CHAPTER FIVE

THE PROMISED REDEEMER: CHRIST

I wonder what you have your hopes set on. This is a crucial question for both you and me to answer. Many, even most, of our problems come from attaching our hopes to things that were not made to bear them—things that will sink like stones in water and pull us down with them. Some things even hold out great promise in the beginning but eventually prove to be passing fancies, or worse. In this old world, it’s not only in politics where promises made are not necessarily promises kept.

So we must turn to God. He made us and knows us. He knows where our hopes should be placed. He has set before us in the Old Testament the very promises upon which we should set our hope. And we look to the New Testament to find the fulfillment of those promises.

The nation of Israel had waxed and waned for almost two millennia until their hopes almost vanished. Even after their release from Babylonian exile, only several hundred years passed before another alien invader crushed them—the mighty Roman Empire. Feelings of disappointment verged on despair. What about all their old hopes? Would their deliverer never come? Would fellowship with God never be restored? Would the world never be put right? God had promised his people all these things.

And God delivered on his promises. The New Testament is the story of how all the promises God made in the Old Testament, God kept.

We’ll consider God’s work of fulfillment in this chapter and the next two. First we will look at Christ, then at God’s covenant people, and finally at the renewal of all creation. You might be helped by thinking of these three themes as three concentric circles. We begin with the heart of the matter and move outward. In all of this, we find that God has penetrated human history and has worked for his own purposes.

A Promised Deliverer

First, would Israel’s deliverer ever come? The New Testament answers this Old Testament promise with a resounding yes! In fact, the one who fulfills this promise is the very center of the New Testament: Jesus Christ.

The New Testament teaches that before history began God planned to send Christ. Adam and Eve rebelled against God’s rightful rule in the garden, and God’s people rebelled continuously over millennia. Yet God’s plan remained in place through everything. An anointed deliverer would come—a Messiah (Hebrew) or a Christ (Greek). And he would come from a tattered remnant of Israel living amid Roman occupation.

Jesus in the Gospels and Acts

The collection of twenty-seven books that comprise the New Testament begins by directly addressing this promise with four accounts of the life of the Messiah. The four documentaries of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all argue that Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah. He is the promised one for whom God’s people have been waiting. Where Adam and Israel failed, Jesus was faithful. As did his predecessors, he faced Satan’s temptations. Yet he survived them without sin. He is the prophet promised by Moses, the king prefigured by David, and the divine son of man promised by Daniel. In fact, Jesus is the very Word of God made flesh (John 1:1, 14).

Following these first four, the next book in the New Testament, Acts, shows how Jesus continues to be active in the world as his church expands to all nations. Acts begins with Jesus’ ascending to heaven and then giving out his Spirit at Pentecost. Over the ensuing chapters, his Spirit establishes the church as God’s new society and empowers it to grow and to do Christ’s work. The book concludes with Paul’s imprisonment in Rome.

We see the fulfillment of God’s Old Testament promises to his people frequently in the book of Acts (e.g., 15:13–18), and this pattern is typical of the whole New Testament. Jesus is the new Adam (1 Cor. 15:45–47). Jesus is the righteous one (Acts 3:14; 1 Pet. 3:18; 1 John 2:1). Jesus is greater than Moses (John 1:17; 5:45–46; Heb. 3:1–6) and greater than David (Matt. 22:41–45; Acts 2:29–36). Abraham, Jesus said, rejoiced to see his day (John 8:56–58). According to the New Testament, promises made in the Old Testament are promises kept in Jesus.

The Point of the Bible

Indeed, Jesus Christ is the point of the Bible. It is all about him. If you wanted to sum up the Bible in one word, you could do so by pointing to Christ. The Old Testament makes promises about Christ, and the New Testament keeps promises in Christ.

We read the Bible because we love Christ, and we want to know more about his love for us. John Stott writes, “A man who loves his wife will love her letters and her photographs because they speak to him of her. So if we love the Lord Jesus we shall love the Bible because it speaks to us of him. The husband is not so stupid as to prefer his wife’s letters to her voice, or her photographs to herself. He simply loves them because of her. So, too, we love the Bible because of Christ. It is his portrait. It is his love-letter.”¹ There are cold religious legalists who fight for the Bible but who do not love the Lord described in its pages. The Bible shows us Christ so that we can look to him as the focus of our hopes and the center of our satisfaction.

In him we find all the answers we need about God and his call on our lives. Christ is the promised deliverer not just for God’s Old Testament people but for you and me as well.

¹ John Stott, Fundamentalism and Evangelism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1959), 41.