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The Old Testament does not portray God as an uncaring dispenser of grim condemnation.
Yes, He is holy, just, and unwavering in His commitment to punish sin, as He is in the New Testament.
But the God of the Old Testament is also a God of love who offers a promise of hope, even toward His enemies.
He is the “compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger and abounding in faithful love and truth” ().
Love is not a uniquely Christian thing; it is a biblical thing.
Love
The Old Testament enjoins love in many places.
For instance, what Jesus will eventually call the greatest command is first given to Israel: — Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength.
The second command that follows from the first comes from the Old Testament as well:
“Love him [a foreigner living among you] as yourself” ().
And the pattern for how Israel should love is how God himself loves: — He executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the resident alien, giving him food and clothing.
You are also to love the resident alien, since you were resident aliens in the land of Egypt.
Since God loves his enemies, his people must do the same.
commands, v — Don’t gloat when your enemy falls, and don’t let your heart rejoice when he stumbles,
And teaches, v — If your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat, and if he is thirsty, give him water to drink;
The God of the Old Testament is a God of love.
Forbearance
When we consider the whole sweep of Old Testament history and observe God’s patience toward
those who have declared themselves His enemies through disobedience,
we see a God of unspeakable love and forbearance.
He did not have to let human history continue after the fall in the garden.
He did not have to persevere with the wayward nation of Israel.
He did not have to persevere with the wayward nation of Israel.
Yet we watch His grace, love, mercy, and patience on an epic scale—stretched out across the history of a people.
It almost looks as if God planned to use history to reveal his glory to his people.
And in fact, he did.
Hope
Hope
Understanding the Old Testament requires understanding its promise of hope.
What hope?
We have talked plenty [in the past] about God’s commitment to holiness and the failure of His people to live up to the requirements of holiness.
And we have considered God’s promise to punish the wicked (in ).
So what hope could sinners have?
**Their hope was not in their history.
The history of the Old Testament proved them (and us) to be moral and spiritual failures.
**Nor was their hope finally in the sacrificial system.
As the psalmist said, “Sacrifice and offering you did not desire,” at least not without something even more basic.
How then could the hope held out in true?
How could God “forgive wickedness” and still “not leave the guilty unpunished”?
If the answer was not in the Old Testament people themselves or in their own history,
it was in God and his promise, particularly in God’s promised person.
As we have seen, blood must be shed in order to assuage the righteous wrath of God against sin.
Justice demands that sin be paid for either by the guilty party himself or herself or by an innocent substitute who bears the suffering and death on behalf of the guilty party.
Furthermore, the punishment of a substitute requires some sort of relation between the guilty one and the one being offered as the sacrifice.
But where would a perfect substitute be found?
A Messiah
Sources from the first century suggest that messianic hope and expectation were prominent at the time of Jesus’ birth.
People did not wonder if the Messiah would come.
They took it for granted that their only hope lay with a specially anointed one of God—the Messiah.
Why?
The Old Testament is filled with the promise of a coming person.
God’s people waited for the prophet God promised to Moses
— “The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own brothers.
You must listen to him.
This is what you requested from the Lord your God at Horeb on the day of the assembly when you said, ‘Let us not continue to hear the voice of the Lord our God or see this great fire any longer, so that we will not die!’
Then the Lord said to me, ‘They have spoken well.
I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their brothers.
I will put my words in his mouth, and he will tell them everything I command him.
I will hold accountable whoever does not listen to my words that he speaks in my name.
They waited for the king and, perhaps, the suffering servant (; ; ).
— For a child will be born for us, a son will be given to us, and the government will be on his shoulders.
He will be named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace.
— He was despised and rejected by men, a man of suffering who knew what sickness was.
He was like someone people turned away from; he was despised, and we didn’t value him.
Yet he himself bore our sicknesses, and he carried our pains; but we in turn regarded him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted.
But he was pierced because of our rebellion, crushed because of our iniquities; punishment for our peace was on him, and we are healed by his wounds.
We all went astray like sheep; we all have turned to our own way; and the Lord has punished him for the iniquity of us all.
They waited for the son of man coming on the clouds seen by Daniel
— I continued watching in the night visions, and suddenly one like a son of man was coming with the clouds of heaven.
He approached the Ancient of Days and was escorted before him.
These promises point toward the answer to the Old Testament riddle.
And these promises are the hope of the Old Testament.
More than anything else, in fact, the Old Testament teaches us that these promises offer us our only hope.
The fulfillment of these hopes, however, would not come in the Old Testament, but in the new, which we turn to now.
The collection of twenty-seven books that comprise the New Testament begins by directly addressing this promise with four accounts of the life of the Messiah.
The four documentaries of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all argue that Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah.
He is the promised one for whom God’s people have been waiting.
Where Adam and Israel failed, Jesus was faithful.
As did his predecessors, he faced Satan’s temptations.
Yet he survived them without sin.
He is the prophet promised by Moses, the king prefigured by David, and the divine son of man promised by Daniel.
In fact, Jesus is the very Word of God made flesh (, ).
And the genealogy introduces a select list of Jesus’ ancestors from Abraham onward in the sytle of the OT genealogies.
Let’s look at it together.
Dever, M. (2010).
What Does God Want of Us Anyway?: A Quick Overview of the Whole Bible (pp.
40–41).
Wheaton, IL: Crossway.
THE PREFACE
— An account of the genealogy of Jesus Christ...
The word “account” “An account of the genealogy”…account means book.
Here is the book of the ancestor’s of our Lord’s humanity.
The first book of the OT is filled with Genealogies as well, which is its glory that it does so.
But the glory of the NT herein excels, in that it begins with an account of the genealogy of Him that made the world.
So here is the One whose origin is from antiquity, from ancient times, being sent forth in the fulness of time, born of a woman.
THE PURPOSE
— An account of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the Son of David, the Son of Abraham:
Matthew uses that full name Jesus Christ (which he doesn’t use together very often at all).
Jesus is His personal name, which is used 150 times which is used only in the account of Jesus.
No one in this gospel addresses Jesus by His name.
Matthew only uses the word “Christ” 17 times.
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