What is the Greatest Love Story ever?

If you were to name some classic love stories you might suggest Helen of Troy & Paris (igniting the Trojan War dramatized in the Iliad), Cleopatra and Mark Antony (whose love entwined Rome in a civil war with Octavian/Augustus Caesar), Romeo & Juliet, Beauty & the Beast, or perhaps Cinderella & Prince Charming. In them, history, pop culture, and romantic fiction come together in offering passionate love stories. These easily captivate our hearts, emotions, and imaginations.

Helen of Troy and Paris
^{_{Richard Westall, PD-US-expired, via Wikimedia Commons}}

Ruth & Boaz Love Story

Amazingly, the love that sparked between Ruth & Boaz has proved far more enduring than any of these love affairs. It still affects the lives of all the billions of us living today. Its ramifications live on more than three thousand years after these lovers met. Rather than the tabloid love stories that last only a fleeting moment their love has outlasted all the classics mentioned above. Their romance is also a picture of a mystical and spiritual love offered to you and me. The story of Ruth and Boaz deals with cross-cultural & forbidden love. It models a healthy relationship between a powerful man and a vulnerable woman. Thus it speaks to today’s #MeToo generation. It becomes a blueprint for us on how to establish a healthy marriage. By any of these measures, the love story of Ruth & Boaz is worth knowing.

The Book of Ruth in the Bible records their love. It is a short book with only 2400 words. It thus makes a quick read (here). The setting happens around 1150 BCE, making this the oldest of all recorded love stories.

Hollywood movie depicting the Ruth Love story

The Love Story of Ruth

Naomi and her husband with their two sons leave Israel to escape drought. They settle in the nearby country of Moab (today’s Jordan). After marrying local women the two sons die, as does Naomi’s husband, leaving her alone with her two daughters-in-law. Naomi decides to return to her native Israel and one of her daughters-in-law, Ruth, chooses to accompany her. After a long absence, Naomi is back in her native Bethlehem. She has become a destitute widow and is accompanied by Ruth, a young and vulnerable Moabite immigrant.

Ruth & Boaz meet

Bereft of income, Ruth goes out to gather grain left behind by the local harvest crews in the fields. The Law of Moses, as a social safety net, had ordained harvesters to leave some grains behind in their fields. Accordingly, the impoverished could gather food and survive. Randomly it would seem, Ruth finds herself picking grains in the fields of a wealthy landowner named Boaz. Boaz notices Ruth among the others working hard to gather up the grains left behind by his work crews. He instructs his foremen to leave extra grain behind in the field so that she can gather more.

Because she can gather plentifully in his fields, Ruth comes back to Boaz’s fields every day to gather left-over grain. Boaz, ever the protector, ensures that his crews do not harass or molest Ruth. Instead, he commands them to leave more grain behind for her to gather. Ruth and Boaz become interested in each other. But because of differences in age, social status, and nationality, neither makes a move. Here Naomi steps in as match-maker. She instructs Ruth to boldly lay down by Boaz’s side at night after he has celebrated the harvest gathering. Boaz understands this as a marriage proposal and decides to marry her.

Kinsman Redeemer

But the situation is more complicated than simply love between them. Naomi is a relative of Boaz, and since Ruth is her daughter-in-law, Boaz, and Ruth are kin by marriage. Boaz must marry her as a ‘kinsmen redeemer’. This meant that under the Law of Moses, he would marry her ‘in the name’ of her first husband (Naomi’s son). In this way, he would provide for Naomi also. This would entail that Boaz purchases Naomi’s family fields. Though that would prove costly to Boaz it was not the biggest obstacle. There was another closer relative that had first rights to buy Naomi’s family’s fields (and also thus marry Ruth).

So the marriage of Ruth to Boaz hung on whether another man wanted the responsibility to care for Naomi and Ruth. At a public meeting of the city elders, this first-in-line declined the marriage. He did so because it put his estate at risk. Boaz was thus free to purchase and redeem Naomi’s family estate and marry Ruth.

Legacy of Ruth & Boaz

In their union, they had a child, Obed, who in turn became the grandfather of King David. God promised David that ‘a Christ’ would come from his family, with further prophecies following. Centuries later, Jesus was born in Bethlehem, the same town that Ruth and Boaz had met in long before. Their romance, marriage, and family line resulted in offspring that today is the basis for the BCE and CE calendar. Global holidays like Christmas & Easter also count among the by-products of that love. Not bad for a romance in a dusty village over 3000 years ago.

Picturing a Greater Love Story

The rich and powerful Boaz treated Ruth, the destitute foreign woman, with chivalry and respect. This speaks against the harassment and exploitations now common in our #MeToo day. The historical impact of the family line which this romance and marriage produced, detectable every time we note the date on our devices, gives this love story an enduring legacy. But the Ruth & Boaz love story is also a picture of an even greater love. You and I are invited to this one.

The Bible describes us in a manner evoking Ruth when it says:

I will plant her for myself in the land;
I will show my love to the one I called ‘Not my loved one.’
Hosea 2:23

The Old Testament prophet Hosea (ca 750 BCE) initiated reconciliation in his fractured marriage. The scripture used this reunion to picture God reaching out to us, the unloved, with His love. Ruth also entered the land as one unloved but then was shown love by Boaz. Likewise, God desires to show His love even to those of us who feel far from His love. The New Testament (Romans 9:25) quotes this to show how God reaches wide to love those far from Him.

How is His love shown? Jesus, that descendant offspring from Boaz & Ruth, is God come-in-the-flesh. Therefore he is our ‘kinsman’, just as Boaz was to Ruth. Thus, as Boaz paid to redeem Ruth, Jesus paid for our debt to God on the cross, and thus he…

gave himself for us to redeem us from all wickedness and to purify for himself a people that are his very own, eager to do what is good.
Titus 2:14

Boaz was a ‘kinsman-redeemer’ who paid a price to redeem Ruth. This explicitly illustrated, how likewise, Jesus our ‘kinsman-redeemer’, paid (with his life) to redeem us.

A Model for our marriages

The way Jesus (and Boaz) paid to redeem and then win his bride models how we can build our marriages. The Bible explains how we establish our marriages:

Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.

Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. ²³For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. ²⁴Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.

²⁵Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her ²⁶to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, ²⁷and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. ²⁸In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself.²⁹After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church— ³⁰for we are members of his body. ³¹“For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” ³²This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church. ³³However, each one of you also must love his wifeas he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.
Ephesians 5:21-33

Boaz and Ruth established their marriage on love and respect. Jesus’ care for his church is a model for husbands to love their wives sacrificially. So we do well to build our marriages on these same values.

A Wedding Invitation for you and me

As in all good love stories, the Bible concludes with a wedding. The price that Boaz paid to redeem Ruth paved the way for their wedding. Likewise, the price that Jesus paid has paved the way for our wedding. That wedding is not figurative but real, and those accepting his wedding invitation are called ‘The Bride of Christ’. As it says:

Let us rejoice and be glad and give him glory! For the wedding of the Lamb has come, and his bride has made herself ready.
Revelation 19:7

Those who receive Jesus’ offer of redemption become his ‘bride’. This heavenly wedding is offered to all of us. The Bible ends with this invitation for you and me to come to His wedding

The Spirit and the bride say, “Come!” And let the one who hears say, “Come!” Let the one who is thirsty come; and let the one who wishes take the free gift of the water of life.
Revelation 22:17

The relationship between Ruth & Boaz is a model of love that is still making itself felt today. It is a picture of the heavenly romance of God who loves us. He will marry as His Bride all who accept His marriage proposal. As with any marriage proposal, His offer should be weighed to see if you should accept it. Start here with the ‘plan’ laid out from the beginning of human history and follow its development. Notice how it is all predicted long beforehand to prove it really is God’s Proposal.

Another adaptation of the Book of Ruth in film

February 12, 2023

What’s the Gospel? Considered through COVID, Quarantine and Vaccine

The novel coronavirus, or COVID-19, emerged in China towards the end of 2019. Just a few months later it had raged around the world, infecting and killing millions while spreading to every country.

The lightning fast spread of COVID-19 created panic around the world. People were unsure what to do in light of this pandemic. But before vaccines emerged, medical professionals insisted that success in containing COVID-19 hung on one big strategy. Everyone on the planet practiced social distancing and quarantine. This caused authorities around the world to setup lockdown and isolation rules.

In most places people could not meet in large groups and had to keep at least two meters distance from others. Those who came in contact with someone testing positive for COVID-19 had to completely isolate themselves from contact with others.

Simultaneously, medical researchers raced to find a vaccine. They hoped that vaccinated people would develop resistance to the coronavirus. Then the spread of COVID-19 would be less fatal and slow down.

These extreme procedures to isolate, quarantine, and develop a coronavirus vaccine, provide a living illustration of another procedure to treat a different virus. But this virus is a spiritual one. That procedure is at the heart of the mission of Jesus and his Gospel of the Kingdom of Heaven. The coronavirus was so serious that societies across the planet attempted drastic steps to protect their citizens. So perhaps it is worthwhile to also understand this spiritual counterpart. We do not want to be caught unaware by this threat like the world was with COVID. The COVID-19 pandemic illustrates abstract Biblical themes like sin, heaven, and hell, but also the mission of Jesus.

First how the infectious disease illustrates sin…

A Deadly & Contagious Infection.

No one really thought that COVID-19 is pleasant to think about, but it was unavoidable. Likewise, the Bible talks a great deal about sin and its consequences, another topic we prefer to avoid. An image the Bible uses to describe sin is that of a spreading infectious disease. Like COVID, it describes sin as going across the whole human race and killing it.

Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned.
Romans 5:12

All of us have become like one who is unclean,
and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags;
we all shrivel up like a leaf,
and like the wind our sins sweep us away.
Isaiah 64:6

Epidemics are diseases but are not the cause of the disease. For example, AIDS is the disease; HIV is the virus that causes the disease. SARS is the disease; SARS Coronavirus-1 is the virus that causes the disease. COVID-19 is a disease with its symptoms. SARS Coronavirus-2 is the virus behind it. In the same way, the Bible says that our sins (plural) are a spiritual disease. Sin (singular) is its root, and it results in death.

Moses & the Bronze Serpent

Jesus linked an Old Testament event connecting disease and death to his mission. This is the account of snakes infesting the Israelite camp in the time of Moses. The Israelites needed a cure before death overwhelmed them all.

They traveled from Mount Hor along the route to the Red Sea, to go around Edom. But the people grew impatient on the way; ⁵they spoke against God and against Moses, and said, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? There is no bread! There is no water! And we detest this miserable food!”

⁶Then the Lord sent venomous snakes among them; they bit the people and many Israelites died. ⁷The people came to Moses and said, “We sinned when we spoke against the Lord and against you. Pray that the Lord will take the snakes away from us.” So Moses prayed for the people.

⁸The Lord said to Moses, “Make a snake and put it up on a pole; anyone who is bitten can look at it and live.” ⁹So Moses made a bronze snake and put it up on a pole. Then when anyone was bitten by a snake and looked at the bronze snake, they lived.
Numbers 21:4-9

Throughout the Old Testament, one became unclean either by infectious disease, by touching dead bodies, or by sin. These three are associated with one another. The New Testament sums up our situation like this:

As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, ²in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient.
Ephesians 2: 1-2

Death in the Bible means ‘separation’. It involves both a physical (soul separates from the body) and spiritual death (soul separated from God). Sin is like an unseen but real virus inside us. It causes immediate spiritual death. This then leads to a certain physical death over time.

Though we would rather not think about it, the Bible treats sin as real and deadly as the Coronavirus. We cannot afford to ignore it. But it also points to the vaccine…

The Vaccine – Through the death of the Seed

From its beginning, the Bible developed a theme of the coming Seed. A seed is essentially a packet of DNA that can unfurl and develop into new life. The DNA in a seed is specific information from which it builds large molecules of specific shapes (proteins). In this sense, it is similar to a vaccine, which are large molecules (called antigens) of a specific shape. God promised that this coming Seed, announced from the beginning, would solve the problem of sin and death.

And I will put enmity
Between you and the woman,
And between your seed and her seed;
He shall bruise you on the head,
And you shall bruise him on the heel.”
Genesis 3:15

See here for details on the woman and her Seed. God later promised that the Seed would come through Abraham to go to all nations.

In your (Abraham’s) seed all the nations of the earth shall be blessed, because you have obeyed My voice.
Genesis 22:18

In these promises the Seed is singular. A ‘he’, not a ‘they’ or an ‘it’, was to come.

The Gospel reveals Jesus as the promised Seed – but with a twist. The seed would die.

Jesus replied, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. ²⁴Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.
John 12:23-24

His death was on our behalf.

But we do see Jesus, who was made lower than the angels for a little while, now crowned with glory and honor because he suffered death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.
Hebrews 2:9

Some vaccines first kill the virus in it. Then the vaccine with the dead virus is injected into our bodies. In this way, our bodies can produce the necessary antibodies. Our immune system can thus defend our bodies from the virus. Similarly, the death of Jesus enables that Seed to now indwell us. So now we can develop an immune defense against that spiritual virus – sin.

No one who is born of God practices sin, because His seed abides in him; and he cannot sin, because he is born of God.
1 John 3:9

The Bible continues to explain what this means:

Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature, having escaped the corruption in the world caused by evil desires.
2 Peter 1:4

Though sin has corrupted us, the life of the Seed in us takes root and enables us to ‘participate in the divine nature’. The corruption is not only undone, but we can be like God in a manner impossible otherwise.

But, without an adequate vaccine our only option for Covid is quarantine. This is also true in the spiritual realm. We know that quarantine more commonly as Hell.

How is this so?

Quarantine – Separation of Heaven & Hell

Jesus taught on coming of the ‘Kingdom of Heaven’. When we think of ‘heaven’ we often think of its situation or milieu – those ‘streets of gold’. But the greater hope of the Kingdom is a society with citizens of completely honest and selfless character. Reflect on how much we build into the ‘kingdoms’ of the earth to protect ourselves from each other. Everyone has locks on their homes, some with advanced security systems. We lock our cars and tell our kids not to speak to strangers. Every city has a police force. We vigilantly protect our online data. Think of all the systems, practices, and procedures that we have put in place in our ‘kingdoms on earth’. Now realize that they are there simply to protect ourselves from each other. Then you may get a glimmer of the problem of sin in heaven.

Exclusivity of Paradise

A depiction of what heaven might look like

If God set up a kingdom of ‘heaven’ and then made us citizens of it, we would quickly turn it into the hell we have turned this world into. The gold on the streets would vanish in no time. God must root out the sin in us just like societies try to eradicate COVID-19 for society to be healthy. Not one person who ‘missed’ (the meaning of sin) this perfect standard could enter God’s kingdom. Because then he would ruin it. Instead, God needs to enforce a quarantine so sin would not wreck heaven.

What then for those whom God quarantines and denies entry? In this world, if you are denied entry to a country you cannot also participate in its resources and benefits. (You cannot receive its welfare, medical treatment ,etc.). But all in all, people around the world, even terrorists on the run from all countries, enjoy the same basic amenities of nature. These include such basic and taken for granted things as breathing the air, seeing light like everyone else.

What separation from God finally is

But who made light? The Bible claims

‘God said, “Let there be light” and there was light’.
Genesis 1:3

A depiction of what hell might look like

If that is true then all light is His – and it turns out that we are just borrowing it now. But with the final establishment of the Kingdom of Heaven, His light will be in His Kingdom. So ‘outside’ will be ‘darkness’ – just as Jesus described Hell in this parable.

“Then the king told the attendants, ‘Tie him hand and foot, and throw him outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’
Matthew 22: 13

If there is a Creator then most of what we take for granted and assume is ‘ours’ is really His. Start with such a basic entity as ‘light’, the world around us, and go on to our natural abilities such as thought and speech. We really did nothing to create these and our other abilities. We simply find ourselves able to use and develop them. When the Owner finalizes His Kingdom He will reclaim all that is his.

When COVID-19 breaks out bringing death and havoc among us all we hear no argument when experts insist on quarantine. So it is no surprise to hear Jesus teach in his parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus that

And besides all this, between us (in Kingdom of God) and you (in Hell) a great chasm has been set in place, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us.
Luke 16:26

Taking the vaccination – Jesus’ explanation of the Bronze Serpent

Jesus once explained his mission using the story above about Moses and the deadly serpents. Think about what would have happened for the people bitten by the snakes.

When bitten by a poisonous snake, the venom entering the body is an antigen, just like a virus infection. The normal treatment is to try to suck the venom out. Then bind the bitten limb tightly so that the blood flow ebbs and the venom does not spread from the bite. Finally, reduce activity so that the lowered heart rate will not quickly pump the venom through the body.

When the serpents infected the Israelites, God told them to look at the bronze serpent held up on a pole. You might imagine some bitten person rolling out of bed, looking at the nearby bronze serpent, and then being healed. But there were about 3 million people in the Israelite camp. (They counted over 600 000 men of military age). This is the size of a large modern city. Chances were high that those bitten were several kilometers away, and out of sight from, the bronze serpent pole.

The Counter-Intuitive Choice with the serpents

So those bitten by the snakes had to make a choice. They could take standard precautions involving binding the wound tightly and resting to restrict blood flow and spread of the venom. Or they would have to trust the remedy announced by Moses. To do that they would have to walk several kilometers, raising the blood flow and spread of the venom, before looking on the bronze serpent. The trust or lack of trust in the word of Moses would determine each person’s course of action.

Jesus referred to this when he said

As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up; ¹⁵so that whoever believes will in Him may have eternal life.
John 3:14-15

Jesus said that our situation is like that serpent story. The snakes that infested the camp are like sin in us and society. We are infected with the venom of sin and we will die from it. This death is an eternal one requiring Quarantine from the Kingdom of Heaven. Jesus then said that his being lifted up on the cross was like the bronze serpent lifted on a pole. Just as the bronze serpent could cure the Israelites of their deadly venom so he can cure ours. The Israelites in the camp had to look at the raised serpent. But to do that they would have to explicitly trust the solution provided by Moses. They would have to act counter-intuitively by not slowing the heart rate. It was their trust in what God provided that saved them.

Our Counter-Intuitive Choice with Jesus

It is the same for us. We do not physically look at the cross, but we trust in that provision given by God to save us from the infection of sin and death.

However, to the one who does not work but trusts God who justifies the ungodly, their faith is credited as righteousness.
Romans 4:5

Rather than trusting our ability to fight off the infection, we trust God who made the vaccine in the Seed. We trust him with the details of the vaccine. This is why ‘Gospel’ means ‘Good news’. Anyone who has been infected with a deadly disease but now hears that a life-saving vaccine is available and given for free – that is good news.

Come & See

Of course, we need a reason to trust both the diagnosis and the vaccine. We dare not give our trust naively. As one of the earliest discussions on this theme records

Philip found Nathanael and told him, “We have found the one Moses wrote about in the Law, and about whom the prophets also wrote—Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.”

⁴⁶“Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?” Nathanael asked.

“Come and see,” said Philip.
John 1:45-46

The Gospel invites us to come and see, to examine that Seed. Here are some articles to help you do that including:

Come and see like Nathanael did so long ago.

January 21, 2023

The Precision and Power of Pentecost

The Day of Pentecost always comes on a Sunday. It celebrates a remarkable event. But it is not only what happened that day but when and why it happened that reveals the hand of God. It also offers a powerful gift for you.

What happened on Pentecost

If you heard of ‘Pentecost’, you probably learned that it was the day when the Holy Spirit came to indwell the followers of Jesus. This is the day that the Church, the “called-out ones” of God, was born. Acts chapter 2 of the Bible records the event. On that day, the Spirit of God descended on the first 120 followers of Jesus. Then they started proclaiming loudly in languages from around the world. It created such a commotion that thousands in Jerusalem at the time came out to see what was happening. In front of the gathered crowd, Peter spoke the first gospel message. The account records that ‘three thousand were added to their number that day’ (Acts 2:41). The number of gospel followers has been growing ever since that Pentecost Sunday.

People were filled with the Holy Spirit
_{^{The story of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, PD-US-expired, via Wikimedia Commons}}

That day happened 50 days after Jesus’ resurrection. It was during these 50 days that Jesus’ disciples became convinced that Jesus had risen from the dead. On Pentecost Sunday they went public and changed history. Whether you believe in the resurrection or not, the events of that Pentecost Sunday have affected your life.

This understanding of Pentecost, though correct, is not complete. Many people want a repeat of that Pentecost Sunday through a similar experience. The first disciples of Jesus had this Pentecostal experience by ‘waiting for the gift of the Spirit’. So today people hope that likewise by ‘waiting’ He will come again in a similar way. Therefore, many people plead and wait for God to bring about another Pentecost. To think this way assumes that it was the waiting and praying that moved the Spirit of God back then. To think this way is to miss its precision. In fact, the Pentecost recorded in Acts Chapter 2 was not the first Pentecost.

Pentecost from the Law of Moses

‘Pentecost’ was actually an annual Old Testament festival. Moses (1500 BCE) had established several festivals to be celebrated through the year. Passover was the first festival of the Jewish year. Jesus had been crucified on a Passover day festival. The exact timing of his death to the sacrifices of the Passover lambs was meant as a sign.

The second festival was the feast of Firstfruits. The Law of Moses commanded its celebration on the ‘day after’ Passover Saturday (=Sunday). Jesus rose on Sunday, so his resurrection occurred exactly on the Firstfruits Festival. Since his resurrection happened on ‘Firstfruits’, it Promised that our resurrection would follow later (for all those who trust him). His resurrection is literally a ‘firstfruits’, just as the festival name prophesied.

Precisely 50 days after the ‘Firstfruits’ Sunday the Jews celebrated Pentecost. (‘Pente’ for 50. It was also called Feast of Weeks since it was counted by seven weeks). Jews had been celebrating Pentecost for 1500 years by the time the Pentecost of Acts 2 happened. The reason that there were people from all over the world that Pentecost day in Jerusalem to hear Peter’s message was precisely because they were there to celebrate the Old Testament Pentecost. Today, Jews still celebrate Pentecost but call it Shavuot.

We read in the Old Testament how Pentecost was to be celebrated:

Count off fifty days up to the day after the seventh Sabbath, and then present an offering of new grain to the LORD. From wherever you live, bring two loaves made of two-tenths of an ephah of the finest flour, baked with yeast, as a wave offering of firstfruits to the LORD.
Leviticus 23:16-17

Precision of Pentecost: Evidence of a Mind

The Acts 2 Pentecost events precisely coordinate with the Old Testament Pentecost (The Feast of Weeks). We know this since they occurred on the same day of the year. The crucifixion of Jesus occurring on the Passover, the resurrection of Jesus occurring on FirstFruits, and the Acts 2 Pentecost occurring on the Feast of Weeks, points to a Mind coordinating these through history. With so many days in a year why should the crucifixion of Jesus, his resurrection, and then the coming of the Holy Spirit happen precisely on each day of the three spring Old Testament festivals? Unless they were planned. Precision like this happens only if a mind is behind it.

Events of New Testament occurred precisely on the three Spring Festivals of the Old Testament

Did Luke ‘make up’ Pentecost?

One might argue that Luke (the author of Acts) made up the Acts 2 events to ‘happen’ on the Feast of Pentecost. Then he would have been the ‘mind’ behind the timing. But his account does not say that Acts 2 is ‘fulfilling’ the Feast of Pentecost. It does not even mention it. Why go to such trouble of creating these dramatic events to ‘happen’ on that day but not help the reader see how it ‘fulfills’ the Feast of Pentecost?

In fact, Luke did such a good job of reporting events, rather than interpreting them, that most people today do not know that the events of Acts 2 fell on the same day as the Old Testament Feast of Pentecost. Many people think that Pentecost simply began at Acts 2. Since most people today are not aware of the connection between them, Luke would be in the impossible situation of being a genius to invent the connection but utterly inept in selling it.

Pentecost: A New Power

The Father, The Son, and The Holy Spirit
_{^{Max Fürst (1846–1917), PD-US-expired, via Wikimedia Commons}}

Instead, Luke points us to a prophecy from the Old Testament book of Joel. This predicted that one day the Spirit of God would pour out on all peoples. The Pentecost of Acts 2 fulfilled that.

One reason that the Gospel is ‘good news’ is that it provides power to live life differently – better. Life is now a union between God and people. And this union takes place through the indwelling of the Spirit of God – which began on the Pentecost Sunday of Acts 2. The Good News is that we can now live life on a different level. We live it in a relationship with God through His Spirit. The Bible puts it like this:

And now you Gentiles have also heard the truth, the Good News that God saves you. And when you believed in Christ, he identified you as his own by giving you the Holy Spirit, whom he promised long ago. The Spirit is God’s guarantee that he will give us the inheritance he promised and that he has purchased us to be his own people. He did this so we would praise and glorify him.
Ephesian 1:13-14

The Spirit of God, who raised Jesus from the dead, lives in you. And just as God raised Christ Jesus from the dead, he will give life to your mortal bodies by this same Spirit living within you.
Romans 8:11

Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies.
Romans 8:23

The indwelling Spirit of God is another firstfruits, because the Spirit is a foretaste – a guarantee – of completing our transformation into ‘children of God’.

The gospel offers an abundant life not through possessions, pleasure, status, wealth and all the other passing trifles pursued by this world. Solomon found these to be such an empty bubbles. But rather the abundant life comes by the indwelling of the Spirit of God. If this is true – that God offers to indwell and empower us – that would be good news. The Old Testament Pentecost with the celebration of fine bread baked with yeast pictured this coming abundant life. The precision between the Old and New Pentecosts is perfect evidence that it is God who is the Mind behind this precision. Thus He stands behind this power of an abundant life.

June 13, 2022

Is the Bible textually Reliable? Or has it been corrupted?

Textual Criticism and the Bible

In our scientific and educated age, we question many of the non-scientific beliefs that earlier generations had. This skepticism is especially true of the Bible. Many of us question the reliability of the Bible from what we know about it. After all, the Bible was written more than two thousand years ago. But for most of these millennia, there has been no printing press, photocopy machines or publishing companies. So the original manuscripts were copied by hand, generation after generation. Concurrently, languages died out and new ones arose, empires changed and new powers ascended.

Since the original manuscripts have long been lost, how do we know that what we read today in the Bible is what the original authors actually wrote? Perhaps the Bible was changed or corrupted. Maybe church leaders, priests, bishops, or monks did so because they wished to change its message for their purposes.

Principles of Textual Criticism

Naturally, this question is true of any ancient writing. Textual Criticism is the academic discipline of determining whether an ancient text has changed from its original composition until today. Because it is an academic discipline it applies to any ancient writing from any language. This article explains some basic principles of Textual Criticism and applies them to the Bible to determine its reliability.

This diagram shows an example of a hypothetical document written 500 BCE. The original text did not last long. So before it decays, is lost, or destroyed, a manuscript (MSS) copy of it must be made (1st copy). A professional class of people called scribes did the copying. As the years advance, scribes make copies (2nd & 3rd copy) of the 1st copy. At some point a copy is preserved so that it exists today (the 3rd copy).

Principle 1: Manuscript Time Intervals

In our example diagram, scribes produced this extant copy in 500 CE. So this means that the earliest that we can know of the state of the text is only after 500 CE. Therefore the time from 500 BCE to 500 CE (labeled x in the diagram) forms the period of textual uncertainty. Even though the original was written long before, all manuscripts before 500 CE have vanished. Therefore we cannot evaluate copies from this period.

Thus, the first principle used in textual criticism is to measure this time interval. The shorter this interval x, the more confidence we can place in the correct preservation of the document to our time, since the period of uncertainty is reduced.

Principle 2: The number of existing manuscripts

The second principle used in Textual criticism is to count the number of existing manuscripts today. Our example illustration above showed that only one manuscript is available (the 3rd copy). But usually, more than one manuscript copy exists today. The more manuscripts in existence in the present day, the better the manuscript data. Then historians can compare copies against other copies to see if and how much these copies deviate from each other. So the number of manuscript copies available becomes the second indicator determining the textual reliability of ancient writings.

Textual Criticism of Classical Greco-Roman writings compared to New Testament

These principles apply to any ancient writings. So let us now compare New Testament manuscripts with other ancient manuscripts that scholars accept as reliable. This Table lists some well-known ones…

Author	When Written	Earliest Copy	Time Span	#
Caesar	50 BC	900 AD	950	10
Plato	350 BC	900 AD	1250	7
Aristotle*	300 BC	1100 AD	1400	5
Thucydides	400 BC	900 AD	1300	8
Herodotus	400 BC	900 AD	1300	8
Sophocles	400 BC	1000 AD	1400	100
Tacitus	100 AD	1100 AD	1000	20
Pliny	100 AD	850 AD	750	7

Manuscript data of well-known ancient writers accepted as reliable
_{^{McDowell, J. Evidence That Demands a Verdict. 1979. p. 42-48}}

*from any one work

These writers represent the major classical writers of antiquity. Basically, their writings shaped the development of European and Western civilization. But on average, they have been passed down to us by only 10-100 manuscripts. Moreover, the earliest existing copies are preserved starting about 1000 years after the original was written. We treat these as our control experiment since they comprise writings that form the foundation of history and philosophy. So academics and universities world-wide accept, use and teach them.

New Testament Manuscripts

The following table compares the New Testament manuscripts along the same principles of Textual Criticism. Then we will compare this to our control data, just like in any scientific investigation.

MSS	When Written	Date of MSS	Time Span
John Rylan	90 CE	130 CE	40 yrs
Bodmer Papyrus	90 CE	150-200 CE	110 yrs
Chester Beatty	50-60 CE	200 CE	20 yrs
Codex Vaticanus	50-90 CE	325 CE	265 yrs
Codex Sinaiticus	50-90 CE	350 CE	290 yrs

Textual Data of the earliest New Testament manuscripts
_{^{Comfort, P.W. The Origin of the Bible, 1992. p. 193}}

However, this table gives just a brief highlight of some of the existing New Testament manuscripts. The number of New Testament manuscripts is so vast that it would be impossible to list them in one table.

Testimony of the Scholarship

As one scholar who spent years studying this issue states:

“We have more than 24000 MSS copies of portions of the New Testament in existence today… No other document of antiquity even begins to approach such numbers and attestation. In comparison, the ILIAD by Homer is second with 643 MSS that still survive”
McDowell, J. Evidence That Demands a Verdict. 1979. p. 40

A leading scholar at the British Museum corroborates this:

“Scholars are satisfied that they possess substantially the true text of the principal Greek and Roman writers … yet our knowledge of their writings depends on a mere handful of MSS whereas the MSS of the N.T. are counted by … thousands”
Kenyon, F.G. (former director of British Museum) Our Bible and the Ancient Manuscripts. 1941 p.23

This data pertains specifically to the New Testament manuscripts. This article looks at Textual Criticism of the Old Testament.

New Testament Textual Criticism and Constantine

Significantly, a large number of these manuscripts are extremely ancient. For example, consider the introduction of the book transcribing the earliest Greek New Testament documents.

“This book provides transcriptions of 69 of the earliest New Testament manuscripts…dated from early 2^nd century to beginning of the 4^th (100-300AD) … containing about 2/3 of the new Testament text”
Comfort, P.W. “The Text of the Earliest New Testament Greek Manuscripts”. p. 17. 2001

This is significant because these manuscripts come before Roman Emperor Constantine (ca 325 CE). They also precede the rise to power of the Catholic Church. Some wonder whether either Constantine or the Catholic Church altered the biblical text. We can test this by comparing the manuscripts from before Constantine (325 CE) with those coming later. However, we find that they have not changed. The manuscripts from, say 200 CE, are the same as those that come later.

Thus, neither the Catholic Church nor Constantine changed the Bible. This is not a religious statement but is based solely on the manuscript data. The figure below illustrates the timeline of manuscripts from which today’s New Testament comes from.

New Testament manuscripts from which modern Bibles derive

University presentation on Textual Criticism of New Testament

Implications of Bible Textual Criticism

So what can we conclude from this? Certainly, at least in what we can objectively measure, the New Testament is verified to a much higher degree than any other classical work. The verdict can be best summed up by the following:

“To be skeptical of the resultant text of the New Testament is to allow all of classical antiquity to slip into obscurity, for no other documents of the ancient period are as well attested bibliographically as the New Testament”
Montgomery, History and Christianity. 1971. p.29

What he means is that if we doubt the reliability of the Bible’s preservation, we should discard all that we know about classical history. Yet no informed historian has ever done so. We know that the Biblical texts have not been altered as eras, languages and empires have come and gone. We know this because the earliest existing manuscripts precede these events. For example, we know that no overly zealous medieval monk, or plotting pope, added in the miracles of Jesus to the Bible. We have manuscripts that come before all medieval monks and popes. Since all these early manuscripts contain Jesus’ miracles then these imaginary medieval conspirators could not have inserted them.

What about translation of the Bible?

But what about the errors involved in translation? Why are there so many different versions of the Bible today? Do the existence of many versions mean that it is impossible to determine what the original authors wrote?

The Bible is translated into many different languages

First, let us clear up a common misconception. Many think that the Bible today has gone through a long series of translation steps. They imagine each new language translated from the previous one. So they visualize a series something like this: Greek -> Latin -> Medieval English -> Shakespeare English -> modern English -> other modern languages.

Linguists translate the Bible into diverse languages today directly from its original languages. So for the New Testament, the translation proceeds to Greek -> modern language. For the Old Testament, the translation proceeds to Hebrew -> modern language (further details including Orthodox translations here). But the base Greek and Hebrew text is standard. So the different Bible versions come from how linguists choose to translate them into the modern language.

Translation Reliability

Due to the vast classical literature that was written in Greek (the original language of the New Testament), it is possible to precisely translate the original thoughts and words of the original authors. In fact, the different modern versions attest to this. For example, read this well-known verse in the most common versions, and note the slight variance in wording, but consistency in idea and meaning:

For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Romans 6:23 (New International Version)

For the wages of sin is death, but the gracious gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Romans 6:23 (New American Standard Version)

For the wages of sin is death, but the gracious gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Romans 6:23 (New Living Translation)

You can see that there is no disagreement between the translations because they say exactly the same thing using only slightly different words.

Conclusion

To summarize, neither time nor translation has corrupted the ideas and thoughts expressed in the original Bible manuscripts. These ideas are not hidden from us today. We know that the Bible today accurately communicates what its authors actually wrote back then.

But it is important to realize what this study does not show. This does not necessarily prove that the Bible is the Word of God.

Textual Criticism of Old Testament

But understanding the textual reliability of the Bible provides a start-point from which we can start investigating the Bible. We can see if these other questions can also be answered. We can also become informed about its message. Since the Bible claims that its message is God’s blessing to you, what if it is possibly true? Perhaps it is worth taking the time to learn some of the important events of the Bible. A good place to start is in its beginning.

June 13, 2022

How were details of Christ’s death prophesied?

Christ’s “cut off” Detailed Hundreds of Years Beforehand

Previously we looked at Daniel’s prediction of the coming Christ’s ‘cutting off’ after a specified cycle of years. Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem (often called Palm Sunday) fulfilled Daniel’s prophecy exactly 173,880 days after the Persian Decree to restore Jerusalem. The phrase ‘cut off ’ referred to Isaiah’s imagery of the Branch shooting up from the seemingly dead stump. But what did he mean by it?

Isaiah and Daniel shown in historical timeline.

Isaiah had also written other prophecies in his book, using other themes as well as the Branch. One such theme was about the coming Servant. Who was this ‘Servant’? What was he going to do? We look at one prophecy passage in detail, reproduced in full below, with only some comments inserted.

The Coming Servant Introduced

See, my servant will act wisely;
    he will be raised and lifted up and highly exalted.
¹⁴Just as there were many who were appalled at him—
    his appearance was so disfigured beyond that of any human being
    and his form marred beyond human likeness—
¹⁵so he will sprinkle many nations,
    and kings will shut their mouths because of him.
For what they were not told, they will see,
    and what they have not heard, they will understand.
Isaiah 52: 13-15

Isaiah describes a human male since he refers to the Servant as ‘he’, ‘him’, and ‘his’. Isaiah prophetically predicts the future (from the phrases ‘will act..’, ‘will be raised up…’). But what was the prophecy about?

Sprinkling – The Priest’s Job

When the ancient Temple priests offered sacrifices for the Israelites, they sprinkled blood on them. This symbolized the forgiving and covering of their sins. But Isaiah prophesied that the coming Servant would sprinkle ‘many nations’. So Isaiah saw that this Servant would provide forgiveness for non-Jews like those priests did for the Jewish worshipers. This is parallel to the prophecy that the Branch would be a priest since only priests could sprinkle blood. This global scope of ‘many nations’ follows those promises made centuries earlier to Abraham that ‘all nations’ would be blessed through him.

But in sprinkling the many nations, Isaiah foresaw the very ‘appearance’ and ‘form’ of the Servant disfigured and marred. He promised that one day the nations ‘will understand’.

The Servant Despised

Who has believed our message
    and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
²He grew up before him like a tender shoot,
    and like a root out of dry ground.
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
    nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
³He was despised and rejected by mankind,
    a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.
Like one from whom people hide their faces
    he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.
Isaiah 53:1-3

Though the Servant would sprinkle many nations, he would also be ‘despised’ and ‘rejected’, full of ‘suffering’ and ‘familiar with pain’.

The Servant Pierced

Surely he took up our pain
    and bore our suffering,
yet we considered him punished by God,
    stricken by him, and afflicted.
⁵But he was pierced for our transgressions,
    he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was on him,
    and by his wounds we are healed.
Isaiah 53:4-5

The Servant would take ‘our’ pain. ‘Pierced’ and ‘crushed’ in ‘punishment’ would also be his lot. This punishment will bring us (those of the many nations) ‘peace’ and healing.

Secular and biblical sources tell us that about 2000 years ago (but still 700+ years after Isaiah) Jesus was crucified. In that execution, the authorities literally pierced him with the nails of the crucifixion.

Our Sins – on Him

We all, like sheep, have gone astray,
each of us has turned to our own way;
and the Lord has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.
Isaiah 53:6

The Bible defines sin as ‘missing the intended target’. Like a bent arrow we go our ‘own way’. This Servant will carry that sin (iniquity) which we caused.

Lamb to the Slaughter

He was oppressed and afflicted,
    yet he did not open his mouth;
he was led like a lamb to the slaughter,
    and as a sheep before its shearers is silent,
    so he did not open his mouth.
Isaiah 53:7

The Servant will be like a lamb going to the ‘slaughter’. But he will not protest or even ‘open his mouth’. Abraham had a ram substitute for his son and Abraham sacrificed the ram in place of Isaac. This coming Servant would carry a similar role as that ram.

‘Cut off’ from Living

By oppression and judgment he was taken away.
Yet who of his generation protested?
For he was cut off from the land of the living;
for the transgression of my people he was punished.
Isaiah 53:8

The Servant dies (‘cut off’ from the ‘land of the living’). Daniel used this exact term (‘cut off’) in prophesying what would happen to the Christ after his presentation as Messiah. Isaiah here predicted in greater detail that ‘cut off’ meant ‘cut off from the land of the living’! So, on that fateful Good Friday Jesus died, literally ‘cut off from the land of the living’. This occurred just after he presented himself as the Christ in his Triumphant entry.

The Paradox of His Burial

He was assigned a grave with the wicked,
and with the rich in his death,
though he had done no violence,
nor was any deceit in his mouth.
Isaiah 53:9

They executed Jesus as a criminal (‘assigned a grave with the wicked’). But the gospels record how a rich man, Joseph of Arimathea, buried the body of Jesus in his own tomb. Jesus literally fulfilled both sides of the paradox. Though he was ‘assigned a grave with the wicked’, he was also ‘with the rich in his death’.

God’s Plan all along

Yet it was the Lord’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer,
and though the Lord makes his life an offering for sin,
he will see his offspring and prolong his days,
and the will of the Lord will prosper in his hand.
Isaiah 53:10

This whole cruel death was not some terrible accident or misfortune. It was explicitly “the LORD’s will” to crush him.

But why?

Jews in Isaiah’s time brought lambs to sacrifice as offerings for their sins, so that they could receive forgiveness. So here the ‘life’ of this Servant would likewise also be an ‘offering for sin’.

For whose sin?

Considering that ‘many nations’ would be ‘sprinkled’ (see above), it is the sin of the peoples in the ‘many nations’. Those ‘all’ who have ‘turned away’ and have ‘gone astray’. Isaiah is talking about you and me.

Life after Death

After he has suffered,
he will see the light of life and be satisfied;
by his knowledge my righteous servant will justify many,
and he will bear their iniquities.
Isaiah 53:11

Though the Servant’s ordeal is horrible, here the tone changes to optimism and triumph. After the terrible suffering detailed previously, this Servant will see ‘the light of life’.

He will come back to life?!

Isaiah prophesied the seemingly impossible 750 years before Jesus made the case for his resurrection compelling.

And in so ‘seeing the light of life’ this Servant will ‘justify’ many. To ‘justify’ is the same as giving ‘righteousness’. God had set the pattern by previously ‘crediting righteousness’ to Abraham. In a similar way this Servant will justify, or credit, righteousness to ‘many’.

Legacy among the Great

Therefore I will give him a portion among the great,
    and he will divide the spoils with the strong,
because he poured out his life unto death,
    and was numbered with the transgressors.
For he bore the sin of many,
    and made intercession for the transgressors.
Isaiah 53:12

Jesus of Nazareth ranks among the most influential, great people in history. But, unlike other great men of history, Jesus did not lead a mighty army or conquer large swaths of land. He did not write a great book or come up with a new philosophy. He did not amass a great fortune or make a brilliant scientific discovery or technological breakthrough. Unlike other great men of history, Jesus made his legacy through his crucifixion and the meaning people attach to his death. Isaiah could not have better predicted the reason for the coming Servant’s worldwide legacy than he did with this conclusion.

Fingerprints of God’s handiwork

Isaiah’s prophecy of the Servant points directly to the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. Therefore some critics say that the gospel writers made up their story specifically to ‘fit’ this Servant passage. But Isaiah’s conclusion also defies these critics. The conclusion is not a prediction of the crucifixion and resurrection as such, but of its impact many years later. And what does Isaiah predict? This Servant will die as a criminal, but one day he will be among the ‘great’. The gospel writers could not make this part ‘fit’ the gospel narratives. The gospels were only written a few decades after Jesus’ crucifixion. At that point, the impact of Jesus’ death was doubtful.

In the eyes of the world, Jesus was just the executed leader of a rejected cult when the gospels were written. We, 2000 years later, can see the impact of his death. We can understand how the subsequent course of history has made him ‘great’. With simple human foresight the gospel writers could not have foreseen that.

But 750 years before Jesus even lived Isaiah predicted it. Likewise, David did something very similar 1000 years before Jesus in Psalm 22.

The only explanation is that God revealed it to him. Only God could conceivably know the future that far ahead. That Isaiah wrote this down, and that it was preserved, along with the other prophecies of Jesus, constitutes evidence that the purposes advanced in the Bible are His. It has the fingerprints of the Divine handiwork all over it.

January 17, 2022

The Puzzle of the Psalm 22 Prophecy

A few years ago a work colleague, J, wandered to my desk. J was smart and educated – and definitely not a follower of the gospel. But he was somewhat curious about the gospel so we had some warm and open conversations between us. He had never really looked at the Bible so I had encouraged him to investigate it.

One day he came into my office with a Bible to show that he was taking a look. He had opened it randomly in the middle. I asked him what he was reading. Our conversation went something like this.

“I am reading in Psalm chapter 22”, he said

“Really”, I said. “Any idea what you are reading about?”

“I guess I am reading about the crucifixion of Jesus”, J replied.

“That’s a good guess”, I laughed. “But you are about one thousand years too early. Psalm 22 was written by David around 1000 BCE. Jesus’ crucifixion was in 30’s C.E. one thousand years later”.

The Psalms…

J did not realize that the Psalms were not the gospel accounts of Jesus’ life written by his contemporaries. Psalms were sacred Hebrew hymns written 1000 years before Jesus primarily by King David. J had only heard some stories about Jesus, including his crucifixion, and randomly opening his Bible, read what seemed to describe the crucifixion. Not knowing any better, he just assumed it was the story of the crucifixion which many around the world remember annually on Good Friday. We had a chuckle over his first mis-step in Bible reading.

Then I asked J what he saw in Psalm 22 that made him think he was reading about Jesus’ crucifixion. Thus began our little study. I invite you to consider some of the similarities J noticed by placing the passages side-by-side in a table. The eye-witness accounts of the crucifixion recorded in the Gospels are on the left. Psalm 22 is on the right side. To help catch the connections within the many words I have color matched the similar texts. (Click here for enlarged print version).

Comparison of Gospel accounts of the Crucifixion with the details in Psalm 22

That J made the logical but wrong conclusion that Psalm 22 was an eye-witness account of the Good Friday crucifixion, should make us ask a question.

How do we explain the similarity between the crucifixion accounts and Psalm 22?

Is it coincidence that the details match so precisely that both Psalm 22 and the Gospels divide the clothes. But both also cast lots. (tearing seamless garment would destroy it so the soldiers gambled for it). Psalm 22 was written before crucifixion was invented yet it describes various details of it (piercing of hands and feet, bones being out of joint – by being stretched as the victim hangs).

In addition, the Gospel of John states that blood and water flowed out when soldiers thrust a spear in Jesus’ side. This indicated a fluid buildup around the heart. Jesus thus died of a heart attack. This matches the Psalm 22 description of ‘my heart has turned to wax’.

Psalm 22 reads like a first-person account of a person undergoing crucifixion. The gospels read like third-person eye-witness accounts. And both sets match

How so?

God-Inspired Explanation for Psalm 22

Jesus, in the Gospels, argued that these similarities were prophetic. God inspired Old Testament prophets hundreds of years prior to Jesus’ life to predict details of his life and death so that we can know that this was all in the plan of God. Prophetic fulfillment would be like having a Divine signature on these events of Good Friday since no human could foresee the future in such detail. This is evidence of God’s work and intervention in history.

Naturalistic Explanation for Psalm 22

Others argue that the similarity of Psalm 22 with crucifixion events of Good Friday is because the Gospel writers made up the events to ‘fit’ the prophecy. But this explanation totally ignores the testimony of historians from that time outside of the Bible. Josephus and Tacitus respectively tell us that:

“At this time there was a wise man … Jesus. … good, and … virtuous. And many people from among the Jews and the other nations became his disciples. Pilate condemned Him to be crucified and to die.”
Josephus. 90CE. Antiquities xviii. 33. Josephus was a Jewish Historian

“Christus, the founder of the name, was put to death by Pontius Pilate, procurator of Judea in the reign of Tiberius”
Tacitus. 117 CE. Annals XV. 44. Tacitus was a Roman Historian

Their historical testimony agrees with the Gospels that Jesus was crucified. This is important because many of the details in Psalm 22 are simply particulars of the act of being crucified. If the gospel writers were going to make up the actual events to make them ‘fit’ Psalm 22 then they would basically have had to make up the whole crucifixion. But the Jewish historian Josephus explicitly states that Pilate did crucify him.

_{^{Drawn by Gustave Doré, engraved by J. Gauchard Brunier. Scanned by Michael Gäbler with Epson Perfection 4490 Photo., PD-US-expired, via Wikimedia Commons}}

Psalm 22 and Jesus’ legacy

Also, Psalm 22 does not end at verse 18 as in the table above. It continues on. Note the triumphant mood at the end –after the person dies!

The poor will eat and be satisfied;
    those who seek the Lord will praise him—
    may your hearts live forever!

²⁷All the ends of the earth
    will remember and turn to the Lord,
and all the families of the nations
    will bow down before him,
²⁸for dominion belongs to the Lord
    and he rules over the nations.

²⁹All the rich of the earth will feast and worship;
    all who go down to the dust will kneel before him—
    those who cannot keep themselves alive.
³⁰Posterity will serve him;
    future generations will be told about the Lord.
³¹They will proclaim his righteousness,
    declaring to a people yet unborn:
    He has done it!
Psalm 22:26-31

This is not talking about the details of events of this person’s death. The beginning of the Psalm dealt with those details. The psalmist is now addressing the legacy of that person’s death with ‘posterity’ and ‘future generations’ (v.30).

Who would that be?

Psalm 22 foresaw Jesus’ legacy to our time

That is us living 2000 years after Jesus’ crucifixion. The Psalmist predicts that the ‘posterity’ which follows this ‘pierced’ man dieing such a horrible death will ‘serve’ him and be ‘told about him’. Verse 27 predicts the geographic scope of the impact. It will go to the ‘ends of the earth’ and among ‘all families of nations’ to cause them to ‘turn to the LORD’. Verse 29 predicts that ‘those who cannot keep themselves alive’ (since we are mortal that means all of us) will one day kneel before him. The righteousness of this man will be proclaimed to people who were not yet alive (the ‘yet unborn’) at the time of his death.

Psalm 22’s conclusion has nothing to do with whether the gospel accounts borrowed from it or made up the crucifixion events because it is now dealing with a much later era – that of our time. The gospel writers, living in the 1^st century could not ‘make up’ the impact of the death of Jesus down to our time. How could they know what that impact would be?

One could not make a better prediction of the legacy of Jesus than Psalm 22 does. Even simply noting annual worldwide Good Friday celebrations remind us of his global impact two thousand years after his death. These fulfill the conclusion of Psalm 22 as precisely as the earlier verses predicted the details of his death.

Who else in world history can make a claim that details of his death as well as the legacy of his life into the distant future would be predicted 1000 years before he lived?

Scratching Below the surface.

Perhaps, like my friend J, you will take the opportunity to consider the meaning of the death and resurrection of Jesus. It will take some mental effort. But it is worthwhile because the man Psalm 22 foresaw promised:

I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.
John 10:10

Some ways to do this:

January 14, 2022

The Branch: Sprouting Exactly in time to be … ‘cut off’

We have been exploring the Branch theme in the Old Testament prophets. We saw that Jeremiah in 600 BCE continued the theme (which Isaiah began 150 years earlier) and declared that this Branch would be a King. Then, Zechariah followed predicting that the name of this Branch would be Jesus. Additionally, he foresaw that the Branch would uniquely combine the roles of King and Priest.

Daniel’s Riddle of the scheduled arrival of the Anointed One

Now to Daniel. He lived in the Babylonian exile, being a powerful official in the Babylonian and Persian governments, as well as a Hebrew prophet.

Daniel shown in timeline with other prophets of the Old Testament

In his book, Daniel received the following message:

while I was still in prayer, Gabriel, the man I had seen in the earlier vision, came to me in swift flight about the time of the evening sacrifice. ²²He instructed me and said to me, “Daniel, I have now come to give you insight and understanding. ²³As soon as you began to pray, a word went out, which I have come to tell you, for you are highly esteemed. Therefore, consider the word and understand the vision:

²⁴“Seventy ‘sevens’ are decreed for your people and your holy city to finish transgression, to put an end to sin, to atone for wickedness, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal up vision and prophecy and to anoint the Most Holy Place.

²⁵“Know and understand this: From the time the word goes out to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until the Anointed One, the ruler, comes, there will be seven ‘sevens,’ and sixty-two ‘sevens.’ It will be rebuilt with streets and a trench, but in times of trouble. ²⁶After the sixty-two ‘sevens,’ the Anointed One will be put to death and will have nothing. The people of the ruler who will come will destroy the city and the sanctuary. The end will come like a flood: War will continue until the end, and desolations have been decreed.
Daniel 9:21-26

God gave a timetable for when the ‘Anointed One’ (= Christ = Messiah) would come. The timetable used a cycle of sevens. The prophecy said a countdown would begin with ‘the issuing of the decree to restore and rebuild Jerusalem’. God gave Daniel this prophecy around the year 537 BCE. But Daniel did not live to see the start of this countdown.

The Decree to Restore Jerusalem

In fact it was Nehemiah, living almost one hundred years after Daniel, who saw the start of this countdown. He was the cup-bearer to the Persian Emperor Artaxerxes and thus lived in present-day Iran. Note when he lived in the timeline above. He tells us in his book that

In the month of Nisan in the twentieth year of King Artaxerxes, when wine was brought for him, I took the wine and gave it to the king. I had not been sad in his presence before, ²so the king asked me, “Why does your face look so sad when you are not ill? This can be nothing but sadness of heart.”

I was very much afraid, ³but I said to the king, “May the king live forever! Why should my face not look sad when the city where my ancestors are buried lies in ruins, and its gates have been destroyed by fire?”

⁴The king said to me, “What is it you want?”

Then I prayed to the God of heaven, ⁵and I answered the king, “If it pleases the king and if your servant has found favor in his sight, let him send me to the city in Judah where my ancestors are buried so that I can rebuild it.”

⁶Then the king, with the queen sitting beside him, asked me, “How long will your journey take, and when will you get back?” It pleased the king to send me; so I set a time.
Nehemiah 2:1-6

I went to Jerusalem, and after staying there three days
Nehemiah 2:11

So this records the “issuing of the decree to restore and rebuild Jerusalem” that Daniel had prophesied would one day come. It occurred in the 20th year of the Persian Emperor Artaxerxes. Historians recognize him as starting his reign in 465 BCE. Thus his 20th year places this decree in the year 444 BCE. God gave Daniel a sign for the start of the countdown. Almost a hundred years later, the Persian Emperor, not knowing about this prophecy of Daniel, issued this decree. The Persian emperor Artaxerxes set in motion the countdown that the prophecy said would bring the Anointed One.

Seven ‘Sevens’ and Sixty-two ‘Sevens’

The riddle given to Daniel indicated that it would take “seven ‘sevens’ and sixty-two ‘sevens’” before the revealing of the Anointed One.

What is a ‘Seven’?

Moses’ writings instituted a cycle of sevens of years. Every 7th year the land was to rest from agriculture so that the soil could replenish its nutrients. So a ‘Seven’ is a 7-year cycle. With that in mind we see that from the start the time would counted in two parts. The first part was ‘seven sevens’ or seven 7-year periods. This, 7*7=49 years, was the time it took to rebuild Jerusalem after the initial decree by the Persian Emperor. This was followed by sixty-two ‘sevens’, so the total countdown was 7*7+62*7 = 483 years. In other words, from the start, there would be 483 years until the revealing of the Anointed One.

A 360-Day year

We have to make one little calendar adjustment. As many nations did in ancient times, the prophets used a 360-day year. Different ways exist to calculate the length of a ‘year’ for a calendar. The one that Daniel used was a common Egyptian calendar of 360-days long years. So 483 ‘360-day’ years is 483*360/365.24 = 476 solar years of the International Calendar used today.

The Scheduled Arrival of the Christ

Now we can calculate when the King was prophesied to come. In going from the ‘BCE’ era to the ‘CE’ era there is only 1 year from 1BCE – 1CE (There is no ‘zero’ year). The table now summarizes the calculations.

Start year	444 BCE (20^th year of Artaxerxes)
Length of time	476 solar years
Expected arrival in International Calendar	(-444 + 476 + 1) (‘+1’ because there is no 0 CE) = 33
Expected year	33 CE

Calculations for Expected Anointed One’s Coming according to Daniel’s Sevens

Jesus of Nazareth came to Jerusalem riding on a donkey in what has become the well-known celebration of Palm Sunday. That day he announced himself and rode into Jerusalem as their King. The year was 33 CE.

The Anointed: Coming to be …?

Now notice something unique in this riddle pertaining to the coming king. Daniel had predicted after his arrival after the cycle of sevens that:

After the sixty-two ‘sevens,’ the Anointed One will be put to death and will have nothing. The people of the ruler who will come will destroy the city and the sanctuary. The end will come like a flood: War will continue until the end, and desolations have been decreed.
Daniel 9:26

It says, quite clearly, that the Anointed One will be ‘put to death and will have nothing’. Then foreign people will destroy the sanctuary (the Jewish Temple) and the city (Jerusalem) making the place desolate. Examine the history of the Jews to see that this indeed happened. Forty years after Jesus’ crucifixion the conquering Romans burned down the Temple, destroyed Jerusalem, exiling the Jews into worldwide exile. After their exile the land went desolate. Events happened at Jesus’ coming and in 70 CE exactly as prophesied by Daniel in 537 BCE. Moses had also predicted this catastrophe in his Curses 1500 years beforehand.

Basically, only God could foresee events over these hundreds of years between Daniel, Emperor Artaxerxes, Nehemiah, Palm Sunday and the Roman destruction of Jerusalem. Though they lived a hundred years apart, they declared and started the countdown that would reveal the King. About 570 years after Daniel received his message, Jesus entered Jerusalem as the King, precisely on Daniel’s schedule. Along with Zechariah’s predicting of Jesus’ name, these prophets developed a truly detailed group of predictions. God laid these out in writing long beforehand so that all can have opportunity to see God’s fingerprints at work.

We look next at the details laid out through Isaiah hundreds of years in advance as to how the Anointed would die. David, through the Psalms, did likewise.

[i] Dates for Artaxerxes from Dr. Harold W.Hoehner, Chronological Aspects of the Life of Christ. 1977. 176pp.

July 21, 2017

Why did a Good God create a Bad Devil?

The Bible says that it was the devil (or Satan) in the form of a serpent who temped Adam and Eve to sin and brought about their fall. But this raises an important question: Why did God create a ‘bad’ devil (which means ‘adversary’) to corrupt His good creation?

Lucifer – The Shining One

In fact, the Bible says that God created a powerful, intelligent, and beautiful spirit who was chief among all angels. His name was Lucifer (meaning ‘Shining One’) – and he was very good. But Lucifer also had a will with which he could freely choose. A passage in Isaiah 14 records the choice he made:

How you have fallen from heaven,
morning star, son of the dawn!
You have been cast down to the earth,
you who once laid low the nations!
You said in your heart,
“I will ascend to the heavens;
I will raise my throne
above the stars of God;
I will sit enthroned on the mount of assembly,
on the utmost heights of the North.
I will ascend above the tops of the clouds;
I will make myself like the Most High.”
Isaiah 14:12-14

Lucifer, like Adam, faced a decision. He could accept that God was God or he could choose to be his own ‘god’. His repeated “I wills” show that he chose to defy God and declare himself to be ‘Most High’.

A passage in Ezekiel gives a parallel description of the fall of Lucifer:

You were in Eden, the garden of God.
… I ordained and anointed you
as the mighty angelic guardian.
You had access to the holy mountain of God
and walked among the stones of fire.
“You were blameless in all you did
from the day you were created
until the day evil was found in you.
… and you sinned.
So I banished you in disgrace
from the mountain of God.
I expelled you, O mighty guardian,
from your place among the stones of fire.
Your heart was filled with pride
because of all your beauty.
Your wisdom was corrupted
by your love of splendor.
So I threw you to the ground.
Ezekiel 28:13-17

Lucifer’s beauty, wisdom and power – all the good things created in him by God – led to pride. His pride led to his rebellion, but he never lost any of his power and abilities. He is now leading a cosmic revolt against his Creator to see who will be God. His strategy was to enlist mankind to join him. He did so by tempting them to the same choice that he made: become autonomous from God and defy Him. The heart of Adam’s temptation was the same as Lucifer’s. It was just presented differently. They both chose to be ‘god’ to themselves.

Satan – working through others

The passage in Isaiah speaks to the ‘King of Babylon’ and the Ezekiel passage speaks to the ‘King of Tyre’. But from the descriptions given it is clear they do not speak to humans. The “I wills” in Isaiah describe someone thrown to the earth in punishment for wanting to place his throne above that of God. The passage in Ezekiel addresses an ‘angelic guardian’ who once moved in Eden and the ‘mountain of God’. Satan (or Lucifer) often puts himself behind or through someone else. In Genesis he speaks through the serpent. In Isaiah he rules through the King of Babylon, and in Ezekiel he possesses the King of Tyre.

Why did Lucifer revolt against God?

But why did Lucifer want to challenge the all-powerful and all-knowing Creator? Part of being ‘smart’ is to know whether or not you can defeat your opponent. Lucifer may have power, but that would still be insufficient to defeat His Creator. Why lose everything for something he could not win? I would think that a ‘smart’ angel would have recognized his limitations against God – and hold back his revolt. So why didn’t he?

But consider that Lucifer could only believe that God was His all-powerful Creator by faith – the same as for us. The Bible suggests that God created angels during creation week. For example, a passage in Job tells us:

Then the Lord spoke to Job out of the storm. He said:…
Job 38:1

“Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?
Tell me, if you understand.
Job 38:4

…while the morning stars sang together
and all the angels shouted for joy?
Job 38:7

Imagine that Lucifer was created, becoming sentient during creation week, somewhere in the universe. All he knows is that now he exists and is self-aware. Also another Being claims that He has created Lucifer and the universe. But how does Lucifer know that this claim is true? Perhaps, this so-called creator had popped into existence in the stars just before Lucifer popped into existence. Since this ‘creator’ arrived earlier on the scene, he was (perhaps) more powerful and (perhaps) more knowledgeable than Lucifer. But then again maybe not. Perhaps both he and the ‘creator’ just popped into existence simultaneously. Lucifer could only accept God’s Word to him that He had created him, and that God himself was eternal and infinite. But in his pride he chose to believe his fantasy instead.

gods in our minds

Maybe you doubt that Lucifer could believe that both he and God (and the other angels) just ‘popped’ into existence. But this is the same basic idea behind the latest thinking in modern cosmology. There was a quantum fluctuation of nothing, and then out of this fluctuation the universe popped into existence. That is the essence of modern cosmology theories. Fundamentally, everyone – from Lucifer to Richard Dawkins & Stephen Hawkings to you & me – must decide by faith whether the universe is self-contained or was created and sustained by a Creator God.

In other words, seeing is not believing. Lucifer had seen and talked with God. But he still had to accept ‘by faith’ that God had created him. Many people say that if God would just ‘appear’ to them, then they would believe. However, in the Bible many people saw and heard God – but still did not take Him at His word. ‘Seeing’ alone never resulted in trust. The issue was whether they would accept and trust His Word about Himself and themselves. The fall of Lucifer is consistent with this.

What is the Devil doing today?

So, according to the Bible, God did not create a ‘bad devil’, but a beautiful, powerful and intelligent angelic being. In pride he led a revolt against God – and in doing so was corrupted. Yet he retains his original splendor. You, I and all of mankind have become part of the battleground in this contest between God and his ‘adversary’ (devil). The devil’s strategy is not about wearing sinister black cloaks like ‘Black Riders’ in the Lord of the Rings. Nor does he put evil curses on us. Instead he seeks to deceive us from the redemption that God has accomplished in the death and resurrection of Jesus. As the Bible says:

Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light. It is not surprising, then, if his servants also masquerade as servants of righteousness.
2 Corinthians 11:14-15

Because Satan and his servants can masquerade as ‘light’ we are more easily tricked. Perhaps this is why the Gospel always seems to run against our instincts and against all cultures.

June 26, 2017

What is the History of the Jewish People?

Jews are one of the most ancient peoples in the world. The Bible, ancient historians outside the Bible, as well as archeology, all record their history. We have more facts about their history than that of any other nation. We will use this information to summarize their history. To make the history of the Israelites (an Old Testament word for the Jewish people) easier to follow, we will use timelines.

Abraham: The Jewish Family Tree Begins

The timeline starts with Abraham. God promised that through him God would bless all nations. Then God tested him in the symbolic sacrifice of his son Isaac. This was a sign pointing to Jesus by marking the future location of his sacrifice. God then named Isaac’s son Israel. The timeline continues in green when Israel’s descendants were slaves in Egypt. This period began with Joseph, son of Israel (the genealogy was: Abraham -> Isaac -> Israel (also known as Jacob) -> Joseph). He led the Israelites to Egypt, where later on the Egyptians enslaved them.

bible timeline with abraham and moses in history — Living in Egypt as slaves of Pharoah

Moses: The Israelites become a Nation under God

Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt by the Passover Plague, which destroyed Egypt and allowed the Israelite Exodus from Egypt to the land of Israel. Before he died, Moses announced Blessings and Curses on the Israelites (when the timeline goes from green to yellow). God would bless their obedience but curse them if they did not obey. These Blessings & Curses would follow the Jewish people ever after.

bible historical timeline from Abraham to david — Self-Rule as a confederation of Tribes with no king and no capital

For several hundred years the Israelites lived in their land but they did not have a King, nor did they have the capital city of Jerusalem. However, with King David at 1000 BCE this changed.

historical timeline Living with Davidic Kings ruling from Jerusalem — Kings of David ruling from Jerusalem

David establishes a Royal Dynasty at Jerusalem

David conquered Jerusalem and made it his capital city. He received the promise of a coming ‘Christ’. From that time on the Jewish people waited for the ‘Christ’ to come. His son Solomon, rich and famous, succeeded him and built the First Jewish Temple on Mount Moriah in Jerusalem. The descendants of King David continued to rule for about 400 years. This was the period of Israelite glory – they had the promised Blessings. They were a powerful nation; had an advanced society, rich culture, and a magnificent Temple. The timeline shows this period in aqua-blue (1000 – 600 BCE).

But the Old Testament also describes their growing corruption during this time. Many prophets in this period warned the Israelites that the Curses of Moses would come if they did not repent. But the Isralite nation ignored their warnings. During this time the Israelites divided into two separate kingdoms. There was the northern Kingdom of Israel or Ephraim, and the southern Kingdom of Judah. This is like Koreans today, one people split in two countries – North and South Korea.

The First Jewish Exile to Babylon

Finally around 600 BCE the Curses happened. Nebuchadnezzar, a powerful Babylonian King came just like Moses had predicted 900 years before when he wrote in his Curse:

The Lord will bring a nation against you from far away, from the ends of the earth, like an eagle swooping down, a nation whose language you will not understand, ⁵⁰a fierce-looking nation without respect for the old or pity for the young. ⁵¹They will devour the young of your livestock and the crops of your land until you are destroyed. They will leave you no grain, new wine or olive oil, nor any calves of your herds or lambs of your flocks until you are ruined. ⁵²They will lay siege to all the cities throughout your land until the high fortified walls in which you trust fall down. They will besiege all the cities throughout the land the Lord your God is giving you.
Deuteronomy 28: 49-52)

Nebuchadnezzar conquered Jerusalem, burned it, and destroyed the Temple that Solomon had built. He then exiled the Israelites to Babylon. This fulfilled the predictions of Moses that:

Just as it pleased the Lord to make you prosper and increase in number, so it will please him to ruin and destroy you. You will be uprooted from the land you are entering to possess.

⁶⁴Then the Lord will scatter you among all nations, from one end of the earth to the other. There you will worship other gods—gods of wood and stone, which neither you nor your ancestors have known.
Deuteronomy 28:63-64

jewish historical timeline Conquered and exiled to Babylon — Conquered and exiled to Babylon

So for 70 years, the period shown in red, the Israelites lived as exiles outside the land promised to Abraham and his descendants. The term Jews began in this period in reference to their foremost tribe Judah.

Return from Exile under the Persians

After their exile, the Persian Emperor Cyrus conquered Babylon and Cyrus became the most powerful person in the world. He permitted the Jews to return to their land.

jewish historial timeline Living in the Land as a part of Persian Empire — Living in the Land as a part of Persian Empire

However they were no longer an independent country, they were now a province in the Persian Empire. This continued for 200 years, shown in pink in the timeline. During this time the Jews rebuilt the Jewish Temple (known as the 2nd Temple) and the city of Jerusalem. Though the Persians permitted the Jews to return to the land of Israel, many remained abroad in exile.

The period of the Greeks

Then Alexander the Great conquered the Persian Empire and made the Israelites a province in the Greek Empires for another 200 years. The timeline shows this period in dark blue.

jewish historical timeline Living in the Land as part of Greek Empires — Living in the Land as part of Greek Empires

The Period of the Romans

Then the Romans defeated the Greek Empires and they became the dominant world power. The Jews again became a province in this Empire. The timeline shows this period in light yellow. This is the time when Jesus lived. This explains why there are Roman soldiers in the gospels. The Romans ruled the Jews in Israel during the life of Jesus.

jewish historical timeline Living in the Land as part of Roman Empire — Living in the Land as part of Roman Empire

The Second Jewish exile under the Romans

From the time of the Babylonians (586 BCE) the Jews had not been independent. A succession of other empires ruled them. The Jews resented this and they revolted against Roman rule. The Romans came and destroyed Jerusalem (70 CE), and burned down the 2nd Temple. Then they deported the Jews as slaves across the Roman Empire. This was the second Jewish exile. With the vastness of the Roman Empire the Jews eventually scattered around the whole world.

Jerusalem and Temple destroyed by Romans in 70 AD. Jews sent into world-wide exile

This is how the Jewish people lived for almost 2000 years, dispersed in foreign lands and never totally accepted there. In these different nations they regularly suffered great persecutions. This persecution of the Jews was particularly true in Europe. From Spain, in Western Europe, to Russia the Jews lived often in a dangerous situations in these kingdoms. Jews emigrated to India and Kaifeng, China to escape these persecutions. The Curses of Moses back in 1500 BCE were accurate descriptions of how they lived.

… Among those nations you will find no repose, no resting place for the sole of your foot. There the Lord will give you an anxious mind, eyes weary with longing, and a despairing heart.
Deuteronomy 28:65

God gave the Curses against the Israelites to make peoples ask:

All the nations will ask: “Why has the Lord done this to this land? Why this fierce, burning anger?”
Deuteronomy 29:24

And the answer:

And the answer will be: “It is because this people abandoned the covenant of the Lord, the God of their ancestors, the covenant he made with them when he brought them out of Egypt. ²⁶They went off and worshiped other gods and bowed down to them, gods they did not know, gods he had not given them. ²⁷Therefore the Lord’s anger burned against this land, so that he brought on it all the curses written in this book. ²⁸In furious anger and in great wrath the Lord uprooted them from their land and thrust them into another land, as it is now.”
Deuteronomy 29: 25-28

The timeline below shows this 1900 year period as a long red bar.

Historical Timeline of the Jews - featuring their two periods of exile — Historical Timeline of the Jews – featuring their two periods of exile

Note that the Jewish people went through two periods of exile. But the second exile was much longer than the first exile. an the first exile.

The 20th Century Holocaust

The persecutions against the Jews peaked when Hitler, through Nazi Germany, tried to exterminate all the Jews living in Europe. Six million Jews lost their lives in what today we know as the Holocaust. Hitler almost succeeded but he was defeated and a remnant of Jews survived.

Modern Re-birth of Israel

The fact that there were people who self-identified as ‘Jews’ after thousands of years without a homeland was remarkable. During this period the Jews even lost their native language, Hebrew. But this allowed the final words of Moses, written down 3500 years ago, to come true. In 1948 the world, through the United Nations, saw the incredible re-birth of the modern state of Israel. This fulfilled what Moses had written centuries before regarding how their exile would end.

then the Lord your God will restore your fortunes^[a] and have compassion on you and gather you again from all the nations where he scattered you. ⁴Even if you have been banished to the most distant land under the heavens, from there the Lord your God will gather you and bring you back. ⁵He will bring you to the land that belonged to your ancestors, and you will take possession of it. He will make you more prosperous and numerous than your ancestors.
Deuteronomy 30:3-5

The Jews established their modern state of Israel in spite of great opposition. Most of the surrounding nations waged war against Israel in 1948 … in 1956 … in 1967 and again in 1973. Israel, a very small nation, was sometimes at war with five nations at the same time. Yet not only did Israel survive, but her territory increased. In the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel regained Jerusalem, her historic capital city David had founded 3000 years ago. The creation of the state of Israel, and the consequences of these wars, has created one of the most difficult geo-political tensions of our world today.

As Moses predicted (explored further here), the re-birth of Israel created an impetus for Jews to return to Israel. Per Moses’ blessing they are being ‘gathered’ from the most ‘distant lands’ and being brought ‘back’. Moses wrote that both Jews and non-Jews should note the implications.

January 15, 2017

The Branch: Named hundreds of years before his birth

We saw how Isaiah used the image of The Branch. A ‘he’ from the fallen dynasty of David, possessing wisdom and power was coming. Then Jeremiah followed up by stating that this Branch would be known as the LORD (the Old Testament name for God) himself.

Zechariah continues The Branch

The prophet Zechariah lived 520 BCE, just after the Jewish people returned to Jerusalem from their first exile to Babylon. At that time, the Jewish people were rebuilding their destroyed temple. The High Priest then was a man named Joshua, and he was re-starting the work of priests. Zechariah, the prophet, was partnering with his colleague Joshua, the High Priest, in leading the Jewish people. Here is what God – through Zechariah- said about this Joshua:

‘”Listen O High Priest Joshua and your associates seated before you, who are men symbolic of things to come: I am going to bring my servant the Branch.” …, says the LORD Almighty, “and I will remove the sin of this land in a single day”.’
Zechariah 3:8-9

The Branch! Started by Isaiah 200 years before, continued by Jeremiah 60 years earlier, Zechariah carries on further with ‘The Branch’. Here God also calls the Branch ‘my servant’. In some way the High Priest Joshua in Jerusalem at 520BCE, colleague of Zechariah, was ‘symbolic’ of this coming Branch.

But how?

It says that in ‘a single day’ the sins will be removed by the LORD. How would that happen?

The Branch: Uniting Priest and King

To understand we should know that God strictly separated the roles of Priest and King in the Bible. None of the Kings could be priests, and the priests could not be kings. The role of the priest was to mediate between God and man by offering sacrifices to God. The responsibility of the King was to rule with justice from the throne. Both were crucial; both were distinct. Yet Zechariah wrote that in the future:

The word of the Lord came to me:…
Zechariah 6:9

Take the silver and gold and make a crown, and set it on the head of the high priest, Joshua son of Jozadak.¹²Tell him this is what the Lord Almighty says: ‘Here is the man whose name is the Branch, and he will branch out from his place and build the temple of the Lord. ¹³It is he who will build the temple of the Lord, and he will be clothed with majesty and will sit and rule on his throne. And he will be a priest on his throne. And there will be harmony between the two.’
Zechariah 6: 11-13

Against previous precedent, Joshua, the high priest in Zechariah’s day, was to symbolically put on the king’s crown as the Branch. (Remember Joshua was ‘symbolic of things to come’). Joshua, the High Priest, by putting on the crown prophesied a future uniting of King and Priest into one person. This coming Branch would be a priest on the King’s throne. Furthermore, Zechariah wrote that ‘Joshua’ was the name of the Branch. What did that mean?

The name ‘Joshua’ is the name ‘Jesus’

We had summarized pertinent details of Bible translation here necessary to understand further. The original Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek in 250 BCE, and called the Septuagint or LXX. We saw how the Septuagint made the title ‘Christ’ well-known. Here we follow that same analysis for ‘Joshua’.

joshuajesus-diagram — ‘Joshua’ = ‘Jesus’. Both come from the Hebrew name ‘Yhowshuwa’

Joshua is a Hebrew transliteration of the original Hebrew name ‘Yhowshuwa’. Quadrant #1 shows how Zechariah wrote ‘Joshua’ as ‘Yhowshuwa’ in Hebrew in 520 BCE. Scholars transliterate the Hebrew ‘Yhowshuwa’ in modern Bible translations (#1-> #3). ‘Yhowshuwa’ in Hebrew is the same as Joshua in modern languages like English. But when the Septuagint was translated from Hebrew to Greek in 250 BCE Yhowshuwa was transliterated to Iesous (#1 -> #2). ‘Yhowshuwa’ in Hebrew is the same as Iesous in Greek. When scholars translate the Greek New Testament to modern languages (like English), Iesous is transliterated to ‘Jesus’ (#2 -> #3). Iesous in Greek is the same as Jesus.

People called Jesus ‘Yhowshuwa‘ when they spoke to him in Hebrew. But the writers of the Greek New Testament wrote his name as ‘Iesous’. This was exactly as the Greek Old Testament Septuagint wrote that name. In New Testament translations of today’s modern languages (#2 -> #3) ‘Iesous’ is transliterated to the familiar ‘Jesus’.

So the name: ‘Yhowshuwa’ = ‘Jesus’ = ‘Joshua’.

The name ‘Jesus’ goes through an intermediate Greek step, and ‘Joshua’ comes directly from the Hebrew.

In summary, both Jesus of Nazareth, and Joshua the High Priest of 520 BCE had the same name. They were named ‘Yhowshuwa’ in their native Hebrew, but in Greek both were called ‘Iesous’.

Jesus of Nazareth is the Branch

Now Zechariah’s prophecy makes sense. He predicted in 520 BCE that the name of the coming Branch would be ‘Jesus‘. In doing so he pointed directly to Jesus of Nazareth.

Jesus of Nazareth is well-known outside the gospels. The Jewish Talmud, Josephus and all other historical writers of Jesus, both friend and enemy, always referred to him as ‘Jesus’ or ‘Christ’. So his name was not invented in the Gospels. But Zechariah predicted his name 500 years before he lived.

Served as Priest…

This coming Jesus, according to Zechariah, would unite the King and Priest roles. What was it that the priests did? On behalf of the people they offered sacrifices to God to atone for sins. The priest covered the sins of the people by sacrifice. Similarly, the coming Branch ‘Jesus’ was going to bring a sacrifice so that the LORD could ‘remove the sin of this land in a single day’. This was the day Jesus offered himself as the sacrifice.

While known as Christ

Now think of the life of Jesus of Nazareth. He certainly claimed to be a king – The King in fact. This is what ‘Christ‘ means. But what he did while on earth was actually priestly. The priest offered acceptable sacrifices on behalf of the people. The death of Jesus was also an offering to God on our behalf. So his death was in his priestly role. In his death he fulfilled all the requirements as Priest, even as most know him as ‘The Christ’ or King. In his resurrection, he showed his power and authority over death. He brought the two roles together.

The Branch, the one that David long ago called the ‘Christ’, is the Priest-King. Remarkably, the prophet Zechariah wrote down his name in prophecy over 500 years before his birth.

The Prophets then predicted when the Christ would come. We look at this next.