Broad meadows

Thanks be to the Israel of God. Through them mankind was reintroduced to their Creator, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. From them comes the gold standard for all legitimate law, the Ten Commandments. From them are the prophets I call brothers and teachers. And most importantly, from them, salvation in the form of Jesus Christ comes to the nations, as Jesus himself said, “. . . Salvation is from the Jews.” (John 4:22).

Their history is deeply imbedded in the land of Israel as continued archaeological finds show. The finding of the Dead Sea scrolls was a monumental find, giving the oldest known version of the Old Testament, the law and the prophets, giving credence and confidence in the direct translations of scripture. Their reintroduction into the land of Israel points to the gracious promise of our Lord to bringing them back in the last days, something no other people group can claim. Their very existence points to the God of the Bible, making them a target for those who oppose the God and the Bible.

For all this, they miss the one thing they need to know: who their messiah is. It doesn’t seem to occur to them that it is now impossible to attach a lineage to any messianic claims, as those records were destroyed in 70 ad. It would seem to be a necessary prophetic component to any claim. And given 2000 years of Christian apologetics, there seems to be no wholesale movement on the part of the Jews to move from this position. Don’t get me wrong, there is a messianic movement among them, but it’s hard to gain traction when open discourse is eschewed.

I think the answer is in their own scripture, the Old Testament. For today I will give one example of what I mean. If you have been following any of my earlier writings, you may be familiar with a concept I call a horizontal reading of scripture where the connecting features are the symbols presented in each account. And at each account there is an addition of a prophetic sense that is added to that characters prophetic story. One of the ways that I tested this was by trying to find Jesus in the Old Testament using these methods. What I mean is that I will bring something in the Old Testament down to one and only one figure using a whole of Bible approach. Where I ran into trouble with my old church was that I was able to apply it to others. They didn’t like that.

One of the lessons that I learned in doing this was that you don’t need to necessarily define a symbol in order to get useful meaning from an Old Testament story. In Genesis 14, the story of Abram coming back from rescuing his nephew Lot and defeating the kings that banded against them. Abram encounters a man, a king, named Melchizedek. This man is only referred to in two other places in the Bible, Psalms 110 and the book of Hebrews.
Psalms 110:4 says, “ The LORD has sworn
and will not change his mind:
“You are a priest forever,
in the order of Melchizedek. ”” No one really disputes that this is a messianic prophecy. But what does that mean?

Genesis 14:17-20 relates the following: “After Abram returned from defeating Kedorlaomer and the kings allied with him, the king of Sodom came out to meet him in the Valley of Shaveh (that is, the King’s Valley).
Then Melchizedek king of Salem brought out bread and wine. He was priest of God Most High, and he blessed Abram, saying,
“Blessed be Abram by God Most High,
Creator of heaven and earth.
And praise be to God Most High,
who delivered your enemies into your hand.”
Then Abram gave him a tenth of everything.”

Just looking at the symbols “bread and wine “, what this tells us is that the Messiah would be the bringer of the bread and wine. And from the time of Abraham to the time of Jesus, only Christianity has as its only ceremonial meal being the bread and the wine. Anyone now trying to hijack those symbols would be seen as an obvious fraud. What this means is that Jesus and only Jesus can meet that criteria.