What's In It FOR ME? One Story (Luke 24:13-27)

Hidden History in Khipu Cords

One of the biggest puzzles of South American history is the Inca khipus. The earliest known khipus are from Peru and are more than 1000 years old. To us, these look like cords with knots in them. But what we know about Inca khipus is that they are an elaborate and complex recording and writing system for numbers and words or phrases. The data in the cords is not only in the knots, but the positions of the knots, the colors of the cords, the directions of the twists, the numbers of the twists, and the placement of the cord’s branches. Very, very complex. It used to be thought that these twisted cords were complex calculators. But in 2018 Manny Medrano, a Harvard student, discovered that some khipus have written information, with names and towns embedded in the cords. Even with recent discoveries, these cords are so complex that Medrano and other historians still have no code to unlock all the stories and histories that are currently hidden in the khipu cords. The Incas have spoken, but there is no one to decipher what they are saying.

Unlocking the Bible

If you were one of those two disciples walking on the road to Emmaus, you probably felt as though you had been reading the Old Testament all wrong. In fact, in a matter of just 3 days, what you thought you knew now looks like a khipu cord and you have no way of interpreting what you’ve read, much less what you’ve witnessed. They watched Jesus die. And as they watch Jesus die, their entire worldview collapsed. Jesus’ death challenges assumptions about the way the world works. And his death and resurrection challenges the way many think the Old Testament should be read… including those two guys on the road that day. A stranger shows up and strikes up a conversation, and here’s what they tell him:

Luke 24:21 “We were hoping that he was the one who was about to redeem Israel.”

We were hoping that he was the One who was about to redeem Israel. We’ve read our Old Testaments. We know there’s a Messiah coming. And the Messiah we read about in our Bibles is going to redeem Israel. We’ve spent our whole lives working and hoping and living on that assumption.. that the Messiah would redeem Israel. And these two aren’t the only ones. That was the popular opinion of the crowds, of the religious leaders. For hundreds of years, all of life centered on the idea that a Messiah would redeem Israel.

This stranger hears this, and the amazing thing that this stranger does is that he proceeds to tell these two very confused and devastated travelers that the Messiah just redeemed Israel, just like the Old Testament promised. And the Messiah rose again from the dead, just like the Old Testament promised. You see, they had the word “redeem” all wrong. They thought the word redemption was a military term. A geo-political term. They also had “Israel” all wrong. They thought Israel was a plot of land on the east side of the Mediterranean only consisting of ethnic Jews. This stranger is telling them that all along, the plan in the Old Testament was about redemption from sin. And that this redemption is forming a new Israel made of up Jews and Gentiles by faith. And that the Old Testament tells us that this Messiah, who is saving people from sin to make a new Israel, would indeed rise from the dead. This stranger was their Old Testament code-breaker.

This week we continue our series, “The Bible: What’s in it for ME?", a series to help us read and study our Bibles better. One of the most important texts in all of the Bible that helps us understand the Bible is this Luke 24 passage because of what this stranger, Jesus, says about himself in the Old Testament. All of our Bible study begins here. Do you want to know how to read your Bible better? It all starts here. Jesus gives us the key, the code, the interpretive lens for understanding the whole Bible. We are going to walk through this a little differently today so we understand what Jesus is saying here.

Beginning with Moses and the Prophets

This is how Jesus answers those two disciples that day:

Luke 24:27 “Beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted for them the things concerning himself in all the Scriptures.”

Later that same day, he says again to the disciples:

Luke 24:44–45 “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you—that everything written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms must be fulfilled.” Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures.”

Beginning with Moses and all the prophets. Everything about ME in the law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms. When we see these combinations of law and prophets being used by Jesus and the New Testament authors that is their way of saying the entire Bible, and the Bible that they had at the time was what we know as the Old Testament.

Luke 24:27 “Beginning with Genesis and all the way to Malachi, Jesus interpreted for them the things concerning himself throughout all of the Old Testament.”

That must have been shocking to those two disciples. This isn’t their worldview. It’s not how they read their Bibles.

Jesus places his death and resurrection FOR sinners at the center of the entire story of the Bible.

Remember what they told the stranger who joined them? We thought he was the Messiah, the One who was about to redeem… Israel. They had one thing right… the story is about the Messiah. But their worldview was Israel-centric. The Messiah serves to save Israel. All of history was to be interpreted through Israel. And now this stranger is saying, no, all of history is to be interpreted through the Messiah and his redemption of sinners. That’s shocking for them, and quite frankly, 2000 years later, it’s still shocking to many people reading their Old Testaments. Too many think of the Old Testament as a history of Israel, when in fact, Jesus here is saying it’s a history of Jesus.

Jesus wanted them and wants us to understand that he is the key to understanding it all. So what can we say about how this impacts the way we read, the way we study, the way we teach, and the way we preach the Bible? Here are a few things we can say from Jesus’ statement here and some other places around the Bible.

The Entire Old Testament is One Story about Jesus

First, the entire Old Testament is One Story about Jesus. In fact, the entire Bible is One Story about Jesus. Our Bible talk series beginning in November has this as its running theme: the Whole Story. One story about Jesus throughout the whole Bible.

This isn’t the only time Jesus says that the entire Bible is about Him. Jesus is having a frank and at times, very heated discussion with the unbelieving religious leaders of his day. And he says this to them:

John 5:39 “You pore over the Scriptures because you think you have eternal life in them, and yet they testify about me.”

You pore over the Scriptures. What Scriptures? All of them. And Jesus is telling them that they’ve missed the point of the Bible. The point of the Bible is its witness everywhere to Jesus and his work of salvation for His people.

John brings this up as he is closing out his biography of Jesus, telling the readers that he is writing with the same purpose as any other author of the Bible:

John 20:31 “These are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.”

These are written. Yes, John is saying this about his own biography. But based on what Jesus has already said, John is saying this about the entire Bible.

John 20:31 “The entire Bible was written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.”

All of the Bible was written so that we would place our faith and trust in Jesus, who is the Messiah, the Promised One of the Old Testament, and by having faith in him, have life in His name.

The story of Adam and Eve? Written so we would have faith and receive eternal life in Jesus. The story of Noah and the flood? Written so we would have faith and receive eternal life in Jesus. David and Goliath? Written so we would have faith and receive eternal life in Jesus. Jonah and the whale? Written so we would have faith and receive eternal life in Jesus. Daniel in the lions den? Written so we would have faith and receive eternal life in Jesus. And everything in between.

How does this work? And how can Jesus, John, and then Paul, and other authors say this? Where are they getting this?

The Entire Old Testament Anticipates Jesus; the entire New Testament explains Jesus

Here’s a very simple way of understanding this. The entire Old Testament anticipates Jesus. And then we can say that the entire New Testament explains Jesus. The verse that helps us understand the entire Old Testament is Genesis 3:15. We read it earlier. Adam and Eve have sinned. God says I’m going to fix the sin problem myself. And here’s the promise he makes to Adam and Eve through the serpent:

Genesis 3:15 “I will put hostility between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring. He will strike your head, and you will strike his heel.”

The rest of the Old Testament is unpacking that Promise. The Old Testament is the story of God’s making good on His Promise to crush the head of the serpent through Eve’s offspring. All the Old Testament stories and songs and prophecies in some way connect to this Promise that there would be an offspring, later known as the Messiah, who would crush the enemy and redeem Adam and Eve and all who follow them in faith. Yes, Israel is important in the story, but Israel is simply the vehicle for the story of the Messiah and his plan to redeem humanity.

Which leads to this:

The Entire Old Testament is about Jesus’ mission to save sinners

If you follow the story from Genesis 3 and the Promise to Adam and Eve, eventually that Promise is made again to Abraham with a little more detail and this is what God tells Abraham:

Genesis 12:1–3 “The Lord said to Abram: Go from your land, your relatives, and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make you into a great nation, I will bless you, I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, I will curse anyone who treats you with contempt, and all the peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”

This is where the two disciples on the road that day begin to get hung up and where their view of history and the world begins to swerve away from what God is unpacking for them in history. They are focused on the great nation that will have a land. God is focused on the blessing for the entire world and the offspring through whom will come all those blessings. That promise later includes:

Genesis 17 “God said, I will bless Sarah. She will bear you a son. She will produce nations and kings. You will be the father of many nations and I will be their God.”

You see, it’s about Israel yes, but keep your eyes on the son. The offspring will bless all nations. And how will that blessing happen? The angel appearing to Joseph in Nazareth, hundreds of years later, says this:

Matthew 1:21 “She will give birth to a son, and you are to name him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.”

The angel is unpacking the story of the Messiah in the Old Testament for Joseph. Jesus is on a mission to “save his people from their sins”. This goes all the way back to Genesis 3 and the Promise. The plan all along was for a Messiah to come, God himself, who would fix the sin problem. God himself is coming to save people from their sins. That’s the story of the Old Testament.

The Bible: What in it FOR ME? Our Story.

The entire Bible is Jesus’ story. The entire Bible is our story, the story of a Savior who comes to save us. The entire Bible is the story of Jesus doing for us what we cannot do for ourselves. The story of the cross FOR US.

This is a famous painting of this conversation on the road to Emmaus. The painter and us are at a distance. So much so, we see these figures and we are immediately pulled into this painting to have a seat with the painter from a distance and wonder just what it is that they must be talking about. What is Jesus saying? What Luke tells us is that Jesus is explaining to them their very own story for the very first time. And it is our story.

This entire story is our bad news and then good news. The bad news is the world gone bad because of sin in the garden. And only the Good News, the cross can make sense of it for us. Those two disciples had it flipped, like all of us do. They thought of the cross as bad news and the idea of political and world conquest as good news. That day on that road those disciples admitted to Jesus that they couldn’t understand what they thought of as bad news. And their fix for the bad news was one of power. The world they know. Our Messiah is coming to beat the Romans.

We want a Messiah who wins. We want a Messiah who beats up our political enemies. Who places us in positions of power and influence. Who gives us the advantage over other people. That cross makes no sense when life is all about one-upmanship and making sure all the people who are down on me get their just deserts. The cross makes no sense when life is about making sure you’re on the winning end of all of your conversations, and making sure that life lines up the way you want it to.

And here comes the stranger to burst our grand designs of running the show. It’s not about power. It’s about a cross, a cross that lays bare our desires to always win. That cross is God’s fix for our sin problem, and throughout the pages of the Old Testament, we find the One Story of a God who is on a mission to crush the head of the serpent through His own death FOR US.

The Bible we read is not some puzzle like the Inca khipu, lost to interpretation so that we are constantly guessing. And we can’t rely on ourselves to get the story right. We need Jesus to interpret the Scriptures for us. Jesus has given us what we need to know about Him and his love for us in this conversation with these two disciples. As we read the Bible, we must constantly keep in mind, regardless of wherever we are at in the storyline as it unfolds, that whatever is happening in the text is God’s forgiveness and salvation FOR US because he loves us.

Let’s Pray.

The Table

Throughout the Old Testament, there are meals and stories of meals that are pointing to this moment, especially the Passover Meal. All of it is anticipating Jesus and what he does for His people in the death of a lamb.

Benediction

Numbers 6:24–26 “May the Lord bless you and protect you;

may the Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you;

may the Lord look with favor on you and give you peace.”