The Promised Messiah
The scepter shall not depart from Judah,
nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet,
until tribute comes to him
and to him shall be the obedience of the peoples. -Genesis 49:10
Jacob’s astounding prophecy regarding his son Judah in the above verses, long before Jesus’ birth, has been regarded as a prediction that the Messiah will descend from the tribe of Judah. At the time, there was no tribe of Judah. There was only Judah, his son. So how did Jacob know that, out of all his twelve sons, it was Judah who would establish the kingly Davidic line that would lead, eventually, to the world’s Ruler, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ? This could not have been a random guess.
In fact, Jesus’ arrival (Advent) on the scene was not some haphazard act on God’s part, with no background, history, or warning. Right from Genesis, Jesus is alluded to and continues to be referred to throughout the rest of the Old Testament. Its pages tell of the arrival of a person who was to become known as the key to history and the fulfillment of God’s plan of the ages.
The Jews always knew of the promised Messiah, and one generation after another awaited his arrival. They were aware that when he appeared, the entire history of Israel would make sense, and the messed-up world of sin and folly would finally be dealt with in some definitive way, God’s way.
As is typically the case, any prophecy is not fully understood until its fulfillment. Mysterious, hard to grasp words and images become clear only after the events happen. So it was with the many expectations. Even after their fulfillment, many still didn’t get the point.
It’s the same for us today. Normally, we don’t grasp the meaning of Old Testament passages until we read them in the light of the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ. It is Jesus who teaches us how to find him in the complicated history of the Jews. He shows us that without the Holy Spirit moving upon our minds, we’ll never get the message, never understand the history of Judaism, and never recognize him as the Messiah. Jesus said: “My sheep hear my voice” (John 10:27), and, “All that the Father gives to me will come to me” (John 6:37).
As we move from one glimpse to another of this Messiah, the light gets brighter with each new epoch of Jewish history, culminating in the birth of the baby and his Spirit-empowered thirty-year ministry. So Christmas is both an end and a beginning, the end of long anticipation, and the beginning of a new story, one that summarizes and gathers up all the puzzle pieces of the old and puts them together into the amazing picture of God’s eternal plan of salvation.
The Advent season we observe today is the recapitulation and the celebration of every great act of God, leading up to and including the present day. It’s not just a story about the Jews and the acts of their great God, but also the story about us, our role in it, and our eternal destiny.
As we pray through this Advent season, let us pick up our Bible and follow along with the historical glimpses of the Messiah. Watch as the anticipation grows throughout Israel’s long history, leading ultimately to the Nativity scene in a simple setting in Bethlehem. This is where the “Word-become-flesh” first appears publicly and signals the beginning of the world’s transformation.
“And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased!” –Luke 2:13,14
Let us find ourselves in Bethlehem, learning from all those surrounding the arrival of the Christ child, and let us joyfully and gratefully, with arms open wide, receive his gifts to us.
Photo by Juan Apolinar on Unsplash
