Which messianic prophecies did jesus fulfill

Surely he is the prince of peace and the shoot from the stump of Jesse. But then, as always in the Bible, the following story throws a wrench in this positive depiction of Hezekiah.

Isaiah 39 tells a story about a group of Babylonian ambassadors who arrive in Jerusalem to court Hezekiah. They were going around forming alliances all over the ancient world to help them pull off this coup. They arrive in Jerusalem and Hezekiah is flattered. He shows them all of his treasury and resources Isaiah He relied upon the God of Israel at the moment of crisis, but once a better political option shows up, Hezekiah crumbles. The possibility of having Babylonian military firepower in his pocket was more attractive than going through another Assyrian crisis on his knees in prayer.

Isaiah then confronts Hezekiah Isaiah and tells him there will be serious consequences for this faithless act. We had our hopes all worked up. We thought Hezekiah was the promised king, then he failed too, just like David, and Solomon, and all the rest. Those divine promises of a future king from earlier in the book Isaiah 1, 9, 11 are left hanging open and unfulfilled. However, as you turn to the next main movement of the book, Isaiah , these chapters will pick up this thread and develop it more in a surprising direction.

The author of Isaiah wants us to see that the hope for a faithful king who would bring the Kingdom of God has deep roots going all the way back to David. Hezekiah came close, but in the end, even he was disqualified by his selfishness and sin. The future promise keeps getting delayed and kicked out into the distant future.

This a very different conception of messianic prophecy than the popular conception of the prophets think Nostradamus , who looked into a crystal ball and predicted events far removed from their own day. And then the exile happened. This is how the promise of the Messiah became a hope for the distant future once the kingdom of David was hauled off to Babylon. This was the story Jesus was born into. The basic claim of the four Gospel stories in the New Testament is that Jesus was that faithful king from the line of David.

He was the one to whom this entire story had been pointing all along. But how Jesus fulfilled these ancient promises also surprised many people. That will be the focus of our exploration of Isaiah Tim Mackie is a writer and creative director for BibleProject.

He wrote his dissertation on the manuscript history of the book of Ezekiel, with a focus on the Septuagint and Dead Sea Scrolls. What a total nerd! He is a professor at Western Seminary and served as a teaching pastor for many years. How to Read the Bible. Word Studies. Old Testament Overviews. New Testament Overviews. Book Collections. Visual Commentaries. All Podcasts. Of course, all of these prophecies were fulfilled by Jesus.

Great expectations? For example, Psalm 40 foreshadows the Messiah becoming the perfect sacrifice. I delight to do your will, my God; your law is in my inner being. We find the explanation of the fulfillment of these verses in Jesus in Hebrews This New Testament text interprets the Psalm as foretelling that the Messiah would replace the covenant of the law with a new covenant.

That is to say, the offerings and holocausts were offered according to the law, the Torah. Jesus certainly became a stumbling block, was despised and rejected, and redeemed the Gentiles 1Peter; Luke; Matthew. From Good Friday to Easter Sunday Unsurprisingly, the most important Old Testament prophecies about Jesus concern his death and resurrection — and there are plenty of them. We will highlight just a few. For instance, the anointed one would be the Passover Lamb, whose blood once saved the people of Israel from death in Egypt and whose bones were not to be broken Exodus.

Additionally, Old Testament texts predict that the Messiah would be forsaken and scorned; would have his hands and feet pierced; and would have lots cast for his clothing.

By way of comparison, note that the Gospel of John also quotes Zech in connection with its much briefer version of this scene John — When Matthew rewrites this brief scene, he has Judas demand the money up front and specifies the amount of money agreed on by Judas and the priests: thirty silver pieces Matt — Mark never mentioned the amount, nor do Luke or John. From what source has Matthew obtained this inside information?

Answer: the prophets. Later in the story Judas, overwhelmed by guilt, flings the money back at the priests and then commits suicide Matt —5. When the priests use the money to buy some land, Matthew informs us that this fulfills a prophecy of Jeremiah about thirty pieces of silver Matt — The prophecy in question is actually from Zechariah, not Jeremiah. To position Jesus as fulfiller of prophecy, Matthew chooses descriptive details from Isaiah and crafts them into elaborations on the reports and clues that he found in Mark.

Matthew creates a ludicrous scene: Jesus stunt-rides two animals into Jerusalem. This bizarre scene shows us to what extremes Matthew was prepared to go to portray Jesus as the fulfiller of prophecy. With the thirty silver coins, Matthew yet again inserts details from a prophecy into a story that he borrowed from Mark. It is not the case that Matthew knew a factually accurate account of the life of Jesus and then realized, from his knowledge of scripture, that the life of Jesus fulfilled prophecy.

Rather, the process worked in the opposite direction. From our perspective it is obvious that Matthew was reading Jesus into the prophecies he quoted. Respect for the Bible requires us to understand the prophets as speaking to their own times, with messages that they and their audiences understood in relation to their situations centuries before the time of Jesus.

Respect for the Bible also requires us to understand Matthew on his own terms. As a result, sometimes neither the prophets nor their audiences could understand the true significance of their words, and thus the real meaning of some of those pagan prophecies could be discerned only after the predicted events had already occurred.

First-century Jews applied these Greek beliefs about prophecy to the biblical prophets, and so came to believe that God had planted throughout their writings cryptic clues about his plans for the future.

Many Christians hold this same belief today. They think that prophets such as Isaiah and Ezekiel, as well as New Testament authors such as Paul, Peter, and John, unwittingly wrote about events happening in our own time or about to happen in the near future.

Inevitably, these books explain that we are living in the last generation, a time of unparalleled evil from which only a few will be saved. Rather than pursue this issue further, I will ask only that you to pause for a moment to consider three interrelated premises of that view of prophecy:. Matthew gives the impression that the Jewish leaders knew or at least should have known that Jesus was the messiah but opposed him because of their hypocrisy and hard-heartedness. At the very end of the gospel, Matthew makes his accusation explicit: these authorities knew that Jesus had risen from the dead but conspired to deceive their own people about the truth of his resurrection — First-century Jews applied … Greek beliefs about prophecy to the biblical prophets, and so came to believe that God had planted throughout their writings cryptic clues about his plans for the future.

The first thing to be said about Matt —15 is that there is not a shred of historical evidence for the conspiracy Matthew describes. It is fiction. Now the gospels contain many fictions that express truth—stories that while not historically true communicate truths that are more important than historical facts. It is a malicious lie.