He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end. (Luke 1:32-33 ESV)
An ancient Christian writer once said that there are four
Gospels in the New Testament to match the four winds of heaven that blow
throughout the earth. An interesting thought. The four Gospels tell the same
story of Jesus, but from slightly different perspectives and for different
purposes. In certain Gospel there are some details omitted altogether. For
example, the birth of Christ is only told by two of the Gospel writers: Matthew
and Luke. John takes a more theological path and speaks of the pre-incarnate
Christ. Mark begins with the ministry of John the Baptist. So Matthew and Luke
include the infancy accounts. For these two writers the details about how Jesus
was born are important. But even they do not record the same events. And they
seem to have different strategies in mind. Matthew appears to be writing with a
Jewish audience in mind. Luke is tailored for the Gentile mind, Luke himself
being a Greek. Matthew shows that Jesus is the Messiah, or the Christ, who was
promised to Israel. Luke seeks to demonstrate that Jesus is for the whole world
and not just for Israel. The differences in their accounts add richness and
fullness to the meaning of the Gospel message.
Matthew wants his readers to see that Jesus is the King who
would reign on David’s throne forever, which was promised to Israel in the Old
Testament Scriptures. However, there is every indication in Matthew that the
people of Israel would not recognize or welcome their King. Only the Magi from
the East seek to worship Jesus. Luke seems to emphasize the lowliness and the
humility of Jesus’ birth. Jesus was born in obscurity and the only people
invited to celebrate were some lowly shepherds. Jesus did not come into the
world in power and glory as we might expect. Even though Jesus was a king He
did not look like the kind of king the world would recognize as great. Of
course, God did it this way intentionally to overturn the world’s pride and
vain wisdom.
One of the most important facts of Christ’s birth is
something that both Matthew and Luke emphasize: the connection between Jesus’
birth and the Scriptures. The Scriptures they refer to are the Old Testament.
Jesus is the One anticipated by the inspired writers of Scripture and all the
true people of God in Israel. So there is some continuity between the New and
the Old. God was fulfilling the words He had previously spoken to the people of
Israel through Moses in the Law and in the Prophets, not to mention God’s
promises to Abraham and to King David. God had prepared for this very moment in
history and He had used the people of Israel to accomplish His purpose.
The true meaning of the Scriptures and the prophecies God
had given previously to Israel were being fulfilled and made clear by Christ’s
birth. These things had not been made clear to previous generations, not even
to the very Prophets who spoke for God (See 1 Peter 1.10-12). There was a new
revelation being given when Jesus was born, but it had been anticipated in the Old
Covenant era. Jesus’ birth was like the coming of a greater light, like the
rising of the morning sun, which would illuminate everything God had said
previously in the Scriptures.
Both Matthew and Luke makes connections between the birth of
Christ and the Old Testament Scriptures. They are showing us that Jesus is the
Christ. He is God’s chosen agent to bring salvation and reign eternally over
the Kingdom of God. We must be able to identify the Christ. We cannot worship
or trust in a person we cannot identify. The real Christ is always known
through the Scriptures and He perfectly conforms to everything God had
previously revealed.
Jesus came into the world through a prepared People: the
nation of Israel. If we are not familiar with what God had said to Israel to
prepare the way for the coming of Christ, then we will probably not understand
the Gospel. The Law and the Prophets prepare us to receive Jesus as the Christ.
God had a consistent plan from which He never deviated that was being fulfilled
when Jesus was born.
The Gospel writers interpret or understand Scripture in
light of who Jesus is. Christ illuminates Scripture because He is the theme and
the message of all of Scripture. All Scripture must be interpreted with Christ
at the center of it or we will never really understand what God is saying. Any
interpretation of the Bible that that does have Christ as the ultimate goal and
meaning is spurious and potentially misleading.
Preparing for the Christ
A Prepared People
The Bible
begins with the glory of creation, which culminated in the creation of man in
the image of God. But disaster soon followed. The man and his wife disobey God
and are cast out of the Garden. As we continue following the narrative in
Genesis, things get progressively worse. Cain kills his brother Abel. And then
things get so violent and wicked in the earth that God determined to destroy
the whole human population with a great flood, except righteous Noah and his
little family. But even after getting a fresh start, the human race soon goes
back to its wicked ways and attempts to build a city with a tower reaching to
heaven. This was done in direct rebellion against the God of heaven, who comes
down to confuse their language and scatter humanity over the face of the earth.
It is immediately following the judgment at Babel that God calls Abram out of
the pagan city of Ur and makes an astounding promise to him concerning a
blessing for the entire world that had just been scattered in judgment.
From this
one man, whose name was soon changed to Abraham, God created a special nation:
the people of Israel. Later at Mount Sinai, after bringing them out of slavery
in Egypt, God made a covenant with the people of Israel and gave them His law.
Beginning with Moses, God sent a steady stream of prophets to the people of
Israel who spoke God’s words to them. These words were also written down and
preserved in what became the Scriptures. It was the people of Israel who heard
the Word of God and who wrote it down. All of God’s prophets, His spokesmen,
were sent to speak to the people of Israel.
Among all
the nations of the world, Israel alone knew the one, true living God. All the
other nations worshiped idols. God was preparing to send the Christ, His Son, in
the world through this special nation that He had created. The Christ would not
be born in the midst of one of the pagan, idolatrous nations. The Christ would
come into the world through a nation specially prepared by God, cultured by His
Law, and with His Word ringing in their ears. At just the right time in human
history, God would send His Son into the world, to be born of a Jewish woman,
and raised up in submission to the Law of God. The nation of Israel had been
created for this very purpose: to be the nation that would produce the Christ,
the Son of God, and the Savior of the world.
The Christ
would come through the people of Israel but He was not sent only to the people
of Israel. God had not forgotten the nations He had scattered at Babel, nor had
He forgotten His promise to Abraham concerning a blessing for the whole world.
The Christ would come as a light to the Gentiles. The nations that had for so
long walked in darkness and in ignorance of the one, true, living God would
receive a revelation from God in the person of Jesus Christ. The nation of
Israel had been the only group of people on the planet who knew anything about
the true God and how to worship Him (See John 4.21-26). But when Jesus was
born, all of that was about to change. The Christ would also be a light to the
nations of the earth (Isa 49.6). The world-wide Kingdom of Christ had always
been God’s plan. The Jewish people were at the center of this plan but it was
much larger than them and their nation or ethnic group.
A Consistent Purpose
It was not as if God had suddenly changed His mind about
Israel and decided to do something different by sending His Son into the world.
The coming of Christ was not a departure from God’s original promises to bless
the world through the Seed of the Woman (Gen. 3.15) and the Seed of Abraham
(Gen. 12.3). Christ was the fulfillment of these promises. Jesus is the Seed
(descendant) of Abraham through whom God blessed (and still blesses) anyone who
believes the Gospel of Christ (Gal. 3.16). God never changed His mind or His
purpose. In fact, God’s promises in the Law and the Prophets, like the promises
about the Seed of the Woman and the Seed of Abraham in the book of Genesis,
provide the context for understanding the narrative flow and unity of all Scripture
- both Old and New Testaments. The New Covenant is not a radical departure from
the Old but is its fulfillment and Divinely-ordained goal. All of Scripture
must be viewed as a single story or Divine purpose. This does not minimize the
differences between the Covenant of Law made through Moses and the Covenant of
Grace made through Christ. But we should not see the coming of Christ as a
radical departure from what God had said to Israel. The Gospel of Christ is in
harmony with the Law and the Prophets, with what we call the Old Testament
today, and is not in opposition to the revelation God gave to Israel. There
were two covenants and two dispensations, but a single divine purpose.
This also means that God did not change His mind about the
people of Israel. The Christ came to the Jewish people first. And the Gospel
message was preached to the Jews first (Rom. 1.16). The Jews were the people
who had been divinely cultured by the Law to receive the Christ when he came.
The privileged position of the Jewish people cannot be denied and God never
repudiated the words He spoke to them, especially those promises that had to do
with the coming of Christ and His Kingdom glory (See Rom. 9.4-5). This was in
spite of the fact that many, if not most, of the Jewish people were unbelieving
and disobedient to God. Most of the Jewish people did not recognize Jesus as
the Christ and still remain hardened in unbelief today concerning Christ and
the Gospel. But this has also allowed the Gospel to be preached to the Gentiles.
Gentile believers who receive Jesus as the Christ are “grafted in” the family
tree of the true, spiritual Israel of God (See Romans 11.17). And we expect
that the “times of the Gentiles” will eventually come to an end and God will
turn the hearts of the Jewish people to their Messiah, Jesus (See Romans
11.25-32).
God has never received anyone simply on the basis of his or
her physical descent. Faith in the promises of God has always been the thing
that justified a person before God. This was demonstrated by the father of the
Jewish people, Abraham, who believed God and was declared righteous because of
that faith (Gen. 15.6). All who believe, Jew or Gentiles, are the true children
of Abraham. This means that Jews and Gentiles all enter the Kingdom through the
same Door: faith in Jesus. All without faith are excluded, Jew of Gentile,
without any favoritism being shown by God. So there is one God, one Plan, one
Gospel, one Faith, and one Body (See Eph. 2.11-22).
It is important for us to understand that God’s original
plan and purpose was revealed in His promise to Abraham. The Law of Moses was
added to that original promise because of the problem of sin, until the time
came for the Christ to come into the world (Gal. 3.19). This means that the
coming of Christ, and the New Covenant that He established, are actually all in
fulfillment of God’s original promise to Abraham (Gal. 3.8-9; 14, 29). God is
faithful!
A Necessary Introduction
Everything that God said to Israel through the Law of Moses
and all the Prophets is designed to bring us to faith in Jesus. In fact, if we
do not believe the Law and the Prophets then we will not believe the Gospel of
Christ. Without the Law and the Prophets as an introduction to the Gospel it
becomes nearly impossible to even understand who Jesus is, why He came, and
what He did. The Law of Moses, for example, introduces us to the very concepts
of sin and salvation. How can we understand that Jesus is our savior unless we
understand the meaning and effects of sin? Perhaps this is why many today do
not understand the message of the Gospel because there has not been a proper
introduction. In the past the great preachers of the Gospel understood the
importance of first making people aware of their sin through preaching the Law
of God. But in our generation this necessary introduction has been neglected.
Jesus is not viewed as a savior who rescues us from sin, but something like a
spiritual guru, a moral teacher, or a problem solver. We must come to know the
true Christ who was promised in the Law and the Prophets. Unless we know the
Law and the Prophets we cannot come to know the Christ.
Most of the first Christians were people who had first come
into contact with the Law and the Prophets. The Jews heard the Scriptures read
in the synagogue meetings each Sabbath day. And there were Gentiles who were
often attracted to the faith of Israel. Philip preached the Gospel to an
Ethiopian eunuch who had been to the Temple in Jerusalem to worship and was
reading from the prophet Isaiah. Philip began with that very Scripture and
preached the Gospel of Christ to him (Acts 8.35). These kinds of conversions
should be more common today.
Identifying the Christ
God’s Chosen One
It seems that many people do not really know what is meant
when we call Jesus “Christ” or “the Christ.” I suppose some folks think that is
simply Jesus’ last name! But it is actually a title and not just a name or a
nickname. Calling Jesus “Christ” means that He is the anointed one. The
tradition of anointing a man is found in the Old Testament Scriptures. Priests,
Kings, and Prophets were all people who were anointed as a sign of their
Divinely-chosen work. Anointing meant that the person was set apart for a
special task related to the work of God. So when we use the title “Christ” to
speak of Jesus we are saying that He is chosen by God to do something for God.
Of course, Jesus is a Prophet, a Priest and a King!
God had already set a precedent that when He wanted
something done He would send a single person to do His will and accomplish His
work. This pattern actually stated very early in human history. When God
decided to destroy the early world with a flood because of its wickedness, God
found a single man named Noah who would be saved from the judgment and
repopulate the earth. God later called another solitary man, named Abram, from
whom God would create the nation of Israel. When there was a famine that could
have wiped the chosen nation before it even got started, God sent Joseph down
to Egypt to save them. When God was ready to bring Israel up from Egypt and
into the Promised Land, He sent Moses to lead the Exodus. God also chose Moses’
brother, Aaron, to serve as the High Priest. When Moses died Joshua then took
the people of Israel into Canaan. When Israel was in Canaan God raised up a
succession of men (a one woman!) to be judges and deliver the people from their
enemies. When the people wanted a king to rule them, God gave them Saul. But
God actually chose David to lead the people after Saul’s disobedience and
demise. And when the people of Israel fell into idolatry and sin, God sent them
prophets. These prophets were men (and again, at least one woman) who were
usually solitary figures sent to speak the Word of God. Although the entire
nation of Israel belonged to God, there were also special servants of God
raised up individually to do God’s work. All of this helps us to understand who
Jesus is and what He came to do. From the nation of Israel, which was chosen by
God out of all the other nations of the world, would come a single, chosen
individual who would be God’s chosen agent. That would be the Christ.
This chosen agent would work in behalf of all the people of
God and would be our representative as well as God’s servant. That is why the
one who would come from God had to be like us. Angels could also be sent to do
God’s will, but an angel could not be our representative. This had to be a
member of the human race. Choosing one man to represent all the people was
first illustrated in the ministry of the High Priest. Aaron and his sons were
set aside to serve as High Priests and intercede for the rest of the nation. By
this God was showing that He could use one special person to bring the rest of
the people to Himself. Jesus would come into the world to reconcile all of us
to God.
As God’s chosen and anointed agent, Jesus would come into
the world to accomplish what no one else could have done. Even though God had
used other men and women in the past to accomplish His will, there was no one
who did it perfectly. All had failed. The very first man God created disobeyed
God’s command and every other man has followed his example. “All have sinned
and fallen short of the glory of God.” Collectively, the human race has been a
dismal failure. Even when all the people in the world shared a common language
and a single purpose, as was the case in the building of the Tower of Babel,
the people were in opposition to the will of God. When God called Abram and created
the nation of Israel from him, we would expect Israel to be different from
other nations. But they also failed to obey God and God eventually sent His own
people into captivity. No one has done the will of God perfectly and that means
we all need someone who can. Jesus would come into the world to do the will of
God and do it perfectly. The Christ would succeed, even when tempted by the
Devil, where all had failed.
And so we would expect God’s Christ to be completely holy,
completely dedicated to God, and separate from all sin and defilement. When it
came time for the Christ to be born, He was conceived by the Holy Spirit and
born of a virgin. The Virgin Birth not only fulfills prophecy (See Isa 7.14) it
also identifies Jesus as the Son of God. Jesus is a completely unique person,
even in the way that He came into the world. It should not surprise us that
Jesus was born of a virgin because we know that nothing is impossible for God.
Anyone who refuses to believe that Jesus was born of a virgin is questioning
the very foundation of the entire Biblical record. If God could not make a
virgin conceive, then there is no compelling reason to believe anything else
miraculous or supernatural recorded in Scripture and the whole thing falls to
the ground. How would we recognize the Son of God when He came into the world?
He is the One who would be born of a virgin and would live a life of holy,
sinless perfection before God. This can be said of no man other than Jesus.
This is how we know that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God.
A Ruler and a Savior
The prophets God sent to Israel revealed that a King would
come both to rule and to save the people of God. This King would come from
David’s line, as God had promised to David personally (See 2 Sam. 7.11-13; Luke
1.32-33). What was not made clear was the nature of this King’s reign or the
kind of salvation he would accomplish. The people of Israel had been ruled by a
series of world empires: Babylon, Persia, Greece, and then Rome. Most Jews
assumed that the Christ would liberate the nation of Israel from foreign
oppressors and make the Jewish people a powerful Kingdom again as they had been
in the days of David and Solomon.
When Jesus was born in Bethlehem, as the prophet Micah had
predicted (See Micah 5.2; Matthew 2.4-6), there was another king ruling over
Israel. King Herod was a puppet set up by the Romans and was not even a true
Israelite. The true King of Israel was born in obscurity and His birth would
probably have never even been known except for the visit of the mysterious Magi
from the East who followed a star all the way to Jerusalem. These Magi came to
worship the one born to be King of the Jews. Jesus was born to be a King and
deserved to be worshiped even as an infant in Bethlehem. While His own people
did not yet recognize that their King had been born, God made this known
through these Gentile Magi from the East, which also anticipated the salvation
of the Gentiles. It was being revealed that the King sent to Israel would not
only rule over Israel. God’s kingdom and salvation would extend over the entire
world.
The salvation and reign of the Christ would be much larger
than even the people of Israel had anticipated. The Kingdom of God would not be
like the corrupt kingdoms of men but would be of an entirely different order.
And the kind of salvation the Christ would bring would involve something more
profound than deliverance from a political situation. The real liberation that
was needed was from the bondage of sin and death. Jesus was born to save people
from sin and all its effects. The corrupt political institutions that have
oppressed mankind were just symptomatic of the real Power that had enslaved the
human race. God’s salvation would address the real needs of the human race. The
kingdom and salvation brought by Jesus would have eternal consequences. His
Kingdom would never end. His salvation included the gift of eternal life.
The birth of Jesus in David’s city of Bethlehem was just the
beginning. And it was a humble beginning. The Christ who would rule the nations
and bring eternal salvation would first have to descend in humility and
obscurity before ascending in glory. Saving the human race from sin and death
would involve suffering and death for the Savior. Jesus was born to die. The
Cross would prove to be the one thing that was the most difficult for the
Jewish people to understand about the Christ. This King would be victorious by
laying down His own life. The Christ would suffer before entering into His
glory. As important as the birth of Jesus was, this event did not accomplish
salvation. To finish the work He was sent to earth to accomplish, Jesus had to
suffer the death of the Cross. To really understand the true nature of the
Kingdom of God and salvation we must go beyond the manger to the Cross.
The Scriptures Fulfilled
Everything about Jesus is in complete agreement with what
God had revealed previously through the Law and the Prophets. Jesus fulfilled
the Scriptures. False teachers and false Messiahs twist the Scriptures to fit
themselves and their own agendas. But the true Christ fulfills the Scripture.
This is how we recognize the One God sent. There have been and will continue to
be many false Messiahs. Any version of Christ that does not conform to what has
been revealed about Him in Scripture cannot be the real thing. We would expect
the real Christ to conform to what God had previously revealed and not to
contradict it. This is a key point concerning the fulfillment of Scripture. God
is consistent and does not contradict Himself. Of course, we must make sure
that we are familiar with what God has said in the Scripture. The Jews were
people who were familiar with Scripture and had a reverence for the written
word of God. This prepared them to recognize the Christ when He came into the
world. The Scriptures point to the Christ and reveal who He is and what He
would come to accomplish in the world.
So the coming of Christ was not something completely
unexpected or unannounced. Jesus did not simply appear without any prior
preparation for His coming. The birth of Christ was an event for which God had
been preparing from the very beginning of human history. After Adam and Eve
sinned God promised that the Seed of the Woman would come to bruise the
Serpent’s head (Gen. 3.15). God also promised Abraham that his Seed
(descendant) would come to bless the world (Gen. 12.3). So what God was doing
was not completely hidden from view. Neither was Christ’s birth a completely
new and different plan. God did not suddenly change His purpose or forsake the
promises He had made previously to Abraham and the people of Israel. Jesus is
the fulfillment of all those promises, not something completely different or
incongruous.
Until the time came for God to fulfill His Word, much of
what God had said in the Law and the Prophets concerning the coming of the
Christ remained vague. Now that Christ has come the true meaning of the
Scriptures have been illuminated. Jesus is the light that illuminates
everything God has said in the Law and the Prophets. The Scripture is understood
correctly in the light of Christ. So Jesus did not come to contradict or to
nullify the Law and the Prophets (Matt. 5.17). He came to fulfill the Law
because Christ was the end, or the true goal, of the Law (See Rom. 10.4). The
Law was given to lead us to Christ (Gal. 3.24). In the past God spoke through
Moses in the Law and the Prophets. But now God has spoken to us through His
Son, Jesus (Heb. 1.1-4). Are you listening to what God has said through Jesus Christ?
