Part 2 – Understanding dawns
As soon as Jesus was raised back to life again, he got right down to the business of explaining what had just happened – first of all to the ladies gathered at his tomb, and then to two men on the road to Emmaus.
The two men were deeply saddened by Jesus’ death because, Luke 24:21, they thought Jesus “was the glorious Messiah who’d come to rescue Israel,” but now he was dead. It must have been quite a shock, then, when Jesus, who’d joined them, burst out with, “You are such foolish, foolish people,” verses 25-26, because “you find it so hard to believe all that the prophets wrote in the Scriptures. Wasn’t it clearly predicted by the prophets that the Messiah would have to suffer all these things before entering his time of glory?”
It was? But where in Scripture was the Messiah’s suffering predicted? They hadn’t a clue, so in verse 27, “Jesus quoted them passage after passage from the writings of the prophets, beginning with the book of Genesis and right on through the Scriptures, explaining what the passages meant and what they said about him.”
The two men were so excited by what was in their Scriptures all along that they asked Jesus to stay over that night to explain more. But during supper, when it dawned on them who Jesus was, he disappeared. So they packed their bags and headed straight back to Jerusalem to report to the remaining eleven disciples what had just happened.
But half way through their report Jesus suddenly appears (36). And again he reminds them, “When I was with you before,” verse 44, “don’t you remember me telling you that everything written about me by Moses and the prophets and in the Psalms must all come true?”
Well, yes, that IS what he’d told them in Luke 18:31, when he’d said they were all going to Jerusalem, and when they got there “all the predictions of the ancient prophets concerning me will come true.’”
And in John 5:45-46 he’d mentioned one of the prophets by name too, when he told the Jews who wanted to have him killed, “Your accuser is Moses,” because “he wrote about me, but you refuse to believe him, so you refuse to believe in me.” So again, it was in their Scriptures all along, starting with the writings of Moses, that Jesus would be coming – and what he was coming for. What other scriptures could there be, then?…(continues tomorrow)
Buck To Basics 