1473 - Connecting the Messianic Dots.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Welcome to On the Way with Tony Crisp. Each weekday, Dr. Crisp will be discussing biblical passages, people, places, and prophecy. Tune in daily to start your day right and deepen your understanding of how to better walk the way and enjoy the journey. Here's your host, Dr. Tony Chris.

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Welcome to On the Way. This is Tony Crisp, and this is Podcast 1473. We are examining what the New Testament says about the Old Testament in relation to Isaiah 53. Isaiah the prophet is quoted more than any of the other prophets in the New Testament. Sixty-five times it is specifically quoted, and many other times it is alluded to in the New Testament. Yesterday I explained to you how there is so much confusion about Isaiah 53 among the Jewish people. Now I am not a Jew, but I have worked with Jews now for fifty years. I have been to Israel over the last fifty years, week after week after week, month after month after month, spending as much time as ninety to one hundred and twenty days a year in Israel. I have walked with the Jewish people, I have loved the Jewish people, and I have been astonished at how few of the Jewish people, even many who are Orthodox, who have never studied Isaiah fifty three. And I have examined over the years by asking and researching through personal anecdotes by asking why do you think this is and so forth, and I've come to a conclusion. First of all, it is impossible or just total ignorance to read Isaiah fifty three and not think of Jesus of Nazareth. No matter what you've been taught, no matter what you say, if you just go into it objectively and you read the New Testament accounts of Jesus, especially his suffering and his quotations, you look at the eyewitness accounts of his works, of his words, and Isaiah fifty three comes into your mind. In Israel, more than a decade and a half ago, on a Shabbat evening, I was meeting in the house of a prominent rabbi having a sabbatical meal with him. Others were with us. He was asking questions of evangelicals. He's very familiar with evangelicals, although he is an Orthodox Jew. And he's very well known. And I tried to answer his questions as he asked not Sunday school questions, but very penetrating questions, great questions. Questions that in some cases I had to say, I don't know the answer to that. I will have to continue to search the scriptures because I don't have the answer to that because as far as I know, God has not given us the answer on that. But I asked him, I said, Have you ever read Isaiah fifty three? He said, Yes, I have. I said, Do you ever teach that to your congregation? And he said no. He said, and I'm not going to. And I said, Why not? And this is what he replied. He said, I cannot read Isaiah fifty three being a student of history and having read through the gospel accounts of Jesus of Nazareth without thinking of Jesus suffering on a Roman cross. And he said, I cannot introduce that to my congregation. And that was his answer. Now I was somewhat shocked, but I was not shocked. Another instance I had with a guide, a Jewish guide from London. She was a wonderful lady. She had grown up during the days of World War II. She had been there when London had been bombed night after night after night, and she spent hours with me and we spent many, many weeks together, and she told me of the horrors of World War II, of her family members that had died in the Holocaust. We got to know one another well and we talked often. And I was in the area called the Sisters of Zion on the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem. And we were underneath the Sisters of Zion area there, and that would have been the area of the Antonio Fortress, just north of the temple complex in Jerusalem. And I read to a group that I was teaching Isaiah 53 about the suffering, about the stripes of flagellation, of scourging. And I read Isaiah 53. And when I finished with that, my guide, this lady friend of ours, was weeping. And she came to me afterwards as people were still milling around and uh trying to get photos of this place because it's a very special place. And the question she asked me was astonishing. She said, Tony, please tell me that was such a moving passage. Please tell me where in the New Testament that passage is found. And I called her by name and I said, My dear friend, that is Isaiah 53. When I said that, I think I could have smacked her in the face and there would not have been a more startled look on her face. She was petrified because immediately she was bewildered. She was totally unfamiliar with it. And so in recent years I have begun to research that and I found out one of the reasons why that many religious Jews have never read Isaiah 53. You see, every year the Jews read through the Torah. It's called a Torah portion. And for a number of historical reasons that I'm not going to get into now for the sake of time, and I don't want to get sidetracked, there were also added to the synagogue readings and the weekly readings, Torah readings and Torah portions, there was added a Haftor, which was a reading from the prophets. And from Isaiah there are fifteen such readings. And it's amazing in these portions of the Haftorah, the readings in Isaiah, that the beautiful passage that is what we refer to as Isaiah 53. Remember there were no chapter verse divisions. But from Isaiah fifty-two to verse twelve is a halfturah reading. And then chapter fifty-four and verse one picks up another Haftora reading. But Isaiah fifty-two and what we call verse thirteen through fifty-three and verse twelve, that's not included in the Haftora. It is a picture of a suffering servant, one who would take the punishment for sin, would justify many, would heal by his suffering. And he would suffer not for himself but for others. Now in the days ahead, God willing, I'm going to explain why I say that last statement. And Isaiah fifty two verse thirteen and all twelve verses of Isaiah fifty three make up what I believe was the passage that dealt with the Lord Jesus, Jesus of Nazareth. And it is so remarkably accurate that it defies imagination that anyone would not put together the truth of the scriptures that were lived out seven hundred and fifty years later by Jesus of Nazareth from the time that Isaiah prophesied. There are reasons why even the Jews of Jesus' day who followed him, they would not have been familiar with this, and they would not have connected the dots. Now it's interesting in the Gospel of Luke, where we left off yesterday, and the disciples on the road to Emmaus, that he opened up and expounded the scriptures to them, and he thoroughly hermenuo, he dia hermenuo, that is, he thoroughly explained, he thoroughly put everything together for them. After they left him, when they recognized that indeed he was Jesus himself that was meeting with them in their home, and they recognized that by the way he broke bread, by the way he prayed, by the way that he gave the blessing, immediately they recognized him and he vanished out of their sight. And when he left them, they said to one another, Did not our hearts burn within us as he explained the scriptures, as he opened up the scriptures to us. They immediately went back to Jerusalem, met with the disciples, and said, We have seen Jesus with our own eyes. The women were right, Peter and John, they did see an empty two. We saw Jesus. We just broke bread with him. And they were speaking, and as they said these things, verse thirty-six of Luke twenty four says, Now as they said these things, Jesus himself stood in the midst of them and said to them, Peace to you. And they were terrified and frightened, and supposed that they had seen a spirit. And he said unto them, Why are you troubled? And why do doubts arise in your hearts? You see, He's God, He knew their hearts. He said, Look, look, behold, my hands, my feet, that it is I myself. It's a reflexive pronoun, I myself. Handle me, that is, touch me, feel of me. For a spirit does not have flesh and bones. I truly am glorified. I truly am risen from the dead, never to die again. You see, Jesus is the first one who ever died, rose again, never to die again. All of those who had been resurrected in the past, including Lazarus, died again. But not Jesus. He's alive forevermore. And so after this, he said, you know that he knew their hearts. He had just explained that. And so he knew that they were still doubting, even though he was talking in his voice that they recognized he was the same Jesus that they had seen before, but yet now he was totally different. In verse 31, it says, But while they did not believe, for joy, that is, they were so happy about it, they just could not believe it. And he said to them, Do you have any food here? In other words, he was trying to solidify in their mind that indeed he is the risen Christ, the risen Messiah, and that all of this had to happen. And so in verse 44, he said, These are the words which I spoke to you while I was still with you, that all must be fulfilled, which were written in the Law of Moses, the Torah, and the Nebiim, the prophets, and the Psalms, which is the first book of the Ketuvim, the third category of the Hebrew categorization of the Old Testament, the Tanakh, the law, the prophets, and the writings. And he opened their understanding that they might comprehend the scriptures. The word here for understand is the word which paints a picture for us. It's the idea of putting things together. So Jesus connected the dots. He connected the dots for them that they did not see. What the angels themselves searched to find out how is all this going to happen? How can he suffer and die and rise from the dead and rule and reign? All of that they had not connected. And Peter, James, and John and the closest disciples, the inner circle, they had not connected it. But Jesus put it all together for them. And no doubt he explained to them, I am the suffering servant. It's not the nation of Israel. Look at the pronouns. It is a person. I was, as you know, I was a mangled piece of flesh. My visage, my visual, my person was so marred that you couldn't even tell who I was. Look at me. I'm whole again. Oh, I can't wait to share more with you. But for right now, that's all the time we have. Read it. Study it. God will help you to connect the dots. I pray that God would whet your appetite to get in the book of God and never get out again. Stay in it for the rest of your life. Relish it. Search for these great nuggets of gold and silver and treasure, as you would for earthly gold and silver and treasure. And when you seek the Lord with all of your heart, you will find it. For on the way, this is Tony Chris.

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Thanks for listening to On the Way with Tony Crisp. Tune in every weekday for information on biblical passages, people, places, and prophecies. Fridays are for your questions. Email your questions to questions at TonyCrisp.org. Then just listen for your question to be answered on Friday's podcast. That's questions at TonyC R I S P dot org. Thanks for listening and have a blessed day on the way.