JESUS FULFILLED THE OLD TESTAMENT (2)

LIBERTY AND LOVE #53

Jesus was the perfect fulfillment of the promises of the Old Testament. Due to the destructive nature of sin, God put into action a plan to bring about man’s redemption. Many promises of this divine plan, which of course would culminate in the ministry and death of Jesus Christ, are found in the Old Testament.

In Genesis 3:15, following the transgression of Adam and Eve, God made a promise to Satan that the “Seed of woman” was coming: I will make you and the woman enemies to each other. Your descendants and her descendants will be enemies. One of her descendants will crush your head, and you will bite his heel (Genesis 3:15). Some four thousand years later, this “descendant of woman” appeared: This is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about. His mother Mary was engaged to marry Joseph, but before they married, she learned she was pregnant by the power of the Holy Spirit. Because Mary’s husband, Joseph, was a good man, he did not want to disgrace her in public, so he planned to divorce her secretly. While Joseph thought about these things, an angel of the Lord came to him in a dream. The angel said, “Joseph, descendant of David, don’t be afraid to take Mary as your wife, because the baby in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son, and you will name him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.” All this happened to bring about what the Lord had said through the prophet: “The virgin will be pregnant. She will have a son, and they will name him Immanuel,” which means “God is with us.” (Matthew 1:18-23).

God’s plan to bring the Messiah into the world included the development of the Jewish nation into which he would be born. This began with God’s promise to Abraham: The Lord told Abram, “Leave your country, your relatives, your family home, and travel to the country I'm going to show you. I will make you the ancestor of a great nation and I will bless you. I will make sure you have a great reputation and that you are a blessing to others. I will bless those who bless you; I will curse those who curse you. Everyone on earth will be blessed through you” (Gen. 12:1-3). The apostle Paul revealed that this promise to Abraham was fulfilled in the work of Christ: And the scripture saw in advance that God would save the Gentiles by faith and so he preached the good news of Jesus in the past to Abraham saying, in you all of the nations will be blessed (Gal. 3:8). So in the Old Testament, when God told Abraham that Abraham’s descendant would bless all nations, that promise was fulfilled in Christ Jesus. It was fulfilled by him because it was talking about him. Christ was a descendant of Abraham, just as God had promised (Matt. 1:1).

The promise that God made to Abraham regarding his son Isaac was also fulfilled in Christ: And God said, “No, But your wife Sarah will bear you a son and you must call his name Isaac: and I will establish my covenant with him and it will be an everlasting covenant with his descendant” (Genesis 17:19). Jesus was of the lineage of Isaac (Luke 3:34) and was the descendent of whom God spoke. The promise to Abraham concerning Isaac’s descendant was fulfilled in Jesus because it was talking about Jesus.

There is also the often quoted promise of God to Moses concerning the life and ministry of Christ as God’s Prophet: The Lord your God will raise up for you all a prophet like me. He will be from among you, an Israelite; and you must listen to and obey him...I will raise them up a prophet from among the Jewish family. He will be like you because I will put my words in his mouth and he will speak to the people what I tell him to speak (Deuteronomy 18:15,18). Peter quoted this promise to prove that it was fulfilled in Christ (Acts 3:20-22).

There are many other promises which could be noted, but these few prove that Christ was the fulfillment of Old Testament promises.

If the Old Testament is still in effect, then these promises have not been fulfilled. But they have been fulfilled. Because Jesus fulfilled the promises, the promises are no longer in need of fulfillment. So while we learn about Jesus from them, we are not under them. We are not under the Old Testament. It has been fulfilled.

Dewayne Dunaway