Knowing Jesus through the Old Testament – part 1

I'm going to take a page from Scot McKnight and start blogging about the books that I've been reading. This will be a 5-part look at Christopher J.H. Wright's book 'Knowing Jesus through the OT'.

First chapter is called Jesus and the OT Story. 

Wright contends that the Old Testament is significant, indeed crucial in understanding Jesus. He starts off by suggesting that we look more carefully at Matthew 1:1-17, the schematized genealogy of Jesus that people tend to skip over. We know that ‘in Jewish society genealogies were an important way of establishing your right to belong within the community of God’s people’ (p. 3). We see through the scope of this genealogy that Jesus was a son of Abraham, a son of David, and he would therefore inherit all the promises and blessings included in this sonship. This includes the promise that through Abraham, one nation will become a blessing to all other nations. The promise through David as illustrated in Psalm 72 is that ‘all nations will be blessed through him, and they will call him blessed (v. 7).

Through the genealogies, Matthew traces three approximately equal spans of time between critical events: ‘from Abraham to David; from David to the Babylonian exile; from the exile to Jesus himself’ (p. 2). Wright proposes that the first seventeen verses of Matthew is the story so far of the Jewish people. These seventeen verses would carry the following overtones:

After the climax of the tower of Babel, god chose to restore the nations through Abraham. From that humble beginning, he would then come to make a covenant with Abraham’s descendents at Mount Sinai. ‘He would be their God and they would be his people, in a relationship of sovereignty and blessing on the one hand, and loyalty and obedience on the other’ (p. 11). God would then make a personal covenant with David he ‘tied his purpose for Israel to his promise to the house of David himself’ (p. 12). We see that this covenantal promise included practical social obedience to God’s commands. Meaning, God’s people were to stand for justice for the oppressed. The people of God eventually went through a period of exile and then restoration. We note that many people still believe they were under exile, although they were back in their home land. This is the story that Matthew condensed into seventeen verses.

It is a tendency for Christians to view the Old Testament as only a foreshadowing of Jesus Christ. This should not be the case. Instead, we should see ‘the full significance of the Old Testament story in the light of where it leads – the climactic achievement of Christ; and on the other hand, we are able to appreciate the full dimensions of what God did through Christ in the light of his historical declarations and demonstrations of intent in the Old Testament’ (p. 33). This is altogether viewed as Salvation-history.

In looking at the relationship between Israel’s history (salvation history) and the rest of human history, we begin to see a pattern of God’s work. We go back to God’s covenant promise to Abraham – that all peoples on earth will be blessed through you (Gen 12:3). God’s promise of blessing is ‘linked to the ethical demand on Abraham’s descendants… if Israel would only come back to living as they were create to, with social life and public worship both grounded in truth, justice and righteousness, then God could get on with his wider and greater purpose – blessing the rest of humanity’ (p. 38).

We note that the ‘particularism of Israel’s history is a particular means for a universal goal’ (p. 38). Even more particularly, we see that ‘the Messiah (Jesus) was Israel representatively and personified. The Messiah was the completion of all that Israel had been put in the world for – ie. god’s self-revelation and his work of human redemption’ (p. 44). There is a purposeful inclusion of all nations in the scope of God’s specific plans for Israel. We see that ‘eschatological future hope of Israel saw their own history ultimately flowing into the universal history of the nations, in order that the nations should be granted salvation and inclusion within the people of God’ (p. 51).

A final observation about this chapter is that the same blessings, promises, and duties of this story in Matthew 1:1-17 would also include us. It is the story of Israel, the story of Jesus and our story as well.