E-Book, Englisch, Band 2, 272 Seiten
Guthrie The Lamb of God (A 10-week Bible Study)
1. Auflage 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4335-3301-3
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection
Seeing Jesus in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy
E-Book, Englisch, Band 2, 272 Seiten
Reihe: Seeing Jesus in the Old Testament
ISBN: 978-1-4335-3301-3
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection
Nancy Guthrie teaches the Bible at her home church, Cornerstone Presbyterian Church in Franklin, Tennessee, as well as at conferences around the country and internationally, including her Biblical Theology Workshop for Women. She is the author of numerous books and the host of the Help Me Teach the Bible podcast with the Gospel Coalition. She and her husband founded Respite Retreats for couples who have faced the death of a child, and they are cohosts of the GriefShare video series.
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I worked at a publishing company for a long time before my name ever appeared in a book. In their acknowledgments, authors often thanked people such as the acquisitions editor who contracted the book and the editors who worked on the manuscript—people they worked with prior to the book’s publication. As the publicist, I usually didn’t become active in the process until after the book was shipped off to the printer, so my name never seemed to make it into the published books. But, finally, after working there for about six years, an author put my name in his book. Max Lucado, one of the most gracious and authentic authors I’ve ever worked with, mentioned me in the acknowledgments in the front of his book The Applause of Heaven. I had a new claim to fame—proof that I not only knew Max Lucado, but, more importantly, he knew me. (Thanks, Max. I hope you’ll like it that now I’ve put your name in my book.)
When someone people know and respect writes about a person, it makes us more willing to read or listen to what that person has to say. This is why we like to read through the endorsements on the covers of book jackets looking for names we recognize in the list of endorsers. When someone we respect has taken the time to read what a writer has written and offers an endorsement that commends it as worthwhile, we’re usually more inclined to read the book.
Imagine if you could say that someone who lived hundreds of years before you, someone who wrote a book that everyone you know has read and reread and sought to live by, wrote about you. Imagine that you could say that the book he wrote not only mentioned you but was actually all about you—that you were the central character in all of his writings, the person whose identity had been kept hidden from all who had read his book throughout the centuries. That would be an astounding claim.
That’s exactly the claim Jesus made. In an interchange with the religious leaders of his day who were questioning his right to assume authority that had always been reserved for God alone, Jesus claimed that the book written by the one author whom his questioners respected more than any other was actually all about him. Jesus said:
You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life. . . . For if you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote of me. (John 5:39–40, 46)
We can almost see them shaking their heads with quizzical looks on their faces, thinking, What do you mean, that Moses wrote about you? Where exactly did Moses write about you? These were A+ students of the book of Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Most of them could quote long passages from Moses’s writings and did so on a daily basis. And here was Jesus telling them that what they had been reading and studying their whole lives was all about him, suggesting that there was a deep fault line, a huge blind spot, in their understanding.
This general lack of understanding about how to read the Old Testament was why, in the forty days between his resurrection and his ascension, Jesus sat down with his disciples—men who had grown up reading the Old Testament Scriptures—and taught them how to truly understand them, how to read them in light of their fulfillment. Luke tells us that, “beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:27). Jesus opened his disciples’ eyes to see all the ways Moses and all of the other Old Testament writers wrote about him.
And this is what we want him to open our eyes to see. We don’t want to be like the religious people of Jesus’s day who regularly went to Bible study yet were so stuck in their long-held assumptions about the Bible, so bogged down by the long to-do list they derived from the Bible, that they completely missed what it was all about—namely who it was all about.
If you’ve done the previous study in this series, The Promised One: Seeing Jesus in Genesis, then you could probably list many of the ways Moses wrote about Christ in the first book of the Bible. When Moses wrote in Genesis 3:15 about the offspring of the woman who would crush the head of the Serpent, he was writing about Jesus. In his account of the ark in which Noah and his family found safety in the storm of God’s judgment, he was writing about the nature of salvation found by those who hide themselves in Christ. When he wrote about God’s call and promise to Abraham that in him “all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Gen. 12:3), he was writing about the blessing available to people of every tribe and tongue through Abraham’s future descendant, Jesus. When Moses took thirteen chapters to tell the story of Joseph, the beloved son of his father who was rejected by his brothers and became the one person all people in the world had to come to for salvation, he was writing in shadow form about the greater Joseph, Jesus.
We will see in this study, as we make our way through the rest of the writings of Moses, that he has much more to tell us about the Christ who would come fifteen hundred years after he wrote about him in his book.
In Moses’s account of his own life, as one who was born under the threat of death, left the royal palace to identify with his suffering brothers, and led his people out of slavery, we will see the shadow of Jesus, who left the halls of heaven to be born under Herod’s murderous edict and lead his people out of their captivity to sin.
In the unblemished lambs who died that first Passover night so that the firstborn son could live, we will see Jesus, God’s firstborn, “the Lamb who was slain” so that we can live (Rev. 5:12).
As we witness Moses leading his people through the waters of the Red Sea unscathed, we will see Jesus, who leads us through the waters of death into everlasting life.
In the pillar of cloud and fire that guided God’s people, the manna that fed them, and the rock that gushed with water for them to drink, we will see the light of the world, the bread of life, the living water—Jesus himself.
As we listen to the law given by God on the mountain, we will hear its echo in the words of Jesus, who climbed up a mountain and spoke with authority about what it means to obey God from the heart.
We will go over Moses’s record of the design for the tabernacle in which God descended to dwell among his people, details that have no meaning apart from Jesus, who descended to dwell among his people.
We will witness the establishment of the priesthood, those who were to be holy to the Lord and offer sacrifices for sin. In the priest’s clothing and ceremonies and sacrifices we’ll see that Moses was preparing his people to grasp the Great High Priest, the Holy One of God, who offered himself as a once-for-all sacrifice.
We’ll follow Israel’s forty years in the wilderness where they repeatedly disobeyed and rebelled, seeing the contrast between them and Jesus, the true Israel, who went out into the wilderness for forty days meeting every temptation with perfect obedience.
We’ll begin today by giving attention to something Moses wrote near the end of his last book, Deuteronomy, a prophetic promise and instruction for God’s people as they prepared to cross over the Jordan and enter into the Promised Land. Here is what he said:
The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your brothers—it is to him you shall listen. . . . And the LORD said to me. . . . “I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him.” (Deut. 18:15–18)
This is interesting. Moses was a prophet—not so much in the sense that he foretold the future but in that he spoke for God to the people. God installed Moses as his first official prophet to Israel when the Israelites arrived at Mount Sinai because the Israelites were too terrified to hear God speak directly to them. They asked Moses to go up the mountain in their place and hear what God had to say and then relay it to them so they wouldn’t have to hear God’s thunderous voice. So Moses listened to God for the people and spoke to the people for God.
Evidently, the same Spirit who imparted God’s word to Moses for the people also imparted understanding to Moses about himself—an understanding that God had woven into the fabric of his life a pattern that would also be seen in the Messiah’s life. God sovereignly orchestrated Moses’s life in such a way that it would one day become clear that his ministry had been a miniature version of the ministry of the coming prophet. Numerous aspects of Moses’s life provided God’s people with pictures of the Promised One, the Messiah whom God promised to send. If God’s people would remember who Moses was and what he had accomplished and experienced, it would help them to recognize the Messiah when he came. He would be the one they would need to listen to even more intently than they listened to Moses.
So as we begin our study of these four books of the Pentateuch written by Moses, let’s take a mini tour of Moses’s life in order that we might see more clearly and listen more intently to the greater prophet God raised up from among God’s people, who...
