The Old Testament Witness to Christ and His Kingdom, Mentor's Guide, MG09

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T H E O L D T E S T A M E N T W I T N E S S T O C H R I S T A N D H I S K I N G D O M

The Promise Universalized

Welcome to the Mentor’s Guide for Lesson 4, The Promise Universalized . The overall focus of this lesson is helping to see the Messianic prophetic links in the Old Testament witness to Christ and his Kingdom in two interrelated ways. First, in the sense of the OT’s use of Messianic prophecy to point to the coming and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth, and second, in the way in which this prophetic testimony points to God’s plan to include the Gentiles. Both of these themes, the prophetic pointing to Messiah and the promise of Gentile inclusion in the Abrahamic promise, universalize our sense of God’s redemptive purpose. Rather than referring to Yahweh as a provincial deity for the tribes of Israel, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is truly the God of the Jews and the Gentiles . This focus on the biblical predictions about the Messiah’s coming and his redemption for all the nations is the heart of this lesson. Prophecy is a rich and multi-layered concept in its usage in both the OT and NT. E. E. Ellis provides a nice summary of the key senses of the use of prophecy, as well as the power of prophecy as a mode of revelation, which is the primary way in which we are referring to it in this lesson: Prophecy may be defined as (1) a way of knowing truth; and as such, may be compared and contrasted with philosophy. In its biblical manifestation it forms a part of (2) the theology of the Holy Spirit and is represented as (3) one mode of the divine revelation of God’s truth or, in a broader sense, the totality of that revelation. Prophecy may be expressed in (4) a variety of literary forms and in (5) both canonical and non-canonical contexts. . . . The varieties of divine revelation are described in Jeremiah 18.18 as ‘the law … from the priest, counsel from the wise [and] the word from the prophet’ (cf. Isa. 28.7; 29.10, 14). While prophets might live together in communities or guilds (2 Kings 2.3ff.; 6.1), others were attached to the temple and some were probably themselves priests; for example, Samuel, Elijah, Ezekiel (1.3) and Jeremiah (1.1). At the same time priests had a ‘prophetic’ function in interpreting, transcribing and updating the Law (Isa. 28.7). Thus, the roles of the OT prophet and priest in mediating God’s word were not so distinct as some have thought (Pedersen, Johnson).

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