The Messiah in the Old Testament –Abraham, Judah
In his book The Messiah in the Old Testament, Walter Kaiser, of Gordon-Conwell
Theological Seminary, notes 8 promises God made to Abraham.[i] The seventh of these was that through
Abraham, God would bless all the peoples of the earth (Genesis 12:3; 18:18;
22:18). Kaiser feels this promise points
to the heart of the Gospel. Salvation
comes as a gift given by God apart from human works.[ii] In Galatians 3:8 & Romans 4:10-12, the
Apostle Paul looks to this early expression of the Gospel in Abraham’s life. The Messiah – Jesus – fulfills this promise
by overcoming the divide between Jews (the Chosen People) and the gentiles
(those without knowledge of God).
I find Kaiser’s identification of
the anticipated Messiah in the promises made to Abraham to be very
convincing. The continuity from Genesis
3:15 and “the seed,” born of woman t0 Abraham to the promise to Jesus and then
to Paul’s discourse on Jesus is easy for me to accept.
I am not as inclined to follow Kaiser’s
assertion that Abraham knew God would raise Isaac or provide a substitute when
God commanded Abraham to sacrifice his son (Genesis 22).[iii]
I think for our ancestors in the faith, things were not as settled as for us
with the benefit of hindsight. I don’t
know what Abraham knew or believed when he took Isaac up Moriah to be a human
sacrifice. That story is problematic and
I find that it is unhelpful to try to dampen the cruelty and the lack of moral
clarity in that story. But it is quite
easy to see the birth of a Messianic hope in the promise to Abraham.
This Abrahamic promise is specified four generations later when his great, great grandson Joseph is giving blessing to his 12
sons. Jacob reserves the most important
blessing not for the oldest, but for the fourth son, Judah.
Genesis
49:8-12New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)
8 Judah,
your brothers shall praise you; your hand shall be on the
neck of your enemies; your father’s sons shall bow down before you.
9 Judah is
a lion’s whelp; from the prey, my son, you have gone up.
He crouches down, he stretches out like a lion, like a lioness—who dares rouse him up?
He crouches down, he stretches out like a lion, like a lioness—who dares rouse him up?
10 The
scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor the
ruler’s staff from between his feet, until tribute comes to him; and the
obedience of the peoples is his.
11 Binding
his foal to the vine and his donkey’s colt to the choice vine, he washes his
garments in wine and his robe in the blood of grapes; 12 his eyes
are darker than wine, and his teeth whiter than milk.
The key word in this prophecy from Genesis 48 is in verse
10, ‘shiloh’ (translated ‘tribute’ in the NRSV). This Hebrew word, based upon its usage in
Ezekiel, means his ‘due,’ or that which is ‘rightfully his.’ Based on understanding ‘shiloh,’ this way,
Kaiser understands Genesis 48:10 to mean Judah will govern until the Messiah
comes at which point the Messiah (Jesus) will rule the world.[iv] This is why we call Him King of Kings and
Lord of the Lords. The roots of this
idea reach all the way back to Genesis and the constituting of the nation of
Israel.
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