The last two weeks I've written about trying to understand God through his Son, whom we know as Jesus the Messiah (Christ). We looked at some scriptures including Heb. 1:1-3 and John 5:39-40 to show that the written word of God points us to the Living Word of God (John 1:14) who shows us exactly what the Father is like (John 14:9). So this time, let's look at a passage from the Old Testament that points us to what God was going to do in Jesus Christ.
Skipping over, for now, the first-ever indication of a savior in Genesis 3:15 (second half), and the desperation of the human race without God in the next few chapters, let's go to the call of Abram / Abraham in Genesis 12:1-4. Here, God says Abram must leave his native land, go to another place, and that God will make him into a great nation, plus make him famous and a blessing to many; God will bless those who bless Abram and curse those who treat him with contempt. This passage is pivotal for a lot of reasons: it starts the story of the "father of the faithful" as an example of a life of growing faithfulness to the call of God; it tells about the roots of the nation of Israel; it foretells the birth of the Messiah as Abram's descendent ("All the families on earth will be blessed through you"); and it tells how we are to respond when God shows us his will ("So Abram departed as the Lord had told him").
But there's one more level of meaning we can find here: look again at the command and the promises from God to Abram: leave your home, go to a strange place; and you will be famous, be blessed and become a blessing to all nations. That's a picture of what the Father asks the Son to do, and that the Son is willing to do, for our sake. Paul writes in Phil. 2:5-11: "You must have the same attitude that Christ Jesus had. Though he was God, he did not think of equality with God as something to cling to. Instead, he gave up his divine privileges; he took the humble position of a slave and was born as a human being. When he appeared in human form, he humbled himself in obedience to God and died a criminal’s death on a cross. Therefore, God elevated him to the place of highest honor and gave him the name above all other names, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father." The calling of Abram is a rough picture, in a way, of what the Son of God would do later, going to a 'strange land' -- the physical earth -- and through his life, death and resurrection for us, become famous and a blessing to all nations.
The Old Testament is full of word pictures that make sense in their original context, up to a point. (Some of those stories don't seem to make any sense at all on their own, but that's a story for another day.) The entire history of Israel sets up for us the larger story of the Messiah to come. But only in Christ are these stories, histories and concepts given their full weight of meaning; revealing "the story behind the story" as it were; and only as we see them fulfilled in Christ can we understand how they apply to us today.
Reading the New Testament scriptures and letting them highlight the Old Testament is kind of like seeing the Old Testament in 3-D: everything jumps out at you in a much different way. Next time we'll look at someone else's story and see what we can learn.
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