Part 3 – It really was predicted
Imagine being a Scripture taught Jew since childhood sitting at a table with Jesus in Emmaus, not having a clue who he was, and “beginning with Moses and all the Prophets” he explains in detail “what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself,” Luke 24:27.
Scriptures like Deuteronomy 18:15 – when Moses told the Israelites, “God, your God, is going to raise up a prophet for you. God will raise him up from among your kinsmen, a prophet like me. Listen obediently to him.” And how Moses repeated those same words in verses 18 and 19 too (so would Peter in Acts 3:22, and Stephen in Acts 7:37).
The Jews of Jesus’ day KNEW, therefore, that a great prophet like Moses would arise again. They were looking for him too, as we see in Philip’s excited shout to Nathaniel in John 1:45, “We’ve found the One Moses wrote about in the Law, the One preached by the prophets. It’s Jesus, Joseph’s son, the one from Nazareth.”
Philip got that part right, but still no clue that the One Moses wrote about would also suffer and die, or why his suffering and death were necessary, or what would actually be accomplished by his suffering and death as well. That part was still a mystery to all Jesus’ disciples.
But how did they MISS it, when only two hundred years earlier an amazing book had hit their Jewish bookstores specifically predicting the Messiah’s arrival, including actual dates they could work out for themselves, that also predicted his death as well? There it was in Daniel 9:25, that great prediction of an “Anointed One” who would put an end to sin and “set things right forever” (24) – BUT, who would also be killed (26).
Surely that would ring a bell or two in their heads as they sat there with Jesus taking them through the prophecies they were already familiar with in Isaiah – like the one in Isaiah 49:5-6 that spoke of a great Servant whom God had chosen to “recover the tribes of Israel” so that Israel would become “a light for the nations to make God’s salvation global.” And how that Servant, in the process of saving Israel and the whole world, would also suffer and die – mentioned in considerable detail just four chapters later in Isaiah 53.
It was all there in their Scriptures, but so difficult for them to accept. And not just difficult for those two men either…(continues tomorrow)
Buck To Basics 