HD Jesus
Without the gracious gift of God which is the Old Testament, we would not see the extent of the beauty, majesty and glory of the person and work of Jesus Christ. Our vision of him in the New Testament would be very accurate, but it would be small and the horizon incomplete. Let me give an example. My wife and I used to have a 13’’ Orion5 cathode ray tube television that we would watch in our bedroom. For those of you have not seen one of these sorts of ancient devices, it has a small screen and it is fat panel, not flat panel. If I were to watch a movie on this TV I would see it, I would get it and could honestly say I watched the movie. Now, think for a second if I got this same film on HDDVD and watched it on a 60 inch, 1080p HDTV along with theater surround sound. Same movie? Absolutely! Same vision and experience of the film? Well, those of you with the home theatre system know the answer to that. The same thing could be said of seeing Jesus in the Bible. If you only had the New Testament you might be asked who Jesus is and reply in a 13 inch TV fashion: Jesus is the Savior and the Son of God. This would be absolutely and beautifully true. Now if you looked at both Testaments you would get a full featured High Def Jesus. This Jesus is the promised one who would crush the head of Satan (Genesis 3:15), who is the seed of Abraham through whom the whole world would be blessed (Genesis 12), the long promised messiah of Israel who sits on the eternal throne of David as our covenant King (2 Samuel 7), who fulfilled the law of Moses perfectly (Matthew 5:17, 18) and lived without sin (Hebrews 4:15), the final priest of the tabernacle (Exodus 25-28) and sacrificial lamb foreshadowed in the book of Leviticus (Leviticus 16). He is our Savior, he is our God, and he is the suffering servant prophesied long ago by the prophet Isaiah (Isaiah 53). He is our great high priest, our covenant mediator, and unique sacrificial Lamb of God which takes away the sins of the world (Hebrews 8-10). The one whose cross reconciles all things to God and whose return will usher in a new Kingdom which will have no end. 60 inch HD Jesus, we have to study the whole book to see the difference.
The Old Testament is central to seeing the big picture of the history of redemption, understanding the character and attributes of God, and seeing Jesus, God the Son in all his glory. Now that we see a bit of the importance of the Old Testament, let’s go ahead and unroll the first part of the scroll and get an overview of this first section of Scripture.
Notes:
5. Orion is the brand of the TV, it seems it is a Japanese company who sells inexpensive TVs at places like Wal-Mart.
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