ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CUENet AUDIO TRANSCRIPTION DOGMATICS 2 LESSON 43 Captioning Provided By: Caption First, Inc. 10 E. 22nd Street Suite 304 Lombard, IL 60148 800-825-5234 *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. *** >> Thank you. Let me ask another question about the Old Testament and Christ. What is the relationship between the person of Jesus and such Old Testament persons as Adam, Moses, Joshua, David and Solomon? >> DR. DAVID SCAER: We already discussed the question of the Old Testament in Christ in regard to messianic prophesies. And most of our people are acquainted with that approach simply because many of our children's Christmas programs have the children recite various messianic prophesies. But we really want to go one step beyond that. And perhaps it's something a little bit more profound. And that is when the New Testament people, when they heard the story about Jesus, it was not as if they were hearing something entirely new, Eric. It was new in the sense that Jesus of Nazareth was not known to them before. But how he described himself and how he was revered, this was not new to them. There was something about him which they already knew. And there are any number of significant figures in the Old Testament which kind of point to the kind of person that Jesus was. Maybe it was not immediately evident that Jesus stood in the place of Adam. However, that became kind of clear as time went on. Certainly when you get to the end of the Gospel of Matthew and Jesus says, "All authority has been given unto me in heaven and earth," a number of things must have struck their mind. That here was a person who had authority at a number levels. He had the authority -- he had the teaching authority, which even surpassed that of the Old Testament. And he had the authority, also, to do miracles. It was almost with Jesus' coming as if the people were taken back into the Garden of Eden. The miracles of Jesus demonstrated that he was God. But there was something else in his miracles. By performing the miracles, paradise was being reconstructed. Here was Adam the way Adam should have been for his entire life but was not. And I think we have to say something a little bit more about the person of Moses. It's quite typical in Lutheran preaching to say negative things about Moses as a preacher of the law. I would endeavor to say that the most significant Old Testament person so far as understanding the person of Jesus is concerned is the person of Moses. When Matthew wrote his Gospel, any number of figures appeared in his mind. We already mentioned Jesus was like Jonah. There was a negative comparison to him. There was a positive comparison to Solomon. Solomon really preached the gospel of salvation. Some traveled a long distance to hear them. There Jesus came to the people and they rejected him. There was something that reminded Jesus about -- that reminded the people in Jesus about David. Here was the beloved Son of God. David's name is beloved. But the important person is Moses. Look at the story of the birth of Jesus. There's the wicked king who persecutes children, who desires their death. There's the king who actually slaughters the children. There is the flight into Egypt in order to get salvation. There is the flight back out of Egypt. There's the living in Nazareth. All of this had reminded the people of the first Moses. How pharaoh killed the children. How Moses had to flee for his life. How the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan River was reminiscent of the people coming to the Red Sea and Joshua taking the people to the River Jordan and to the land of salvation. And then there's the references to the mountain. We've already mentioned that. There's the Sermon on the Mount. There's the transfiguration on the mount. And the last words of Jesus, Matthew 28. It says the disciples went to the mountain which Jesus had directed them. Here is Jesus again pictured as Moses. Not giving orders to the 12 tribes to go into the Promised Land. But now giving leaders -- giving the leaders of the church, now 11 not 12, to go into the Promised Land. Now the Promised Land is no longer Palestine. The Promised Land is the entire world. And they are to go out with this message. And the person of Moses is extremely important in understanding what kind of person Jesus was. Moses is the one who was quite willing to give up his life for the people. Moses is the one who pleads for the people that God would have mercy upon them. And so Jesus is in the same position. Praying that God would have mercy on them. Of course Jesus surpasses Moses. But Moses -- the word of the Lord never came to Moses and the word of the Lord never came to Jesus. Moses knew God face to face. Jesus came out from God and had the word of God. And then there's David. David, the author of the Psalms. It would be the words of David that Jesus would take to the cross with him. When Jesus prayed "My God, My God, why has thou forsaken me?" he was not praying only one Bible verse. Some people claim he was just proclaiming one Bible verse and they wanted by that to prove that Jesus died in total despair. But Jesus did not die in despair. He prayed all of Psalm 22. And Psalm 22 ends with the sure hope of the psalmist that God is going to deliver him out of his predicament. And with all of the despair that Jesus had, he still had faith. He believed in God just as David did, that he would come to his rescue. And indeed, God did by the resurrection. And there is Solomon. Perhaps the most persecuted figure in the Old Testament. Persecuted by Christians. Even to the point that he didn't even attain salvation. But I think we ought to look at this a little bit more carefully. There is Solomon, the author of the Song of Songs. And what is so prominent in the preaching of Jesus is that he is the bridegroom and the church is the bride. Then there are the Proverbs, which speaks about the wisdom of God. Solomon spoke about the wisdom which believers need for their everyday lives. Jesus gave them the wisdom to live in God's world, to live forever. And then there's the book of Ecclesiastes. When I was teaching at the University of Illinois the first year, there was a Jewish student. And when he came to the book of Ecclesiastes, he didn't believe that life could be so desperate. He was a young man about 20, 21 years of age. He had a teaching career in front of him and came from a very well-to-do family. And in reading the book of Ecclesiastes, it contradicted everything which he knew and experienced in his own life. It's a desperate book. A book with no hope. A book that asks the question whether the soul of a man is any better than the soul of a beast. It all goes to the ground. But as I mentioned before, I think it's a very Lutheran book. Because it's only in that desperation that we begin to know Christ. And at the end of the book of Ecclesiastes, which is the last of Solomon's writings, it says the body returns to the earth and the soul of the spirit returns to God who gave it. There is the hope. There's a great deal of desperation and a sense of worthlessness in the Sermon on the Mount. "Do not lay up for yourself treasures on earth" almost sounds like Solomon, doesn't it? Because what has he destroyed by animal life, moths. He's destroyed by chemicals from moth and rust dust corrupt. Lay up for yourself treasures on earth. It almost sounds as if Solomon is speaking through Jesus or maybe it was Jesus speaking through Solomon about the desperateness of this life. That this life doesn't have anything permanent to offer. I said at the very beginning that I thought the course in Christology was the most important course that you would ever take. And I did not mean to suggest by that that you wouldn't preach on the Old Testament. In fact, by preaching on the New Testament you will be forced to incorporate the Old Testament into what you're going to say. So you won't need as many illustrations taken from outside the scriptures. But the scriptures themselves can provide you with all of the examples that you need. Even as Jesus preached in precisely this kind of way. He referred to the Old Testament. When he said that judgement was going to come upon those who disregarded his message and the message of the Apostles, he said that the judgement that comes upon those who ignore the Gospel will be worse. And what happened to Sodom and Gomorrah? He also said about himself, people who ignored his preaching, he pointed to the days of Noah when people lived ordinary lives. They got married. They gave in marriage. And they just engaged in one succession of marriages one after another. That was life. Life would go on forever and ever. And of course, it was a surprise that life ended. And Jesus makes that point very clearly. That those who deny his preaching and ignore what he has to say about himself will face the same fate. So the Old Testament prepares -- it really -- maybe we could look at it like this: The Old Testament gives us the outline of who Christ is. But it is only the New Testament that tells us what the content of that outline is. We value the Old Testament very greatly. However, the Old Testament prophets -- and this includes everyone -- they did not have a clear vision of Jesus. They were like men groping around in a dark and misty and foggy place desiring for the answer that was going to come. They had all the parts. They had all the parts of what it meant to be the Christ. But only with the coming of Jesus did they see how the parts fit all together. And on that account Jesus says, "Many just men and many prophets desire to see the things that you see. But you see them." And therefore, the Old Testament is always the necessary prelude to the New Testament. But the Old Testament itself was never complete in itself. It is a very sorrowful and sad book. Every book ends with an incomplete. The five books of Moses end with the burial of Moses. Well, Genesis ends with the burial of Jacob and Joseph. The book of Joshua ends with Joshua promising something better. There's always going -- with the death of David and Solomon, there's always going to be something better. With Isaiah, there's always going to be something better. The Old Testament ends with Malachi, with the promise that God is going to send Elijah before the great and terrible day of the Lord. The Old Testament is a book yearning and desiring an answer but not having the answer in itself. That answer comes with the gospels. On that account, we stand in our church for the reading of the gospels during the church service. Because this is not simply a report of what Jesus did, about what Jesus said. Rather, it is Jesus himself speaking. And on that account, it's customary in the Lutheran Church for the days of the Holy Communion to preach on the Gospel. It's the Lord's Day. The Lord's Supper. The Lord's Word. The Lord's Table. The Lord's Prayer for the Lord's people. *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ***