Cornerstone Curriculum, Official Certification Edition - Mentor's Guide

M E N T O R N O T E S / 8 1

The Old Testament Witness to Christ and His Kingdom The Promise Given

L E S S O N 3

Welcome to the Mentor’s Guide for Lesson 3, The Old Testament Witness to Christ and His Kingdom: The Promise Given . The overall focus of this lesson is to help your students see how thoroughly and convincingly the OT communicates about Messiah as revealed in the person of Jesus Christ. It will be the thesis of this lesson that the OT’s theme is the presentation of Christ, providing a window into the character, work, and glory of the coming Messiah, and it does this in a variety of ways and modes. In a real sense the OT foreshadows and anticipates the coming one, revealing him in the history of Israel, in analogical relationships with OT characters in its institutions and events, and in its moral righteousness and Messianic prophecies about the Redeemer and Anointed one to come. Fundamentally, this lesson is about hermeneutics, that is, how we are to read and interpret the Old Testament in a way that corresponds to its own internal coherence and structure. For many students of the Bible, urban and suburban, we find today a general neglect and illiteracy of the OT text. And little wonder, it is a collection of remarkably diverse literature, oriented around an ancient people and culture, and communicates oftentimes in figurative and symbolic language. It is largely centered around the developing history of the people of Israel, and God’s relationship with this people as the nation from which his own Messiah would come as the Savior and Redeemer of the world. What will be argued in this lesson is that the subject proper of the OT is its relationship to the Messiah revealed in Jesus Christ in the NT. This impulse to provide a sense of anticipation of the Messiah in the OT makes it intimately connected with the corresponding impulse in the NT, which is the revelation of the Messiah in Jesus of Nazareth. The Old Testament’s relationship to the New is specifically Christocentric: the OT offers the foundation of the hope and promise of the Messiah which is revealed and clarified in the NT. In this sense, we cannot understand the OT on its own; uninterpreted by its appeal and application to the New Testament . In terms of the history of Israel, the highlight of religious celebration and ceremony, its high moral teaching, and its predictions about the coming Messiah, the OT provides the groundwork for comprehending and appreciating the ministry of Jesus. This essential

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