when you first introduced
\n20:20 to them, but you discover it later.
\n20:22 So every single page, every single paragraph
\n20:26 in a novel is part of the story.
\n20:30 chapter, for instance, in the brothers' koramasov,
\n20:33 oh, this chapter is not really part of the story.
\n20:35 Of course, it's part of the story.
\n20:37 It's all flowing like a stream in this same direction.
\n20:43 The Old Testament is like that as well.
\n20:45 Now, the main story,
\n20:47 the main theme of the Old Testament is the salvation
\n20:51 that God promises in the seed, in the servant,
\n20:54 in the son, in the king, in the Messiah.
\n21:00 where is going on as well.
\n21:02 You've got a lot of other characters
\n21:04 that are filtering into this big story.
\n21:07 So it doesn't matter if you're talking
\n21:09 about Genesis 1 and creation.
\n21:11 It doesn't matter if you're talking about
\n21:12 one of the Psalms.
\n21:14 It doesn't matter if you're talking about
\n21:15 that real short book called Obadiah.
\n21:18 In one way or another,
\n21:19 they're all within the covers of this one book.
\n21:23 And so they're all part of this big story.
\n21:30 I guess you could kind of summarize it this way.
\n21:33 Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back.
\n21:38 That's kind of the story of the Old Testament.
\n21:41 So boy meets girl, that's God meeting humanity.
\n21:46 God creates a heavens and the earth,
\n21:48 and after he's created the heavens and the earth,
\n21:51 he places a man and a woman, Adam and Eve there.
\n21:55 And they're not just kind of one more thing in creation.
\n22:00 In fact, God waits until the last day, the last day of creation before He makes Adam
\n22:07 and Eve.
\n22:08 It's like God wants to get everything ready.
\n22:10 It's going to make the heavens and the earth.
\n22:12 He's going to divide everything up.
\n22:13 He's going to make dry land.
\n22:15 He's going to create the sun, the moon, and stars.
\n22:17 He's going to make sure everything is just the way He wants it to be so that when He creates
\n22:22 the pinnacle of creation, Adam and Eve, man and woman, they're going to have the world
\n22:27 ready for them.
\n22:30 anything else in creation too because they're created in the image and likeness of God.
\n22:34 They are His image bearers on earth.
\n22:36 So Adam is a king and Eve is a queen and they're just the way that God wants Him to
\n22:41 be and why does He create them?
\n22:44 Because He wants to have someone upon whom to bestow His love.
\n22:49 That's why you have humanity.
\n22:50 That's why you have Adam.
\n22:51 That's why we're still exists today because God wants someone to love.
\n22:56 And so He, it's a boy-meat girl kind of experience, right?
\n23:00 humanity and they're just the way he wants them to be.
\n23:03 And then they blow it.
\n23:06 That's the beginning.
\n23:07 Genesis three, you can read about their rebellion
\n23:10 and when they think, you know what?
\n23:12 We know better than God how things should be.
\n23:15 And so they kind of elevate themselves
\n23:17 as if they're little gods and they know what's best for them.
\n23:20 And all of human history, all of biblical history
\n23:23 and all of human history is a documentation
\n23:25 of the ripple effects of that rebellion that happened
\n23:30 that we still suffer today. It's a reason people still die. It's a reason we still have
\n23:36 droughts and deprivation and all the terrible things that happen in our lives all kind of stem
\n23:42 from that event way back there in Genesis 3 when Adam and Eve decided that they would do a better
\n23:50 job of being God than God had done for them. And so boy lose this girl. There's a separation that
\n24:00 managing. And the Old Testament documents this in some pretty graphic, colorful, unforgettable
\n24:05 ways as to the effects of this. You've got a worldwide flood that's describing the book
\n24:11 of Genesis. You've got Sodom and Amor that is destroyed by God. And then that's only the
\n24:18 beginning. That's only in the book of Genesis. You can read on in what happens in Exodus and
\n24:22 what happens in the book of Judges and what happens with the rest of the Kings as human
\n24:30 God, they shove him away and they think they know what is best for them instead of what
\n24:35 God their Creator knows what is best for them.
\n24:38 But God is not giving up on those whom he loves.
\n24:43 And so God has a plan.
\n24:45 And he actually talks about this plan in Genesis chapter 3.
\n24:48 He says that he's going to send a seed, he's going to send a man, and this man will be the
\n24:54 one who brings humanity back to him.
\n25:00 Boy meets girl boy loses girl, but God the boy will get her back and of course
\n25:06 That's what we have in the coming of Christ and the Old Testament is the telling of this particular story
\n25:12 It's a telling of how it all began
\n25:15 How it all fell apart and then how God?
\n25:19 Through his son has restored humanity to where he wants us to be in Christ
\n25:30 There's four basic questions for us.
\n25:32 And these are all questions that we ourselves
\n25:36 either explicitly or implicitly ask.
\n25:39 One of these is, where are we?
\n25:44 I think the big picture kind of questions, where are we?
\n25:47 I mean, so the world that we are in,
\n25:49 did it have a beginning?
\n25:50 And does it have a definite end?
\n25:53 Is it eternal or did it have a beginning point?
\n26:00 make it. Well, the Old Testament gives us the answer to that. Where are we? Well, we're
\n26:04 in the heavens and the earth that God himself created. And this creation has a definite
\n26:10 in it. It has a telos. It has a goal toward which it is moving. And that goal is the resurrection
\n26:20 of the dead when Christ returns. So where are we? We're in a world that God out of love
\n26:30 beginning and that has a definite end. And the Old Testament is a huge part of that
\n26:35 particular story. Who are we? So when we think about who humanity is, I mean, are we just one
\n26:45 more element in creation? Are we no different than the animals, no more important than the animals?
\n26:49 So who are we? Well, if you look in the Old Testament, it tells you who we are.
\n27:00 special aspect of creation. We are different from all other creatures. That's who we are. And we were created
\n27:08 by the loving heart of God who desired us to be. So if you're ever asking yourself, \"Why do I even exist,
\n27:16 why am I here? Who am I?\" Well, you exist because God loves you. That's why. You exist because in the heart of God,
\n27:30 that you might be just the way that he wants you to be.
\n27:33 And he gives Jesus Christ to restore you to himself,
\n27:37 to create you, to recreate you in the image,
\n27:40 in the image of his son.
\n27:42 That's who you are.
\n27:45 What's gone wrong?
\n27:47 That's kind of another kind of basic question, right?
\n27:49 So what's really wrong with humanity?
\n27:51 I mean, is it kind of a psychological issue that we have?
\n27:54 Is it ecological issue that we have?
\n28:00 world. Everybody acknowledges this. I've never met a single person that says, \"You know what?
\n28:05 We live in utopia.\" Nobody says that. Everybody acknowledges that there's lots of things wrong
\n28:11 with people. There's lots of things wrong with the world. There's lots of things wrong with
\n28:16 relationships. Things are not the way they should be. Well, what went wrong? What started all this?
\n28:24 Well, the Old Testament answers that question as well. If you go back to the Genesis 3 story
\n28:30 what went wrong and Genesis 3 is sort of perpetuated throughout our lives.
\n28:36 Anytime we think that we know better than God knows what's actually going to lead to a flourishing life.
\n28:44 We're kind of repeating Genesis 3. We're putting ourselves in Adam and Eve's position saying,
\n28:49 \"I know, God, that you think you know what is best, but actually we know what is best for ourselves.\"
\n28:55 That's what's wrong with the world.
\n29:00 of these personal tragedies, all these relationship breakups, all of these issues with our body
\n29:05 and our minds, it all stems back from that.
\n29:09 That's why the world is the way that it is.
\n29:14 And then finally, what's a solution?
\n29:16 Well, of course, everybody these days seems to think that they have a solution to how
\n29:20 to fix the world, right?
\n29:22 And you've had all sorts of political movements, you had all sorts of social movements, all
\n29:30 If we do this, it'll fix the situation.
\n29:33 This is the solution.
\n29:36 And what you see if you're a student of history is that every time that that has been tried,
\n29:41 it has demonstrably failed.
\n29:43 And sometimes in not minor ways, but in ways that led to the deaths of thousands, if not millions of people,
\n29:50 people trying to fix the world by conforming it to the way they think the solution should be.
\n30:00 exactly what the solution is. The solution lies in the one who created us. The solution lies always
\n30:07 outside of us. The solution is God active in Christ in order to reconcile the world to Himself.
\n30:17 So in this world that God has created, in which we exist as those who are His image bearers,
\n30:30 one of us in this world, to live among people who are broken, who are diseased, who are immoral,
\n30:40 who are messed up in mind and in body, and in living among them to be their friend,
\n30:45 to be the friend of sinners, as his adversaries would call him.
\n30:50 Jesus, as the friend of sinners, came to draw people to himself and to heal them, to
\n31:00 restore them in forgiveness and salvation to his father.
\n31:06 So that is the solution.
\n31:08 And of course, we're not at the end of history yet.
\n31:10 So this solution is still making its way.
\n31:12 That's the reason that Christ is so preached.
\n31:13 It's a reason that we have classes such as this
\n31:16 to study the scriptures, to study who Christ is
\n31:18 so that we might realize that he is the solution.
\n31:22 He's the one who reconciles us back to God the Father.
\n31:30 answers all these questions, the story of how God made humanity, lost humanity, and regained us in Christ.
\n31:36 And it all leads all these Old Testament Scriptures lead into what we call the New Testament,
\n31:43 which of course begins with Matthew, these four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
\n31:49 So I think a good question to ask as we kind of reflect on these introductory general sorts of questions is,
\n32:00 a boy meaning girl, boy losing girl, boy getting the girl back or these four basic questions of life.
\n32:06 When you get to the New Testament, how does a New Testament think about the Old Testament?
\n32:12 How does it describe these scriptures that came before it? Well interestingly, we have
\n32:19 multiple passages in the New Testament that tell us in black and white, clear language,
\n32:30 not just his apostles and his disciples, but how actually Jesus himself wants us to read
\n32:37 the Old Testament.
\n32:38 And I just want to go through a list of these.
\n32:41 We'll move through them pretty rapidly.
\n32:44 But I just want you to hear them one after the other, exactly how the New Testament describes
\n32:50 how we should approach Genesis and the books that follow it all the way to Malachi.
\n32:55 So these are some samples.
\n33:00 gospel. This is Luke chapter 24. Jesus is walking with the
\n33:05 Emmaus disciples and he begins basically to give them a walking
\n33:10 Bible study. He begins to open their minds to understand the
\n33:14 scriptures and he's talking here about the Old Testament. And
\n33:17 here's the statement. It says that Jesus, beginning with Moses,
\n33:21 that's the first five books and all the prophets that's the rest
\n33:24 of the books. So this entire Old Testament, Moses and all the
\n33:30 In all the scriptures, the thing is concerning himself.
\n33:36 So Jesus begins with the Pentateuch or the Torah
\n33:39 or the books of Moses, those five first books.
\n33:41 He moves to the rest of the scriptures
\n33:43 and he interprets all of this in relationship,
\n33:45 not to how they should or shouldn't be,
\n33:48 not in reference to morality,
\n33:49 not in reference to all these intriguing facts
\n33:52 about history that they can learn from the Old Testament,
\n33:54 but rather about himself.
\n33:57 He's saying, you know what?
\n34:00 The entire Old Testament is right here.
\n34:02 It's me, it's Jesus.
\n34:04 I'm the one who opens up these scriptures to you.
\n34:07 And then later in the gospel of Luke,
\n34:09 later in that same chapter in fact,
\n34:11 Jesus says, \"Everything written about me in the law of Moses,\"
\n34:14 first five books, \"and the prophets, the rest of them,
\n34:17 any throws this in, and the Psalms,
\n34:19 those hymns or poems or prayers in the middle of the Bible.
\n34:23 Everything must be fulfilled, written about me.\"
\n34:30 that Jesus is saying, the entire Old Testament is about him.
\n34:34 You go to the gospel of John,
\n34:36 the very first chapter of John,
\n34:39 and this is Philip talking to Nathaniel,
\n34:41 so two disciples, and this is right after Philip has met Jesus.
\n34:45 Philip says to Nathaniel,
\n34:47 we have found him of whom Moses in the law
\n34:51 and also the prophets wrote,
\n34:53 Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.
\n34:56 So Philip is saying, Moses wrote about Jesus,
\n35:00 Let's read about Jesus.
\n35:01 And we have found Him.
\n35:05 Move forward in the gospel of John to chapter five.
\n35:07 Jesus is talking.
\n35:09 He's talking to people that were his adversaries
\n35:12 and they were kind of engaging in a back and forth argument.
\n35:16 Jesus says to them,
\n35:17 \"You search the scriptures.\"
\n35:18 He's talking about the Old Testament again.
\n35:20 You search the Old Testament, we might say.
\n35:22 Because you think that in these scriptures
\n35:24 you have eternal life.
\n35:25 And it is these that bear witness about me.
\n35:30 You notice all the \"me\" language.
\n35:32 Everything written about \"me\" in the law of Moses
\n35:34 and the prophets must be fulfilled.
\n35:35 Interpreted all the things in the Scriptures concerning himself.
\n35:38 Jesus says, \"Moses wrote about me.\"
\n35:43 Now, if you go past the Gospels into the book of Acts,
\n35:47 chapter 3, Peter's preaching.
\n35:49 Now, notice the language.
\n35:51 I'm going to quote you three verses from the book of Acts,
\n35:54 3, 18, 3, 24, and chapter 10, verse 43.
\n36:00 the prophets. First he says what God foretold by the mouth of all the prophets
\n36:06 that his Christ should suffer he thus fulfilled. Later on he adds all the
\n36:12 prophets who have spoken from Sammeline those who came after him they
\n36:16 proclaim the days in the Messiah. Skip forward to chapter 10 verse 43 Peter's
\n36:22 preaching that Christ preaching that all the prophets bear witness that
\n36:30 name. Three times, Peter says all the prophets. All the prophets, very
\n36:36 witness of Christ. All the prophets talked about these days. All the
\n36:39 prophets prayed to forgiveness of sins that we have in Jesus Christ. Not
\n36:43 some, not most, but all. And then finally, you get to the apostle Paul, and
\n36:50 Paul kind of puts his exclamation point on everything that was said before. He
\n36:54 writes in 2 Corinthians 1-20, that all the promises of God, all the
\n37:00 their yes in Christ Jesus. Not their no, not their maybe, not their almost, but their yes
\n37:09 in Christ Jesus. All these promises that God gave to the people of Israel in the Old
\n37:13 Testament, find their fulfillment, find their yes and their amen in Jesus Christ.
\n37:21 So the New Testament bears witness that when you're reading the Old Testament, the way that
\n37:30 Every single chapter, every single story, how in these words is Christ talking about himself to the church?
\n37:39 You read in Genesis 1, the creation. How is Christ talking about himself in the account of creation?
\n37:45 You read in the store of Cain and Abel. How is Christ talking about himself in this story?
\n37:50 Read about the flood. You read about Joshua's conquest to the Holy Land.
\n38:00 How is this story? How is this prophecy? How is this Psalm? In one way or another,
\n38:08 talking about Christ. How is Christ using these words in order to speak to us today about who He
\n38:16 is and what He's come to accomplish for us? Now, let me explain a little bit of something that's
\n38:23 kind of the background when I was reading some of these verses from Luke and from John. There were
\n38:30 to the Scriptures.
\n38:31 Now I want to clear up something for us.
\n38:35 If you have a Bible today,
\n38:38 and I know most people, you know,
\n38:39 they use their phones or their tablets
\n38:40 for their Bible today, you have your Bible app,
\n38:43 and I do that too, but say you have a book, okay?
\n38:46 You got it, the Bible, that book.
\n38:49 Well, if you were, just pretend with me for a minute,
\n38:52 if you were a follower of Jesus,
\n38:55 and you were living, we'll say the first couple of decades
\n39:00 Well, when you gathered with your fellow believers to talk about the Scriptures for
\n39:05 worship or to study the Scriptures, the Bible that you used would be significantly shorter
\n39:12 than the one we have today.
\n39:14 In fact, you could take 27 books out of your Bible and then you would have the Bible
\n39:20 that the earliest believers had.
\n39:22 In other words, they didn't have what we refer to as the New Testament.
\n39:30 heaven and his church was growing and flourishing, Romans have not yet been
\n39:35 written. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John have not been written. Acts have not been
\n39:38 written. Revelation have not been written. So when the Bible talks about the
\n39:44 Bible, in other words, when the New Testament in particular talks about the
\n39:48 Scriptures, it's not talking about the big book that we ordinarily think of as
\n39:52 the Bible, it's talking about what we refer to as the Old Testament. So any time
\n40:00 or Peter or Jesus talking about the law and the prophets or the scriptures or the sacred writings or whatever language is used
\n40:07 Just kind of get out of your mind. They're talking about the New Testament. The New Testament did not yet exist
\n40:12 So for the earliest believers their Bible is what we refer to as the Old Testament. The scriptures were exclusively Genesis through Malachi
\n40:21 Why is that important you might be asking yourself? Well, it's important because
\n40:30 in the Old Testament.
\n40:32 Everything necessary about who he is.
\n40:35 Is he divine?
\n40:36 Is he human?
\n40:37 What is he going to accomplish?
\n40:39 What did he accomplish?
\n40:40 What does it mean for us to have our sins forgiven?
\n40:43 What does atonement mean?
\n40:44 What does his priesthood mean?
\n40:45 What does it mean that he's king?
\n40:47 All of these kind of questions
\n40:49 were already there in the Scriptures of Israel
\n40:53 in the Old Testament.
\n40:55 So for the earliest church,
\n40:57 it was no problem for them to think of Christ
\n41:00 But for them, that was just like saying Christ in the Bible.
\n41:03 That was it.
\n41:05 That was their Bible.
\n41:06 So what we're doing is we're kind of trying to get back into that mentality in this class.
\n41:12 We don't want to ignore the New Testament, but our focus is mainly going to be, all right,
\n41:16 how does this Bible, the Old Testament, how does it talk about Christ?
\n41:21 And another thing to kind of clarify, and some of this is just kind of getting you familiar
\n41:24 with some of the terminology we're going to use.
\n41:30 One way to think about the Old Testament is it's an acronym, Tannak. The T stands for Torah.
\n41:37 That's the first five books, sometimes called the Pentateuch. That's the books of Moses.
\n41:43 The inn in Tannak stands for the Hebrew word neva'im, which is prophets, and then includes not
\n41:49 disguised like Isaiah and Jeremiah and Hosea, but also what are called the prophetic writings.
\n41:54 That would be Joshua and Judges and 1st and 2nd Samuel and 1st and 2nd Kings. So it's a
\n42:00 corpus of writings included in the prophets. And then you have the the
\n42:06 kutuvim, that's the K. So the tannak, the K on the end is for kutuvim. And this is
\n42:11 Hebrew word for writings and that's just kind of the grab bag of everything
\n42:15 else that doesn't fit there. Things like Psalms and Proverbs and
\n42:19 Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs and whatnot. So the Old Testament or the tannak, the
\n42:24 Torah, the nevim, the kutuvim, the Torah, the prophets and the writings. These are
\n42:30 the scriptures of Israel. These are the Old Testament.
\n42:34 And so sometimes you'll hear reference to the law
\n42:37 that's talking about the Torah
\n42:38 or to the prophets that talk about the Nevee.
\n42:41 Now, all of these together in one way or another
\n42:43 going to bear witness about Christ.
\n42:46 And all of them are kind of layered if you,
\n42:50 if you want to picture it that way.
\n42:51 So the way I like to think of it as like a pyramid
\n42:54 and on the bottom is the Torah.
\n42:57 The Torah is the foundation for the rest of the scriptures.
\n43:00 that what happens repeatedly in the Old Testament
\n43:04 and the New Testament is that there is reference back
\n43:08 to what happens in the Torah.
\n43:09 So creation, which of course happens in Genesis 1,
\n43:12 is gonna be referred to over and over
\n43:14 in the rest of the scriptures.
\n43:16 The promise of the seed that comes up in Genesis 3
\n43:19 is gonna be referred to over and over
\n43:20 in the rest of the scriptures.
\n43:22 Eden and what happened with Adam and Eve there,
\n43:25 that's all gonna be referred to
\n43:26 in the rest of the scriptures.
\n43:30 foundation. And then what happens is over time that gets added to so the next layer
\n43:35 is going to be the prophets and next layer is the writings and then on top of all this
\n43:39 of course is the New Testament. But the reason this is important is because and we're
\n43:43 going to spend a lot of time talking about this in fact in the next lecture we're going
\n43:47 to get to this. What you're going to see is that later scriptures are going to be
\n43:53 echoing and alluding to and quoting from earlier scriptures. So there is this interconnectedness
\n44:00 all of the scriptures so that if you don't know what the foundation is, you're going to
\n44:07 miss a lot of these allusions and echoes and references.
\n44:10 And we'll expand on that more in the next lecture.
\n44:14 But I want to point it out now because I want you to understand that the Torah, especially
\n44:18 Genesis 1 through 3, that is the foundation stone upon which the rest of the scriptures
\n44:24 rest.
\n44:30 themes. We're going to be seeing how Christ is the one who brings about a new creation,
\n44:35 a regenesis of the world, if you will. We're going to be talking about how the book of Exodus,
\n44:39 which talks about how God brought the Israelites out of Egypt, how Christ is the one who's going
\n44:44 to bring about a new Exodus, not just bringing people out of Egypt, but out of the entire world.
\n44:50 He is repatriating humanity to the Father. So a lot of these themes that we see in the Torah
\n45:00 into the prophets, into the writings, and then of course into the New Testament as well.
\n45:04 And so a lot of our job in the course of these lectures is going to be kind of to engage in
\n45:11 archeology, if you will. We're going to dig down. We're going to get our hands already by digging
\n45:15 through these biblical texts to see what layers beneath. We'll see, oh, we found this. And if we
\n45:21 dig up a deep room, oh, we found this. Dig a little deeper, we found something else. Until we finally
\n45:30 how one is built upon the other.
\n45:32 Until we finally get to the foundation
\n45:35 and we realize, oh, everything was beginning here.
\n45:39 And then it grew from there until it finally reached
\n45:42 its pinnacle in the Messiah, in Christ.
\n45:47 So that's where we're going.
\n45:49 This was, as you could tell,
\n45:51 just kind of the introductory matters,
\n45:53 kind of get you to know a little bit about me
\n45:55 and why I think this is important
\n46:00 that it's not a gem, it's not a museum,
\n46:03 it's certainly not a desert with a few oasis in there,
\n46:05 it is the Genesis through Malachi, unified witness
\n46:11 about who God in Christ is
\n46:14 and what He has accomplished for us.
\n46:17 So I look forward to the next lecture
\n46:19 where we're going to talk more
\n46:21 about how there is this interconnectedness
\n46:23 between all these various parts of scripture.
\n46:25 And to accomplish that,
\n46:27 we're gonna begin by talking about some movies.
\n46:30 We'll see you for lecture number two.
"}00:00 [music]
\n00:15 Welcome to Lecture 2 in Christ in the Old Testament.
\n00:18 Last time we talked about some of the big issues.
\n00:21 We talked about what the Old Testament is and how we are to think about it and some of the big questions that it answers for us.
\n00:30 was to first of all deal with some misguided ways
\n00:34 to approach the Old Testament.
\n00:35 It's not a place where you go looking
\n00:36 for moralistic stories about how to be a good person
\n00:39 and please God.
\n00:40 It's not a place where you go just kind of out
\n00:43 of historical or intellectual interest.
\n00:45 It's not the museum.
\n00:47 Nor is it a place that's just kind of a big desert
\n00:49 where there's only a few places where you can stop
\n00:51 and get a messianic drink, if you will.
\n00:54 The whole thing in a variety of ways is this big story
\n01:00 that God is going to accomplish in the Messiah.
\n01:03 So we had the big story, we got all these little stories
\n01:05 that also filter into it.
\n01:07 We of course talked a little bit about how the Old Testament
\n01:10 is comprised of the Torah, the prophets, and the writings,
\n01:13 the Tanak as it's sometimes referred to.
\n01:16 And one of the points I made toward the end is that
\n01:20 the Old Testament is all built upon this Torah foundation.
\n01:25 Torah just means teaching.
\n01:30 five books, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy called the Pentateuch or the
\n01:35 Law of Moses or the Torah.
\n01:39 And one of the points that I stressed is that on top of the Torah you had the prophets
\n01:44 and you had the writings and you had the New Testament and all of these are interconnected.
\n01:48 Really, we call it the Bible, which means book, but it's a whole collection of books.
\n01:55 So what we refer to as the Bible is actually a whole library of books from different
\n02:00 by different authors over a long period of time, different genres.
\n02:05 You've got historical narrative, you've got poetry, you've got fables,
\n02:09 you've got all kinds of things thrown in the mix.
\n02:12 But within this historical and literary diversity,
\n02:17 you have what unifies it all.
\n02:19 You have a lot of human authors, but you have one divine author.
\n02:22 You have the inspired scriptures.
\n02:24 So you can say the Holy Spirit is the co-author of all of these biblical books.
\n02:30 They all have this unity that's woven throughout them and this unity is expressed in a number of different ways
\n02:36 But what we're going to focus in on with with this lecture is how there is this
\n02:41 textual unity that's woven throughout all of the scriptures beginning of the Torah
\n02:47 But then working its way all the way into into into the New Testament
\n02:51 What I what I really want you to to learn the primary message is that?
\n02:55 Any time that you're reading any part of the scriptures whether it's old or New Testament
\n03:00 You cannot read it in isolation.
\n03:03 You have to see how this verse
\n03:05 connects with the broader context of the verses around it,
\n03:08 which connects with the broader context of the chapter
\n03:10 and the chapter with the book,
\n03:12 and the book with all the other books
\n03:14 that are part of the scriptures.
\n03:16 So we can never read one little part of the Bible
\n03:19 in isolation.
\n03:20 It has an immediate context, it has a bigger context,
\n03:23 and then it has the biblical context as well.
\n03:26 And this is actually not just to keep us
\n03:30 particular passages, but it's also to get us to see, to fully read instead of
\n03:38 underread what the Scriptures are wanting to communicate to us. There's so much that God wants
\n03:42 us to know that God wants us to learn. And if we just look at this little pinpoint of a verse
\n03:48 and disregard the rest of the Scriptures, we're going to miss out on all that God wishes us to learn.
\n03:53 Now to kind of get us to think in these terms, I want us to use some examples from the movies.
\n04:00 And the reason I want to do this is because, well, first of all, almost all of us love movies.
\n04:05 I love movies, I have older movies, movies that are still coming out in the theaters today.
\n04:10 Movies that they're fascinating because by and large, what do movies do?
\n04:13 They tell us a story and we are story people.
\n04:16 God actually created us this way.
\n04:18 When you think about the Bible, God didn't give us a catechism or philosophical manual
\n04:24 or anything like that.
\n04:25 He gave us a story.
\n04:30 So we are created as people that just love stories.
\n04:34 And of course movies are both visual and auditory stories.
\n04:39 And movies I like to compare to the scriptures.
\n04:43 And I'll explain that more as we go along, but that's why we want to first of all talk about movies
\n04:48 and relate those to the scriptures.
\n04:49 And then we're also going to talk about art because art can actually be helpful for us
\n04:53 to understand how we approach the scriptures.
\n05:00 who's work visually portrays a way that we can actually
\n05:05 sexually portray, think about the way that the scriptures bear
\n05:09 witness of the message that's the message of salvation.
\n05:13 So we're going to talk about movies, we're going to talk about art,
\n05:16 and we're going to connect all of this together with the scriptures,
\n05:18 and then we're going to look at some examples from the scriptures of how this works
\n05:22 its way into some very important narratives in the New Testament that talk about Jesus,
\n05:30 with an Old Testament accent.
\n05:33 So that's what's in store for us over the next 45 minutes or so.
\n05:38 To start with, what I want to do is kind of play a game with you.
\n05:43 It's kind of an oral exam, you might say.
\n05:45 I'm going to give you a quote.
\n05:47 I'm just going to read the quote.
\n05:48 I'm going to pause the second, and I want you to ask yourself if you know what movie it's from,
\n05:54 and if you can kind of even picture the context in which this quote was spoken.
\n06:00 with with some pretty old movies. So maybe you don't know the quotes, maybe you do, but either way,
\n06:07 I want you to hear them and then ask yourself if you know where they came from and then we'll
\n06:12 talk more about these as we as we go along. So, the first one, and I'm not going, and by the way,
\n06:18 I'm not going to, I'm not going to afflict an accent on you. I'm not going to try and say these
\n06:23 the way that they were actually said in the movies because I can't. And you would laugh at me if I
\n06:30 one. Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn. Now where's from? It's from Gone With a Wind
\n06:38 Year 1939, almost a century ago. Next, you're going to need a bigger boat. Jaws 1975. You're
\n06:51 all going to know this one. May the force be with you. Of course everybody knows that
\n07:00 one of my favorite movies. Here's Johnny. Of course, the Shining 1980. It was a long time ago.
\n07:10 Another one of my favorites. Go ahead, make my day. Of course, that was Clint Eastwood,
\n07:16 sudden impact 1983. Another famous line, you can't handle the truth. A few good men, 1992,
\n07:30 My mama always said, life is like a box of jocklets.
\n07:34 Of course, Forrest Gump, 1994, and then one other one.
\n07:39 And we're gonna talk about this one in just a second.
\n07:41 It's not really a line, it's a phrase,
\n07:42 it recurs very frequently in this movie,
\n07:44 series of movies actually.
\n07:46 My Precious, of course this was spoken by Gollum
\n07:50 in Lord of the Rings in the early 2000s.
\n07:54 It's all the way from Gone with the Wind
\n07:56 to Lord of the Rings, all these quotes.
\n08:00 Maybe you knew all of them, maybe you knew some of them, maybe actually knew the quote,
\n08:03 but you had no idea where it came from.
\n08:06 Or maybe you knew the quote and you had a pretty good idea of the movie that it was
\n08:09 from that you don't really remember the context in which it was spoken.
\n08:14 Now the reason that I wanted to go through this is I want you to think about these movies
\n08:19 and these quotes and the context and what's they were spoken in connection with how these
\n08:26 are used actually or how we might use them in daily life.
\n08:30 If you're around, say it's a friend, or maybe it's your spouse, or maybe it's somebody
\n08:34 to go to school with, and you're both in kind of the same movies, you know, sometimes
\n08:39 in whatever the context might be, you might just kind of throw out a movie quote, right?
\n08:44 And the other person immediately gets it.
\n08:47 They're like, they don't just know where the quote came from and the movie, but they
\n08:51 realize why you quoted that in the context in which you said it.
\n09:00 render in with the situation that the movie's talking about.
\n09:04 But suppose, suppose that you were with a group of people.
\n09:09 Say there's five of you.
\n09:11 And you and your friend know this movie,
\n09:13 but the other three people don't know the movie.
\n09:15 And when you throw out a quote, your friend laughs,
\n09:18 because of course he or she knows the movie,
\n09:21 knows the quote, knows the context,
\n09:23 realizes how the quote fits this particular context.
\n09:26 And maybe your other three friends will look at you like,
\n09:30 Or, that seemed like a random dumb thing to say.
\n09:34 Why are they having that reaction?
\n09:37 Because of course, they don't know the movie.
\n09:40 They don't know the quote.
\n09:41 They don't know the context, and therefore they can't understand how this particular string
\n09:45 of words you said were applicable to the situation in which you found yourself.
\n09:52 In other words, if you don't know the movie, if you don't know the quote came from that
\n10:00 text in which the quote was said in the movie, \"Who said it, who they said it to?\"
\n10:05 What was happening? Chances are, when this line is dropped in a conversation,
\n10:11 it's going to completely go over your head. You're not going to get it. Now, you
\n10:17 can kind of see where I'm going with this, right? It's the same with the
\n10:20 scriptures. So, if I quote from the scriptures, or let me rephrase it, \"If a
\n10:30 the Old Testament Scriptures.
\n10:32 And you don't realize they're quoting from the Old Testament Scriptures.
\n10:36 Chances are you're not going to get it.
\n10:40 You're not going to realize what they're saying in the New Testament
\n10:43 is connected to something in the Old Testament.
\n10:46 It kind of be like, say you've got a person who has never seen Lord of the Rings.
\n10:52 They know nothing about the ring. They know nothing about golem, nothing like that.
\n11:00 here. Let's suppose that I have a buddy. And we've known each other for a long time, but I notice
\n11:06 that this guy is kind of getting into some bad stuff. Maybe it's an addiction type thing,
\n11:14 or maybe it's some behavior that he shouldn't be engaging in, or maybe just simply that he's
\n11:20 ignoring his family and he's spending all this time with his hobby or his work or whatever it
\n11:24 might be. He's going on a path he shouldn't be going down. And suppose my friend and I are
\n11:30 And I say, listen, listen, John, man, this thing is really becoming your precious.
\n11:38 Now, if he doesn't know my precious, where that came from in Lord of the Rings, if he doesn't
\n11:45 know what the ring represented, if he doesn't know how it affected Gollum, if he doesn't know the
\n11:50 destructive power of this precious thing, how it was destructive to Gollum, then he is not going to
\n12:00 is completely taken hold of him has become his precious. In other words, if he doesn't
\n12:06 know where the quote came from and the context and who said it and everything about the entire
\n12:12 story of the movie, then what I said to him is completely going to be missed by him.
\n12:18 Let me give you another example and I've actually done this. So one of the things I do is I write
\n12:23 books. And so sometimes when my wife and I go on vacation I'll do a little bit of writing.
\n12:30 But one time on social media, we were gone somewhere,
\n12:33 and I was going to do a little riding
\n12:34 when we were going on vacation.
\n12:35 So on Facebook, I posted a picture of a typewriter.
\n12:39 And there was a piece of paper in the typewriter.
\n12:42 And the only line that you could see in this piece of paper
\n12:45 was all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
\n12:49 And I posted the picture, and then I posted above it
\n12:52 that my wife on our vacation,
\n12:54 and I was getting a lot of riding done.
\n12:56 (laughing)
\n13:00 shining that movie and if you don't know about the whole typewriter scene and
\n13:05 The fact that he was typing out that sentence over and over and he was going mad
\n13:09 He was about to try and kill his wife then you're gonna miss the joke, right?
\n13:12 It's not funny to you. You don't get the punchline because why?
\n13:17 You don't know the movie you don't know the context and you don't kind of get the joke that I'm that I'm making
\n13:22 Let me let me use one more example
\n13:25 suppose a
\n13:30 And whoever the president is says something like what just happened to us is a day that's
\n13:37 going to live in it for me.
\n13:39 Well of course what he's just done, he's taken a very famous quote from a presidential
\n13:44 speech connected to of course the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
\n13:47 And by lifting just those few words about living in it for me and applying it to whatever
\n13:53 has just happened today, he's drawing a parallel between these two situations, right?
\n14:00 to each related to Pearl Harbor.
\n14:02 Well the words that he just said about living in Effie
\n14:04 are going to be completely missed by you.
\n14:09 Now all of this is to demonstrate
\n14:14 to exemplify the point that when it comes to the Bible,
\n14:20 you can kind of think of it as one,
\n14:22 the Bible is one long movie.
\n14:24 And it's full of all sorts of characters,
\n14:26 all sorts of actors.
\n14:27 Some of them are main characters,
\n14:30 characters, but they're all part of the same movie. They're all part of the same story.
\n14:35 And a lot of these people have a lot of things to say. The more that we watch and rewatch and
\n14:43 rewatch again, the movie of the scriptures, the more that we learn the characters, the more that
\n14:49 we learn the lines, the more we realize how this guy is connected to that gal, or this woman is
\n15:00 particular woman. How this story is in some way similar to that story or how the language
\n15:06 used to describe this event is echoed to describe a later event. The more in other words,
\n15:12 that we just sit there and watch and rewatch the movie of the scriptures and hear the lines
\n15:17 and see how everything is kind of interconnected in this story. The more we're going to be able
\n15:30 If we really don't know the biblical movie, if we don't know the biblical story, then
\n15:35 a lot of the times when some later character will drop a line from earlier in the Bible
\n15:41 movie, over in some scene will be portrayed in a way that mirrors an earlier scene, well,
\n15:48 if we don't know the movie, we're not going to get it.
\n15:51 And it's not a matter of just us not getting it, but we're missing out on the beautiful,
\n16:00 that the Spirit has woven into the movie of the scriptures.
\n16:06 So this is not, by the way,
\n16:09 this is not just an encouragement to read your Bible.
\n16:11 Of course, read your Bible.
\n16:12 That's always a great thing.
\n16:14 But it's an encouragement to realize
\n16:16 that it really is a fully integrated, interconnected movie
\n16:21 that has the beginning and that has an end.
\n16:23 It has an opening scene in Genesis
\n16:25 and has a closing scene in Revelation.
\n16:30 that a lot of things in the beginning are foreshadowing what's going to happen at the
\n16:34 end.
\n16:35 And a lot of things at the end look a whole lot like the things that happened at the beginning.
\n16:40 So just as one example, if you read Genesis 1 and 2 you hear about God creating the heavens
\n16:45 and the earth and they create the garden of Eden and he puts Adam and Eve there.
\n16:49 Well it just so happens that everything that happens in Genesis 1 and 2 is then replicated
\n16:56 on a grander scale in Revelation 21 and 22.
\n17:00 more God coming down, He creates a new heavens and a new earth and there's a new garden of Eden that
\n17:06 has this river of life flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb and God dwells with humanity.
\n17:13 So you can't understand revelation without understanding Genesis. And I would argue you
\n17:18 can't really understand Genesis without understanding revelation because why? Because it's all part
\n17:30 interconnected story.
\n17:34 So hopefully that's helpful for you.
\n17:36 Just kind of imagine the way
\n17:38 that we're going to approach the scriptures.
\n17:40 Now everything that I've been talking about
\n17:43 is a more popular way of describing what scholars
\n17:46 sometimes refer to as intertextuality.
\n17:49 So intertextuality means nothing more than how
\n17:54 two or more texts are in some way related one
\n18:00 Another, break off when this happens, where you have an earlier text is going to shape
\n18:05 the way that a later text is going to be written, where you're going to have an echo
\n18:09 of an earlier text and a later text.
\n18:12 And one way or another, two written texts are going to, they're going to be similar one
\n18:17 to another.
\n18:18 And one of the ways that you have this connectedness is through what's referred to as metilepsis.
\n18:30 way, some signal that this particular text is wanting us to go back to an earlier text
\n18:38 and to compare the two. So what I want to do is I want to read you, read you kind of
\n18:44 a complicated definition of metallapsis by a guy named Richard Hayes, and then I want
\n18:49 to kind of take it apart phrase by phrase and explain exactly what he's what he's communicating
\n19:00 technique of siding or echoing a small bit of a precursor text in such a way that the
\n19:08 reader can grasp the significance of the echo only by recalling or recovering the original
\n19:14 context from which the fragmentary echo came and then reading the two texts in dialogical
\n19:21 juxtaposition.
\n19:22 Did you get all that?
\n19:26 It's a lot.
\n19:30 then you can read the quote there.
\n19:32 What I want to do is kind of break that apart.
\n19:34 And I want to explain each of these parts of the definition
\n19:37 because they're all significant.
\n19:39 And we're going to be doing a lot of metaleptus
\n19:42 over the next few lectures.
\n19:43 We're going to be seeing how one text is related
\n19:46 to another text as they talk about Christ and the Old
\n19:48 Testament.
\n19:49 So let's break this down.
\n19:51 First of all, it's a literary technique.
\n19:54 And so this isn't isolated just to what the Bible does.
\n19:57 You'll find metaleptus all over the place.
\n20:00 according or alluding to earlier texts or other texts all the time.
\n20:04 So this is this literary technique that isn't just in the scriptures,
\n20:08 but it is all over the place in the scriptures.
\n20:10 And if you think about it, it makes sense because this is a unified story,
\n20:14 a unified book.
\n20:15 So you would expect there to be this kind of literary connectedness.
\n20:19 That's the first phrase.
\n20:21 \"Siding or echoing a small bit of precursor text.\"
\n20:25 In other words, you're going to have Isaiah, for instance.
\n20:30 or is echoing something from Genesis? Or you're going to have Joshua siding or echoing something
\n20:36 from Deuteronomy. Again, the book of Psalms siding or echoing something from Exodus. That's all within
\n20:42 the Old Testament. You jump into the New Testament, you'll have Matthew siding or echoing something
\n20:46 from Deuteronomy. You'll have John siding or echoing something from Genesis, whatever it might
\n21:00 or allude to this precursor text, an earlier text.
\n21:04 All right?
\n21:05 So it's a literary technique where you have
\n21:07 this echoing or the saluting to earlier text.
\n21:10 Why?
\n21:11 So that the reader can grasp the significance of the echo.
\n21:16 Now, the reason I want to stress that
\n21:18 is this is part of your job.
\n21:20 So if you're reading a book, don't expect the author
\n21:23 to do all the work for you.
\n21:24 The author is not going to do all the work.
\n21:26 I don't care if it's fiction or nonfiction.
\n21:30 for doing part of the work. You're not just kind of laying there all passive and everything
\n21:35 and just being given to you. If that's the way that you read, you're not reading.
\n21:38 That's extremely lazy reading. You want to be an active, thoughtful, hardworking reader.
\n21:44 To do that, you've got to be paying attention. The reader can't tell you everything. A lot of
\n21:50 things you just do unconsciously. You fill in the blanks here and there. But you're always being
\n22:00 You've got to always ask yourself, okay, what is he saying?
\n22:03 What is she really getting at here?
\n22:05 And how is he maybe echoing something earlier
\n22:09 that he said or expanding him on something
\n22:11 that the earlier said?
\n22:12 So reading is hard work.
\n22:14 It's a wonderful hard work, but it is hard work.
\n22:17 So part of reading the scriptures is doing your job
\n22:21 as a reader paying attention.
\n22:24 So the reader can graph the significance of the echo
\n22:27 by doing what?
\n22:30 context from which the fragmentary echo came. In other words, if Isaiah quotes from the book
\n22:37 of Exodus, you can't just go back to Exodus and look at say Exodus chapter 20 verse 5,
\n22:43 and expect to understand what's going on. You've got to look at verse 4 and verse 6 and verse
\n22:48 3 and verse 7. You've got to look at all of Exodus 20. But don't stop there, look at Exodus 19
\n22:53 and Exodus 21. And look at the whole book of Exodus. You've got to see how this echo, but earlier
\n23:00 this echobah precursor text is used contextually by this later author.
\n23:07 Now we're going to get into a great example of that in Isaiah when we talk about how he
\n23:13 this makes this almost seeming passing illusion to what he calls the day of Midian.
\n23:19 Well the day of Midian is referring to something that happened in the book of Judges.
\n23:23 Judges six through eight with a guy named Gideon and who was Gideon and how to
\n23:30 And what does Isaiah mean when he just says, \"In the day of Midian,\" and he's talking about what the Messiah is going to do?
\n23:37 Well, you have to look at this whole story and then put that beside what Isaiah is saying to understand what's going on here with this
\n23:45 metilepsis moment between these two writings.
\n23:47 And I've gotten ahead of myself because that's the last thing here. You're going to be reading the two texts in
\n24:00 To use the example from Isaiah again, you can take judges six to eight and say okay stand there
\n24:05 And you can take Isaiah and say okay you stand there now you guys talk to each other
\n24:10 Judges talk to Isaiah Isaiah talk to judges and let's see how you guys are speaking the same language talking about the same thing
\n24:17 And what happens is now you're going to understand judges better and you're going to send Isaiah better
\n24:23 Now the reason this is important is because first of all this occurs all over the Bible
\n24:30 all over the Bible in reference to who the Messiah is and what he's going to do.
\n24:34 And this then goes over into the New Testament so that if you're reading through Matthew,
\n24:40 for instance, and you don't know anything about Moses, you're going to miss the point
\n24:45 of episode after episode of Matthew because what Matthew does is he patterns the life of
\n24:50 Jesus after the life of Moses.
\n24:53 Or, we'll look at this example in just a minute, if you're reading the Transfiguration
\n25:00 completely ignore the Old Testament
\n25:02 when you're reading about the transfiguration of Jesus,
\n25:04 you're gonna understand just a miniscule part
\n25:08 of what's going on in the transfiguration
\n25:09 because that thing is just flooded with metallapses,
\n25:12 with all of these references to these Old Testament stories,
\n25:15 these precursor texts that came before it.
\n25:18 So what do you wanna do?
\n25:19 You wanna say, \"Come here, transfiguration,
\n25:20 \"you stand there.\"
\n25:22 And come here, you 20 Old Testament stories,
\n25:24 whatever it might be, and you stand there.
\n25:27 All right, you guys talk to each other.
\n25:30 better and through the transfiguration you understand all the, understand all these other Old
\n25:34 Testament stories better. And in this way the beautiful thing is all of a sudden we have a much
\n25:40 richer deeper understanding of who Christ is because we're not looking at him in isolation,
\n25:45 but we're seeing that he's part of this bigger movie. He's part of this movie that's really all
\n25:49 about him, but his story is told in all of these different sorts of, these different sorts of ways.
\n26:00 but hopefully breaking that down has helped you to better understand it.
\n26:04 Now, we're going to transition from talking about movies to talking about art.
\n26:10 So my daughter actually introduced me to this particular artist.
\n26:14 She was, she travels abroad quite frequently and loves art,
\n26:18 and so she was at an art museum, and when she came home,
\n26:21 she was telling me all about this artist that she had been learning about
\n26:26 and had seen his paintings.
\n26:30 He lived in the early 1900s and throughout his art career he kind of dabbled in all sorts
\n26:38 of different artistic, all different sorts of ways of doing art.
\n26:44 But in one of his phases, he did a whole bunch of art that were called \"transparencies.\"
\n26:51 We're going to put one of these on the screen so that you can kind of get a visualization
\n26:55 of what this heart was like.
\n27:00 is called Salome.
\n27:03 So this is pattern after an account
\n27:07 that happened in the life of John the Baptist.
\n27:09 So John the Baptist was arrested, he was kept in prison,
\n27:12 and then when Herod was having a birthday party,
\n27:15 his daughter, his stepdaughter was dancing,
\n27:19 her name was Salome, and she's so pleased,
\n27:22 Herod, that he's like, \"Tell me what you want.
\n27:25 \"I'll give you anything you want up to half my kingdom.\"
\n27:30 Tom hated John the Baptist, hated him with a passion.
\n27:34 And so she told her daughter to ask for the head of John the Baptist on a platter.
\n27:38 And so that's what the daughter asked for.
\n27:41 That's what happened to John.
\n27:42 John was beheaded and his head was brought in.
\n27:45 And so this biblical story, this gruesome biblical story, is the background of this particular
\n27:52 piece of art.
\n27:53 Now, if you look at it on the screen, what you're seeing here is all sorts of things
\n27:58 that are woven together.
\n28:00 transparencies because what you'll notice is everything of course is transparent.
\n28:06 So you can see there is kind of a large face of Jesus in the background and then you've got this
\n28:13 woman, this nude woman who's extending her leg in the foreground kind of on the near the bottom
\n28:19 left, you can see the severed head of John the Baptist and then if you look up top of the painting
\n28:30 going on that's all kind of scattered throughout the piece of art. What's
\n28:35 happening in this? What's happening in this is that every single piece of this
\n28:39 story, both the holy as well as the profane, are placed one upon each other.
\n28:45 And you can't see one without seeing the rest of them. And you can't see the rest
\n28:50 of them without also seeing the individual parts. And they're all kind of
\n28:53 layered one on top of the other. You're looking through one to another and
\n29:00 And so you've got a lot going on in this one particular scene.
\n29:05 Now the reason I love this as an example what's going on in the Scriptures is we see
\n29:11 over and over in the Bible basically narrative transparencies.
\n29:17 You've got one particular thing happening, we'll say the crossing of the Red Sea, or
\n29:22 maybe it's Noah and the Ark, or maybe jumping forward into the New Testament it's Jesus
\n29:30 Now in each of these what you're really looking at is a textable transparency.
\n29:35 You're looking at a piece of art and in this artistic transparency in the
\n29:41 scriptures there's a whole lot of things going on. You don't just have one thing
\n29:44 happening. You're looking at this but you're looking really through that at
\n29:48 something else happening and connected with that is this thing that's happening
\n29:51 over here and some of these things that are happening are ancient. We'll look at
\n30:00 Really what you're seeing here is also this picture of Israel crossing the Red Sea.
\n30:06 But even more anxious than that, you can see the waters of creation and God bringing calm and order out of this chaos and confusion.
\n30:14 Now all of this is part of this one painting, if you will, of the crossing of Jesus walking on the Sea of Galilee.
\n30:23 It's just like the transparencies of the caveat.
\n30:30 kind of artistic textual moves going on in the scriptures.
\n30:33 And the reason that the reason this happens,
\n30:35 we're going to put this on the screen as well.
\n30:38 The reason this happens is because
\n30:40 the scriptures are what's been called
\n30:43 kind of the first Hopper Linked book.
\n30:46 You know, today,
\n30:48 when you're, say, reading an article,
\n30:52 you'll see, okay, that's linked to another article.
\n30:55 So you click on that and you go to this article
\n30:57 and you're reading it and you're like,
\n30:58 oh, I'm going to click on this
\n31:00 and pretty soon you got 100 tabs open, right?
\n31:02 You're looking at all of these interlinked, interconnected
\n31:06 articles, the Bibles like that.
\n31:08 You can hardly read a verse in the scriptures,
\n31:10 which is not as it were a Hopper link to something else.
\n31:13 This verse is linked to maybe these two verses,
\n31:15 and then will those two verses lead to six other verses,
\n31:17 and those six other verses lead to 12 other verses.
\n31:19 And so the graphic that we're going to put up here for you
\n31:22 shows kind of this whole arc that you can see
\n31:26 from Genesis to Revelation.
\n31:30 and you have this line that's drawn all the way to the end of Revelation. You can see how from Genesis to Revelation
\n31:36 everything in between you have all of these intertextual connections. They're linked one to another. So there's no part of the Bible
\n31:45 that stands in isolation.
\n31:48 It's in one way or another connected to what came before it and what came after it and within it
\n31:53 it's going to have
\n32:00 also an allusion to something that's going to happen later on, kind of a foreshadowing
\n32:05 of what's going to come much later. So you can't ever read a verse or a book or a chapter
\n32:11 in isolation. You have to see how it's all connected. And to say it again, and I can't say it
\n32:16 enough, all these interconnections serve one primary purpose, to point to the Son of God, to
\n32:22 point to who He is and what He is accomplishing for us by His life, death, and resurrection.
\n32:30 that purpose isn't it? In other words, it isn't just like cool stuff. Well, that's really neat.
\n32:35 A lot of the Bible's all interconnected that way. Well, yeah, I mean, that is cool. That is kind
\n32:39 of neat. Now I do love that too, but the purpose is not to show us how a book is connected,
\n32:44 but to show us how all of these interconnections serve to portray Christ to us in this multifaceted,
\n32:51 multidimensional sort of way. So we talked about movies, we talked about this art,
\n33:00 look at some examples from the New Testament of how we see this portrayed in the Gospels.
\n33:06 And we could do this all day long.
\n33:09 In fact, one of the things I do on a weekly basis is I look at a gospel reading for the
\n33:14 coming week and I see how it's kind of connected intertextually to other parts of the scripture.
\n33:19 You could do this with every part of the gospel.
\n33:22 So we're going to focus primarily upon two or three texts in the time that we have allowed
\n33:30 movie quotes if you will that refer to earlier parts of the movie or you have
\n33:35 these transparencies going on in the the textible depiction. The first one
\n33:40 we'll look at is the one I already referred to, the walking on the walking
\n33:45 on the Sea of Galilee. So I guess you might say that Jesus walking on water is
\n33:50 probably his most famous miracle. At least it's probably one of the top three
\n33:54 of the miracles that everybody knows about. Yes somebody in the street, hey you
\n34:00 Yeah, he did, but see that's where they get it wrong.
\n34:03 Jesus didn't just walk on water.
\n34:05 He walked on the sea of Galilee.
\n34:08 There's an important, there's a crucial aspect
\n34:11 to where he did this.
\n34:13 And I'll explain that in just a minute.
\n34:15 So Jesus walks on the sea of Galilee.
\n34:17 What's the context?
\n34:18 Well, Jesus has fed 5,000 people.
\n34:21 It's a feeding miracle, much like the miracle that God performed
\n34:26 through Moses back in the Israelites
\n34:30 and with manna and with quail.
\n34:32 So this is another one of these aspects of the movie.
\n34:34 You know, the metal epsis going on here.
\n34:36 You're supposed to understand Jesus
\n34:37 as a new and greater Moses,
\n34:39 who works new and greater miracles.
\n34:41 So you're thinking in terms of Exodus, right?
\n34:43 Jesus fed people with miraculous food,
\n34:46 just like God through Moses fed
\n34:47 the Israelites with miraculous food.
\n34:49 What else happened in that context?
\n34:51 Well, you had this major event in Exodus 14 and 15
\n34:54 when God parts the sea of Galilee.
\n34:57 So the Israelites, excuse me, the Red Sea,
\n35:00 that the Israelites can cross on dry ground.
\n35:04 And the Egyptians pursue them and the Egyptians are destroyed
\n35:08 and then God brings calm in the morning.
\n35:11 All of that is in the background now
\n35:14 when Jesus walks on the sea of Galilee.
\n35:17 His disciples are in a boat.
\n35:19 They're caught in this kind of stormy, windy condition.
\n35:22 They're in danger.
\n35:24 Jesus comes to them in the darkness
\n35:30 by them, they're frightened at first, he gets into the boat, he calms the sea. And different
\n35:37 evangelists tell different parts of the story. We'll just kind of focus on the main points here.
\n35:41 What's going on there? Jesus is demonstrating that he is the same Lord who was the Lord at the
\n35:48 crossing of the Red Sea. He comes walking on top of the water, just like Job talks about how the
\n36:00 brought peace and calm after he had his people safely across.
\n36:05 So Jesus comes to his disciples,
\n36:07 he stills the storm, he brings peace and calm.
\n36:12 And then just like God brought the Israelites safely
\n36:14 to the other side of the Red Sea.
\n36:16 So now Jesus brings his disciples safely across
\n36:19 to the other side of the sea.
\n36:21 And this is crucial.
\n36:23 The reason I said he didn't just walk on water,
\n36:24 but he walked on the Sea of Galilee's
\n36:26 because the sea in the Old Testament
\n36:30 and confusion and death, in fact the whole kind of non-Jewish Gentile world.
\n36:35 So Jesus walking on the sea means that He is the one who's now the Lord of the
\n36:41 Gentile world. He's the one who walks upon this emblem of the chaos and confusion
\n36:47 of the world and what is the result, peace and order and stillness and in
\n36:53 His disciples being brought safely to the other side. So the reason Jesus does
\n37:00 But on the Sea of Galilee is because this was an emblem that was all over the Old Testament
\n37:07 about the sea being chaos and confusion and now Jesus brings order and calm after that.
\n37:14 I just kind of a taste for how this works with the New Testament story.
\n37:18 Let's also look at one more.
\n37:20 Transfiguration account.
\n37:21 Agreed about that?
\n37:22 Matthew, Mark, or Luke, all three recorded.
\n37:30 down in just a few verses in the New Testament. For instance, Matthew says that after six days,
\n37:37 Jesus led his disciples up to a mountain. Well, if you go back to the book of Exodus, you're told
\n37:42 that after six days, the Lord appeared to Moses on a mountain. So you already have the six days,
\n37:50 six days, mountain, mountain, and of course the connection again between Moses and between Jesus.
\n38:00 Jesus takes within Peter, James and John,
\n38:03 because in the Old Testament you need two or three witnesses
\n38:05 to verify that something has happened.
\n38:06 So there's a reason he takes two or three.
\n38:09 And of course they go up onto a mountain.
\n38:12 If you're familiar with the Old Testament story at all,
\n38:14 the Old Testament movie,
\n38:16 you know that mountains are always where key events take place.
\n38:20 We're gonna talk about this more in the future,
\n38:22 but Eden was on a mountain.
\n38:24 Eden was, it was Mount Eden.
\n38:26 So Eden was on a mountain.
\n38:30 that the ark rested after the flood, and Noah brought his family and the animal safely
\n38:35 out of it.
\n38:36 Mount Sinai's word, the Lord gave the Ten Commandments, the covenant to the people of
\n38:41 Israel.
\n38:42 It was from a mountain that Moses was able to see the promised land before he died on
\n38:45 the other side of the promised land.
\n38:47 Mountains, mountains, mountains in the Old Testament are the geographical location of a
\n38:53 theophany.
\n38:54 Theophany is where God manifests himself.
\n38:56 He reveals himself.
\n39:00 like giving the covenant to Israel.
\n39:04 So the reason that Jesus goes up onto a mountain
\n39:07 is because something big is about to happen.
\n39:09 It's gonna be a theophany.
\n39:10 It's gonna be a God appearance.
\n39:12 They get on top of the mountain
\n39:13 and you can all sorts of things going on.
\n39:16 First of all, you have Moses and Elijah
\n39:18 who are appearing and talking with Jesus.
\n39:21 Well, you can't get much more old testament
\n39:23 than Moses and Elijah.
\n39:24 And if you know anything about them,
\n39:25 you also know that they're both connected
\n39:27 with events that took place at mountains.
\n39:30 at theophany to Moses on a mountain,
\n39:32 yet at theophany to Elijah on a mountain.
\n39:35 And now they are here with Jesus talking up,
\n39:38 talking with him.
\n39:39 And what are they talking about?
\n39:41 They're talking about, Luke tells us this,
\n39:43 they're talking about his exodus.
\n39:45 In your English translation, it's sometimes translated
\n39:48 to departure in the Greek, it's exodus.
\n39:50 They're talking about his exodus,
\n39:52 that he's going to accomplish in Jerusalem.
\n39:55 Well, Exodus of course, that's the name of the second book
\n39:57 of the Bible.
\n40:00 reverberates through the whole rest of the scriptures.
\n40:03 The Exodus is when God redeemed his people.
\n40:06 He brought them out of slavery.
\n40:08 So the Exodus story reverberates through the whole rest of the scriptures.
\n40:12 And the Exodus story is when God brought his people out of slavery.
\n40:15 He liberated them and he brought them all the way to the promised land.
\n40:18 What Jesus is doing is he is going to affect the Exodus, the Exodus of Exituses.
\n40:25 Because he's going to go into the exile of the grave itself.
\n40:30 of death and he's going to then come forth from there. He's going to be, he's going to come out of the
\n40:37 exile of the grave and when he comes out, all humanity comes with him because he is a representative
\n40:43 human. So what he does is when Jesus comes into life again, when he comes out of this Egypt of the
\n40:48 grave, all humanity comes out with him into liberation into freedom into life again. So that's what
\n41:00 understand what they're talking about unless you know the Exodus. You know, so
\n41:04 there's two guys there, Moses and Elijah. If you don't know who Moses and Elijah are,
\n41:07 how are you going to know the significance of the fact that they're
\n41:10 talking here with Jesus? Then it's not over. All of a sudden, a cloud shows up. Now,
\n41:17 anytime in the Old Testament you have clouds, it's very often connected with the
\n41:21 presence of God. He appears in a pillar of cloud to the Israelites when he
\n41:25 inhabits the holy of holies in the tabernacle. He comes down as a cloud and
\n41:30 enough, when this cloud shows up, it's like the cloud, the clothing of God himself. He's
\n41:37 there and he's about to talk. So he addresses Jesus and he says, \"This is my beloved Son,
\n41:46 in whom I am well pleased. Listen to Him.\" Now I wish we had the time to dive into all
\n41:53 the details here, but what God says in those just few words is an allusion to about four
\n42:00 passages. This is my, first of all, my son. That's an allusion to Psalm 2. That's a, that's a
\n42:06 metaleptus, taking you back to Psalm 2. The beloved part, Genesis 22, where Isaac is the
\n42:12 beloved son of Isaac, who is to be taken to be, to be sacrificed. You mean about that in Genesis 22.
\n42:18 \"In whom I am well pleased is an echo from the book of Isaiah, where it talks about how the
\n42:23 servant, the Messianic servant, is well pleasing to God. And then when God says, listen to him,
\n42:30 That is a direct quote from Deuteronomy 18 when Moses says that in the future, another prophet,
\n42:36 the Messiah is going to come. And we are to listen to Him. So what God accomplishes is in that one,
\n42:44 that one verse is a metaleptus to multiple Old Testament passages. Now, if you don't know the
\n42:50 movie, if you don't know the quotes, if you don't know the characters, you're going to miss out on
\n43:00 in the transfiguration, instead of fully read everything
\n43:03 that's happening there.
\n43:05 Because the transfiguration is connected intertextually
\n43:11 by metalepsis to this entire Old Testament story.
\n43:14 It's all filtering down to what's happening
\n43:17 in the transfiguration.
\n43:20 And there's of course more happening there as well,
\n43:22 but that kind of gives you an idea
\n43:25 of what's happening in that particular account.
\n43:27 Again, you gotta take the transfiguration
\n43:30 put it beside all these Old Testament stories
\n43:32 and guess they could talk to each other.
\n43:34 And when they talk to each other,
\n43:35 all of a sudden, and we're part of the conversation,
\n43:38 we're listening in, all of a sudden we realize
\n43:40 exactly what is being communicated to us
\n43:44 as we listen with these Old Testament ears open,
\n43:47 hearing everything that's being said.
\n43:49 And we could go on,
\n43:50 there's plenty of other Old Testament examples
\n43:52 where things like this happen,
\n43:55 where they are the background to,
\n44:00 understanding what's happening in the New Testament.
\n44:03 Then one of the reasons I wanted to spend this lecture
\n44:06 talking about all of these ways in which the scriptures are
\n44:11 one united message is because what we're going to see in the
\n44:15 upcoming lectures is how there is a building up in the Old
\n44:20 Testament itself of the expectation of who the Messiah will be.
\n44:24 And this building up is frequently going to rely upon
\n44:30 So we're going to see in the future how Noah is already
\n44:35 intertextually connected to Adam.
\n44:37 So that Noah is like a second Adam.
\n44:40 And then of course Christ himself is the last Adam
\n44:43 and he's like a second Noah.
\n44:45 We're going to see how Genesis 14 talks
\n44:47 about a guy named Melchizedek,
\n44:49 and how he is then referred to in Psalm 110
\n44:52 as this priestly precursor to who the Messiah is going to be.
\n44:57 So already within the Old Testament
\n45:00 earlier prophets. You have within the Torah itself allusions to earlier events. So there's this,
\n45:07 I guess you might call it kind of this vast conversation happening within the Bible itself,
\n45:12 where people talk to people, where text talks to text, where event talks to event,
\n45:17 and we're listening in on this. And we're seeing how all of these conversations are leading finally
\n45:23 to this one conversation that's all about Christ, the one who comes to fulfill all these promises,
\n45:30 prototypes in the Old Testament were pointing forward to Jesus of Nazareth. So I hope that
\n45:38 kind of this big picture of the interconnectedness of the scripture is going to serve you as
\n45:44 we move forward and talk about more details related to exactly who the Messiah is and how
\n45:50 the Old Testament bears witness of Him. We'll see you in the next lecture.
\n46:00 (upbeat music)
"}00:00 (upbeat music)
\n00:15 - Welcome to Lecture 3 in Christ and the Old Testament.
\n00:17 We've covered some territory so far.
\n00:19 We've talked about kind of the big picture
\n00:21 of what the Old Testament is
\n00:22 and how we should approach it.
\n00:24 We've also talked about the interconnectedness
\n00:26 of the entire Old Testament.
\n00:28 Of course, really the entire Bible,
\n00:30 have all of these textual connections between what happened before and what happens after
\n00:36 that and how one might mirror the other.
\n00:38 We looked at some new Testament examples of that with the Transfiguration and then
\n00:41 Jesus walking on the Sea of Galilee.
\n00:44 Today, what I want to talk about are the multitude of ways that the Messiah is described
\n00:53 in the Old Testament.
\n01:00 So all the ideas there are out there about who Jesus is.
\n01:04 So if you were just to stop anybody today and say,
\n01:08 \"Who do you think Jesus is?\"
\n01:09 Whether they were to church or don't go to church,
\n01:11 whether they're a Christian or a Muslim or a Jew
\n01:14 or not religious at all,
\n01:16 Chase is you're gonna get all kinds of answers, right?
\n01:19 Some people are gonna say, well, he was a good teacher
\n01:22 or some people might say he was a prophet
\n01:24 or some people might say he was just kind of a good guy
\n01:27 or some people might not have really have any idea
\n01:30 kind of a few things they've heard here and there, but they can't kind of put them together
\n01:33 into one description of who Jesus is.
\n01:36 So there's a lot of ideas out there about who Jesus actually was and the significance
\n01:43 of what he both taught as well as accomplished.
\n01:47 And strangely, it's really no different now than it was in the first century.
\n01:53 So if you were to stop any person in the first century, any Jew in the first century and
\n02:00 the Messiah is, or who do you think the Messiah is going to be?
\n02:04 Well, you probably would have heard a whole lot of different answers to that.
\n02:08 And that's some of what we're going to be going through today.
\n02:12 And so I want us to kind of appreciate a little bit of the confusion
\n02:19 that a first century Jew might have had if you said,
\n02:22 who is the Messiah going to be and what is he going to accomplish?
\n02:30 when I look at the rest of the Old Testament.
\n02:33 And by that I mean, because the Old Testament talks about
\n02:36 who the Messiah is going to be in all these different ways,
\n02:41 you can kind of understand if you're a first century Jew,
\n02:43 not exactly being able to narrow it down
\n02:46 to one particular answer.
\n02:48 So is the Messiah going to be a teacher?
\n02:50 Yes.
\n02:51 Is he going to be a prophet?
\n02:53 Well, yes.
\n02:54 Is he going to be a priest?
\n02:55 Well, yeah, I'm pretty sure he is.
\n02:58 Well, is he going to be a king?
\n03:00 that too. So how in the world do you have all of these represented in one person? So what we see
\n03:07 is in the first century there were all kinds of ideas about there, out there about who the Messiah
\n03:11 was going to be, just actually like there is today. There's all sorts of impressions and opinions
\n03:18 and confessions about who Jesus as the Messiah was. So we're going to do kind of a quick run through
\n03:30 and buckle up because we're gonna be going pretty quickly
\n03:33 over a whole lot of different texts,
\n03:35 a whole lot of different ideas.
\n03:37 And to begin, I want to, I want us to think about
\n03:40 a particular incident that happened in the life of Jesus.
\n03:43 You may remember this, Jesus said to his disciples one day
\n03:47 he said, \"Who do people say that I am?\"
\n03:50 And it's kind of one of these,
\n03:51 well, depends on who you ask, right?
\n03:54 Who do you say I am?
\n03:55 His disciples gave him an answer,
\n03:56 but they kind of said, \"Well,
\n04:00 Was the response? Well, some people say that you're John the Baptist. Some people say that you're
\n04:07 Jeremiah. Some people say that you're Elijah. Some people say that you're one of the prophets.
\n04:13 So people are saying all sorts of things about you, Jesus. And of course, Jesus turns out around
\n04:18 and he says, \"But who do you say that I am?\" And Peter makes this great confession that
\n04:30 However, what they reported about some of the other ideas about who Jesus were, they were
\n04:37 mostly wrong but partially right in the sense that yes, Jesus was in fact like one
\n04:44 of the Old Testament prophets.
\n04:46 We'll talk about that when we get to that part of this overview.
\n04:53 One way that you can think about this run through the Old Testament and all the various
\n05:00 kind of picture yourself walking down a road.
\n05:04 Now, I grew up in the Texas Panhandle.
\n05:08 If you've ever been to the Texas Panhandle,
\n05:09 you know that you can see a long way.
\n05:12 It's pretty flat country.
\n05:14 There's not a whole lot out there.
\n05:16 So you can stand on your front porch and you can see way, way into the distance.
\n05:22 So imagine you're in a situation like that.
\n05:24 You're in West Texas, you're in the Texas Panhandle,
\n05:30 And you can see way in the distance something.
\n05:34 Now you know something's there, but you can't tell exactly what it is.
\n05:40 But you know you're walking towards something.
\n05:43 There's something in the distance that you're definitely going towards.
\n05:46 You just don't really have any clarity about who or what it might be.
\n05:50 Well you get a little bit closer and you realize, ah, it's definitely a person.
\n05:55 Definitely a person that I'm walking toward.
\n06:00 man or a woman or a child or an adult,
\n06:03 but I can definitely tell it's a person
\n06:05 because it's walking, it's on two legs coming toward me.
\n06:09 Well, you get a little bit closer to what happens.
\n06:10 You're like, oh, definitely a man,
\n06:13 but I can't tell if he's old or young,
\n06:15 or if he's handsome or ugly, or what color is hair is,
\n06:19 but it's definitely a man that I'm walking toward.
\n06:22 Then of course, as you narrow the distance,
\n06:24 you have greater and greater clarity
\n06:30 We'll just get that scenario and then transfer it over into the Old Testament.
\n06:35 And that's kind of what happens as you're walking through the Old Testament.
\n06:40 So you start out your journey and you're walking through Genesis.
\n06:44 And you can tell that in the distance there's going to be something, and this something
\n06:49 is this promised Savior, Redeemer, Deliveror, the one who's going to stop on the head of
\n07:00 So you know that in the distance, way in the distance,
\n07:03 there's something you're walking toward.
\n07:05 And as you walk through the rest of the Old Testament,
\n07:08 as you get closer and closer, you get greater clarity.
\n07:13 Now what kind of clarity am I talking about?
\n07:16 Well, let's just look at some examples of this.
\n07:18 So I already mentioned one of them, Genesis 3.15.
\n07:21 This is after Adam, you have rebelled and you have Adam,
\n07:24 you have Eve, and then you have the serpent.
\n07:26 And to the serpent, God says that there's going to be
\n07:30 enmity, there's going to be strife between the serpent's seed and then the woman's seed.
\n07:37 And then eventually the seed of the woman is going to crush the head of the serpent,
\n07:42 and at the same time the serpent is going to stick its fangs into the heel of the one
\n07:47 who crushes its head.
\n07:48 So this is often called the proto-event gellium, which is fancy way for saying the first gospel,
\n07:55 the first gospel promise.
\n08:00 the evil one, but notice in the very destruction of the evil one, his heal is going to be punctured.
\n08:06 So there's going to be kind of a dual death, if you will, a dual destruction.
\n08:10 Evil will be destroyed, but at the same time, the one who crushes the head of the serpent will himself die.
\n08:15 And of course, in hindsight, this is what the crucifixion is.
\n08:19 This is the destruction of death while at the same time the Messiah dies on the cross.
\n08:24 But if you're just beginning the journey, of course, there's not much clarity yet.
\n08:30 stick to that. As you walk along, you encounter Genesis chapter 12. Genesis
\n08:37 chapter 12 is when God, out of all humanity, selects a man and a woman named
\n08:43 Abram and Sarai, whose names are later changed to Abraham and Sarah. And God
\n08:48 says, \"You, you two, are going to be the one who carries on the promise of the seed
\n08:54 that promise that I made back in Genesis 3.15.\" So they're kind of a new Adam and
\n09:00 old. They're very advanced in age, but they're like the new chosen couple. They're the new Adam
\n09:06 and Eve, and they're going to carry on this promise of the seed. So we know that much. The seed's
\n09:10 going to come from the offspring of these two people. Once you go further along in the story,
\n09:16 they do have a child eventually named Isaac. He carries on the promise of the seed. He has sons,
\n09:22 one of them is named Jacob. He carries on the promise of the seed. So you see how we're going
\n09:30 more clarity. It's kind of narrowing down at first. It could be anybody. It could be any,
\n09:35 any, any male offspring of a woman. And then it narrows down, it's going to be the
\n09:38 offspring of Abraham and Sarah or of Isaac or of Jacob. And then as we get a little bit further,
\n09:45 we realize it's not going to be just of Jacob, but it's going to be of one of his sons. It's going
\n09:50 to be Judah. We're learned this from Genesis chapter 49. Jacob also named Israel, \"Blesses,
\n10:00 prophetic word upon each of their tribes. And to Judah, he says that he is going to be the one
\n10:06 that rules. So Judah becomes the one who carries on the promise of the seed. Now jump forward,
\n10:12 all the way from Genesis to 2 Samuel, chapter 7, which is a mountaintop text in the Old Testament.
\n10:19 Second Samuel 7 is hugely important because in that chapter, David, who is a descendant of Judah,
\n10:30 who carries on the promise of this seed. So you see, as we are walking our way along through the
\n10:36 flatlands of the Old Testament, we're getting a little bit, a little bit clearer as to exactly
\n10:41 at least where the Messiah is coming from. And if you get to that all the way to the New Testament,
\n10:46 the New Testament writers make a big deal about the fact that Christ is a descendant of David.
\n10:53 That's why he's called the son of David. So we know that much. And when we're walking through
\n11:00 that where he's coming from. We know his genealogy is going to be traced from Adam to Abraham to
\n11:07 Isaac to Jacob to Judah to David. Okay, but as we go along, are there other things that we learn?
\n11:14 Yeah, there's a lot of other things we learn. For instance, we learn that he's going to be a
\n11:20 prophet, a prophet like Moses. And Deuteronomy 18, 15 tells us that. I think we've talked about
\n11:30 He's going to be a descendant of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Judah and David,
\n11:36 but he's also going to be a prophet who's like Moses.
\n11:40 We learn later on is going to be a priest.
\n11:42 We'll talk about more about what the priest are in just a minute.
\n11:45 But so he's going to be prophet and priest.
\n11:48 And then we start learning all sorts of details as we go even farther into the old
\n11:53 testament.
\n11:54 And so as we're approaching this figure, we learn more and more about exactly what
\n11:58 he looks like and what he's going to do.
\n12:00 For instance, that he's going to be born in the little town of Bethlehem.
\n12:05 Why?
\n12:06 Because that's where David came from.
\n12:08 So he's going to be born in David's hometown.
\n12:11 We learn from Isaiah that he's going to be born of a virgin.
\n12:15 This is a famous promise that is quoted by Matthew in his gospel.
\n12:21 And then you get to prophets like Isaiah.
\n12:24 Isaiah talks all over the place about how the Messiah's going to be a servant.
\n12:30 who calls Israel out of exile.
\n12:33 He's going to be the one, as Isaiah 53 puts it,
\n12:35 who's going to suffer death for the sins of his people
\n12:40 and then rise again.
\n12:43 And then you get into really strange, old,
\n12:45 testament books like the book of Daniel.
\n12:48 And you look at Daniel chapter seven,
\n12:49 and now the Messiah is described as a son of man
\n12:54 who is given this power and authority
\n12:57 in a throne alongside God.
\n13:00 So, that is a very, very quick run through through just kind of a selected number of
\n13:06 prophetic texts that tell us more and more about who the Messiah is going to be.
\n13:12 So as we're walking through the Old Testament, as we work our way closer and closer to the
\n13:17 actual coming of the Messiah, we see with greater clarity who is going to be and what
\n13:23 he's going to do.
\n13:25 That doesn't mean that all our questions are answered.
\n13:30 With the coming of Jesus, we know exactly that Jesus fits perfectly with all of these.
\n13:36 It just means that we have a pretty good idea because as you see in the New Testament
\n13:40 and as we'll see, as we look at some examples of Jewish literature, there was still a lot
\n13:44 of confusion out there.
\n13:46 Because it was kind of there in the way it is now.
\n13:50 People tend to accent one particular aspect of Jesus.
\n13:54 That kind of tends to be the tendency that folks have.
\n13:57 So they like this about Jesus.
\n14:00 about Jesus. So very often in the teaching and preaching that ends up being what people
\n14:05 really talk about the most. And when that happens, a lot of the other aspects of who
\n14:10 Christ is and what He did kind of gets, gets sidelined, right? Well, it was kind of like
\n14:14 that with Messianic expectations. Some people focused on the fact that He was going to be
\n14:19 a king and He was going to be the one who drove out the Romans. Some people focused on the
\n14:24 fact that He was going to be a priest and He was going to be the one who brought about
\n14:30 because on how he was going to be a great teacher
\n14:32 and he was going to be reviving the teaching
\n14:35 of the Torah of Moses.
\n14:37 So when Jesus comes along
\n14:40 and he really doesn't fully satisfy anybody's
\n14:43 expectations of the Messiah,
\n14:46 some people shoved him away.
\n14:48 Some people actively persecuted him
\n14:50 and of course some people also believed in him
\n14:54 and followed him.
\n14:55 But the one thing that we discover,
\n14:57 the one basically universal truth about Jesus
\n15:00 is that when he was betrayed and arrested and crucified and died, he didn't meet
\n15:09 people's expectations. So that is one of the great surprises of the ministry of
\n15:14 Jesus. Now I was talked about Psalm 22 talks about the suffering in the Messiah.
\n15:18 Isaiah 53 talks about the suffering in the Messiah, but it hadn't worked its way
\n15:22 into the expectations that people had like it should have. And so when he was
\n15:30 even as close as followers said, you know,
\n15:33 we hoped that he was gonna be the one
\n15:35 that redeemed Israel, and then he went and got himself
\n15:37 crucified and all our hopes were dashed.
\n15:40 Then he realized of course that in his very crucifixion
\n15:42 was the act of redemption for them.
\n15:45 So there is this great surprise,
\n15:49 this great revelation or epiphany at the death
\n15:52 and resurrection of Jesus.
\n15:53 And as we saw a couple of lectures ago,
\n15:56 when Jesus was talking to the Amaz disciples,
\n16:00 opens their eyes and he opens our eyes to see how all of this was already spoken of beforehand
\n16:07 in the prophets and in the Torah. And so it's kind of one of these after the fact sort of thing is
\n16:14 you go back and you read and you realize, oh yes, I see it now. I see how all of this was spoken
\n16:20 of beforehand. All of this was wars foreshadowed. So a lot of times when you're studying the Bible,
\n16:30 You're going to be reading it every time with new eyes and fresh eyes.
\n16:35 So the more you learn about Jesus, the more you read the Old Testament, and the more you learn about
\n16:39 Jesus and the more you read the Old Testament, every time you're going to be picking up new things,
\n16:44 fresh insights. You'll see Jesus in places you didn't see him before. You realize different aspects
\n16:49 of the Messiah you didn't see before because every time you're going through these scriptures again,
\n16:54 the Spirit is opening your eyes to see even more how they testify of Christ. So you're really going
\n17:00 same thing that the earliest disciples of Jesus went through as their eyes were open and their
\n17:04 minds were open, illumined by the Spirit to see how the biography of Jesus was laid out there for
\n17:12 all of us to read in the Old Testament. So what I want to do in the rest of our time is look at
\n17:20 some of the expectations of what the Messiah was going to be like in the first century. So we're
\n17:30 that are contemporary with the New Testament.
\n17:32 And we're also going to just kind of take a trip
\n17:35 through the rest of the Old Testament
\n17:36 and look at various ways in which the Messiah is portrayed.
\n17:42 And then of course, we will compare that
\n17:44 with how all of these were fulfilled,
\n17:46 were fulfilled in Jesus.
\n17:48 And the first one of these I wanna look at is priest.
\n17:52 So if you go back to Leviticus, for instance,
\n18:00 overdoing. And most of what they did concerned their activities there at the tabernacle. And then
\n18:07 later when the tabernacle, which was a moveable tent, kind of a moveable shrine, once it was replaced
\n18:15 by the temple, which was a permanent structure in Jerusalem, you had the priest serving both places,
\n18:20 you had them serving the tabernacle, and I'm serving at the later at the temple. And the priest's
\n18:30 the temple was clean, was holy, was the kind of acceptable sacrifices and clean people that
\n18:39 were allowed to come into this sacred space. So the priests are all about distinguishing
\n18:44 between that which is holy and that which is unholy, between that which is clean and
\n18:49 that which is that which is that which is unclean. Now two of the main things that the
\n19:00 this sacred space. We're going to talk more about that in a later lecture, but I
\n19:05 want you to keep this in mind. The priests were to serve and they were to
\n19:09 guard or to protect. Now, the reason I want you to keep that in mind is because
\n19:14 that is exactly the two duties given to Adam and Eve with regard to Eden. They
\n19:20 were to serve it, which in Hebrew is a vaud, and they were to guard or protect it,
\n19:30 that were given to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden are the same two duties, primary
\n19:33 duties given to the priesthood, which the reason I introduce this now is because in
\n19:40 the Garden of Eden we have the first sacred space. It was like a tabernacle, it was like
\n19:45 a temple. And you had the first two priests, Adam and Eve, who were to serve there and
\n19:51 he were to guard to protect it from any unclean things or evil influences entering the garden.
\n20:00 The reason I'm bringing it up now is because usually we think of the priest
\n20:04 as something later on in Israel's history. No, no, no.
\n20:07 The priests are right there from the beginning.
\n20:09 Adam and Eve were the first two priests in charge of this sacred space.
\n20:14 Now later on, we encounter different priests.
\n20:16 We encounter Melchizedek that we'll talk more about.
\n20:18 He's in Genesis chapter 14.
\n20:20 And then we begin to encounter the priest of Israel who did this distinguishing
\n20:25 between that which is holy and that which is unholy, that which is clean and that which is
\n20:30 Now what happened with regard to the priesthood is that all of these activities of the priest
\n20:37 served as a pattern for the ministry of the Messiah. The high priest in particular was called
\n20:46 the anointed priest. So in Hebrew the word for anoint is the basis for our word, Messiah. So a
\n21:00 Chiyok simply means one who has been anointed.
\n21:03 Some kind of oil has been placed upon the head
\n21:05 of someone who is then placed into an office.
\n21:10 So the high priest was the anointed priest.
\n21:12 He was the little M. Messiah priest.
\n21:16 And he served as kind of the embodiment,
\n21:19 the one person embodiment of the nation before God.
\n21:24 He had symbols of the 12 tribes that he wore
\n21:30 on his chest plate were 12 precious stones that represented the 12 tribes of Israel.
\n21:35 On the day of atonement, the high priest, the little M Messiah priest would place his hands on
\n21:41 the head of a goat, and he would confess on the head of that goat the sins of the nation.
\n21:47 So he was the one person representative or embodiment of the whole nation before God.
\n21:55 Now it doesn't take much imagination to realize how this was serving as the pattern
\n22:00 was to be. He was also going to be a priest, a priestly figure who distinguished between
\n22:07 the holy and the unholy, the clean and the unclean. And we see Jesus doing this in his
\n22:12 ministry, except he kind of switched things around. Jesus as a priest said, \"You know
\n22:19 what? It's not that which is out there that goes into that makes you unclean. It's not
\n22:25 like unclean food that you eat that make you unclean or contact with something unclean
\n22:30 you touch and makes you unclean.
\n22:32 He said, no, no, no, you get the backwards.
\n22:33 What makes you unclean is what comes from within.
\n22:36 Murder and evil thoughts and adultries
\n22:38 and all the wickedness it flows from within.
\n22:41 That makes you unclean.
\n22:42 So in his priestly teaching,
\n22:44 Jesus begins to switch things around
\n22:47 where he locates uncleanness, not externally,
\n22:51 but internally.
\n22:52 And also Jesus as a priest did something radically new.
\n22:56 He actually let unclean people,
\n23:00 and he touched them, which no Old Testament priests would have done.
\n23:04 For instance, when a man came up to him who had leprosy,
\n23:08 before Jesus healed him, he expressed solidarity with that man by touching him.
\n23:14 So Jesus, the Messiah, priest, touched an unclean man,
\n23:18 that would never have been done by an ordinary priest, but again, Jesus is reversing things.
\n23:23 He's a different kind, he's a different kind of priest.
\n23:30 of priests, but he also came as our new high priest. Because just like the Old Testament priest
\n23:37 embodied all Israel before God and even bore the names of the 12 tribes of Israel on his
\n23:42 vestments before God. So Christ comes as the representative human. He is all humanity in one
\n23:51 person so that what Jesus experiences is what humanity experiences. What Jesus suffered is what
\n24:00 He rises again, all humanity dies and all humanity rises again with him because he is
\n24:06 our representative high priest before the Father.
\n24:11 And get this, we know from New Testament writings such as the Dead Sea, from writings
\n24:17 contemporary with the New Testament, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, we know that there
\n24:22 was actually a lot of expectation that the Messiah would in fact be a priest.
\n24:30 Hebrews, for instance. But we also know from other contemporary Jewish literature, such as the Dead Sea
\n24:36 Scrolls, that there was an expectation that when the Messiah came, he would in fact be a priest. In
\n24:43 fact, one of these, it's called 11 Q Melchizedek, came from cave 11 at Qumran, and it's all about
\n24:50 this person in Melchizedek. And they say that this in-time figure is going to come on the day of
\n25:00 between good and evil and his name is going to be Melchizedek.
\n25:04 So he's a priestly figure and he's coming on the day of atonement and he's engaging
\n25:08 in this Messiah type of activity.
\n25:11 So we know that at least among the people of the Dead Sea, the people of the Dead Sea
\n25:15 there's this Essene community that they were expecting, a priestly kind of Messiah
\n25:22 to come.
\n25:23 So that is one of the ways in which the Messiah described in the Old Testament.
\n25:30 He's a high priest like the Israel had high priest and I'll add this and we'll expand on this in a later election
\n25:36 When we talk about the temple and everything else. He's also
\n25:40 The priest that Adam failed to be
\n25:43 Adam miserably failed in his priestly duties because he didn't serve as he should he didn't guard the garden of Eden as he should
\n25:49 So as the last Adam as the true priest Christ comes to be obedient where Adam was not
\n26:00 to combat evil as this fulfillment of who Adam himself was not.
\n26:07 So there was this priestly expectation of the Messiah.
\n26:10 But there was also this idea that the Messiah was going to be kind of a profit/teacher.
\n26:18 So just so you understand what prophets were in the Old Testament, because we still
\n26:21 have that, we still use that word today.
\n26:23 And the way that we use it is not really in conformity with the way it was used in the
\n26:28 Old Testament.
\n26:30 a prophet today, you might be somebody who is just kind of forecasting the
\n26:34 future or you know he's telling you what's going to happen next week or
\n26:38 next to your hundred years from now whatever it might be. Well in the Old
\n26:41 Testament prophets did some of that. They did foretell what was to come. They
\n26:47 didn't predict. A prediction is this is what I think is going to happen. When you
\n26:52 foretell something you know what's going to happen. You say ahead of time
\n27:00 And the prophets in the Old Testament did some of that.
\n27:03 But the primary activity of Old Testament prophets was not to foretell, but to foretell,
\n27:09 which basically means to preach.
\n27:11 So a lot of what the prophets did is they took the Word of God that had been written up
\n27:15 to that point in whenever they lived, and they would base their preaching upon that.
\n27:21 And of course, the earlier the prophets existed, the fewer scriptures had been written
\n27:26 up to that point.
\n27:27 So they would preach, for instance, on the Torah.
\n27:30 people like Daniel or Ezekiel or even later, Hosea,
\n27:35 they basically got the entire Old Testament before them written.
\n27:38 So they would preach on this.
\n27:40 The prophets and the words were those who took God's word
\n27:45 and they applied it to the people
\n27:47 that they were called to preach to.
\n27:50 So they were preachers, but they were also, of course, teachers.
\n27:53 They would take this word that God had given to them
\n27:56 and they would communicate it to the people.
\n28:00 of the Torah applications that would apply to the people
\n28:04 that they were addressing.
\n28:07 And we also know from the Old Testament
\n28:10 and from literature contemporary with the New Testament
\n28:14 that the Messiah was to be a prophet,
\n28:15 and he was to be a teacher.
\n28:16 I've already referred a couple of times
\n28:18 to this well-known verse from Deuteronomy chapter 18.
\n28:22 Deuteronomy is kind of the swan song of Moses.
\n28:27 So the whole thing is one long sermon.
\n28:30 care how long sermon you've heard preach. I guarantee you've never heard of sermon as long as
\n28:34 Deuteronomy. Yes, it's the one long sermon. And Moses is preaching this at the end of his life.
\n28:41 So he's brought the Israelites to the very edge of the promised land. He's not going to enter,
\n28:46 but he is going to give them this one last long sermon. That's what Deuteronomy is.
\n28:52 So he's preaching. He's telling them all about what God has done for them,
\n29:00 foretelling himself, but at one point in Deuteronomy 18, he says that God is going to raise up after him.
\n29:06 God is going to raise up a profit, and this profit is going to be like Moses.
\n29:12 Now, we know from the rest of the Old Testament that there were a lot of prophets who came after Moses,
\n29:17 but none of them were on the same footing with Moses himself.
\n29:23 They're all like little Moses's, if you will. All the prophets came after Moses were patterned after him,
\n29:30 equal with him. They all looked up to him instead. There were his acolytes, if you will.
\n29:35 Except this one property was to come. And this one property was to come is in fact
\n29:42 the Messiah himself. Now we also know from some of the Dead Sea Scrolls as well as
\n29:48 some other Jewish literature around the time of the New Testament that the
\n30:00 Messiah. So, when Jesus comes along, it's no surprise that when you read through Matthew, Mark,
\n30:08 Luke, and John, you encounter reference after reference to him being in some way likened to
\n30:15 the Old Testament prophets. To refer again to that account of Jesus with the with the Maius
\n30:21 disciples, one of them says that he is a prophet who's mighty in word indeed. So,
\n30:30 prophet in Matthew 16, this great confession we referred to earlier where Jesus says,
\n30:35 \"Who do people say that I am?\"
\n30:37 Again, they say, \"Well, some say you're Elijah or Jeremiah or one of the prophets.\"
\n30:43 So people like to think of the Messiah as being like one of these great Old Testament
\n30:49 prophets.
\n30:51 And when Matthew wrote his gospel, what he did is he took the life of Moses and he kind
\n31:00 major events in the life of Moses. For instance, you've probably heard of the
\n31:06 sermon on the Mount, right? Beginning there in Matthew, Matthew chapter 5. Well,
\n31:09 the reason that Jesus delivers his sermon on the Mount is because Moses
\n31:14 delivered his teaching about the Torah, teaching about the law, the
\n31:18 Ten Commandments from Mount Sinai. So Matthew patterns his telling of the
\n31:24 story of the Messiah after the story of Moses. So Jesus was certainly a
\n31:30 figure, the Messiah was a prophetic figure. And we have example after example in the Old
\n31:35 Testament where God was calling people out to speak His words. And they were the mouthpiece
\n31:43 of God. So God said this, the prophets would speak it to the people. So it wasn't like the
\n31:48 prophets were in charge of their own words. The prophets were given that which they were to
\n31:54 speak and then they turned and they spoke that to the people. And in this way, really all the
\n32:00 a foreshadowing of who the Messiah was to be.
\n32:04 Jesus Himself said, \"I came to do the will of my Father,
\n32:07 and I speak that which my Father has given me to speak.\"
\n32:10 So what He does and what He speaks
\n32:13 is in a prophetic sort of way.
\n32:16 He speaks that which the Father has given Him to speak.
\n32:19 And of course, He is also rejected
\n32:23 like almost all the Old Testament prophets had been as well.
\n32:27 God would send a prophet to the people of Israel.
\n32:30 and most of the time is that profit would be rejected.
\n32:32 Oftentimes that profit was either attacked
\n32:36 or in some cases killed.
\n32:40 Same thing happens with Jesus.
\n32:43 He comes and he speaks the word of God
\n32:46 and the people rebel against this.
\n32:47 Until eventually of course, they actually attack him,
\n32:50 arrest him and put him to death
\n32:53 just like happened to the Old Testament,
\n32:55 many of the Old Testament prophets.
\n33:00 would be a prophet. And in fact, he was a prophetic sort of figure, but again, more than a prophet.
\n33:05 He was a priest also, but he was more than a priest. He wasn't on the same level as the Old
\n33:10 Testament priest. He wasn't on the same level as the Old Testament prophets. But when you read
\n33:15 about the priests in the Old Testament, or when you read about the prophets in the Old Testament,
\n33:20 what you're reading about are all these individuals who in ways large and small,
\n33:30 preaching and they're foretelling and
\n33:32 foretelling who the Messiah was was to
\n33:36 be. So you've got priests the
\n33:38 expectation, you've got the prophetic
\n33:40 expectation, but you also have this
\n33:43 expectation that when the Messiah comes,
\n33:46 he's going to be a warrior king like David
\n33:50 was. And I suspect that if you were to
\n33:55 stop a Jew, an Jew, on the road in the
\n34:00 and say, \"I've got a question for you.\"
\n34:03 So, when the Messiah comes, who do you think He'll be like?
\n34:09 I think that probably 99% of the time, if they were only given one choice,
\n34:13 they would say, \"Oh, well, David, that's who He's going to be like.\"
\n34:18 If there's one individual in the Old Testament that first century Jews expect the Messiah to be like,
\n34:23 it is David.
\n34:25 Why?
\n34:30 prophesies that the Messiah will be in the line of David.
\n34:34 And that's why he's often called the son of David in the gospels.
\n34:39 There's also another part to this.
\n34:41 There's a whole list of parts to this.
\n34:44 So David was known for what?
\n34:47 Well, I told you in the first lecture that of course David is most famous for taking on the Philistine giant Goliath, taking him out.
\n34:54 After that David became the head of the armies of Saul.
\n35:00 warrior. He was known as the one who took on the enemies of God. And so he became the icon warrior
\n35:06 of those who would take on the enemies of God. He was the warrior figure that you could count on
\n35:13 to basically win every battle, to take on any foe that faced Israel. So if you were facing an
\n35:19 enemy, if you wanted an enemy cast out, if you wanted to be victorious, you needed a David.
\n35:30 Now, put yourself into the first century.
\n35:33 You're living, say, in Judea.
\n35:36 And you are basically in exile on your own land because the Romans are the ones who have
\n35:41 control.
\n35:42 They've had control for a long time.
\n35:44 And so even though you have some liberties, even though you have some freedoms, pretty
\n35:49 much you're under the Roman thumb.
\n35:52 Ultimately, they're the ones who have control.
\n35:54 Now, if you want freedom, if you want liberation, then you've got to get rid of the Romans.
\n36:00 Romans. Well, you're not going to vote them out. It's not the way it worked. You're the only way
\n36:04 you're going to get rid of the Romans is actually by having an army that has a leader, a warrior
\n36:11 figure who's going to have the wherewithal and the divine authority to drive the Romans out and
\n36:17 to bring liberation and glory to Israel again. Well, for many people, that's exactly what they
\n36:23 wanted in a Messiah. They didn't want a Messiah that was a good teacher. They wanted a Messiah
\n36:30 He wanted a Messiah who was going to be able to lead the armies of Israel against the Romans,
\n36:35 drive out the Romans, purify the land, and once again restore the glory that Israel had
\n36:40 back in the days of David and Solomon.
\n36:44 So they were looking for a Messiah like David, but they wanted the warrior David to
\n36:51 be the pattern for how this Messiah was going to engage in combat and victory.
\n37:00 And Jesus certainly is the son of David.
\n37:03 He's in the line of David.
\n37:04 He's a king like David.
\n37:06 But here was the shock.
\n37:07 When Jesus went to war, when he went to battle,
\n37:11 he didn't go to battle with a sword.
\n37:13 He went to battle by suffering under the authority
\n37:19 of the powers that be.
\n37:21 So he submitted himself to be arrested.
\n37:23 He didn't fight back.
\n37:24 Remember Peter drew a sword and cut off the year
\n37:27 of the high priest when Jesus was arrested.
\n37:30 That's not the way this is going to work.
\n37:32 Put your sword away.
\n37:33 He lets himself be arrested.
\n37:35 He lets himself be put to trial.
\n37:37 He lets himself be crucified.
\n37:39 And in John's gospel, this is an amazing part of John's gospel.
\n37:44 John says that Jesus revealed his glory.
\n37:48 He was glorified when he was crucified.
\n37:51 That's kind of the reverse way of New Testament thinking.
\n37:54 So Jesus' glory was revealed when he was crucified.
\n38:00 from the throne of the cross.
\n38:02 That's where Jesus was King David.
\n38:04 He rode into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey,
\n38:06 just like Solomon had rode into Jerusalem
\n38:09 on the back of David's mule
\n38:11 when he was gonna be crowned king.
\n38:13 So now this son of David,
\n38:15 this next Solomon rides into Jerusalem,
\n38:18 and he's gonna take his throne
\n38:20 and accept it's a bloody Roman throne.
\n38:23 It's a cross.
\n38:24 That's where Jesus is glorified.
\n38:26 That's where Jesus reigns as king.
\n38:30 of way that God is always working in the scriptures and in our own lives today.
\n38:35 And what was the result?
\n38:38 Victory.
\n38:39 The victory came about when Jesus rose from the grave and now he stands triumphant as
\n38:44 the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords, so that he actually is the king of the world.
\n38:49 He's not just the king of the Jews, he's also the king of the Romans and he's the king
\n38:53 of the Germans and he's the king of the Africans and the king of the Americans.
\n39:00 of his father, where he reigns as the son of David, over a kingdom that is not just circumscribed
\n39:06 within the area around the Mediterranean Sea, but a kingdom that expands over the entire world.
\n39:12 So he comes as a warrior, he comes as a son of David, he is the fulfillment of all of these
\n39:17 Messianic expectations revolving around David in the Old Testament, but he does it in a way that is
\n39:30 the backwards way that God likes to work in our world.
\n39:36 So he did fulfill the priests the expectations,
\n39:39 he did fulfill the prophetic expectations,
\n39:41 he did fulfill the Davidic warrior expectations,
\n39:44 but he did all of this in a Jesus sort of way,
\n39:48 which always catches us off guard,
\n39:50 which always takes the wisdom of the world
\n39:51 and flips it upside, upside down.
\n39:55 Now one more thing that we'll wrap up with is,
\n40:00 in the Old Testament, whether the priestly or that revolving around David or the prophetic
\n40:07 or whatever it might be. One question that remains is that people really expect the Messiah
\n40:13 to be divine because Jesus is Lord and God. Thomas says to him, when Thomas says to him
\n40:21 a week after his resurrection, \"My Lord and my God,\" do you ever think about that? How
\n40:30 in the face of another human being and say, \"You're my God. How was that possible?\"
\n40:36 Well, it's possible because when you begin with Genesis and you work away through the rest of
\n40:42 the Hebrew Scriptures, the kind of God that you encounter is one. Okay, there's no doubt about
\n40:50 that monotheism for sure, the one God, but it's kind of a complexity within this monotheism. So
\n41:00 meaning that yes, you have one God.
\n41:03 But interestingly, this one God, first of all,
\n41:06 has a spirit.
\n41:07 In fact, we read about the spirit of God,
\n41:09 and already in the second verse of the Bible,
\n41:11 the spirit of God was hovering on the face of the waters.
\n41:13 So you have God, you have the spirit of God,
\n41:15 but then you also have multiple occasions
\n41:18 where God will send like a messenger,
\n41:21 or he will send his word, or he will send his glory.
\n41:24 And this word messenger glory that is sent by God
\n41:30 He is called God, is called by God's person name in the Old Testament.
\n41:34 Yahweh.
\n41:35 So, this is the complexity.
\n41:38 One God, but you have God, you have His Spirit, you have His Word or His Messenger.
\n41:44 And over time, as you work your way through the rest of the Old Testament, you get to passages
\n41:49 like Old Daniel chapter 7, for instance, where you have the Lord in His glory, and then
\n42:00 are set up. One throne obviously for God, for Yahweh, but who's the other throne for?
\n42:06 Well, along comes a figure who's like the Son of Man, and he is given a glory and a kingdom and
\n42:14 power. He receives the throne. So what happened is around the time of the first century,
\n42:21 the king people was called a belief in two powers in heaven. So two powers in heaven meaning that
\n42:30 the second figure, the son of man figure.
\n42:34 And he has authority, he has power, he has a throne.
\n42:38 In fact, this particular understanding of two powers
\n42:41 in heaven was widespread among Jews,
\n42:44 even in the time of Jesus.
\n42:47 Later, after the ascension of Jesus,
\n42:50 probably another 50, 60 years,
\n42:53 it was declared heretical by the Jewish rabbis.
\n42:56 And you can imagine why,
\n42:57 because of course, people were using this idea
\n43:00 powers and having to talk about who Jesus is. So Jesus is the second power. He's the one
\n43:06 who is the son of man who is beside God on the throne. And that, in other words,
\n43:14 that expectation of God having one who is equal in power and authority to him,
\n43:21 that was how you could have Thomas saying, \"My Lord and my God,\" because there was an expectation
\n43:30 Greece, this David figure, was at the same time going to act with divine authority.
\n43:37 Have the divine name.
\n43:38 Be enthroned beside God Himself.
\n43:43 So it's no surprise in other words, when you read throughout the New Testament, that
\n43:46 Jesus is acting with divine authority.
\n43:50 The actions of God in the Old Testament are often ascribed directly to Him.
\n44:00 equal with God with regard to divinity.
\n44:04 He is the one who shares with the Father in this divine essence,
\n44:08 and the one who has acclaimed King of Kings and Lord of Lords.
\n44:12 So that, I hope, helps to kind of help to explain a little bit,
\n44:18 first of all, why there was some confusion in the first century
\n44:22 because you have all these Old Testament confessions
\n44:23 who the Messiah was to be, but also at the same time
\n44:26 reveals that all these expectations of the Messiah
\n44:30 fit with who Jesus is.
\n44:32 He truly is the prophet.
\n44:33 He truly is the priest.
\n44:34 He truly is the son of David,
\n44:36 who truly is the son of man
\n44:37 who has the same authority as the father.
\n44:40 And so all of these are helping to flesh out,
\n44:44 to more greatly inform us,
\n44:47 clearly inform us as to who he is,
\n44:50 who the Messiah is,
\n44:51 and what God has sent him,
\n44:52 what God has sent him to do.
\n44:55 So that's gonna wrap up this lecture.
\n44:57 Now looking forward to the next one,
\n45:00 We'll be spending some time kind of developing these same ideas, but we're the focus upon
\n45:07 how Christ manifested Himself in the Old Testament.
\n45:11 I've referred a couple of times to Him being a messenger or Him being the Word of the glory.
\n45:15 So we're going to look at a number of texts like the burning bush in Moses to see how,
\n45:21 even in the Old Testament, the Word who was to become flesh was already, as it were,
\n45:30 so that when the time came for him to fully manifest himself
\n45:34 as a human being, we would be ready for that.
\n45:38 So we'll see you at the next lecture.
"}00:00 [Music]
\n00:15 Welcome to lecture four. At the end of the last lecture, we talked about complex monotheism.
\n00:20 Our God has won, and yet there's complexity within God, and we talked a little bit about
\n00:30 in his divine authority. Now we're going to return to that in this lecture. And what I want us to do
\n00:36 is to look at a whole list of appearances. These are often characterized as as theophanes,
\n00:46 which means a God appearance or a Christophany, which means a Christ appearance. So these are going
\n00:51 to be appearances, visual, sometimes auditory, usually both appearances of God's representative.
\n01:00 Now, the way I want us to kind of think of this is in terms of orientation.
\n01:07 So when we orient ourselves, we are making sure that we are going the right direction.
\n01:12 We don't want to be if we're disoriented, of course, we don't know which direction we're
\n01:16 supposed to be going.
\n01:17 We're kind of, we're turned around, we might say.
\n01:19 But if we're oriented, we know which direction we need to be going, which direction we need
\n01:23 to be facing.
\n01:24 We have oriented ourselves in the way we should, we should go.
\n01:30 In the Old Testament, they kind of had a different sort of way of thinking about this.
\n01:35 I mean, when I orient myself, or you orient yourself, we are facing something, right?
\n01:41 You don't orient yourself by walking backwards.
\n01:44 You orient yourself by walking, by walking forwards.
\n01:47 Now in the Hebrew mindset, things are kind of backwards there.
\n02:00 or in front of is also the word for east.
\n02:04 And it's also the word for past.
\n02:08 So when you orient yourself,
\n02:11 you orient yourself by facing east.
\n02:15 You orient yourself by also looking at the past.
\n02:20 So the word for past is the same word for in front of.
\n02:25 You following me here?
\n02:26 When you're looking forward,
\n02:27 you're actually looking at the past.
\n02:30 It means that when you're working your way into the future, you're going backwards.
\n02:35 So you're working way back this direction.
\n02:38 Now, this kind of makes sense.
\n02:40 The future is behind you.
\n02:42 In other words, you can't see it.
\n02:44 You haven't seen it.
\n02:46 The past is in front of you.
\n02:47 You have seen it.
\n02:48 You do see it.
\n02:49 So the way that you orient yourself as a Hebrew is you look at the past, you look at
\n02:54 what's in front of you, and then you work your way backward.
\n03:00 into the future. Now the advantage of this is that you know what's coming, this is kind of the
\n03:07 idea, you know what's coming behind you on the basis of what's in front of you. So you walk into
\n03:12 the future facing backward because the future is pregnant with the past. The future is determined
\n03:20 by that which came before it. And so history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. There's a
\n03:30 into the future.
\n03:32 The past is open before you.
\n03:34 The future is being made manifest before you as you work,
\n03:39 as you work your way backwards.
\n03:41 Now, why all this?
\n03:43 What does this have to do with the subject in hand?
\n03:45 Well, I think that when you're working your way through the Old Testament,
\n03:49 this is a good way to think about orientation.
\n03:51 You look at what's happened in the past,
\n03:54 and on the basis of that, as you work your way backwards
\n04:00 You know what's coming up because it's already been portrayed before
\n04:04 So as you work your way all the way through the Old Testament
\n04:08 Looking at what transpires in the past which is before your eyes
\n04:12 this is a prophecy if you will of what is what is to come and
\n04:18 As we go along you'll see you'll see more and more of this but the general idea is that
\n04:23 As you take in more and more of how God manifests himself in the Old Testament as you walk backwards
\n04:30 you're going to realize when you bump into the manger at Bethlehem and look down at the baby in there,
\n04:39 that once again God has come to us to be among us in a way that's similar to the way that He came to be among us in the past.
\n04:51 In other words, the Old Testament prepares us for the incarnation because the incarnation is God taking on flesh
\n05:00 human being for all eternity.
\n05:03 And yet before the incarnation,
\n05:05 God was already manifesting himself
\n05:08 in visible, tangible sorts of ways.
\n05:12 And you can kind of think of the Old Testament
\n05:14 as a long preparation for Christmas.
\n05:17 And the first indication we have
\n05:19 that God is already kind of preparing us for Christmas
\n05:23 is what happens in the Garden of Eden.
\n05:27 So if you go back to Genesis chapter one
\n05:30 This one in particular, God is creating this and that.
\n05:35 He creates a heavens and the earth and then he divides the waters above and the waters
\n05:39 below and you have the creation of dry land.
\n05:42 You have basically as you work your way through creation, God creates a space and then
\n05:46 he creates that which fills that space.
\n05:49 Now, you get to the sixth day and this is when he makes Adam and Eve, he makes man and
\n05:54 woman.
\n05:55 Now, notice the language you choose to describe the creation of man and woman.
\n06:00 1, 26, and 27.
\n06:02 Then God said, \"Let us make man in our image after our likeness, and let them have dominion
\n06:08 over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over the livestock, and
\n06:12 over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.\"
\n06:15 So, God created man in His own image.
\n06:18 In the image of God, He created Him.
\n06:20 Male and female, He created them.
\n06:25 Nothing else in all creation is said to be in the image of God after His likeness.
\n06:30 and woman. They together are the image bearers of God. Now anything that is an
\n06:37 image bearer is a reflection of that which of course it images. So Adam and Eve
\n06:43 are to be those who on earth are the representatives of God. They are the
\n06:49 embodied image of the one who has created them. Now notice also the language
\n07:00 Well, who is the \"us\" here?
\n07:02 Well, there's divided opinions in scholarship.
\n07:05 Some people think that the \"us\" here is God talking to the angelic host.
\n07:11 I disagree with that.
\n07:13 And my primarily reason for disagreeing with that is because if God is speaking to His
\n07:17 angels, and He's saying, \"Let us make man in our image,\" that must mean that we also
\n07:22 bear the image of the angels.
\n07:25 The only thing is the scriptures never say that.
\n07:30 And they certainly never say that we bear the image or likeness of God.
\n07:33 We have the image of God, but not of his angels.
\n07:36 So if that's not the case, who is the us here?
\n07:40 Well, the us here is father, son and Holy Spirit.
\n07:43 This is as complex monotheism we've talked about before.
\n07:46 This is the Trinity.
\n07:47 This is father, son of Holy Spirit, speaking to one another,
\n07:49 let us make man in our image.
\n07:53 Now what I want you to consider as we orient ourselves and start working our
\n08:00 in the opening chapter of the Bible,
\n08:02 when God creates humanity in His image,
\n08:05 He's already winking at the fact that one day He will come
\n08:10 and He will take on that image Himself.
\n08:14 God, the Creator, will come and dwell among us,
\n08:17 and He who made humanity in His image
\n08:20 will take on this humanity Himself.
\n08:24 And there's plenty of indications in the New Testament
\n08:27 that that's exactly how we should read
\n08:30 Because, multiple times in the New Testament Christ is referred to as the image of God.
\n08:38 Let me give you some examples.
\n08:40 This is from 2 Corinthians chapter 4 verse 4.
\n08:45 Paul says that we see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of
\n08:52 God?
\n08:53 Colossians chapter 1, 15 and following.
\n09:00 the firstborn of all creation.
\n09:03 And those are just a couple examples.
\n09:05 We could look at some more.
\n09:06 But the point is, the New Testament confesses
\n09:08 that Christ, notice the language, is the image of God.
\n09:13 And so is the church fathers would often say it.
\n09:15 Christ is the image of God,
\n09:17 and we are created in the image of Christ.
\n09:21 Christ is the image of God,
\n09:23 and then in Christ we are created.
\n09:26 So that already from the beginning,
\n09:30 they are created in the image of the Son of God.
\n09:33 They already look like Him as it were.
\n09:35 They image Him.
\n09:37 And so it's no great leap when the Son of God,
\n09:41 in whose image we were created, actually takes on humanity.
\n09:45 So that you might say that already in Eden,
\n09:48 you hear the jingling of Christmas bells already happening there
\n09:53 in the creation of man and woman in the image of God,
\n09:55 we see a foreshadowing of God taking on that image.
\n10:00 So that's the first stop on our orientation of walking backwards to Bethlehem.
\n10:06 What I want to transition to now is something a little bit later in Genesis and then coming
\n10:10 up in Exodus and a lot of other places as well.
\n10:13 But before I do that, I want to explain something that has to do with English in Hebrew with
\n10:20 regard to the translation of a particular word.
\n10:23 So what we're going to be looking at are examples of what in your English Bibles is usually
\n10:30 of the Lord. In fact, that's almost universally the way it translated into English, the angel
\n10:36 of the Lord. Now here's my brief rant with regard to that translation. The Hebrew word
\n10:43 that translated there is angel is malloc. But here's the problem. Malloc does not mean
\n10:49 angel. A malloc can be an angel, but a malloc is a messenger. That's what the word simply
\n11:00 It can be an angelic malach, an angelic messenger.
\n11:04 It can also be a divine malach, a divine messenger.
\n11:09 We have examples in the Old Testament of human beings who are called a malach.
\n11:13 In other words, they're entrusted with a message to bring to somebody else.
\n11:18 In fact, if you're familiar with the prophet Malachi, his name in Hebrew simply means my messenger,
\n11:24 my malach, my key, my messenger, my malach.
\n11:30 You have angelic messengers. Certainly. There's no denial of that. However, we also have a very
\n11:36 special messenger, a very special malach. And the examples we're going to be looking at of him
\n11:42 reveal that this is not an angel. This is not a created being whatsoever. And it's certainly not
\n11:48 a human being in the Old Testament. This is a divine messenger, the one sent by the Lord to speak
\n12:00 This is the real phenomenon part, in effect, to be called God, to be called Yahweh, this
\n12:07 particular messenger.
\n12:10 So if you're reading along in your English Bibles and you come across a reference to
\n12:13 the angel of the Lord, and Lord will be in all caps, that's the translator's kind of
\n12:19 signal to you that the Hebrew behind that word is Yahweh.
\n12:23 So when you see angel of the Lord in the Old Testament, just kind of do an immediate translation
\n12:30 or messenger of the Lord,
\n12:32 because that's what we're talking about.
\n12:34 So don't think of this as a created angel.
\n12:36 That's my main point.
\n12:38 This is the uncreated son of the father.
\n12:43 Okay, rant over.
\n12:44 Let's look at some examples of this.
\n12:46 And the first one, you don't have to go very far.
\n12:48 This is the very first appearance of the messenger
\n12:51 of YAH where, the messenger of the Lord.
\n12:53 It occurs in Genesis chapter 16.
\n13:00 Sarah, they had a servant by the name of Hagar.
\n13:05 Now it was legal back in those days,
\n13:07 can legal custom, we might say, back in those days.
\n13:10 If a woman could not bear a child,
\n13:13 she could give her maidservant to her husband,
\n13:16 and then he could father a child through her,
\n13:19 so she was sort of a surrogate mother.
\n13:21 But legally, the child would belong to the wife.
\n13:25 So what happened with Abraham and Sarah
\n13:30 But like all of us human beings, they got tired of waiting on God and took matters into their own hands.
\n13:36 And so they decided we're just going to have a child through Hagar.
\n13:38 So Abraham had intercourse with Hagar. She conceived.
\n13:42 And that led to issues. Let's put it that way.
\n13:46 Between Hagar and Sarah, Hagar was feeling a little bit uppity.
\n13:50 Sarah started reacting to that. By mistreating her. What does Hagar do?
\n13:54 She runs away. She takes off into the desert. And that's where we find ourselves in Genesis chapter 16.
\n14:00 And then what happens when Hagar is out there in the middle of the wilderness?
\n14:04 We're told in Genesis 16 that the messenger of the Lord, the messenger of Yahweh, found
\n14:11 her.
\n14:12 And then he begins to speak to her.
\n14:13 He says, \"Hegar, where'd you come from?
\n14:16 Where'd you go in?\"
\n14:17 She says, \"Well, I'm running away.\"
\n14:20 And he tells her to go back.
\n14:21 Return to your mistress.
\n14:23 And then the messenger also said to her, \"Now notice this language.\"
\n14:26 He doesn't say, \"The Lord will surely multiply your offspring.\"
\n14:30 \"Well surely multiply your offspring.\"
\n14:33 Now this is crucial to catch.
\n14:36 This is the messenger of the Lord speaking in first person singular.
\n14:40 He doesn't say, \"The one who's sent me will do this.\"
\n14:43 He says, \"I will do this.
\n14:45 I will surely multiply your offspring.\"
\n14:47 Now the only one who can make a promise like that is God Himself.
\n14:50 So this is God's messenger speaking with full divine authority.
\n14:56 But notice this again is the complexity.
\n15:00 Because the child's name will be called Ishmael, this child's used to bear, because he says
\n15:06 the Lord has listened to your affliction.
\n15:10 So it's a little confusing because it's a messenger of the Lord who now says, \"I will
\n15:15 do this,\" but then he refers in third person to the Lord who's going to do this.
\n15:21 And then he says a few more things, but listen to the end of this.
\n15:30 you are a God of seeing, which in Hebrew is Elroy.
\n15:35 You are a God of seeing.
\n15:37 She called the name of the Lord, who spoke to her.
\n15:39 The name of Yabbi spoke to her, Elroy.
\n15:43 So what's happening here?
\n15:45 I mean, this is kind of a wild story.
\n15:47 You've got this refugee pregnant woman
\n15:50 who's in the middle of the wilderness.
\n15:51 All of a sudden this divine messenger shows up.
\n15:54 He speaks to her with full divine authority,
\n15:57 saying, \"This is what I'm going to do for you.\"
\n16:00 He refers to the Lord, and then at the end, Hagar says, \"You're God.\" She called the name of YHWH,
\n16:08 who spoke to her, El-Roy, the God who sees, the God who sees our affliction. So you're picking up
\n16:15 on what's happening here. You've got God with a messenger, but the messenger is called God and
\n16:30 And this is certainly the most well known example of this,
\n16:33 even though people don't always kind of read this particular story
\n16:38 with the messenger of Yahweh in his identity in mind.
\n16:42 I'm talking about the story of the burning bush and Moses in the wilderness.
\n16:47 This is in the third chapter of the book of Exodus.
\n16:51 Once again, we're told that, well, let me back up.
\n16:54 Let me get to the context.
\n16:55 So Moses, of course, grew up in Egypt in Pharaoh's house
\n17:00 He killed an Egyptian to defend one of his brother Israelites. He had to flee and for 40 years
\n17:05 He's been on the lamb. Basically. He married a meeting not woman. They had some kids
\n17:10 He's been living the life of a shepherd for the last four decades. He's 80 years old. I don't know about you when I'm 80 years old
\n17:16 I hope I'm fully retired. I hope I'm not working anymore
\n17:19 But Moses is about to begin the most important years of his life
\n17:23 The last third of his life from the age of 80 to the age of 120 are going to be these years that really
\n17:30 That really for us let us know all about who he is and all these great things he's going to accomplish
\n17:36 He doesn't know it at the time. All he sees all he knows is hey
\n17:40 There's a bush burning over there and it's not burning up. So I'm gonna go check it out
\n17:45 So he goes over there to this bush like all of us would and
\n17:49 What happens?
\n17:50 Picking up here with Exodus 3 it says the messenger of the Lord
\n17:54 This is the same the same divine messenger the messenger of Yahweh appeared to him
\n18:00 flame the fire out of the midst of a bush. So the messenger is in the bush. It's surrounded
\n18:04 by flames of fire. So Moses sees this. He's going to go check it out. Notice. You've got
\n18:12 to pay careful attention to the language used here. When the Lord, when Yahweh, saw that
\n18:18 Moses turned aside to see God called to him out of the bush. So now we have mention of
\n18:30 So who's in the bush?
\n18:32 Is it the messenger?
\n18:33 Is it God?
\n18:34 Well, of course, you know the answer.
\n18:36 Yes.
\n18:37 What does he say?
\n18:38 He says Moses, Moses.
\n18:39 Moses says, here I am.
\n18:41 He tells him to take off his sandals because he's standing on a holy ground.
\n18:45 And then the messenger continues to speak.
\n18:47 He says, \"I am the God of your Father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.\"
\n19:00 Talk about complexity. You got mention of messenger. You got mention of Yahweh. You got mention of God,
\n19:06 which in Hebrew would be Elohim. So obviously this messenger is sent. That's what happens with
\n19:13 messengers. They are sent with a message. But when this messenger gets into the burning bush,
\n19:18 he says, \"This is who I am. I'm the God of your fathers. The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac,
\n19:23 and the God of Jacob.\" So how could it be both? How could it be sent by God and also be God? How can
\n19:30 complexity. Well, for us who know the rest of the story, if you will, we put two and two
\n19:37 together. We realize, okay, what's happening here is that the one God sends this messenger,
\n19:43 this messenger who has this message to deliver to Moses. And it's going to be a long dialogue
\n19:49 between Moses and this messenger. They kind of go back and forth. Moses makes all kinds
\n19:55 of excuses like, I don't know what your name is. And people are going to believe me. And
\n20:00 and I can't really talk and you should send somebody else.
\n20:04 It's kind of actually a humorous back and forth
\n20:06 between Moses and this messenger that you can read about.
\n20:08 Until finally, the messenger kind of gets fed up with it all.
\n20:12 It says, \"Listen, I'll send your brother to,
\n20:14 the two of you can work together.\"
\n20:16 And it all works out.
\n20:17 But the main point is that who you have,
\n20:20 this messenger engaging in this back and forth with Moses,
\n20:24 and he's engaging in dialogue as one who is sent.
\n20:30 By which he speaks is fully divinely authoritative. So what he speaks is God speaking
\n20:37 What he does is God doing and of course Moses realizes this
\n20:43 This kind of fits into this whole pattern that you see throughout the Old Testament where
\n20:48 you'll sometimes read things like
\n20:50 no one can see God and live and
\n20:53 Then other times will read they saw God and they lived so what's going on here
\n21:00 So you can't see God and live and yet you have occasions where people see God and they live. So is it just kind of this?
\n21:07 This contradiction no, it's it's two ways of saying the same thing. So
\n21:12 Can we see God in all his full naked glory if you will well not unless we want to just be incinerated and die
\n21:21 We will be destroyed by that when no one can can see God that way and live that's that's what those pastors are talking about
\n21:30 such as with Hagar, who saw God and lived, or Moses who saw God and lived. Or later Isaiah
\n21:36 who saw God and lived. Or we have an example that Mount Sinai where Aaron and Moses and Aaron
\n21:43 and Nadab and Abihu and all these elders of Israel, they ate and drank with God, they held
\n21:47 the God of Israel. And guess what? They lived. How do you have those occasions? Well, we have
\n21:52 those occasions because what God is always doing is He is accommodating Himself to our human capacity
\n22:00 He's not appearing in all of his powerful naked glory because that would destroy us.
\n22:06 Instead, he accommodates himself to our capacity to see and to hear and to stand before him.
\n22:12 So we are, as it were, seeing the backside of God.
\n22:15 God is veiling himself in such a way that we can, the people like Moses or Hagar, others
\n22:20 can see him and live.
\n22:23 So this is the way that you have a resolution between this apparent contradiction of not
\n22:30 And the messenger is just one of these many ways in which this works in the Old Testament.
\n22:36 And this is also the way to kind of jump ahead.
\n22:39 This is also the way that we are prepared for what happens in the incarnation.
\n22:45 Talk about accommodating himself to our human capacity to behold God.
\n22:49 How about if he becomes one of us?
\n22:51 How about if he becomes a baby and then a young man and then a teacher from Nazareth.
\n23:00 to our ability to see Him, and as John says, to touch Him, even to kill Him as happens in His
\n23:07 crucifixion. So all of that are, all of these are previews of the incarnation.
\n23:14 Their foreshadowings of how God is finally and fully going to manifest Himself to us in the
\n23:20 flesh and blood of the Son of God. Now, to kind of go from that jumping forward to back to where we
\n23:30 in the burning bush. Now there is a crucial text for understanding exactly
\n23:36 who this messenger is also in the book of Exodus but you've got to jump
\n23:41 forward a little bit from Exodus 3 to Exodus 23. So between Exodus 3 the
\n23:47 burning bush and Exodus 23 a lot has happened. Moses went down into Egypt and
\n23:52 Pharaoh did not let the Israelites go and so God plagued him and
\n24:00 And a third and a fourth and a sixth and the sixth, all these plagues until you finally
\n24:04 get to that 10th plague, the death of the firstborn, Passover and finally favor relents.
\n24:11 The Israelites led by Moses, leave the land of Egypt and they begin traveling across
\n24:17 the wilderness.
\n24:18 You have in Exodus 14 and 15 the crossing of the Red Sea.
\n24:22 You have them getting to Mount Sinai.
\n24:25 In Exodus 20 you have the speaking of the of the 10 commandments, the 10 words.
\n24:30 Now, where do we find ourselves in Exodus 23?
\n24:34 We find ourselves where God is now going to say to Moses and to the people of Israel,
\n24:40 \"Here's what I'm going to do.
\n24:42 I'm going to send my messenger,\" you know the same one that appeared in the burning bush, Moses,
\n24:47 \"that messenger?
\n24:48 I'm going to send that messenger to be your guide across the wilderness.
\n24:54 He's going to travel with you.
\n24:55 He's going to journey with you.
\n25:00 into the promised land. Let me read you a couple of verses from Exodus chapter 23. God says,
\n25:08 \"Behold, I send a messenger before you,\" and again, just to to underline this again, your
\n25:14 English translations are going to say angel. Change it to messenger. That's the Hebrew. Behold,
\n25:19 I send a messenger before you to guard you on the way. Okay, he's going to be your guard. It's
\n25:25 pretty good. God sends you a divine guard to protect you on your journeys. What else is he's going to
\n25:30 He's going to bring you to the place that I have prepared.
\n25:34 So God's got this place ready for his people.
\n25:37 Take careful attention to him and obey his voice.
\n25:41 Now notice he's going to speak the smethinger that God's sin.
\n25:45 So listen to his voice because his voice is going to be the voice of God himself.
\n25:51 Do not rebel against him, for he will not pardon your transgression.
\n25:56 Meaning if you persist in rebelling against him,
\n26:00 holding the absolution.
\n26:01 He has the power of withholding forgiveness.
\n26:04 Here's a little secret.
\n26:05 Nobody has that power in the Old Testament, but God.
\n26:07 He's the only one who can do that.
\n26:08 So this messenger is going to speak with God's voice,
\n26:12 whether that's a voice of forgiveness
\n26:14 or a voice of judgment.
\n26:16 Now, here's the phrase we've all been waiting for.
\n26:21 For he will not pardon your transgression.
\n26:22 Why?
\n26:24 For my name is in him.
\n26:30 For God to say that he's put his name, his divine name into this messenger basically says it all.
\n26:39 Because God's name is the equivalent of God himself.
\n26:42 He's seen the Old Testament name isn't just kind of a label that you put on something.
\n26:46 A name bears the very substance and essence of that which is named.
\n26:50 So when God puts his name into the temple later, he's putting himself into the temple.
\n27:00 saying is listen, this messenger that I'm sending, he's divine. I'm sending him and he
\n27:07 bears the divine nature. He has the divine name, my name in him. And then just kind of
\n27:14 wrap this up. God goes on to say, if you carefully, I'll catch this. If you carefully
\n27:20 obey his voice and do all that I say, so let's just be read together. If you obey his
\n27:30 Say what I say because my voice and what I say in his voice are one of the same.
\n27:36 He is my mouthpiece.
\n27:37 If you obey his voice and do all I say, then I'll be an enemy to your enemies and an adversary
\n27:41 to your adversaries.
\n27:45 Exodus 23, get your highlighter out, highlight your Bible.
\n27:49 That particular passage is crucial.
\n27:52 God's name is in this messenger.
\n27:53 He's not an angel.
\n27:54 He's not a created being.
\n28:00 nature within him. But we're not done. So that we, that was Genesis, a couple of
\n28:06 passages in Exodus. This messenger of y'all always shows up again. And it's,
\n28:11 it's kind of a humorous episode. This is, this is the nativity announcement
\n28:17 given to the parents of Samson. You probably know about Samson. He, you know,
\n28:22 he was kind of, he was the strong guy with the long hair and the Old
\n28:30 and whatnot, quite an interesting and almost kind of comically tragic figure.
\n28:36 Well, this is, of course, very early in his life.
\n28:40 This is when his birth is going to be announced.
\n28:43 But here's what happens.
\n28:44 This is Judges 13, by the way.
\n28:46 So there's a woman, we don't know her name, but she's married to a guy named Manoa.
\n28:51 So we'll call her Mrs. Manoa.
\n28:53 So Manoa and Mrs. Manoa.
\n28:55 They're childless.
\n28:56 They have no kids.
\n29:00 Here's our messenger again.
\n29:02 The messenger of the Lord, the messenger of Yahweh,
\n29:04 appeared to her.
\n29:06 And he says, \"You're barren.
\n29:08 You haven't born any kids,
\n29:10 but you're going to conceive and bear a son.\"
\n29:13 So I'm summarizing some of this.
\n29:15 It's a long chapter.
\n29:17 You can look at it in detail on your own.
\n29:19 So what does a woman do?
\n29:20 Well, she goes and she tells her husband,
\n29:23 \"A man of God came to me.\"
\n29:26 His appearance was like the appearance
\n29:30 This I think is interesting.
\n29:33 She doesn't really know who he is.
\n29:36 She doesn't know this was a divine messenger.
\n29:38 She says, \"A man of God came to me.\"
\n29:41 So we know who he is, but she says,
\n29:44 \"Well, maybe he was a holy man, maybe he was a prophet.\"
\n29:47 I don't know, but his appearance was certainly very awesome.
\n29:49 I mean, he looked like a divine messenger, but he was a man of God.
\n29:53 So Manoa praise, basically he prays, \"Hey, God, would you let him come back to us?
\n30:00 So, God listens and he sends them once again.
\n30:04 Now I'm just going to kind of summarize the rest of this because I don't want to spend
\n30:08 the rest of the time just going through this story.
\n30:11 But what happens in the rest of this is you have an interplay of names and titles.
\n30:16 He's called the Messenger of Yahweh.
\n30:18 He's called the Man of God.
\n30:19 He's called the Man.
\n30:21 Again, he's called the Messenger of Yahweh.
\n30:25 We have this kind of back and forth.
\n30:30 And Manoa and his wife realized this actually was a divine messenger.
\n30:36 And what I think is extremely insightful about this is that here you have the messenger of
\n30:42 Yahweh, whom we know as the Son of God.
\n30:45 He's appearing, but he's appearing as just kind of a regular looking person.
\n30:50 I mean, yeah, he's very awesome, but also kind of a human appearance.
\n31:00 no idea that he's the divine messenger.
\n31:03 He is appearing as a man.
\n31:06 He doesn't have wings sprouting on his back.
\n31:09 He's not wrapped in the flames of a burning bush here.
\n31:12 He's got two arms and two legs, just like we do,
\n31:15 and he walks up and he's talking to Mrs. Vanoa.
\n31:18 He shows up and he talks to Gideon.
\n31:20 The Son of God is appearing already as a man.
\n31:23 Now, don't get confused.
\n31:26 I'm not saying that he's already assumed humanity.
\n31:30 when he's born of the Virgin Mary.
\n31:32 What is happening is he is temporarily appearing
\n31:35 with this kind of human disguise where he looks
\n31:39 like a man and he talks like a man and he walks
\n31:41 like a man so people think that he's a man.
\n31:43 And it's not until as he bends unfold,
\n31:46 such as when he disappears inside the flames
\n31:48 of a sacrifice, the people realize,
\n31:50 \"Oh, that was the messenger of Yahweh.
\n31:53 Now I get it.\"
\n31:54 That I think is extremely interesting
\n31:56 because it shows that already in the Old Testament,
\n32:00 that Christ was trying on the close of His incarnation.
\n32:03 I love that particular phrase.
\n32:05 He's getting us ready for what is to happen
\n32:09 when we get into the New Testament.
\n32:12 Now, one more thing about that,
\n32:14 one more section about the messenger.
\n32:16 And this one I think is often overlooked.
\n32:20 But for me anyway, it's kind of one of the clinching arguments
\n32:23 for who this messenger is.
\n32:25 So if you turn to Genesis 48, verses 15 and 16,
\n32:30 old, and he's about to bless two of his grandsons, Ephraim and Manasseh, the sons of Joseph. So these
\n32:37 are the grandsons of Jacob. And when he's blessing them, this is one of the things he says.
\n32:43 The god, the kind of three sentences or three phrases. \"The God before whom my fathers,
\n32:49 Abraham and Isaac walked. The God who has been my shepherd all my life long to this day.
\n33:00 bless the boys. So he mentions the God who did this, the God who did that, the messenger
\n33:07 who has redeemed me. And then he all, he wrapped so three different references there
\n33:11 and he wraps it all up by saying, \"May the God, the God, the angel bless the boys.\" Now,
\n33:19 here's a little point that you can't see in English. It's a small point of Hebrew grammar.
\n33:24 If you've got a plural subject, you need a plural verb. Just like I don't say they was
\n33:30 I have a plural subject, so I need a plural verb.
\n33:32 I say they were, right?
\n33:34 Works the same in English.
\n33:34 You have a plural subject, you need a plural verb.
\n33:37 But when you look at this in the Hebrew,
\n33:40 this seemingly plural subject,
\n33:41 the God, the God, the messenger,
\n33:44 when you get to bless, you're looking at a singular Hebrew verb.
\n33:48 The verb bless is in the singular there,
\n33:50 which indicates for us that the subject is also singular.
\n33:54 This is the God, the God, the messenger
\n33:55 is all talking about the same person.
\n34:00 messenger. Can't it be an angel? It has to be God himself. Now, that's a lot of time spent
\n34:08 upon this divine messenger. And there's a lot of other stories we can look at, but I don't want
\n34:13 to spend all our time there because there are some other examples that we have in the Old
\n34:20 Testament of how the Son of God was appearing. He didn't just appear as a messenger. We also
\n34:30 word for word is devar. But here's the thing about devar. Devar can mean a spoken word or
\n34:36 written word. Devar can also mean word or thing or matter. So it has this diversity
\n34:42 within it. It can refer to a spoken or written word or a thing or to matter. So the devar
\n34:48 of God, the word of God could be the thing or the matter of God as well. It kind of has
\n34:54 this complexity built within this word as well. Now usually, if we're reading the Old
\n35:00 a story where it says the Word of God appeared to someone. We think, at least, this is the way that
\n35:06 I used to think about it. Okay, the Word of God appeared to the prophet. That means the prophet
\n35:10 was sitting there and all of a sudden he heard this heavenly voice speaking to him. That was the way
\n35:14 the Word appeared to him. And perhaps sometimes that's the way it worked. But we do have some great
\n35:20 examples of when the Word of God, when it appeared to someone, this wasn't an audible word. This was
\n35:30 two people. Let me give you two or three examples of this. So if you turn to Genesis 15, this
\n35:36 is when the word of the Lord comes to Abraham. And this word doesn't just speak to Abraham,
\n35:42 it actually leads Abraham outside. The word of God leads Abraham outside and says,
\n35:47 \"Hey, count the stars, so will your descendants be.\" This isn't just a word that Abraham heard
\n35:53 calling him, but a word that as it were, grabbed him by the hand, led him outside. Another
\n36:00 in first Samuel, when Samuel was just a young man, he was sleeping there in the sacred area
\n36:07 around the tabernacle and he kept hearing somebody call this name and he'd get up and
\n36:11 he'd go to his master Eli and said, \"Yeah, what do you need?\" He'd get a cup of water,
\n36:14 I mean, what's going on? And Eli would say, \"I didn't call you, go back to bed.\" This happened
\n36:18 two or three times. And then Eli finally realized that, \"Hey, this is God calling to the boy.\"
\n36:25 So the next time, when Samuel hears his voice, he says, \"Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.\"
\n36:30 And we're told that the word of the Lord came and stood, stationed himself before Samuel.
\n36:36 The word appeared.
\n36:38 The word was manifest.
\n36:40 The word spoke, but this is a visible and audible word.
\n36:46 So you got to kind of get your mind wrapped around a new way of thinking about the word
\n36:50 of God in the Old Testament.
\n36:52 Another example, if you turn to the opening chapter of Jeremiah, when Jeremiah is called
\n37:00 And the word reached out his hand and touched the mouth of Jeremiah.
\n37:07 The word touched Jeremiah's mouth, meaning that there's no way that this can be just an audible word.
\n37:13 This is a visible word that is appearing to Jeremiah.
\n37:17 All of that to say
\n37:20 that when you go into, for instance, the first chapter of John's gospel and you read about the word
\n37:30 being God and the word becoming flesh and dwelling among us. What John is doing is he
\n37:36 saying to his readers, \"Hey, all those Old Testament stories about the word coming and
\n37:42 appearing to people, that word was the Son of God. That word was with God and that word
\n37:47 has now become flesh, Jesus of Nazareth, and has dwelt among us.\" And as I mentioned
\n37:52 in the last lecture, Philo, the Jewish philosopher in Alexandria, Egypt, he had been talking
\n38:00 Well, this wasn't new material for the Jewish mind.
\n38:05 John is saying, hey, if you wanna understand,
\n38:08 if you understand who the Son of God is,
\n38:10 go back and read these Old Testament stories,
\n38:12 and you realize that he was already appearing
\n38:14 in the Old Testament, getting us ready
\n38:16 for his forthcoming incarnation.
\n38:20 Now, one more example of these multiple ways
\n38:24 in which the Son of God was appearing in the Old Testament
\n38:26 and these Christophanes.
\n38:30 word, but you also have one that's overlooked very often, and that is him appearing as wisdom.
\n38:38 So if you've read through, for instance, the book of Proverbs, you know that wisdom
\n38:42 is talked about a lot.
\n38:43 A wise person does this, a wise woman does this, a foolish man does that, a foolish
\n38:48 woman does this.
\n38:49 So you have wisdom, you have foolishness, you have kind of these two categories, but
\n38:53 in Proverbs, wisdom often is personified.
\n39:00 it's personified and in the Old Testament because the Hebrew word for wisdom, the Hebrew
\n39:06 noun for wisdom, \"kokma\" is feminine in gender, grammatical gender, it's often referred
\n39:13 to as \"lady wisdom.\" It has nothing to do with being male and female. It's a grammatical
\n39:18 thing. Because kokma is feminine in gender, then wisdom is spoken of it as a woman. So
\n39:30 learn, learn from me. But more than that, if you go to chapter 8 of Proverbs, you've got this long
\n39:38 soliloquy, this speech by Lady Wisdom in which she is describing how she was present there at creation,
\n39:47 before the worlds were made. She was there as the kind of the architect or the master workman at
\n40:00 So wisdom is there alongside God, part of the creative process.
\n40:07 And this is one of the things that wisdom says.
\n40:10 \"The Lord possessed me,\" again, this is wisdom talking, \"the Lord possessed me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of old.\"
\n40:30 ways. So Yahweh begot or possessed me the beginning of his way. This is wisdom saying,
\n40:38 I'm the one who was possessed or begotten by God. This is the language that we have
\n40:45 throughout the New Testament of how the Son of God is alongside the Father. The Son of God is
\n40:50 begotten by the Father. This wisdom that is speaking here is none other than the Son of God
\n41:00 Now, we also have a pretty fascinating parallel here with what's, how, how wisdom is described
\n41:07 in some other Jewish literature and how this worked its way into John's description
\n41:12 to the Son of God as well.
\n41:14 So if you, if you, if you're familiar with the Apocrypha, the Apocrypha is this collection
\n41:19 of Jewish writings that, that were written between the last book of the Old Testament
\n41:24 and the first book of the New Testament, then you can find these often in Catholic,
\n41:30 the Apocrypha has a number of different books
\n41:32 in this particular collection.
\n41:34 One of these is called Ecclesiasticus
\n41:37 or the wisdom of Jesus been Cyrak
\n41:40 or is often just kind of shortened to Cyrak.
\n41:43 So in Cyrak chapter 24,
\n41:46 you have what's more this description of wisdom
\n41:49 and what's more wisdom is engaging in this soliloquy
\n41:53 in which she's talking about who she is
\n41:56 and what she's done.
\n41:58 Now get this.
\n42:00 24 verses 7 and 8.
\n42:02 So this is written a couple of centuries before John writes his gospel, actually,
\n42:07 longer than a couple centuries before Christ was born.
\n42:10 So this is predates in the New Testament.
\n42:13 Well, very well known to the Jews in the first century.
\n42:17 So in Suhark 24, wisdom speaking says this,
\n42:21 \"The creator of all things commanded me,
\n42:30 and said, \"Tint or in camp, in Jacob,
\n42:34 and take possession in Israel.\"
\n42:37 So what's going on here is you have this long speech
\n42:38 in which wisdom is talking about,
\n42:41 okay, I was looking for a place to basically pitch my tent
\n42:45 to remain, to stay, to tabernacle, we might say.
\n42:49 And that fact, the Greek that is used there in Cyrak
\n42:52 means to pitch a tent or to tabernacle.
\n42:55 And where did wisdom tabernacle?
\n42:57 Where did wisdom pitch her tent?
\n43:00 In Jacob, in Israel, that's exactly where this took place.
\n43:05 Now, you might be saying, okay, I don't get it.
\n43:08 How does this connect to Christ in the New Testament?
\n43:12 Well, it connects beautifully because here's the thing.
\n43:15 You have wisdom spoken of in Sir Mark 24,
\n43:18 looking for a place to pitch her tent and she pitches it in Israel.
\n43:22 That's where she tabernacles.
\n43:23 If you turn to John chapter 1,
\n43:30 and tabernacled among us, pitched his tent among us.
\n43:37 And we have beheld his glory, the glory of the only begotten of the Father.
\n43:43 What John has done is John has kind of borrowed this imagery from Sirak chapter 24
\n43:50 that's in relation to wisdom pitching her tent or tabernacling in Israel.
\n43:55 And he said, \"Yeah, you know what?
\n43:58 That's what the Word did.
\n44:00 flesh and pitched his tent or tabernacle among us.
\n44:04 And the Greek that John uses is virtually identical to the Greek that is in Syriac 24.
\n44:13 It's a wonderful example of how writers like John who are trying to communicate to their
\n44:19 first century readers are like, you know, what language or what imagery can I use that's
\n44:25 really going to resonate with people so that I can clearly and faithfully communicate
\n44:30 And John's like, you know what, I need to talk about Genesis.
\n44:34 So in the beginning was the word.
\n44:36 Of course, people are going to think of Genesis 1-1 when I do that.
\n44:39 But I also want to talk about, he is the word because then they're going to think of all these
\n44:42 old-testing examples of how the word was appearing to people.
\n44:45 But people also really love the wisdom of Jesus' been Sirak.
\n44:49 People know that. So, and they're familiar with how he describes
\n44:52 wisdom as tabernacle in Israel.
\n44:55 So I'm going to use that imagery to describe how the word,
\n45:00 in tabernacle among us. Not just among us in Israel, but actually among humanity.
\n45:08 That's a quick run-through of what we could spend a whole lot more time on,
\n45:14 examples in the Old Testament where Christ, to quote it again, was trying on the clothes
\n45:19 of His incarnation. He was preparing us for what was to come when He became flesh as one of us.
\n45:30 past, and we've walked backwards. We've walked from the image of God in the Garden of Eden
\n45:35 to all these stories about the messenger, to these appearances of the word, to these appearances
\n45:40 of wisdom, and we could expand that to talk about the appearances of the name of God,
\n45:45 or the glory of God, or the power of God. All of these are various ways that are descriptions of
\n45:50 the second person of the Trinity, the Son of God. So by the time we see this panoply unfold
\n46:00 walking into the future, when we bump into that manger in Bethlehem and look down and see
\n46:06 the Son of God clothed in our humanity permanently, everlastingly, we're like, \"Ah, I saw that
\n46:15 coming because God has prepared me for Christmas from Genesis 1 all the way to the end of the
\n46:22 Old Testament.\"
\n46:30 own us who he is to become, how he's given us these winks and these hints of Christmas
\n46:36 all through these pages of the Old Testament.
\n46:39 Now in the next lecture we're going to look at a lot of the lives of Old Testament characters
\n46:44 and how they are what I call pencil sketches of the cuddleful life of the Messiah.
\n46:48 We'll be looking at David some more along with Gideon and Melchizedek and a few others.
\n46:53 So we'll see you in the next lecture.
\n47:00 (upbeat music)
"}Understand the Old Testament Like Never Before
This course is intended to survey the literature of the Old Testament to discern prophecies, patterns, and foreshadowings of the Messiah. Students are introduced to interpretive methods of biblical study, the ritual system and sanctuary symbolism of Israel, and historical understandings of the Messiah in the Old Testament, while exploring the ramifications this entails for teaching and preaching on the Old Testament in the church today.
Topics Covered in the Course
- Big Picture and Fine Details
- The Layered Bible: Metalepsis and Intertextuality
- Prophecies and Jewish Expectations of the Messiah
- Christophanies: Walking Backward to Bethlehem
- Pencil Sketches: How Old Testament Individuals Outlined the Messiah’s Colorful Life
- The Genesis of Revelation: Old Creation, New Creation, and the Messiah
- Exodus Events: Passover, Red Sea, Manna, Water Rock, Bronze Serpent
- Exoduses: Exile and Return as the Messianic Mission
- The Sanctuary Garden of God: Eden as Temple and Temple as Neo-Eden
- Furnished for Atonement: Sacrifices and Sanctuary Furnishings
- Sacred Time and the Messiah
- The Psalms as the Prayerbook of Jesus and the Church
Let's Get Started
This course contains twelve sessions, each containing a video lesson. You can complete this course at your own pace. So we encourage you to work through it at whatever pace is most comfortable for you. At the end, you will receive a 'Course Completion Certificate' via email.
