Robert J. P. Lyon, CD MA MDiv
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READING THE BIBLE AS JESUS READ IT
or: Why is the Old Testament Important to Christians?
PART ONE: JESUS' GROWTH IN SELF-KNOWLEDGE
Luke 2:41-52; Matthew 3:13-17; Matthew 4:1-11; Luke 4:1-30; Luke 24:13-32 and 44-47; Isaiah 61:1-4.
This is the first of a four-part study on the topic: "Reading the Bible the way Jesus read it." In this study we consider how Jesus' reading of the Jewish Bible, the Old Testament, shaped his understanding of who he was and what he must do.
It is evident as you read the New Testament that the New Testament writers all saw Jesus as the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies. They considered him to be a second Moses. They found his virgin birth predicted at Isaiah 7:14, his atoning death at Isaiah 53, his Davidic kingship in Psalm 110, and his Second Coming in Daniel 7. Because of this interplay between the Old and New Testaments, St Augustine taught that "The New Testament is in the Old concealed; the Old is in the New revealed." The Anglican way of saying this is found in Article 20: "...it is not lawful for the Church to...so expound one place of Scripture, that it be repugnant to another." These two statements affirm that God's revelation in Scripture is both progressive and self-consistent.
Over the past century it has been popular – even in some Anglican seminaries – to argue that the early church "ransacked" the Old Testament after the fact, looking for proof texts to support ideas about Jesus that they had actually got from non-Jewish sources, such as the mystery religions and Egyptian mythology. This view denies that New Testament views of who Jesus was - and is - have their roots in Judaism and the Old Testament. A personal example will illustrate this attitude: When I was studying at the Anglican Theological College of British Columbia – now the Vancouver School of Theology – I asked my New Testament professor something about messianic prophecies in the Psalms. To my dismay he replied, "I don't think there are any messianic prophecies in the Psalms." Some years later that professor became Bishop of Huron.
Now, we do have to recognize that it is possible – not correct, as I think, but certainly possible – to read the Old Testament as a self-contained book without any reference to Jesus. For example, the young woman referred to in Isaiah 7:14 was present as Isaiah was speaking about her, 700 years before Jesus, and she was already pregnant. The suffering servant in Isaiah 53 is, at a couple of levels of interpretation, not an individual but the nation Israel. That's the way millions of Jews have read these passages for centuries. And it was, after all, their book long before it became also ours.
So it behoves us to consider, How shall we Christians answer someone who contends that the New Covenant founds itself on a misreading of the Jewish Bible? I want to offer a three-part answer to that question. First, the idea that the Old Testament contains Jesus-prophecies is a view that grew in the mind of Jesus himself during his formative years. Second, the early church held that view because that was how Jesus himself taught them to read the Jewish Bible that we call the Old Testament. The third part of the answer is that instances of this view occur in the New Testament in ways that seem to me too innocent to be the result of deliberate invention.
The first hint we get of Jesus' interest in how to read the Bible occurs when we see Jesus at age 12 in the Temple, discussing the Torah with the scholars. We have so identified with their' astonishment at the young Jesus' understanding of Scripture, that we may neglect to notice that he is also asking them questions about things he does not fully understand. That's consistent with what Luke tells us at the end of the passage, that Jesus "grew in wisdom" – as well as in stature and in favor with man and God. We tend to overlook the fact that God's incarnate Self was actually experiencing growth – intellectually, as well as physically, socially, and spiritually.
This young Jesus is quite unlike the Greek myth about the goddess Athena, who was said to have been born fully grown out of Zeus' forehead. That myth is supposed to mean that she was born fully equipped with Zeus' wisdom, and didn't need to learn anything. (I'm tempted to think that some Greek fathers, being pragmatic chaps, may have preferred to understand the Athena myth as a cautionary tale about daughters who view themselves as goddesses with nothing left to learn – which would certainly give their dads a Zeus-size headache.)
When Jesus' parents come looking for him in the Temple, he tells them that they ought to have known they would find him there – "in my Father's house" or "about my Father's business". (The Greek idiom does not actually say "house" or "business", but may imply either.) Why does Jesus think they should have known this? The answer must be, because in the preceding twelve years Mary did what any mother would do: she told her son the stories about his birth, and about the birth to an aged priest and his barren wife of his cousin John. Then when the boy Jesus went to synagogue and learned Bible stories about other remarkable births like Isaac and Samuel and Samson, he started to see a pattern. From his youth, therefore, Jesus must have pondered the question, What does all this have to do with me? Where do I fit into this pattern of unusual births? Jesus' reply to his parents is one of those innocent remarks that, if Luke were a clever fiction writer, he could have used effectively to foreshadow plot and develop character. That he did not do so, either here or in similar instances, strongly suggests that both Luke and his sources understood themselves to be delivering factual accounts, not "cleverly devised myths".
Between the incident in the Temple at age 12, and his baptism at age 30, we have no stories about Jesus' life. (We do have some apocryphal stories, but none that anyone takes seriously – like the boy Jesus making clay pigeons by the seaside, then he claps his hands and they fly away. But such stories come from the second century or later, not from reliable eye-witnesses.) But we do know some things that likely happened during those 18 years.
The first thing that likely happened was the Bible learning that a Jewish boy would get at home and at the local synagogue. Luke has already shown us in the Temple incident how well Jesus took to that. The second thing was learning the carpentry trade from Joseph. For a man so inclined, carpentry can be a reflective activity. When he's not doing something that's highly focused, like measuring twice so he won't have to cut more than once, a solitary carpenter has lots of time to ruminate – especially given the tedium of shaping wood with hand tools. And undoubtedly, Jesus must have spent many hours ruminating on the Scriptures. We should not, of course, think that he had his own scroll of the Bible to consult, but Bible stories were common knowledge, and people in those days retained such things verbatim in memory to an extent that we, dependent as we are on paper and electronic storage, cannot imagine. The third thing is communication between Jesus and his cousin John. Luke tells us (1:36,39) that Mary trekked the hundred kilometers from Nazareth down to the hill country South of Jerusalem to help her cousin Elizabeth through her third trimester when she was pregnant with John. So it's not unreasonable to think that the two families remained in contact, and that over the years the two young men might actually have discussed their growing sense of being called to something important.
Eighteen years later, when Jesus presents himself for baptism, John, who knows his cousin, and who knows the same family stories that Jesus knows, objects that it is Jesus who ought to be baptizing him. But Jesus replies, "Let is be so now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness." This is another of those innocent occurrences that an astute fiction writer could have made more of, and it would be easy for us Gentiles to miss the significance of it. But to John and Jesus, as Jews, "fulfilling all righteousness" had to mean fulfilling the requirements of the covenant. That task had been given uniquely to the Jewish nation, but all the prophets from Moses to Malachi complain that they had failed to fulfill it. So when Jesus' remark about "fulfill(ing) all righteousness" means that John's baptizing him is the way to make God's will as revealed in their Jewish Scriptures finally become a reality. In Jesus' mind, his ministry is to fulfill that reality, defined in the Scriptures that we know as the Old Testament.
After his baptism, Jesus spent 40 days in prayer and fasting out in the wilderness – perhaps the same hill-country desert South of Jerusalem where John had also spent a lot of time. Those 40 days recall Moses' 40 days on Mount Sinai and Israel's 40 years of wandering in the wilderness. And no doubt Jesus chose a 40-day fast precisely to signify that he saw himself as both the new Moses and representative Israel. The purpose of that fast was to test his thinking against Scripture, to define his calling and how he was supposed to fulfill it. We should not understand the temptations as an intrusion on his reflection, but as a necessary part of it. The three temptations as he described them to his disciples are but a snippet of those 40 days, but they tell us enough to grasp what was going on.
'If you really are the Son of God,' comes the temptation, 'repeat that manna-in-the-wilderness trick and satisfy your hunger by making these stones edible.' "Man shall not live by bread alone," replies Jesus, quoting Deuteronomy 8:3; 'that would be an abuse of my calling.' 'OK,' says the temptation, 'if you really want to show that you're the Son of God, it would be a great PR event to jump off the Temple and land unhurt – for Psalm 91 says that angels will bear you up.' 'Yes,' says Jesus, but Deuteronomy 6:16 also says, "You shall not set tests for the LORD your God." 'Well,' says the temptation, if you could get the right kind of political clout, you could create the just society.' 'Yes,' says Jesus, 'but the just society is not the Kingdom of God. And trying to achieve the just society apart from the Kingdom of God would be idolatry, and Deuteronomy 6:13 forbids that.'
Having resolved what Scripture requires him to do and how Scripture requires him to do it, Jesus makes his way back home, knowing very well that "a prophet is not without honor, except in his home town." Then on the Sabbath after his return Jesus attends the synagogue where he grew up. He is invited the read the Scripture portion assigned for the day – synagogues used lectionaries long before we did – and also has to give a homily on the passage. So he reads the assigned portion of Isaiah 61, and then explains: 'Today this Scripture is being fulfilled in your very presence.' Which means, in effect,'This Bible reading is about me."
At first the congregation is impressed, until Jesus reminds them of another pattern: Scripture portrays isolated Gentiles as more grateful for God's covenant than the Jews to whom he gave it. At this point they run him out of town and try to throw him over the cliff.
All the stories in the gospels consistently reflect this theme: that Jesus believed the Bible, that he saw himself portrayed in it, and that he saw as his mission to fulfill what it foretold.
Of course, the disciples really didn't get it. "Who do men say that I am?" Peter says, "You are the Christ – the Messiah." So Jesus tells them how the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected and killed. Then Peter takes Jesus aside and rebukes him – because Peter didn't get it.
They don't really get it until after the resurrection. When Jesus appears to the disciples on the road to Emmaus, he says to them, "'O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and enter into his glory?' Then [Luke tells us] beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself."
Later that day the risen Jesus appears to another group of disciples, and delivers his important I-told-you-so: "'These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.' Then [Luke says] he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures..." and emphasized as key points of interpretation the atonement, the resurrection, and the proclamation in his name of repentance and forgiveness.
My New Testament professor who became Bishop of Huron may not think there are any Messianic prophecies in the Psalms, but Jesus thought there were. Christians read the Old Testament as a book about Jesus – because Jesus taught his disciples to read it that way.
Over the next three studies we'll be considering, How did Jesus see himself portrayed in the Law of Moses? How did he see himself portrayed in the Prophets? How did he see himself portrayed in the Psalms?
But what if Jesus was wrong? What if Christianity really is a misreading of the Old Testament? Just as Jesus' disciples didn't "get it" until after the Resurrection, neither do we. The truth of the Gospel depends utterly and entirely on the evidence for the Resurrection. If Jesus really did rise from the dead, it would be difficult not to trust his views on a whole range of things, including how to interpret the Jewish Scriptures. To anyone with an open mind - by which I mean a mind that has not a priori ruled out the possibility of a God who might do such a thing - the evidence for the Resurrection is sufficiently compelling to elicit faith in Jesus. For an overview of the evidence, I would refer you to Page 3 of this website – An Introduction to Christian Theology – and to Unit 8 within that study. But before you examine the evidence, let me offer a word of caution: it is not for lack of adequate evidence that we are reluctant to believe in Jesus, but because we resist the demands he makes on our conscience.
PART TWO: JESUS' SELF-KNOWLEDGE FROM THE PENTATEUCH
Genesis 17:1-8 and 15-21; Genesis 22:1-19; Deuteronomy 18:15-22; Deuteronomy 34:1-11; John 1:19-29 and 43-46.
In the previous session I made the point that both Jesus and his cousin John the Baptist grew up knowing the stories of their birth, that they compared these stories with Old Testament stories of other remarkable births, and that these comparisons helped to shape their sense of who they were, what their respective missions were, and how those missions were to be carried out. We saw that Jesus understood that his mission was to "fulfill all righteousness" -- which to a Jew could mean nothing less than to fulfill the covenant given to Moses. I suggested that his 40 days of temptation in the wilderness were taken up with defining that mission. We also saw that when he arrived back at Nazareth he told the congregation at a Sabbath service that he himself was the fulfillment of the Scripture passage appointed for that day.
We noted that after the resurrection Jesus gave his disciples that important I-told-you-so: "This is what I told you when I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms had to be fulfilled" (Luke 24:44). In John's gospel you find a variant of that idea, where Jesus says to some of his countrymen, "You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life" (John 5:39f).
These are not the words of what the world patronizingly calls a "good man". They are either the words of one who knows how to walk on water – because he invented it – or they are the words of one who was actually delusional and therefore dangerous. Jesus' family seem to have recognized this latter possibility, for early in his ministry Mark tells us: "[People] had said, 'He has an unclean spirit.' And his mother and his brothers came, and standing outside they sent to him and summoned him. And a crowd was sitting around him, and they said to him, 'Your mother and your brothers are outside, asking for you.' And he said, 'Who are my mother and my brothers?' And looking around on those who sat about him, he said, 'Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother, and sister, and mother'" (Mark 3:30ff). .
So as we look at some of the passages in the Pentateuch – the Books of Moses – that might have attracted Jesus' attention, it seems to me that only two options are open to us: either Jesus was reading Scripture correctly, or he did indeed have "an unclean spirit", in which case it's unfortunate that his mother and brothers were not able to get a grip on him that day -- to protect him from the world's cruelty, and to protect the world from a beautiful but dangerous delusion.
As Jesus compared the story of his birth to some of the remarkable births in the Bible, his attention would first be drawn to Isaac – born, like his cousin John, of a barren mother and an aged father. This only son was the offspring through whom God would fulfill his promise to make Abraham a nation as numerous as the sands on the seashore, a nation through whom all the nations of the world would be blessed. So what must Abraham have thought when God commanded him to sacrifice his only link to the future? One thing I'm sure he thought was that he didn't dare tell Sarah!
Abraham's obedience may have been made a little easier – but not much – by the fact that human sacrifice was an accepted practice in Mesopotamia where he came from, and also in Canaan where he then lived. But more importantly, Abraham must have thought, first, that the God who gave him a son for a hundredth birthday present had a right to demand that son from him, and second, with respect to the apparent conflict between this demand and the promise to make him a great nation, that the God who could give him a son at age 100 must surely know what he's doing. So we're told that "Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him for righteousness" (Genesis 15:6; Romans 4:3).
It is sometimes said that the story of the sacrifice of Isaac was originally told to support a prohibition against human sacrifice. That may be so, but it is only one aspect of its meaning. For Moses (or whoever you think recorded the story) was relating it against an understanding of the Levitical sacrifices. To that author, the ram caught in the thicket – "the LORD will provide" – signifies that the only sacrifice that counts is one that God has prescribed.
But how did Jesus make the transition from the sacrifice of Isaac – or of the ram – to the sacrifice of himself? Steeped in the Scriptures, Jesus knew that "no man can ransom another, or give to God the price of his life, for the ransom of their life is costly and can never suffice, that he should live on forever and never see the pit" (Psalm 49:7ff). He understood that no sacrifice that man can offer – whether human, animal, monetary, or whatever – can atone for an offence against the holiness of God. For the magnitude of an offence against God is the measured by majesty of the Offended Party, not by the insignificance of the offender. Therefore, "the soul that sinneth, it shall die" (Ezekiel 18:20). What Jesus saw in the sacrifice of Isaac, and indeed in all the Old Testament sacrifices, was a pattern of type and antitype, of shadow and form; if neither the sacrifice of the ram in lieu of Isaac nor the Levitical sacrifices were ultimately efficacious in themselves, they must be pointers to something greater that must follow.
Jesus also understood that whatever God does is a reflection of God's character, for God never acts out of character. So what God does with Abraham our Father and his unique son must also inform Jesus' understanding of what his Heavenly Father will do with his unique Son. Jesus must have considered that Abraham was speaking prophetically, and reflecting the character, the method, and the purpose of God, when he said that God would provide for himself a lamb for the offering. Jesus understood what the army calls leadership by example – that God would not ask Abraham to do something – nor even to be willing to do something – that God was not willing to do himself. It is not a great leap from there to Jesus seeing himself as the ram caught in the thicket. .
Jesus' understanding of the Isaac story would therefore necessarily expand to include all the other sacrifices that Moses prescribes. So we find him at dinner on that first Maundy Thursday saying, "This is my body This is my blood of the covenant." He had by then come to understand that not only his destiny, but also ours, is bound up in the meaning of the Passover sacrifice.
But there is more about Jesus in the Pentateuch than just the fulfillment of sacrificial offerings. John's gospel tells us that when John the Baptist began preaching, "the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, 'Who are you?' He confessed, and did not deny, but confessed, 'I am not the Messiah.' And they asked him, 'What then? Are you Elijah?' He said, 'I am not.' 'Are you The Prophet?' (John 1:19ff).
What kind of question is that: "Are you The Prophet?" What prophet? They're talking about the prophet whom Moses refers to in Deuteronomy 18, the prophet "like unto Moses", whom God will raise up from among their brethren and in whose mouth God will put his words. "And whosoever will not listen to my words that he shall speak in my name, I myself will require it of him" (Deuteronomy 18:19).
'No,' says John, 'I'm not The Prophet. I'm just a voice in the wilderness crying, "Prepare the way of the LORD."' But when Jesus appears, John declares, "Behold the Lamb of God." Being the "Lamb of God", the ram caught in the thicket, was Jesus' most important role, but John might also have added, 'Behold The Prophet promised in Deuteronomy 18. Behold the second Moses.'
Now, in Moses' day, 1400 years before Jesus, the immediate fulfillment of the "prophet like unto Moses" was Moses' successor, Joshua, who led the initial foray across the Jordan into the promised land. But at the end of Deuteronomy, Moses' editor says, "There has not arisen a prophet since in Israel like Moses, whom the LORD knew face to face" (Deuteronomy 34:10). This editorial comment leads to the inference that God has some other fulfillment in store, some other successor to Moses, compared to whom Joshua, like so much else in the Old Testament, is merely an anticipation.
Now, Jesus would have known that his name in Aramaic, Yeshua, is a variant of the Hebrew name Yehoshua, which we have anglicized to Joshua. But it is likely that Jesus and his disciples also spoke Greek. For the Middle East had been undergoing intensive Hellenization for the past 300 years since its conquest by Alexander. Before Jesus was born, there already existed several Greek translations of the Old Testament. And if Jesus had occasion to see one of those, he would have noted that Joshua's name in the Greek translations is Iesous, exactly the same as his. Just one more coincidental – or might it be providential – detail to feed his growing sense that the Old Testament was about him.
Now if, without being too presumptuous, we can project ourselves back into the mind of Jesus, thinking about himself as the new Moses, let's look again at the last day of Moses' life, in the first verses of Deuteronomy 34: "Then Moses went up from the plains of Moab to Mount Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, which is opposite Jericho. And the LORD showed him all the land...." Can you hear that as the background to the third temptation in Matthew 4? Out there in the desert Jesus was not being tempted to achieve a wrong objective; he was being tempted to misconstrue a right objective and to pursue it in the wrong way. Maybe he was also being tempted to doubt whether he really was the new Moses. If the suggestion that Jesus was seeing himself in Deuteronomy seems less than convincing, consider also that Jesus answered all three temptations by citing quotations from that same book, Deuteronomy.
So there you have two major themes that Jesus found in the Pentateuch, that were formative in his understanding of his office and mission: the first, the remarkable birth of a first-born son whom God may require as a sacrifice the second, the successor to Moses, who will lead God's covenant people to a place where Moses, despite all his virtues, does not have the moral authority to take them. Jesus undoubtedly found more than these two, but they're sufficient to demonstrate what I think was at work in his mind. (You may wonder why I haven't mentioned Melchizedek, the priest-king of Jerusalem. That's because we'll be looking at him when we consider Psalm 110.)
But before we conclude, I want to turn your attention to one more passage that's germane to this topic: the Sermon on the Mount. Why does Matthew begin his gospel with Jesus delivering a major policy statement on the top of a mountain? Because, of course, Matthew has come to understand what Jesus understood, that he is The Prophet, the new Moses.
In the Sermon of the Mount, Jesus assures his hearers that he has not come to abolish the Law and the Prophets, but to fulfill them. Indeed, he says, until the end of time not a jot nor a squiggle can vanish from the Bible until the whole book is fulfilled (Matthew 5:17f). But the continuity between Moses and Jesus must not obscure the categorical differences between them. For whereas Moses went up the mountain to receive the Word, Jesus goes up to deliver the Word.
And look at the way he delivers it: "You have heard that it was said to the men of old.... But I say to you..." (Matthew 5:21f). Jesus has the audacity to update, to amend, the commandments that God gave to Moses on the mountain. 'You have heard that it was said: don't kill, don't commit adultery, and if you divorce your wife you have to give her a certificate of divorce. But I say to you, hating your brother is already murder, drooling over the woman next door is already adultery, and divorce was never a part of God's original plan for creation. You have heard that it was said: don't swear falsely, don't exact more punishment than an offence deserves ("an eye for an eye"), and love your neighbor. But I say to you, don't take any oaths, give generously to the offender, and love your enemy.' Jesus has redefined righteousness in such a way that it is impossible for anyone but him to perfectly achieve it (except as we may achieve it in him, but that is another topic).
I think those of us who believe have come to develop a comfort level with our faith, so that we don't always recognize how outrageous Jesus really is. Those who heard him certainly knew he was outrageous, and must often have asked, 'Just who does he think he is?' And that, of course, is the bottom-line question.
Well, we know who he thinks he is. And we affirm who he is every time we recite the Creed. But how do we know that what we affirm is true? How do we know that the Word that Jesus speaks, whether in the Sermon on the Mount or anywhere else, is indeed the Word of God? In Deuteronomy 18, in the same passage where Moses foretells the coming of his successor, we get a perfectly pragmatic answer to that question: "...the prophet who presumes to speak a word in my name that I have not commanded him to speak, or who speaks in the name of other gods, that same prophet shall die. And if you say in your heart, 'How may we know the word that the LORD has not spoken?'— when a prophet speaks in the name of the LORD, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word that the LORD has not spoken the prophet has spoken it presumptuously. You need not be afraid of him. (Deut 18:20ff)
This passage is important in connection with Easter. If Jesus had remained dead after that first Good Friday, we should know that his word was a word that the LORD had not spoken. But the Resurrection is God's pragmatic answer to all skepticism. The compelling evidence for the Resurrection is the epistemological basis on which we confidently assert that Jesus' preaching and our believing him are not presumptuous. For an overview of the evidence for the Resurrection, I would again refer you to Page 3 of this website – An Introduction to Christian Theology – and to Unit 8 within that study.
PART THREE: JESUS' SELF-KNOWLEDGE FROM THE PROPHETS
Isaiah 7:1-16; Isaiah 8:3,4,16-18; Isaiah 9:1-7; Jonah 1:11 - 2:10; Daniel 7:1, 9-14; Matthew 12:38-41; Matthew 26:57-68.
This is the third part of a four-part study entitled "Reading the Bible as Jesus Read It". We have been considering how Jesus, from his early years, drew from the Jewish Scriptures his understanding of who he was and what he had been sent to do. After the Resurrection, Jesus reminded his disciples, "These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled" (Luke 24:44). We have already seen how, in the Law of Moses, he understood himself both as the fulfillment of the Old Testament sacrifices and as the new Moses. In this study we shall consider how Jesus saw himself in the writings of the Prophets.
The Prophets, as Jesus would have used that term, included not only the four major and twelve minor prophets, but also the historical books from Joshua through Kings. Fortunately, Jesus seems to have had his favorite texts, so the field has been narrowed for us to a manageable scope that focuses on Isaiah, Jonah, and Daniel.
Perhaps the best known prophetic passage is Isaiah 7:14, which tells us that "a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel," which means "God is with us". But as every skeptic reminds us, the Hebrew word almah does not necessarily mean a virgin; it may, but it may also mean just a young woman. In fact, the almah in this text is standing in Isaiah's presence as he speaks - the Hebrew says "the", not "a". She is already pregnant, and therefore not a virgin. The sign that Isaiah gives to Ahaz is the promise that before her child reaches the age of discretion, the two hostile kings Pekah and Rezin will be gone and Judah will again be prosperous. The fulfillment of this promise will be the sign that "God is with us". In its historical context, that was the extent of Isaiah's meaning.
There is no record that Jesus himself ever spoke about Isaiah 7:14, but because Matthew's use of that verse in the Christmas story has been a source of controversy, we should examine it. Matthew's quotation (1:23f) comes from a Greek translation of the Old Testament, where the Hebrew word almah has been translated by the Greek word parthenos, which does mean "virgin". Did the Greek translator make a mistake? No. There are a half dozen Greek words that the translator could have used, each of them at least partially correct but none of them a perfect match. So he chose the best word that he knew, and there is no guarantee that he knew all half-dozen options. There was no Christian bias in this Greek version of Isaiah 7:14, because the translation had already been made a century before Jesus was born. Frankly, I think the parthenos issue has been overworked: Matthew would not have quoted Isaiah 7:14 if it had not contained the name "Immanuel", "God with us". Indeed, "Immanuel" so well affirms Matthew's understanding of Christmas that he could have quoted the verse to almost as good effect if the translator had used any other Greek word for a young woman.
But when you read Isaiah 7:14 in the context of Chapters 7, 8, and 9, you find a remarkable thing that's often overlooked: Isaiah records not just one instance of a prophetically significant child, but four. At the beginning of Chapter 7 the LORD sends Isaiah to meet King Ahaz, accompanied by Isaiah's son, Shear-yashub. His son's name is the prophetic message to the king: Shear-yashub means "A remnant shall return". It is during that meeting with Ahaz that Isaiah points to the pregnant young woman nearby and gives Ahaz the sign of Immanuel, the promise of a prosperous kingdom before her child reaches years of discretion, if Ahaz and his people will just believe God. But Ahaz and his people continue to fear the nations round about more than they fear God. So Isaiah and his wife, whom he calls the prophetess, have another prophetic son. They name this one Maher-shalal-hash-baz, which means "The robbery comes quickly; the spoil runs away" (8:1). This child signifies to beleaguered Israel that their unbelief will only make their misfortune worse. So Isaiah says, "Behold, I and the children whom the LORD has given me are signs and portents in Israel from the LORD of hosts" (8:18).
But why, you might ask, is Isaiah presenting a string of children – two of them his own – as "signs and portents from the LORD"? Because back at the beginning of Israel's history, God made a promise to Abraham that through an impossible child he would make Abraham a great nation and the father of many nations. That promise takes us to Chapter 9, where we meet the fourth of Isaiah's string of prophetic children, whom the previous three have foreshadowed. Isaiah says that that kingdom will be glorious in spite of Ahaz, but only with the coming of the child who will be David's heir. A promise from God may be future to us, but in the mind of God it is already present; so that is how Isaiah tells it: "Unto us a child is born unto us a son is given and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end, upon the throne of David, and over his kingdom, to establish it, and to uphold it, from this time forth and for evermore. The zeal of the LORD of hosts will do this" (9:6f).
So when Matthew quotes Isaiah 7:14, we miss the point if we take it as an isolated quotation, or if we get hung up on parthenos. We should see it more like the tab on a filing folder that says: To find out more about this topic, open here. And when we open that folder, what we find is this string of prophetic children pointing to Great David's Greater Son, whom David himself calls Lord.
So you see that what the prophets spoke often had both a local and contemporary fulfillment, and at the same time a future and messianic fulfillment. In our day, there is an abundance of skeptical scholarship that regards any belief in the future and messianic aspect of prophecy as naive. But our hermeneutic – that is, our way of reading the Old Testament – comes from as far back as the New Testament writers themselves. The best example of this is in 1 Peter, where we read: "Concerning this salvation, the prophets who prophesied about the grace that was to be yours searched and inquired carefully, inquiring what person or time the Spirit of Christ in them was indicating when he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glories. It was revealed to them that they were serving not themselves but you, in the things that have now been announced to you..."(1 Peter 1:10ff). Jesus' own use of the Old Testament strongly suggests that it was he who taught them this hermeneutic.
The other passage in Isaiah that Christians especially like is the Suffering Servant prophecy at Chapter 53 (which actually starts at 52:13). The New Testament writers are all aware of this passage, but Jesus' only clear use of it is a reference to being "numbered with the transgressors" (Luke 22:37, Isaiah 53:12). This one reference, however, is sufficient to show that he was familiar with the chapter, and that he applied it to himself.
But, we must ask, how could Jesus apply to himself a passage that his contemporaries understood as applying to the nation as a whole? For the answer, think back to his baptism, where he defines his task as "fulfill[ing] all righteousness". Jesus sees himself doing for his people what for 1400 years they have been unable to do themselves. He sees himself as representative Israel. He will become the suffering servant, both to the Gentile world and to his own people.
In Matthew 12, with parallels in the other gospels, some Torah scholars approach Jesus asking for a sign. This is the local credentials committee! But Jesus declines their request. The only sign that they are going to get, he tells them, is the sign of the prophet Jonah. "For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the whale, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth" (Matthew 12:40). The Resurrection, says Jesus, is the only sign we get to confirm the truth of the gospel. Science can neither prove nor disprove God, because God is not measurable by the instruments of human knowledge. With one gracious exception. In the Resurrection – 500 eye-witnesses at one time, Paul says – in the Resurrection, God has breached the epistemological gap between heaven and earth. In the Resurrection he has given us sufficient empirical evidence not only for his existence but also for the truth of the gospel. But that evidence comes with a caution: when we embrace the gospel, we get not only a better philosophy, but also, and more importantly, forgiveness of sins and moral renovation. If we don't want the latter, we can't have the former. Or as Jesus put it at the end of his story about the rich man and Lazarus: "If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead" (Luke 16.31).
But notice the curious thing that Jesus called himself when he addressed that committee: "... the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth." "Son of Man" seems to have been Jesus' favorite title that he used when speaking about himself. Sloppy interpreters take that expression to mean the opposite of "Son of God", as if Jesus preferred to emphasize his humanity rather than his deity. You find it used that way in some twentieth-century hymns. But that's not how Jesus meant it.
Jesus got the expression "Son of Man" from the book of Daniel. It is, at one level, simply a poetical Hebrew way of saying "Man". But it means much more than just "a guy". I think Luther caught it best in his hymn Ein Feste Burg – "A Mighty Fortress" – where he describes Jesus as der richte Mann, or as Carlyle translates it, "the proper Man". There is a passage in Daniel 7 that describes God entering the heavenly court as Judge: "As I looked, thrones were placed, and the Ancient of Days took his seat." Then some verses later Daniel reports, "I saw in the night, visions, and behold, with the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man, and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him. And to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed" (7:1,13,14).
Now let us consider how Jesus understood his preferred title, "Son of Man". At the trial scene in Matthew 26, the high priest orders Jesus, "Tell us if you are the Messiah, the Son of God." Jesus replies obliquely, "You have said so." Then Jesus adds, "But I tell you, hereafter you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of power and coming on the clouds of heaven" (26:63f). At this point the high priest goes out of his mind with rage. The high priest knows, as Jesus knows, that elsewhere in the Old Testament it is only God who comes on "the clouds of heaven". So Jesus is not only claiming an identity with Daniel's Son of Man, but also asserting his divine origin. Jesus also tells the high priest that the high priest will see Jesus "seated at the right hand of power". Both Jesus and the high priest know that Daniel said, "thrones were placed" – not one throne, but thrones – one for the Ancient of Days, the other for the Son of Man.
In conclusion, let me paraphrase what Jesus at his trial told the high priest: 'We'll meet again, Caiaphas. You'll have no trouble recognizing me – first chair on the right. And next time, our roles will be reversed.'
PART FOUR: JESUS' SELF-KNOWLEDGE FROM THE PSALMS
Psalm 2; Psalm 22; Psalm 110; Matthew 22:23-46; Genesis 14:8-24.
This is the final part of a four-part study entitled "Reading the Bible as Jesus Read It". We have been considering how Jesus, from his early years, drew from the Jewish Scriptures his understanding of who he was and what he had been sent to do. After the Resurrection, Jesus reminded his disciples, "These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled" (Luke 24:44). We have already seen how, in the Law of Moses, he understood himself as the fulfillment of the Old Testament sacrifices and as the new Moses. In the Prophets, he saw himself as Isaiah's Suffering Servant, as Daniel's apocalyptic Son of Man, and as the antitype of Jonah. In this study we consider how Jesus saw himself in the Psalms: as the Son of David, as the eternal priest like Melchizedek, and as the crucified and triumphant Messiah.
In Matthew 22 we see how well Jesus knew his way around the Bible. Scholars come to him from the two major groups, the Sadducees and the Pharisees, trying to trip him up with problems of interpretation. He answers them well, and then he turns the tables by posing a problem of interpretation that they cannot answer. The Sadducees' puzzle concerns Moses' rule of levirate marriage. "Levir" is the Latin word for brother-in-law, and the policy says that if a man dies without offspring, his brother has a duty to marry the widow and give the dead brother an heir. So they pose the bizarre situation where a woman has a half-dozen levirate marriages, all of them childless, and they want to know whose wife she will be in the afterlife.
This is a trick question because, as Matthew explains, they Sadducees did not believe in an afterlife. Their real problem, Jesus tells them, is that they don't know either the Scriptures or the power of God. He tells them that if God calls himself the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and if God is the God of the living, then Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob must still be alive. But their life on the other side is like that of the angels, who have no need of marriage, because their life is not the life of this mortal flesh.
The Pharisees get their turn next. They want to trick Jesus into saying that one commandment is more important than another. Jesus avoids their trick with quotations from Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18, that emphasize the importance of all the commandments as ways of loving God and our neighbor.
Then before they can get away, Jesus has his turn. 'Whose son,' he asks them, 'is the Messiah supposed to be?'
'Ah, that question is too easy,' they think. 'The son of David, of course!'
'Well, then,' says Jesus, 'if Messiah is David's son, why does David, inspired by the Holy Spirit, call this son his Lord?
The LORD says to my Lord: "Sit at my right hand,
until I make your enemies your footstool"' (Psalm 110:1).
Nobody knew the answer, so they stopped trying to trip him up with Bible questions.
Jesus' question is a puzzle at two levels. First, as the question says, if David understands that the Messiah is supposed to be his offspring, his great-great grandson or however far removed, how can David call him Lord? If this offspring were alive in David's court, would he not call David Lord? But more than that, how can the offspring be David's "Boss" if the offspring does not yet exist? Jesus seems to imply here that by some heaven-sent instinct, David had already grasped the fact that "Before Abraham was, I am" (John 8:58).
If you think that's stretching a point, just three verses later David says,
The LORD has sworn and will not change his mind:
You are a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek (Psalm 110:4).
David, writing around 1000 BC, refers to an incident 800 years earlier, when Abraham paid a tithe to Melchizedek, the priest-king of Jerusalem, who had welcomed Abraham back from battle, with gifts of bread and wine. The peculiar thing about Melchizedek – in a culture that valued genealogy – is that he has no known ancestry or offspring. He is a deus ex machina character, parachuted into the play from on high. So David, who is king of Jerusalem but no priest, sees in Melchizedek, his predecessor, the image of an eternal priest-king Messiah in whom the kingdom will achieve its ultimate glory.
I have previously referred to a New Testament professor who later became Bishop of Huron, who told us in class that he did not think there were any Messianic prophecies in the Psalms. It seems pretty clear that this was not Jesus' view, nor David's.
Another Psalm in which Jesus saw himself portrayed is Psalm 22. He quoted the first verse of this psalm as the fourth of his seven last words from the cross: My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Given the complexity of the man, and the enormity of the occasion, we should not look for a simple interpretation.
At one level, this verse tells the awful dark night of the soul that Jesus must have felt, and that we cannot imagine – as he hung there, excluded from the Source of Life, for us – the necessary end of all who exclude God from their lives by denying his existence or breaking his commandments. The Creed is right: "He descended into hell."
But there's another way to understand this verse as well. And this second understanding does not exclude the first. Nobody in Jesus' day would have known what you meant if you spoke of Psalm 22. They identified a writing by its first words or first line. So the book of Genesis was known as "In the beginning" – or in Hebrew, B'reshith. Psalm 2 would have been known as "Why do the heathen rage? And Psalm 22 would have been known as "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Eli, eli, lama azavtani?
(Our hymnbooks similarly list hymns alphabetically by their first lines.)
So it is possible that, as well as expressing the darkest possible night of his soul, Jesus might also have been reassuring himself with the flow of ideas in this psalm from desperation to triumph, and at the same time deliberately creating a public memory so that his hearers would later reflect on those ideas. Excerpts from the psalm will show you what I mean:
Why have you forsaken me?
I cry by day, but you do not answer; and by night, but I find no rest.
But you are holy. Our fathers trusted in you and you delivered them.
They trusted in you and were not put to shame.
But all who see me mock me. [They say,]
'He trusts in the LORD; let the LORD deliver him.'
You are the one who took me from my mother's womb.
You made me trust you from my mother's breasts.
But I am poured out like water. You lay me in the dust of death.
A company of evildoers encircles me. They have pierced my hands and feet.
They divide my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots.
But you, O LORD, do not be far off. O you my help, come quickly to my aid.
I will tell of your name in the great congregation.
The afflicted shall eat and be satisfied.
Even the one who could not keep himself alive – posterity shall serve him.
They shall come and proclaim his righteousness to a people yet unborn,
that he has done it!
David wrote that psalm almost a thousand years before Jesus understood himself to be actually fulfilling it. Unless you can persuade yourself that the gospel writers fudged their facts to make them fit a couple of dozen Old Testament motifs, plus a whole lot of minor details, the conclusion is unavoidable that Jesus found his identity and his mission described in the Psalms, and that he drew strength from the descriptions that he found there.
Another psalm that cannot have escaped Jesus' notice is Psalm 2. We do not have any record of Jesus quoting from it, but you hear it at Jesus' baptism when the Father says, "This is my beloved Son" (Luke 3:22), and it is quoted in Acts, Hebrews, and Revelation. The messianic references in this psalm are not merely allusive; they are in-your-face, and they demand a response.
Verse 2 complains that the rulers of the earth "take counsel together against the LORD and against his Christ." Well, yes, I know that your English translation says "against his Anointed". But if you were reading it in Hebrew, as Jesus might have done, it would say "against his Messiah", which is the Hebrew word for "Anointed". And if you were reading it in any of several pre-Christian Greek translations, as Jesus might also have done, it would say "against his Christ", which is the Greek word for "Anointed".
How thoroughly up-to-date: democratic and anti-democratic rulers alike take counsel against the LORD and against his Christ. It was true when David wrote it; it was true when Jesus walked the earth; and it's true today. Human nature, both our needs and our vices, is a constant from age to age, and so the patterns of our history are ongoing. But another thing is also constant: the God whom we know in Jesus is "the same yesterday, today, and forever". That is why it was possible for God-inspired men to write things that were not only true in their own day and but even more profoundly true centuries later. That is why it was possible for Jesus in his days on earth to find himself written in the history of his people. And that is why he who sits in the heavens still laughs – because he has indeed set his King on Zion, his holy hill, and one day we shall see him do so again.
David must surely have understood that the universal sovereignty he prophesied was beyond not only his own reach but also that of his son Solomon. But David was confident that God would eventually keep his word. And Jesus knew that he would achieve universal sovereignty precisely because - as he told the tempter in the desert - his kingdom is not of this world. So David wisely admonishes: Be warned, O rulers of the earth: Serve the LORD with fear, and kiss the Son lest you perish in the way. For blessed are all who take refuge in him. Amen.