Why Read the Old Testament? (8)

Dear Friend,

 

When Jesus cries, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken me?”, He is not only expressing His immediate Incarnational suffering with its deep and veiled mystery of sacrificial atonement, but He is also proclaiming His resurrection. Not only is He proclaiming His resurrection, but He is proclaiming our sonship in Him and the proclamation of the Gospel to all the peoples of the earth. He is also proclaiming the Eschaton, the gathering up of all things into Himself to the glory of the Father.

 

Isn’t this obvious?

 

This should be as obvious as it would have once been that when I say, “When in the course of human events,” or “We hold these truths to be self – evident, that all men are created equal,” that I am invoking the American Declaration of Independence and its historical context. But of course, neither is obvious today. What have we come to?

 

If I do not read the Old Testament, then when I read Matthew 27:46 and Mark 15:34, the cry of Jesus will be subject to my own thoughts and feelings and I will have only the immediate Biblical context in which to read it.

 

If I isolate certain Old Testament passages as Messianic, reading them primarily with an evidentiary lens, failing to read and see the Old Testament as holistically Messianic – then I will miss the glorious portrayal of the Firstborn Son of God in Jesus’ cry, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” I will fail to see the Son in His glory because I do not know and “see” Psalm 22, I see only one verse.

 

Whether I do not read the Old Testament because I think it irrelevant, or whether I primarily read it in an evidentiary fashion, focusing on isolated texts – I am rejecting the full revelation of Jesus Christ as well as the way that Jesus and the Apostles read and taught the Old Testament, with Jesus being the hermeneutic, the lens through which we see all Scripture, the focal point of all Scripture. Do we forget that Christianity should be Jesus Christ, and that Jesus Christ should certainly be Christianity?

 

Now then, what do you see when you read Psalm 22:1 – 21? What do you see when you read this passage alongside all four depictions of the crucifixion in the Gospels? Please take the time to do this – after all, this is the portrayal of the Crucifixion of our Lord Jesus Christ, is it too much to ask us to enter into the deepest mystery of the cosmos, the central point in the history of humanity, the glory of Divinity?  

 

Please read and reread Psalm 22:1 – 21, and then carefully read each Gospel account of the Crucifixion – looking at the Psalm and then the Gospel each time. What do you see?

 

How might you explain what you see to others?

 

I am thinking right now of the African – American spiritual, “Where You There When They Crucified My Lord?”

 

As you work through Psalm 22:1 – 21 and the four Gospel passages of the Crucifixion, how would you answer the question?

 

Where you there?