What Does the Old Testament Have to do With Jesus
“What Does the Old Testament Have to Do With Jesus?”
Luke 24:45-47
Why should we read the Old Testament?
What does the Old Testament Have to Do With Jesus?
If you have read through the Old Testament you may have discovered, like me, that it seems to be filled with some interesting stories and lots of names and laws that I can’t relate to. Because it was written in ancient Hebrew that no one even speaks today, it’s difficult to see how it is relevant to us today.
The best reason for reading these ancient texts is because we are followers of Jesus, the Messiah of Israel. Christianity has adopted Israel’s Scriptures as part of our Scriptures because we follow the Israelite Messiah Jesus. Unfortunately, many of us are not in the habit of reading ancient Near Eastern texts. I certainly am not reading them.
I have to trust the authors who have degrees in such things to provide me with their insight. I also think it is significant that we read the Old Testament from the perspective of Jesus, or from the first century Jewish reader rather than from our 21st century perspective. In order to do so, we need some reading tools to allow us to step into a different perspective. So before we get started with the Biblical text, today I will provide an overview of the story of Joseph and his brothers, which will be a review for many of you, along with a perspective of how we will encounter the story.
We are entering the final part of the first scroll of the Hebrew Scriptures, that we know as the Book of Genesis. We will be reading the story of Jacob’s sons, Joseph and his brothers. I am sure many of you have read these stories or had them read to you when you were a child.
If I were to ask you to tell me the first things that pop into your head when hearing the name “Joseph” what would you say?
[Encourage responses]
Alright, I can see we are familiar with the story. Many of our memories come from children’s literature or movies. Today I want to suggest we consider how Jesus and the Jewish readers of the Hebrew Scriptures, in Jesus’ time, would have thought when they read the scroll and what they saw in the story. Val read for us today the comments Jesus had for this story. Here is a short outline of the story of Joseph and his brothers.
We will begin with the 12 sons of Jacob,
who was the son of Isaac,
who was the son of Abraham,
who was the son of a man named Terah,
who happened to be 10 sons away from a man named, Shem,
who was the son of Noah,
who happened to be 10 sons away from a couple named Adam and Eve.
There you have the generations of the Genesis scroll.
Of these 12 sons, the key character is the next to the last son, Joseph. Joseph is the key character who is elevated both literally and metaphorically in the opening scene. Using stage play metaphors, there are three acts in the Joseph story.
ACT ONE begins with Joseph at age 17, who has some dreams about how he is going to be elevated as the ruler of his brothers and of the universe, ruling over the sun, moon and stars.
The older brothers don’t like his dreams, in fact they don’t care for Joseph very much at all. They decide to kidnap him, although one of his brothers, Reuben tries to rescue him, but that fails. Instead, Judah makes a plan to counter Reuben’s plan which was somewhat successful because it involves selling Joseph as a slave to Egypt.
The sons deceive their father about what happened to their brother and their father is heartbroken.
The next story is about the older brother Judah, who is full of deception towards his daughter-in-law. His deception has the potential to destroy the future of his family. But alas, the daughter-in-law has her own deception for her father-in-law and through her counter deception, actually saves the family line from destruction.
We return back to the story of Joseph where we discover him in prison down in Egypt. However, his dreams come true, he manages to be elevated as ruler over Egypt.
ACT TWO:
Only to have a famine in the land, a food shortage. So, the brothers end up going down to Egypt looking for food. Who do they meet? The brother they sold into slavery. They don’t recognize him, so Joseph manages to begin his own deceptive scheme to test his brothers. He puts his brothers through a whole series of tricky tests to try and recreate the circumstances in which they betrayed him long ago to see if they had changed. There will be an interplay of Reuben and Judah that confirms they had changed. Then Judah ends up giving an epic climatic speech where he offers his own life into slavery on behalf of his brother Benjamin. At that moment, Joseph knows his brothers have truly changed.
The brother that had sold him into slavery was willing to offer himself up as a slave for his brother. Joseph reveals who he really is and the test is over.
It was through his disguise and deceptive testing that Joseph was able to rescue his family from destruction.
Like that hasn’t happened before in the Genesis story?
THE FINAL ACT is when the whole family goes down to Egypt where the ruler Joseph offers them a wonderful garden land full of abundant food as a refuge for his family.
Joseph manages to provide food for not only his family but for the Egyptians. Jacob comes to the end of his life and gives a blessing to Joseph, he elevates Judah as ruler among the brothers and offers a non-blessing to Reuben.
Both Jacob and Joseph draw near to death at different times yet, both request that their bones and bodies get taken out of Egypt and buried in the land of Canaan.
The final story at the end of the Genesis scroll is clearly a story about a family fracturing apart through jealousy, anger and betrayal. God uses these betrayals as the vehicle for His purposes to be fulfilled. Through these betrayals God is able to weave a story of rescue and transformation despite what the humans do to each other. Another narrative that ends with a promise of a ruler who will bring a blessing out of his family for all the nations.
When Jesus and his 2nd Century Jewish contemporaries read the ancient scrolls here are some of the things they would have recognized:
First Thing:
A familiar theme is about the deliverance of a chosen one, about the offering of a sacrifice that releases God’s blessing and the hope of the restoration of creation.
We have seen this theme throughout the narrative, beginning in Genesis 1 with the beginning of creation.
It begins with some kind of creation story,
a cycle of generations that start repeating the failures of their parents and grandparents,
until it unleashes some sort of terror in the world that God hands creation over to de-creation,
but manages to save one faithful person out,
then the cycle continues,
until we get to the New Testament where it ends with the ultimate sacrifice,
Jesus, the Messiah.
Second Thing:
They would have recognized intentional vocabulary used that are exactly the same words that occurred in the previous stories. The same vocabulary appears in the Eden story, the story of Cain and Abel, the flood story, and the post flood story.
Each story contains pieces of a familiar melody that is present throughout the entire Hebrew Scriptures. It is so prevalent that Jesus summarizes it like this in Luke 24,
“This is what is written:
The Messiah will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and
repentance for the forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations, beginning in Jerusalem.”
Why the Jewish leaders who had studied the Torah couldn’t see it is beyond me. Those who had ears, heard and began preaching the good news. They did such a great job, two thousand years later, we are sitting here today, understanding and believing what was passed down over thousands of generations.
I would like to share a metaphor that I found from Tim Mackey, a Hebrew scholar. Early Jewish readers, including Jesus, saw all the stories from the Hebrew Scriptures as networked together, much like a photomosaic.
A photomosaic is a large image made up of hundreds of thousands of smaller, individual photographs. When you look at it from far away, you see the main big picture. When you focus in closer, you see the tiny individual photos that make up the pieces.
[Show Mona Lisa Remastered by Robert Silvers]
In the most famous and widely circulated digital photomosaic of the painting, created by the inventor of this art, Robert Silvers, the small images are thousands of other famous paintings from art history.
- What they show: Portraits and masterworks from various centuries and movements.
- How it works: Silvers didn't digitally alter the colors of the individual paintings. Instead, he created an algorithm that scanned through a huge database of art pieces to find specific color tones, highlights, and shadow shapes within each painting that naturally matched a corresponding spot on Leonardo da Vinci's original portrait.
This is exactly what Jesus and the early followers of Jesus in the Second Temple period did with the Hebrew Scriptures. They put together the patterns, the themes and the repeated words and placed them alongside each other and something greater emerged out of them.
Take the story of a guy named Abraham and his son Isaac going up to a mountain, and the son’s life being offered but then given back again by God’s grace. Put it alongside the story of Jacob going into exile and coming back again. Now the story of Joseph and his brothers.
Somehow, in that upper room, having lunch with His disciples, Jesus was able to open their minds to the Scriptures and place all the little stories into the big picture of what was about to happen.
The suffering Messiah, giving His life, only to rise from the dead and by God’s grace offer everyone that believes in Him, the same experience, had been told over and over in the Torah and Hebrew Scriptures.
Jesus would become the fulfillment of Genesis 3:15,
“And I will put enmity
between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and hers;
he will crush your head,
and you will strike his heel.”
Satan’s head has been crushed.
Check in time.
So now what?
Hopefully I have provided some encouragement for us to continue to read through the book of Genesis and see how it repeats the pattern. Within this story we will discover which son is chosen to carry the lineage of the head crusher.
But more importantly, we will discover where we fit in this narrative. The photomosaic is not finished yet. The risen Messiah is returning to claim His own.
So, what does God want from us in the meantime?
When I read the story of Jesus, I don’t see a God who has a bunch of rules and laws and instructions for His followers. In fact, Jesus came to abolish all of that.
Jesus answered this questions with,
“‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ Matthew 22:37-38
This same question was asked back in the Old Testament. Micah’s response to the Israelites’ complaint that they didn’t know what God wanted from them was just as simple.
He has shown you, O mortal, what is good.
And what does the Lord require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God.
Let’s pray.