IF JEWS REJECT JESUS, DID CHRISTIANS READ THE O.T. WRONG?

QUESTION

GIven that most Jews reject Jesus as Messiah, and that the Old Testament doesn't explicitly reveal a "two stage" Messiah, how can I be confident  that Christianity didn’t misinterpret the covenant in a way that God didn’t intend?  ·Why should I trust the Christian interpretation of fulfillment over the Jewish one?  How do we know we’re not reading something back intothe text that wasn’t originally there?

ANSWER:

This Easter, I gave a partial answer to your question, you can check out that talk here: AC3 YouTube. That week, I dove into the spiritual side of crucifixion and Resurrection and talked about what was going on in the spiritual realm.  The contention of the early Church and the Apostles was that Jesus' death surprised the spiritual realm. (1 Corinthians 2:8.)

If it surprised them, then that means that the purpose was hidden to them. But, they had access to the same scriptures that the Jews had. So how did they, who we presume have more spiritual insight than humans do, miss it? 

The reason is that the crucifixion of Jesus and God's wisdom in allowing it was considered a "mystery" by Paul (1 Cor 2:7).  Mystery doesn't mean something that no one can understand. He means something once hidden but now revealed.

So this explains the most obvious answer to your question: the reason all of Judaism didn't turn to Jesus is because the purpose of his first coming was veiled to them. But not only to them, to the spiritual powers as well.. and, frankly, Jesus own disciples until the resurrection. 

Given this hiddenness, we're left with two options: 

We are justified in going with option two if:

About A: There are many reasons to see the mystery clearly coded in theHebrew scriptures, but the absolute clearest is Isaiah 53:4-5:

This chapter of Isaiah so clearly forecasts not only a suffering Messiah (as opposed to only a merely political or military one) that many later interpreters thought that Christians had added it to the Old testament after Jesus. The Dead Sea scrolls put an end to that theory.

Isaiah 53 reads like a gospel 700 years early, it points to Jesus in a straight line.  So how could it be missed?  

Well, the name of the Messiah in this chapter and the surrounding chapters is "the Servant of the Lord". The Servant is identified with Israel several times (eg. Isa 43:10), but also identified with One who saves Israel (Isa 49:3-5). How can the servant be Israel and at the same time the one who saves Israel? 

Therefore, in the very passage that most clearly shows the purpose of Jesus' first coming (the Servant Prophecies), that purpose is cloaked.  Emotionally, you can see why the Jews, being under oppression, first by the Greeks and then the Romans,  would have a bias to see only Isaiah's predictions of Messiah as a political deliverer (42:1-7) and therefore miss the clear anticipation of sufferings for Messiah, and the reason for his suffering: THEIR sin. (53:5)

When you're under oppression, do you want to hear about your sins being the problem God is going to solve in Messiah? Or do you rather want to hear about comeuppance and Justice for your enemies? 

This second impulse is so profound in the Jews that even after the resurrection, the disciples are still stuck on this aspect of Messiah's purpose (Acts 1:6). They're not wrong to anticipate final victory in a second coming, but their focus on that, (right when Jesus is trying to commission them to preach the gospel to the whole world!), underscores just how much the Jews were fixated on that aspect of Messiah.

About B: Did Jesus give ample or justified reason to overturn the simplistic vision of Messiah that the Jewish establishment held? In short, his stunning claim to be able to lay down his life and take it back up again followed by a resurrection, attested by hundreds of his followers, is just such a reason.

If we have reason to believe in the resurrection, then that changes everything. Suddenly Jesus holds the keys to everything, life and death, but also how to view the scriptures that anticipated his coming. 

And then Jesus did exactly that: he taught his disciples how hewas the center of everything that had been written in the Old testament.  Right after the resurrection, his interest is in explaining how Messiah had to suffer, contrary to their expectation: Luke 24:25-32. 

Suddenly their eyes were opened: he's in every book, he actually shows up in several appearances called "christophanies," the entire thing was driving at Christ. It blew their minds as Jesus opened their minds to a vision of Messiah that was WAY more than end-of-world-merely-human-judge/prophet. He was God's Son, the Lion of Judah, the Bright and Morning Star, the Sacrificial Lamb of the Mosaic system, the Great High Priest in the mode of Levi, the Wisdom of Solomon, the Word of Genesis 1. 

Before resurrection, it was invisible, after, clear as day. 

And on top of all this of course is the very clear expectation in the old covenant that there would be a new one (Jer 31:31-40ff). It cannot be a "reading back" of a new covenant into the old, when it was the Old that first told us to expect a new one!  It is not reading back into the Old Covenant that we believe the sacrifices of that covenant were inadequate:

Now, if the first covenant had somehow made it clear that God's first concern was preserving relationship with only the genetic descendants of Abraham, then their overwhelming rejection of the Christ would be more of a concern.  But as the prophets make clear, God is after spiritual children, the circumcised in heart not in body.

So Paul is being faithful with all this when he says "not all Israel is true Israel." (Roman 9:6,7)  This is not something new , this is something the prophets clearly forecast.  So in the end we can know that Christians did not recon the Old Testament because we can read it's forecasting of Messiah clearly - though we know why God hid his plans. And Jesus demonsration of power puts our trust in him as true fulfillment beyond any doubt.

The problem of most Jews having rejected Jesus was directly addressed in Romans 9-11, so be sure to review that to get a more in-depth answer. I go into that Scripture in another Q and A here: