Things Foretold
by Terry Wane Benton
Peter drove a point home to the Jews who did not believe in Jesus but gave lip service to believing their scriptures. It is impossible for them to actually believe the Old Testament scriptures, the scriptures the Jews claimed to believe because the Old Testament scriptures are “those things which God foretold by the mouth of all His prophets, that the Christ would suffer, He has thus fulfilled” (Acts 3:17-18). Their very participation in rejecting Jesus was also foretold. Psalm 118:22 said, “the stone which was rejected by you builders, has become the chief cornerstone”, and Peter reminded the Jews of this. God foretold that they would “not believe the report,” and they would think Jesus was suffering because He was rejected by God and afflicted (Isaiah 53). Thus, they fulfilled their own scriptures by rejecting Jesus, and their own scriptures said Jesus would suffer, and the real explanation was found in their scriptures that He was God’s “Servant” suffering for “our transgression” (not His own), and their own scriptures telling that this Servant of God “after His soul was made an offering for sin” would “prolong His days,” which implies He would be raised from the dead to prolong His days. All of this foretelling of
- the Jews rejecting Jesus,
- Jesus was raised after He was offered for our sins, and
- very few seeing the arm of the Lord in these activities, were “foretold things.”
Because Jewish scholarship fails to see Jesus in their scriptures, they have had to move into very liberal scholarship that rejects the divine hand in their own scriptures. Thus, their scriptures have become fascinating and wonderful, which Christians believe with awe and amazement but are categorized as myths among blind scholars.
Jesus had told the Jews that “if you believed Moses, you would believe Me, for He wrote of Me” (John 5:46,47). Peter wrote later that “we have the prophetic word made more sure” (II Peter 1:16-21). Failure to see the “hand of the Lord” in the death of Jesus, seeing it properly as not someone dying because of His own sins but making His soul an offering for our sins, and failure to see that God blessed Jesus by prolonging His days (raising Him from dead) is why there is a vast divide in modern scholarship. If you see Jesus in the foretold things, you will greatly appreciate the prophetic word, but if you fail to see Jesus, you will find yourself explaining away the scriptures and attaching a bias of myth to much of it. Isaiah asked, “To whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed” (Isaiah 53:1f). If you see Jesus in the foretold things of the Old Testament, you see the wonderful arm of the Lord in the predictions and fulfillments, and your love of the Bible will soar. If you don’t see Jesus as the fulfillment, then you will fail to see the Bible properly and you will tend to dismiss it without a real honest search to know the truth. To Christians, “we have the prophetic word made more sure.” The Bible is absolutely wonderful in revealing God’s arm in the great redemptive death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus.
Have you seen the arm of the Lord in all these great prophesies?
