Just a brief observation on Ruth that came out of a study day shared with some good guys the other day…
- V1- Naomi’s husband’s name is Elimelech meaning ‘God is king’. He has 2 children who are called Mahlon and Kilion, which mean famine and destruction.
- Bethlehem means ‘house of bread’, but verse 1 tells us there is ironically no bread. There is famine in the land. So the family leave.
- Eventually v6 Naomi hears that the Lord has provided food for his people back in Bethlehem, Judah.
- Her daughter in law Ruth is shown favour though she is a foreigner by the kinsman redeemer 2:10. He offers her bread and wine 2:14. As we know in the story he becomes her kinsman redeemer.
- So in the time of famine the one who proclaims God is King leads away destuction and famine and hearing of the Lord’s loving kindness, Ruth is sustained by the redeemer despite her poverty.
John 6:35 ‘Then Jesus declared, “I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty.’
John 14:22-24: While they were eating, Jesus took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to his disciples, saying “Take it; this is my body.” Then he took the cup, gave thanks and offered it to them, and they all drank from it. “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many”
There is so much in Ruth. Anyone got any ideas about the significance of events taking place during Barley Harvest? Suggestions have been made about Passover associations. How awesome it is that these are the scriptures that testify about Christ…
Filed under: Christ in the Old Testament
Over the past few weeks I’ve been going through Ezekiel in my quiet time, which has been a great education. There are many reasons why not many of us would want to be in Ezekiel’s shoes. But there are maybe some reasons why we should feel quite jealous. Because he has some incredible encounters with Christ that leave us in little doubt that the way God the Father does business with Ezekiel is through his Son.
Ezekiel 40:2-4 left me reeling with excitement when I read it yesterday. Try this: ‘In visions of God he took me to the land of Israel and set me on a very high mountain, on whose south side were some buildings that looked like a city. He took me there and I saw a man whose appearance was like bronze; he was standing in the gateway with a linen cord and a measuring rod in his hand. The man said to me ‘Son of man, look with your eyes and hear with your ears and pay attention to everything I am going to show you, for that is why you have been brought here.’
Strangely similar to Daniel’s vision of a man ‘dressed in linen, with a belt of gold around is waist…his arms and legs like the gleam of burnished bronze..’ Daniel 10:6
Let’s get a further idea of Ezekiel’s experience…
Chapter 1 Verse 3
‘the word of the Lord came to Ezekiel the priest…’ (John makes it clear that Jesus is the eternal word of the Lord in his prologue, who has always made the Father known. Click here for further discussion of this. )
Further…
Verse 25
‘Then there came a voice from above the expanse over their heads as they stood with lowered wings. Above the expanse over their heads was what looked like a throne of sapphire, and high above on the throne was a figure like that of a man. I saw that from what appeared to be his waist up he looked like glowing metal, as if full of fire…this was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD.’
Ezekiel reaches the awesome conclusion that this is the one who is the ‘appearance of the likeness’, the image of the invisible God (Colossians 1:15) who makes God known.
This man, Christ, then goes on to call Ezekiel and instruct him.
Chapter 3:22
‘The hand of the Lord was upon me there, and he said to me, “Get up and go out to the plain, and there I will speak to you.” So I got up and went out to the plain. And the glory of the LORD was standing there like the glory I had seen by the Kebar River, and I fell face down.’
Points to note:
· The word in chapter 1 of Ezekiel ‘by the Kebar river’ has now been confirmed as this man, if we were in doubt!
· This is one who is known as the glory of the Lord, who is worshipped. We must bear in mind that we know that it cannot be the Father because he is invisible (John 1:18).
In chapter 43:2 his voice is described as being ‘like the rushing of waters’, the same as John’s description of Christ in Revelation 1:15.
There is so much there in Ezekiel! But its already been a very long post. Hopefully though we can see that Christ is the word of the Lord- the glory of the Lord- the man sent and forever calling his church to himself, warning the world of his judgement and holding out the promise of the Lord’s everlasting covenant.
In our last post on Abram we saw that Abram’s faith was directly in Christ. This post we are going to take a look in a bit more depth at the exact nature of that faith.
Genesis chapter 22 is interesting, because in it Abram (now Abraham) is often presented as a slightly crazy Father who blindly agrees to kill his son in a fit of rather ‘interesting’ parenting. And so in Sunday school and from the pulpit, we are exhorted to have faith like Abram. That is, a faith in God that is unwavering- even in adversity. Hence the fact that if you preach Christ from the passage it is claimed you are mistaken and that the passage is actually about ‘faith’, whatever that means and not about Jesus.
Now I understand that the passage is about faith. But I don’t think its the sort of faith that is often meant by those who make such statements.
Firstly, Hebrews explains to us that the reason Abraham was prepared to sacrifice his son was because he knew that the promise was going to be delivered through Isaac and therefore God would have to raise him back to life. Not because he was a sandwich short of a picnic!
‘By faith, when God tested him, offered Isaac as a sacrifice. He who had the promises was about to sacrifice his one and only son, even though God had said to him, “it is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned.” Abraham reasoned that God could raise the dead, and figuratively speaking, he did receive Isaac back from death.’ Hebrews 11:17-19
Abraham knew this was not about a random act of violence to his son. It is when we are released from seeing the passage in this way that we see the primary burden of the text is to teach Abraham about the substitutionary work of Jesus on the cross.
Let’s look at the facts, there is a son- an only son, verse 2- who will be sacrificed and approaches his death with wood upon his back, verse 9, which will be the wood upon which he is sacrificed. Surely this is a lesson in substitutionary atonement. Which would explain why Abraham says to Isaac in verse 8: ‘God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son” Verse 8. He is looking to the Lord to provide the sacrifice and knows Isaac is not it.
Consider then, that they are left with the promise in verse 14 that ’The LORD will provide’ and they clearly grasp the point of this so deeply that they name the mountain after this fact ’and to this day it is said “On this mountain of the LORD it will be provided.’
This is not simply a meaning that is retrospectively awarded by New Testament readers as some would contend. This is what they clearly took their experiences to mean. (And I’ll leave you thumbing through the maps to see whether the mountain region of Moriah, verse 2, was the region where Jesus the only son carried wood upon his back.) Blind faith? No. Rather a wonderful picture for Abraham of the saving and substitutionary work of Christ.
Its been interesting to be involved in a series on Genesis recently. One of the big questions for me has become, what is it that we learn exactly about Christ from the Old Testament and in particular the Father’s of faith? What does it mean that Abram ‘believed the LORD and it was credited to him as righteousness?’ Genesis 15:6. On what basis was he righteous? Was it a smoke and mirrors faith, as I’ve come to term it, where he trusted in some sort of general sign or God and through that was indirectly saved by trusting in Christ- even though he didn’t know it. I’m convinced not. I’m convinced in fact that he trusted directly in Christ, who as John Owen and others have so wonderfully commentated has always mediated between God and the church.
For as the Bible puts it: ’Salvation is found in noone else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved.’ Acts 4:12.
‘For I do not want you to be ignorant brothers, that our forefathers were all under the cloud and that they all passed through the sea. They were all baptised into Moses, in the cloud and in the sea. They all ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink: for they drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was Christ.’ 1 Corinthians 10:1-4
Take Genesis 15. Who was it that Abram trusted when the Lord made his covenant with him? Did he have some sort of pre-Christian pseudo faith that we have to learn from by basically discarding for the real deal? No, Genesis 15 presents Abram as trusting in the one who is known as the ‘word of the Lord.’
‘After this, the word of the LORD came to Abram in a vision: “Do not be afraid Abram, I am your shield, your very great reward.” Genesis 15:1
John in his gospel prologue is very clear that we should understand Christ as being the Word of the Lord, who is, in the context of the passage, the eternal Word who predated John the Baptist and has always been at the Father’s side. This word is also visible, verse 1 of Genesis 15, as he came in a ‘vision’. So this is not just a spoken word. Additionally the Bible assures us that it cannot be God the Father, because ‘no-one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only, who is at the Father’s side has made him known.’ John 1:18.
So this word is a person, which is confirmed further, when in verse 5 we read that: ‘He (that’s the word of the Lord) took him outside and said, “Look up at the heavens and count the stars…’
In verse 6 and this is the crux really, we are then told that ‘Abram believed the LORD, and he credited it to him as righteousness.’
So where is Abram’s faith and what is the basis for his righteousness that is always praised in the Bible? Well, he believed the word of the Lord. The word of the Lord, Christ the second person of the Trinity who has always mediated the affairs of the church. Which means that Abrams faith is not ‘trust here and believe some vague thing and indirectly you will be saved by faith in Christ.’ No his faith is in Christ directly.
