"To the law and to the testimony…"

When witnessing to Jewish people, we have to be prepared to root our argument in their own
Scriptures. Bearing in mind the controversy between Judaism and Christianity concerning the Messiah - in which the Jew refuses to accept the authority of the New Testament - we must be ready to consider the testimony of Old Testament on its own grounds. I do not want to press that unduly because I am fully aware that ultimately our interpretation of the Old Testament will depend on whether one accepts the rabbinic writings in the Talmud or the teachings of the apostles in the New Testament.

Dr. John "Rabbi" Duncan, a great character from nineteenth century Scotland, a great Hebrew scholar and a man mightily used of God among the Jewish people, in his lecture The Holy Spirit and the Jews, says,

You say the Talmud is the word of God; we say it is not. We say the New Testament is the word of God; you deny it. We say that Jesus is the Messiah the Son of the living God; your fathers crucified him as a blasphemer and you say you see no reason to forsake the wisdom of your fathers. Well, one thing is sure and on all hands confessed—Adonai is the only God and the Tanakh (Old Testament) is His blessed word. In that word he has promised his Holy Spirit. The holy men of old read the promise, and implored the gift,—the promise is in your hands, and reading you should repair to Adonai: He may be found—He is near … With your eye thus directed in singleness of heart toward Adonai, for His good Spirit to instruct you, read, study, meditate by day and night on the Tanakh (Old Testament), the acknowledged, the indubitable word of God. What the result will be I know full well.

In much the same vein the thesis of a recent book by R.L. Reymond, Jesus Divine Messiah: The Old Testament Witness states: "If we today would follow Jesus in His hermeneutical method, we must make the exegesis of the Old Testament, no less than the New the basis of our Christology." (p. vi) A reviewer of that book contends the weakness of the book is that Reymond does not let the Old Testament texts speak for themselves but looks at them through the glasses of the New Testament. That will be the difficulty and I doubt if we can altogether avoid it.

Messiah through Jewish eyes

Now it appears to me that the most useful contribution that I can make with regard to the vast subject of Messiah is to look at the subject from and Old Testament or the Jewish perspective. First, from the ground of the Old Testament revelation to the appearance of the Messiah and then, pressing through the inter-testamental period into the New Testament period, I want to illustrate the necessity of the New Testament revelation for a proper understanding of the Old Testament. Its hardly necessary to say that the contribution will be suggestive rather than comprehensive but I trust that it will at least stimulate our thinking concerning the progressive revelation of the Messiah.

We look, then, first of all to the five books of Moses and raise the question of what revelation is there of the Messiah. I remember attending a lecture in Glasgow of the Council of Christians and Jews when the speaker was a rabbi speaking of the idea of Messiah in Israel. In the question period a Jewish person raised the question, "Is it true that there is no mention of the Messiah in the five books of Moses?" The rabbi confirmed that indeed it is true there is no mention of Messiah in the Pentateuch.

Among the Jewish people the five books of Moses, the Torah, are the most important part of Scripture. They are elevated above all the rest of Scripture and everything else takes a secondary place. I’ve sometimes been challenged by Jewish people that when I’m quoting from the Prophets that they are "only commentary on the law". The twelth century philosopher Moses Maimonides proposed eleven different degrees of revelation and the Pentateuch takes the highest place. So, therefore, if it is true that there is no mention of Messiah in the treasured five books of Moses that is lending support to the Jewish contention that Messiah is not really central to Judaism. The law is central to Judaism, not the Messiah.

Moses and the Messiah

Hengstenberg’s Christology of the Old Testament contains six references to the Messiah in the Mosaic books. Genesis 3:15 is the embryonic statement of the gospel. God speaks to the serpent: "And I will put enmity hatred between you and the woman, and between your seed and her Seed; He shall bruise your head and you shall bruise His heel." We know that from the hindsight of the New Testament revelation that the divine curse on the serpent is also God’s blessing upon man, in the sense of what God will do in the heart of the man.

In Genesis 9:25, 27 there is the blessing of Noah upon Shem, in which the blessing of God is narrowed to a particular race of mankind.

In Genesis 12:1-3 God chooses Abraham and his seed: "I will make you a great nation; I will bless you." God promises that the Jewish people will conmme from Abraham and that through him He will bless the world. The promise is narrowed diown to anation. It is interesting to note that the three elements in the blessing upon Abraham are identical to the three elements in the divine statement of Genesis 3:15: the propensity to sin is dealt with when God puts hatred in for the serpent in the human heart: "I will put enmity between you and the woman". He then extends the pronouncement to the corporate seed: "and between your seed and her Seed." So also with Abraham: "I will bless you" and then the extension to the corporate seed: "I will make of you a great nation". And then, the Seed of the woman seed shall crush the serpent’s head and the serpent shall bruise His heel. In Abraham ultimately "all the families of the earth shall be blessed".

As the Scriptural revelation increases and progresses we see that the blessing upon the world can only be through the work of the Messiah, and in Genesis 49:10 we read: "The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh comes. And to him shall be the obedience of the people." The promise is focussed on the tribe of Judah and in Numbers 24:17 Balaam prophesies, "A Star shall come out of Jacob; a Sceptre shall rise out of Israel." Finally, in Deuteronomy 18:15-18, we learn that God will raise up in Israel a Prophet like Moses.

The shadow of Messiah in the law of Moses

In the next great part of that revelation, the deliverance from Egypt, the giving of the law and the
accompanying ritual of priesthood and sacrifice, Christians feel there is much more evidence of the Messiah. In the Exodus God laid down the principles of redemption. The deliverance from Egypt, for example comes through the sacrifice of a lamb. Nevertheless, there is no specific reference to a personal Messiah except, perhaps, in the promise of the "prophet like Moses" in Deuteronomy 18, although the Jews strongly argue against applying the passage to the Messiah. But God was establishing principles that would direct the attention of the Jewish people to a future period of blessing. The law not only described the perfect order for the kingdom of God, it also revealed the imperfections of the present state, and these factors served to constrain an earnest soul to long for an answer that would increasingly be seen to be realised only in the promised blessing of God.

The ritual of the priesthood and the sacrifice which Christians now see as rich in symbolism of the person and work of the Messiah was not necessarily connected in the minds of the Jewish people of that period with the work of a personal Messiah. When the Jew was laying his hands upon the sacrifice and confessing his sin he saw only the basic principle that this was the way in which God deals with his sin. But he would hardly make the connection with the Messiah. Nonetheless, the imperfection of that ritual must have increasingly pressed upon the mind of the thinking Jew the need to look beyond this. Dr. Patrick Fairburn has put it very strongly:

The felt imperfection and deficiency in the appointed sacrifices could not fail in such minds to connect itself with the Messiah, with whose coming there was always associated the introduction of a state of order and perfection. Indeed, this principle of felt imperfection must have had a
bearing upon all parts of the Old Testament economy. The establishment of the kingdom and thus the king in Israel, not only narrowed the blessing further from the tribe to the family, the family of David, but also laid the foundation for the expectation of the perfect king. But the disappointments with the successive kingdoms and kings would have again served to deepen
the realisation that fulfilment of promise with regard to the future kingdom would only be accomplished in a glorious kingdom and a perfect king.

Looking to the future

When we move into the prophetic period, the figure of the personal Messiah emerges much more. Nowhere is the Messiah more clearly presented to us than in the prophecy of Isaiah. In chapter 7 we have "the virgin" who will conceive and bear a son his name shall be called Immanuel. In chapter 9 we read of the Child who will be called "Wonderful, Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace." Chapter 11 introduces "the Branch" and God’s blessing upon him.

The latter 27 chapters of Isaiah’s prophecy, can be divided into three sets of nine chapters separated by the expression in 48:22 and 57:21, "There is no peace for the wicked". The middle chapter of the middle section is Isaiah 53, which presents to us the heart of the gospel, and in the midst of that chapter are the words. "He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities."

In the third chapter of Zechariah we are introduced to "the Branch", spoken of in chapter 9 as the king riding on a donkey into Jerusalem. In chapter 13:6 we read of the wounds in his hands, and in chapter 13:7, "Awake, O sword, against My Shepherd, against the man who is My Fellow", a very interesting expression that a man is God’s "Fellow". And, of course, there is the great statement, "And I will pour on the house of David and on the inhabitants of Jerusalem the Spirit of grace and of supplication; then they will look on Me whom they have pierced; they will mourn for Him as one mourns for his only son, and grieve for Him as one grieves for a firstborn."

At this point I am concerned not so much with particular predictions of the Messiah but with the overall view that goes to make up the Old testament picture of the Messiah. Just as rearranging the words in a sentence makes a very different sense, so the same predictions rearranged present a very different overall picture. And this to some extent seems to be the case with the Jewish people and those of the Old Testament period. Alfred Edersheim in his Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah puts it like this:

The general concept of what the rabbis had taught of the Messiah differed totally from what was presented by the prophet of Nazareth. Thus, what is the fundamental divergence between the two may be said to have existed long before the events which finally divided them. Both rabbinism and what, by anticipation, we designate Christianity, might regard the same predictions as messianic and look for their fulfilment whilst at the same time the messianic ideal of the synagogue might be quite other than the faith and hope the Church has claimed. Therefore, it is important, if possible, to ascertain what view the Jew had formulated of the expectation of the
Messiah in the period immediately prior to the commencement of the Christian era the period at the close of the Old Testament prophets utterances up to the revelation of the Old Testament scriptures.

Between the Testaments

Throughout the period between the completion of the Old Testament and the coming of Christ, though there were no further divine utterances through the prophets, it was not without its writings and many of these have survived. All these writings are held to be distinct from the inspired Word of God both by the synagogue and the Church. Nonetheless, there is some value in these writings because they convey something of the religious thought of that period and therefore may indicate Jewish messianic views of that time.

First of all, it is perhaps not without significance that there is no reference to a personal Messiah in the books of the Apocrypha, though they do envisage a national restoration of Israel. Maybe the silence is due rather to the character of the books than the absence of a hope of the Messiah, for that hope is clearly expressed in other writings of the same period. Another major work dating from the inter-testamental period, albeit not set out inb written form at that time, is the "Tradition of the Elders", the Mishnah. In its entirety it has but two cursory references to the Messiah.

The other main writings from that period are the apocalyptic writings of which the book of Daniel is sometimes referred to as the parent. By way of contrast, in the apocalyptic writings we have a considerable volume of visionary comment with regard to the Messiah. Dr. Beasley-Murray, an expert in this field, says in the New Bible Commentary that, "Eschatology is the subject where development is most marred in this inter-testamental period. It is particularly noticeable in the conception of personal immortality, the kingdom of God and the Messiah. Perhaps the best example is the book of Enoch."

The Book of Enoch

Bishop Westcott says of the book of Enoch, "No apocalyptic book is more remarkable for eloquence and prophetic vigour. In Enoch the advent of Messiah is contemplated with joyful and certain hope."

Consider the following passage:

I saw in heaven one ancient of days, his head was white as wool and with him was another whose countenance was as the appearance as of a man full of grace, like unto one of the holy angels. And I asked one of the angels which was with me to show me all of that Son of Man, who he was and
wherefore he went with the ancient of days, and he answered me this is the Son of Man unto whom righteousness belongs, with whom righteousness dwells, and who reveals all the treasures of that which is concealed, because the Lord of Spirits hath chosen him whose lot before the Lord of Spirits has surpassed all.