Following Jesus Through the Bible: An Overview of Jesus’ Role as Messiah

Copyright © 2013 Peter Phipps.

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ISBN: 978-1-4908-0472-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4908-0474-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4908-0473-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013914461

WestBow Press rev. date: 8/21/2013

Table of Contents

1.   Seeing the Bible as a Signpost

2.   Pointers in the Five Books of Moses

3.   Illustrations in the Books of History – Joshua to Esther

4.   Messiah in the Books of Poetry – Job to Song of Solomon

5.   Messiah proclaimed by the Prophets – Isaiah to Malachi

6.   The Good News – Matthew to Acts

7.   The Messianic emphasis in Paul’s Letters: Romans – Philemon

8.   Letters from other church leaders: Hebrews – Jude

9.   Messianic Celebration in the Book of Revelation

Acknowledgements

I will always recognise my debt to the Bible teacher John Peck, whose classes I attended for two years at the Bible Training Institute in Glasgow in the 1970’s. As part of one particular Bible module, he set a project which involved comparing the Old Testament with the New – and he thereby influenced me more than he ever knew.

I have also expressed my thanks to Prof. Richard Bauckham for his book ‘The Theology of the Book of Revelation’. I wish to acknowledge this publicly. At a time when I was assessing my approach to the whole Bible as a unit, his insights in that book confirmed my thoughts and helped to provide a fitting climax to a book about Messiah.

Scriptures taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide.  The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™

Foreword

By Stuart R. Bell, Rector of Aberystwyth

June 2013

‘H oly Scripture is a stream in which the elephant may swim and the lamb may wade’, so said Pope St. Gregory. He was right. The Bible will keep a serious student going for several life times, whilst at the same time it will speak to the needs and circumstances of the ‘academic lamb’. It will have something to say to all who pick it up and read it whatever their level of education.

This is Peter Phipps’ conviction and is the driving motivation behind his ministry as a Christian teacher. For decades he has spoken to appreciative audiences and congregations around the UK, in Canada and in India. He has been one of the key teachers in the Aberystwyth Academy of Christian Discipleship, out of which this book has been birthed. Now he has responded to the request of some of his hearers to put his teaching into print.

The contents of these pages are the result of years of prayer, study, teaching and preaching. They are the fruit of the soul of a man who has attempted to walk with God and to explain his revealed ways to others. His insights are informative, uncomplicated, relevant and practical.

Peter Phipps has one supreme concern and that is that we may see Jesus as the main subject of the whole Bible. Jesus as the agent of creation, as the fulfilment of prophecy, as the one who was alive before he was born, as the Messiah handled and followed by his disciples, as the teacher of truth from heaven, as the crucified and risen one, as the enthroned Lord with wounds, as the King who is still to come. Altogether an exciting theme!

CHAPTER 1

Seeing the Bible as a Signpost

W e get frustrated when for some reason we fail to access the chosen web site, and irritated when we start to habitually misplace the house or the car keys. But we do not resign ourselves to being locked out.

Many folk, however, have resigned themselves to the notion that the Bible is a closed book. Some confess that they have tried but just couldn’t get into it. That’s a great pity – especially when all the time the keys are available. In this book I want to highlight one of those keys, so that we can start appreciating from the inside what from the outside may have seemed to be so forbidding.

What, in practical terms, is the purpose of the Bible? Does it have a coherent theme, and if it does, is it relevant? Good questions. And I think the answers we find to them will also provide answers to two other issues that are prompted by the world we live in.

We may gaze at the world around us – whether it’s the grandeur of the Grand Canyon, the tranquil setting of a Scottish loch, the wonder of a bird’s feather or the amazing properties of a drop of blood – and we find ourselves saying of nature, ‘What an amazing world!’ The more we examine, observe and ponder it, the greater seems to be our wonder.

But then, we become aware of another consideration. That bird song that sounded so beautiful to us is not appreciated as such by other birds. The animal world can be a cruel world. Nature is ‘red in tooth and claw’ and when it throws up all sorts of disasters like tsunamis, tornados and volcanic eruptions, we can find ourselves playing a different tune. ‘What a terrible world!’ And the more we examine, observe and ponder it, the greater becomes our confusion.

It is my contention that one of the purposes of the Bible is to explain both of these opposite realities. It will explain the ‘wonder’ aspect in terms of God, and the ‘disaster’ aspect in terms of sin. But why should we be faced with the problem of evil at all? The short answer to that question involves the power of choice that God initially conferred on the human race. God does not delight in the mechanical obedience of robots or a knee jerk type of worship, but in the spontaneity of love. To achieve that goal it was necessary that the human race had the freedom to choose. Take the flow out of a river and you lose the river. Freedom is just as essential to the concept of love. Of course, such freedom carried the risk that it could be used either way, and when by and large the human race used it to walk away from God rather than towards him the consequences were as we see them today.

As we proceed, however, we will see how both concepts, glory and shame, meet in Jesus Christ, whom the Bible presents as both the revelation of God, and at the same time the remedy for sin.

The Theme of the whole Bible – in a word, ‘Messiah’

The Thinking of Jesus

The key to our understanding of the whole Bible was provided for us by Jesus himself. On one occasion he was visiting Jerusalem for one of the Jewish religious festivals when he healed a man who had been ill for thirty eight years. This brought him into conflict with the Jewish religious authorities who accused him of breaking their Sabbath law. The details are not our concern, but what is relevant for us is the fact that in the ensuing debate Jesus gave us the key to interpreting the Bible. His words to them are on record: ‘You diligently study the Scriptures, because you think that by them you possess eternal life. These are the Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life.’¹

Jesus was not encouraging folk to neglect the Old Testament Scriptures. They had been given by God. But clearly the point he was making was that it was not enough to study the words written down there. Like the foundation of a house, reading was necessary but preparatory. Scripture study was good but incomplete. The Jews saw them as a sort of stockpile of religious resources, among which could be found the secret of eternal life. But they didn’t realise that they were not an end in themselves, only the means to an end. They were meant to be the focus of attention, yes, but in the sense that a signpost is situated in a place where it is meant to be seen. The message of the Scriptures like that of a signpost was meant to lead somewhere. It’s crucial to grasp this. If the Bible is simply seen as an end in itself, we become like folk picnicking under the signpost; whereas we should be on the move to get to the Person to whom it points. All the various positive opinions stated about the Bible are very much like the comments you could make about a signpost – that it was a sturdy post, that it was in the right place, that it had been there a long time, that the detail was clear, its alignment correct and the materials used in making it blended in well with the background. All of that could well be true, but it could also become irrelevant. What a shame it would be to say all that and not travel to where it pointed. Because whoever they were who stayed put under the signpost, whatever their comments about it, would actually be showing by their inaction that they did not really appreciate its purpose and what it was designed for in the first place. Holy Scripture, breathed out by God, was designed to lead us to Messiah.

Theologians can discuss many theories concerning the Bible, but what relevance is it if all they ultimately arrive at is a theory of inspiration rather than the Lord of life and glory. And so Jesus challenged those representatives of the Jewish religious establishment whether after all they really did believe Moses. He said, ‘If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me. But since you do not believe what he wrote, how are you going to believe what I say?’²

Let’s flag this up at this point. The theme of the reliable and divinely inspired Scriptures, according to our highest authority, is a very noble one – in a word, Messiah. This Hebrew word was translated into Greek and then into English as the title Christ. It means ‘the anointed one’, that is, the one selected by God. Strictly speaking, when we refer to ‘Jesus Christ’ we are using his personal name with an official title. What we mean is Jesus the Christ, or Jesus the Anointed One, or Jesus the Messiah.

We will find the Bible far more exciting if we see Jesus Messiah as its theme. And when we do this we are in fact treating the text in the same way the very first disciples did, who took their cue from Jesus.

The Thinking of Philip

Take Philip for example. Soon after becoming one of Jesus’ followers, he shared his thoughts with his friend Nathanael. ‘We have found the one Moses wrote about in the Law, and about whom the prophets also wrote – Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.’³ Notice how Philip treated the Scriptures. He was aware that the words of Moses were like the signpost. He probably had in mind the well-known statement of Moses that God would send the people a prophet like himself, who would emerge from among their ranks but was to be obeyed, because the words he would speak would be God’s words.⁴

And of course Philip was not alone in knowing about Moses’ prophecy. The Jewish authorities also knew about it. When some of their number approached the new sensation John the Baptist curious to know his identity, one of their quick fire questions was ‘Are you the Prophet?’ John, who was indeed a prophet, knew that he was not the Prophet, so he replied ‘No.’⁵

The ordinary people also knew about it, because after Jesus presided over the amazing event we refer to as the feeding of the five thousand, their general talking point and topic of discussion revolved around that same prophecy. Having witnessed the miracle that Jesus had performed, the people there said, ‘Surely this is the Prophet who is to come into the world!’⁶

The Thinking of Peter

It was this same expectation that Peter addressed, soon after the Day of Pentecost, when he spoke to the crowd that had gathered after the healing of the lame man at Solomon’s Porch in the Temple. With the man still there, Peter publicly attributed his healing to God who had granted divine glory to his Servant Jesus; the Jews had recently killed him, but God had raised him from death, and it had been the power of his name that had given strength to the lame man. Faith in the living Jesus had done it. And then Peter significantly referred to the words of Moses we have noted already: ‘The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own people; you must listen to everything he tells you. Anyone who does not listen to him will be completely cut off from his people.’⁷

Stephen, the first recorded martyr, also understood the Old Testament in the light of his encounter with Messiah. Called to account before the Jewish high priest and his council over what he had said about Jesus, Stephen in his defence referred to Jewish history, and especially the cases of Joseph and Moses both of whom had been rejected at first before the tables were turned and they were exalted. Stephen recalled that Moses had said to the people of Israel, ‘God will send you a prophet like me from your own people.’⁸

Peter would later say to some sincere Roman enquirers in the home of the centurion Cornelius that all of the prophets spoke about Jesus.⁹And the apostle Paul would write to Romans about the good news of Jesus Christ, who was indeed born a real human being but was also shown to be the son of God in his resurrection from death. Significantly, Paul said that this good news had been promised by God long before through his prophets, as written in the Holy Scriptures.¹⁰

We do not need to labour this point any more. Philip, Peter, Stephen and later on Paul, all followed the signpost erected by Moses, and they had arrived at Jesus. This was how the first Christians, believing Jews, saw the Old Testament.

But the Jewish scribes and experts in the law missed out. They certainly knew the text of the Scriptures but they sat tight in their studies and therefore missed the Messiah. This is evidenced by one striking incident soon after Jesus was born in Bethlehem Judea. The men who studied the stars came from the East to Jerusalem and asked for the whereabouts of the baby born king of the Jews. King Herod, rather rattled, consulted the chief priests and the teachers of the Law. Of course they knew where the Messiah would be born, but also they knew why they knew. In their answer they quoted the words of Micah the prophet who had specified the town of Bethlehem in Judea. The prophet had written: ‘But you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means the least among the rulers of Judah; for out of you will come a ruler who will be the shepherd of my people Israel.’¹¹ They knew the text, but none of them showed any interest in joining the group going to Bethlehem. The text, true as it was, had no effect on them. Truth in a Bible text does not imply that the student follows it. So they stayed in Jerusalem because they did not respond to the Scripture as a signpost.

Unpacking the Theme: Messiah is both a Suffering One and a Glorious One

If Jesus Christ is the theme of both Old and New Testaments of the Bible, it would be helpful for us to see how he relates to our world, which we have acknowledged we see as both a wonderful world and also a thing of shame.

The Bible presents him both as sharing our shame and introducing us to glory. This was something even the first followers of Jesus found difficult to appreciate. And it was the first of many lessons Jesus found necessary to teach them.

What Jesus had to Say

For instance, after his resurrection two of his followers, engrossed in discussion, looked extremely sad as they walked to their home in the village of Emmaus. When Jesus joined them, they assumed he was just another visitor to Jerusalem, and explained their despondency by telling him their story – Jesus of Nazareth, the authoritative prophet and powerful healer had fallen foul of the chief priests and rulers who had handed him over to be sentenced to death by crucifixion. The two admitted that it had been their ardent hope that he would set Israel free, but this had not happened. Frankly, they were confused, disappointed, disillusioned and felt let down. That explained their gloom. But their story also touched on some of the strange reports that they were hearing. Women who had gone to the tomb had failed to find a body to anoint, but instead had seen a