Bible Study

 Tonight’s topic is Christmas prophecies. On the one hand it seems pretty simple. We know that Christmas is about the birth of Jesus and so Christmas prophecies must be prophecies about the birth of Jesus.  But  – and perhaps this is just going to be stating the obvious – I want to make sure we have an understanding of the significance of Christmas from a Christian perspective. Yes – it’s about the birth of Jesus. But I think we need to take it just a little bit more deeply than that. It’s about the incarnation of God – the coming of God to earth in human flesh. As John’s Gospel says, “The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.” Paul expanded on the idea in Philippians: “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.” So, for those who think that only Matthew and Luke have Christmas stor...

 The Psalms make for some fascinating reading. Depending on which one you read they can be either comforting or disturbing. They also have a mystery that’s pretty much inherent to them and that makes them mysterious. The Psalms are basically prayers or possibly hymns and in some cases they seem to have been written to function liturgically as a part of worship in the temple or the synagogue (or, for us, in church – I sometimes use a selection from the Psalms as the Call to Worship.) So, at least when they were written, they were human words that were addressed to God. Somehow, over the course of centuries, they came to be accepted as sacred Scripture, meaning that human words addressed to God came to be sign as God’s word addressed to us – which, when you think about it, is a kind of a strange transformation. It’s not my purpose today to try to explain how that occurred, but I think it’s just worth noting as part of the mystery contained within the Psalms. The Psalms deal run the w...

 Last week, we took a look at how Matthew used messianic prophecy and – in general – the writings of the Old Testament to make his point about Jesus. If you remember, I said that I thought Matthew’s use of the Old Testament was very well structured and that he moved logically through a few different themes that you could discern as you moved through the Gospel: (1) who Jesus was and where he came from, (2) to establish Jesus as one who was credible as a teacher of the Law and the Prophets, (3) to identify Jesus as the Messiah, (4) to establish that the Jewish Messiah had a ministry to the world, and (5) to demonstrate that how Jesus acted and taught was entirely in keeping with the expectations of how the Messiah would act and teach. Tonight I want to think about the Gospel of Luke, and how Luke uses the writings of the Old Testament, and what it tells us about his particular understanding of Jesus and of what he felt was important about Jesus’ ministry.   I think you shou...

Last week, we took a look at the way many Christians use (or, some would say, misuse or abuse) the Old Testament to try to prove to the world that Jesus is the Messiah, or the one promised and foretold by the Old Testament, and I focussed on how Christians have used the Book of Genesis in particular, even though Genesis is not a prophetic book. I said that we should probably restrict ourselves to how the authors of the New Testament use Old Testament writings to make their point about Jesus rather than just flailing away and trying to force prophecies of Jesus into Old Testament texts that have nothing to do with Jesus, just because they “kind of” sound like something described in the New Testament about Jesus’ life. So today I want to start looking at how the New Testament authors see Jesus being revealed in the Old Testament, and this week I want to look specifically at Matthew and how he handles the question.   Matthew, I think, is in some ways the most important Gospel when...