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August 25 - October 29, 2020
Used in this way, the Old Testament characters should motivate worship and imitation of Jesus.
they were portraying and predicting the same leadership role that Jesus would one day publicly fill.
Consider the courageous yet compassionate leadership of Elijah and Elisha who so faithfully portrayed the Lord who had called them, and predicted the Lord who would one day succeed and excel them in leading the charge against evil and in inspiring godly living.
Many Old Testament saints were called to an experience of leadership that was associated with suffering.
This repeated pattern of righteous and innocent suffering in leadership prefigured the suffering of Jesus and made Old Testament believers long for One who would not only put things right but also show the purpose of the pain.
Though Jesus may not be mentioned specifically, behind every word are the mind of Jesus and the salvation of Jesus. Jesus is everywhere in the Old Testament, but He is everywhere in different ways.
One of the greatest fallacies about Old Testament saints is that they were focused on earthly cities, earthly treasures, and earthly rewards.
The Old Testament is not contrary to the New: for both in the Old and New Testament everlasting life is offered to Mankind by Christ, who is the only Mediator between God and Man, being both God and Man. Wherefore they are not to be heard, which feign [imagine] that the old Fathers did look only for transitory promises.49
I’m not quite sure what I used to think Christ was doing during the four thousand years of Old Testament history. Was He just idling His time away while waiting for His incarnation?
What did make sense was that the Son of God not only was busy in heaven during these four thousand years but also frequently visited the earth and appeared to His people in different forms, primarily as the Angel of the Lord and as the Glory of the Lord.
He not only existed but was executing important tasks prior to His coming to this world in the flesh.
When I say this, I mean that God has never manifested himself to men in any other way than through the Son, that is, his sole wisdom, light, and truth.
Although He sometimes used prophets as His mouthpiece, the Son of God was always the ultimate Speaker.
Thus the need for the Father to publicly acknowledge His Son and command, “Hear Him!”
The Old Testament, then, is as much Jesus’ message to us as the New Testament. As the apostle John wrote: “The testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.”6
Just as the Son of God is the usual way God speaks to humanity, so also the Son of God is the usual way God appears to humanity:
The early church father Tertullian put it like this: It was the Son who judged men from the beginning, destroying that lofty tower, and confounding their languages, punishing the whole world with a flood of waters, and raining fire and brimstone upon Sodom and Gomorrah . . . for he always descended to hold converse with men, from Adam even to the patriarchs and prophets, in visions, in dreams, in mirrors, in dark sentences, always preparing his way from the beginning: neither was it possible, that God who conversed with men upon earth, could be any other than that Word which was to be made
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I wonder if we just assume God the Father in the OT because we see grandious things
But the rarer and rarer appearances also created a growing longing in God’s people for a fuller and longer-lasting revelation of the Son on earth.
moral, ceremonial, and civil—
Although they rejected God’s law by sinning, traces of it remain imprinted on every human conscience.
the ten basic moral principles were to be a permanent moral code for all people at all times.
The ceremonial law guided the Israelites in their tabernacle and temple worship.
the actual ceremonies themselves were abolished when Jesus replaced the tabernacle and the temple with Himself.
However, the general principles of justice underlying these laws should still be studied and applied in appropriate ways in our own day.
“Before we preach law to people, we need to make sure they know the God who stands behind it and the story that goes before it. It is the God of grace and the story of grace.”
The Old Testament precepts communicate the sovereign authority of the divine Lawgiver through the awesome signs and wonders that accompanied the giving of the law at Sinai, and through the unambiguous and undebatable manner of their framing.
the holy character of Christ,
In the moral law we see Christ’s concern for fairness and equity between God and man, and between man and man.
Rather, the penalties show His passion for justice and redress.
No nation has abandoned the wisdom of God expressed in the moral law and prospered.
God’s giving of the law to Israel was an expression of His favor and goodness toward them.12 Never was any nation so privileged as to have such laws. If the nation practiced these laws, the nation’s existence and prosperity would be secured.
In summary, the law predicts God’s intention to restore order to His world, to cleanse it from defilement, and to restore its inhabitants to communion with Him. In so doing, it reveals Christ’s beautiful character.
Because He is the same yesterday, today, and forever, we are not surprised to read that when He entered this world, the moral law was within His heart.
Where Israel, God’s national son, failed repeatedly, Jesus, God’s only begotten Son, succeeded perfectly, continuously, and gloriously.
The more we read the two Testaments together, the more we will discover that the New Testament in general and Jesus’ words in particular are permeated with Old Testament vocabulary and concepts.
Their disobedience testified to the fact that they needed God to act in a new, redemptive way to write the law on their hearts.
The transgression of the law.
The curses of the law.
If you want to better understand what Jesus suffered for His people, study the law’s penalties and curses in Deuteronomy and Leviticus.
Just as the law was concerned with reversing the effects of sin on the whole creation, so, in some significant ways, Jesus’ death reversed the creation-wide effects of sin.
Like Israel, we are redeemed by mercy, brought into a living relationship with Jesus, for which we show our gratitude by obeying His rules, which He in turn also graciously rewards with more of His presence.
We express our love to Jesus by obedience to His unchanging moral law, and this loving law-keeping opens a channel through which Jesus communicates more of His love to us.
And despite many subsequent attempts to create an earthly utopia, the dream continues to elude us.
It is only in heaven that we will see the law’s order perfectly and beautifully honored and practiced—holy worship, holy rest, holy relationships, holy conversation, and holy everything and everyone.
Even our imperfect obedience to the moral law exalts Jesus.
Let us therefore use the law as a friend, not as an enemy. Let us use it as God intended, to magnify and honor Jesus in our lives.
However, once I got over the initial rush of discovering the big picture, I began to notice that sometimes, in the desire to show that Jesus is the culmination or destination of Old Testament history, the little pictures of Jesus that make up the big picture were often being overlooked.
The purpose of Edwards’s book was to show the big picture of redemption, that God’s work of redemption began not at Bethlehem but in the garden of Eden.
And he showed how Jesus was not just the end of redemptive history but also an active participant throughout it.
He did not, however, view the Old Testament events as only stepping-stones to Jesus.
