FourFifteen

Daniel 9:26 " And after the sixty-two weeks Messiah shall be cut off, but not for Himself... " Zechariah 12:10 " And I will pour on the house of David and on the inhabitants of Jerusalem the Spirit of grace and supplication; then they will look on Me whom they have pierced. Yes, they will mourn for Him as one mourns for his only son, and grieve for Him as one grieves for a firstborn." Not For Himself... The Messiah was destined to die. This was the whole purpose of His life. The Old Testament is very clear on this; He came to bear our sin. He was cut off, but  not for Himself . This was the great mystery of the messianic prophecies: On the one hand, He was prophesied to be a king that would reign on David's throne forever. On the other hand, He was prophesied to be a sacrifice that would make many righteous by His death. ( This dilema is only solved when you consider the Messiah's  first  coming as a Savior, and His  second  coming as the Kin...

Isaiah 61:1-2 " The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon Me, because the LORD has anointed Me to preach good tidings to the poor; He has sent Me to preach good tidings to the poor; He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound, to proclaim the acceptable year of the LORD... " Luke 4:21 " Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing. " As the Messiah, Jesus was anointed from Heaven for a specific ministry. According to this verse, this purpose was to preach the gospel, heal broken hearts, and set prisoners free. Then, when we look over in the book of Acts, we see that " God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and power " for the healing of the sick. (Acts 10:38) Jesus' earthly ministry was very important. He didn't just come to die for our sins...He also came to teach: -His words and messages teach us God's own will. -His healing ministry sho...

Psalm 119:130 " The entrance of Your words gives light... " John 1:14 " And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. And we beheld His glory... " Humble Beginnings  Micah 5:2 " But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of you shall come forth to Me the One to be Ruler in Israel, Whose goings forth are from of old, from everlasting." We all know the Christmas story by heart. Mary and Joseph were newly-married.  Mary was very  pregnant with a miraculous Child when they were required to visit Bethlehem. While they were there, she gave birth to Jesus and laid Him in a manger...because there was no more room in the inn. It's easy to assume we know everything about this story, and stop paying attention to it...but let's look a little closer to the details. Bethlehem was a tiny town. Think about this, Mary and Joseph  didn't even live there at the time! There's not even...

Psalm 89:35 " Once I have sworn by My holiness. I will not lie unto David. His seed shall endure forever, and his throne as the sun before us." Psalm 132:11 " The Lord has sworn in truth unto David that He will not turn from it. 'Of the fruit of thy body will I set upon thy throne. " The Greatest Theological Problem In The Old Testament As we've seen already, David was a man after God's heart. He understood the grace and love of God more than anyone else in the Old Testament. He was the one who wrote, " Blessed is the man whose sins are forgiven ." (Psalm 32). He was the man who inspired the majority of the book of Proverbs. He was the first man with the desire to build a permanent place to worship God - a "house" if you will. God responded to this desire of David's by promising an everlasting "house" for David; a descendant from his own body Who will rule forever. This is the promise we read in the previous two ver...

Romans 15:12  And again, Isaiah says: "There shall be a root of Jesse; and He who shall rise to reign over the Gentiles, in Him the Gentiles shall hope." 1 Samuel 16:1  Now the LORD said to Samuel, "You have mourned long enough for Saul. I have rejected him as king of Israel, so fill your flask with olive oil and go to Bethlehem. Find a man named Jesse who lives there, for I have selected one of his sons to be my king." If you remember, we saw  in our last post  that the Messiah needed to come from the seed of Abraham, from the tribe of Judah, and from the family of a man named Jesse. Jesse was the grandson of Ruth and Boaz, and the great-grandson of Rahab and Salmon ( tradition says that Salmon was one of the two spies Rahab hid in Jericho ).   By the time we see Jesse in 1 Samuel 16, he was already an old man...possibly just as old as Samuel himself. Depending on exactly how aged Jesse was, he probably remembered when Saul was first anointed to be king. ...

The Messiah couldn't have come from anywhere or just any nation. He couldn't have been born in just any country, to some random family, or into any of the cultures of the world. If someone was going to claim the title of "the Messiah", he would have to come from a very  limited and specific lineage. In this post, we'll look at seven  bottle-necks in the ancestry of the Anointed One. If  anyone  was going to claim the Messianic title, they had to demonstrate this exact family lineage. The Seed of the Woman Genesis 3:14-15 " And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her Seed; He will bruise your head, and you shall bruise His feet. " We can see two important points about the Messiah's identity from this one verse: 1 - The Messiah must be a human. It seems like this shouldn't need to be said; of course he would be a human! However, there are thousands of people who are holding onto a religion that cla...

As far as most Christians know, the first Messianic promise in the Bible is Genesis 3:15 - speaking of the "Seed of the Woman" that was going to crush the head of the serpent. While this passage is a powerful prophecy of the Messiah and His redemptive work, it isn't considered by most  orthodox Jews  to be the first Scriptural reference to the Messiah.  That reference, they say, is found in third verse of Genesis. The First Glimpse At The Messiah Genesis 1:3 " The God said, 'Let there be light" ; and there was light. " The Hebrew word for "light" is nehorah. For centuries, this word has been considered a hidden name of the Messiah in the Scriptures. It was taught among Rabbis that a brief glimpse can be seen of the Messiah - the promised One that would bring light to the world - in the very first thing God said in Scripture. Granted, this was an act of physical creation. When God said "Light be!" - light was...physically...