Jesus: The Fulfillment
Notes
Transcript
Review ALL IN series. Purpose for the series: how our discipleship process is just beginning like it was for them…
Review where we are: we are studying Peter’s second sermon. He preached this sermon in the temple just after he and John healed the lame man at the gate called Beautiful .
Review Last Week: One of the four prophetic categories Peter declares Jesus as fulfilling: A Prophet like Moses…
There are four sets of prophecies mentioned by Peter that we are exploring…
17 “And now, brethren, I know that you acted in ignorance, just as your rulers did also.
18 “But the things which God announced beforehand by the mouth of all the prophets, that His Christ would suffer, He has thus fulfilled.
19 “Therefore repent and return, so that your sins may be wiped away, in order that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord;
20 and that He may send Jesus, the Christ appointed for you,
21 whom heaven must receive until the period of restoration of all things about which God spoke by the mouth of His holy prophets from ancient time.
22 “Moses said, ‘The Lord God will raise up for you a prophet like me from your brethren; to Him you shall give heed to everything He says to you.
23 ‘And it will be that every soul that does not heed that prophet shall be utterly destroyed from among the people.’
24 “And likewise, all the prophets who have spoken, from Samuel and his successors onward, also announced these days.
25 “It is you who are the sons of the prophets and of the covenant which God made with your fathers, saying to Abraham, ‘And in your seed all the families of the earth shall be blessed.’
26 “For you first, God raised up His Servant and sent Him to bless you by turning every one of you from your wicked ways.”
Pray
Peter is here referencing a depth of 1st century Jewish understanding , making layered points that those in the temple where he’s preaching would’ve understood immediately.
Because we are 2000 years removed from the context, we need to reference the Old Testament to see what he’s talking about.
Peter has just told them that Jesus is the Messiah and references prophecies that He fulfilled, thus proving this to be true.
Peter mentions (1) the “seed of Abraham” (2) the prophet like moses, (3) the prophecies fulfilled in his suffering, and (4) the agreement of all the other prophets in history.
These are all prophetic elements that were understood to be revelations about the coming Messiah and Peter is telling them, “Jesus fulfilled them all.”
He throws the whole gambit at them, he’s careful to talk about every prophetic cornerstone the first century Jewish believers would be familiar with when it came to the Messiah.
In other words, He’s not just the fulfillment of part of what God had, He’s all of it.
Jesus isn’t a bridge to another coming Messiah. He’s not looking forward to another messenger from God to be the anointed one…
Jesus is the Messiah. He is the Christ. He is the fulfillment of all the prophets spoke of.
Here’s the thing… Peter’s words in this sermon are enough that in the next few verses at the start of chapter 4, The priests and the Sadducees have them arrested!
For you to fully understand the weight of Peter’s words, we have to go back to the origin of the prophecies and see exactly what Peter is saying Jesus fulfilled.
Peter begins with the suffering of Christ as a fulfillment of prophecy and works his way backward to the “Seed of Abraham”
We talked about the “Seed of Abraham” the first week, moved chronologically to Jesus being the fulfillment of Moses words quoted by Peter in verse 22 last week, and this week we are talking about Jesus fulfilling the other prophecies throughout the Old Testament.
24 “And likewise, all the prophets who have spoken, from Samuel and his successors onward, also announced these days.
Samuel is the prophet that anointed David as king of Israel… David is the King of whom God said,
16 “Your house and your kingdom shall endure before Me forever; your throne shall be established forever.” ’ ”
This is the prophecy that establishes that the ultimate savior must be in the lineage of David..
Mention the seed
The fulfillment is found in Jesus’ legal lineage in Matthew 1 and His natural one in Luke 3.
The prophets after Samuel agreed, there was a Messiah coming, and He would come after a great devastation.
Jeremiah speaks of a great devastation, which came in the form of the Babylonian exile…
3 “Then I Myself will gather the remnant of My flock out of all the countries where I have driven them and bring them back to their pasture, and they will be fruitful and multiply.
5 “Behold, the days are coming,” declares the Lord,
“When I will raise up for David a righteous Branch;
And He will reign as king and act wisely
And do justice and righteousness in the land.
6 “In His days Judah will be saved,
And Israel will dwell securely;
And this is His name by which He will be called,
‘The Lord our righteousness.’
Isaiah spoke of this branch:
1 Then a shoot will spring from the stem of Jesse,
And a branch from his roots will bear fruit.
2 The Spirit of the Lord will rest on Him,
The spirit of wisdom and understanding,
The spirit of counsel and strength,
The spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.
And Jesus said,
1 “I am the true vine, and My Father is the vinedresser.
This righteous branch of David… The Shoot from the stem of Jesse… the one who will come after a great devastation of Israel appears in Jesus… The true vine…
Jesus shows up in a time that is confirmed by Daniel in chapter 9 verses 24-27 when he speaks of a Messiah prince who will be cut off as He makes a covenant, putting a stop to sacrifice and grain offerings… Which means He had to arrive when there was still a temple to make sacrifices in..
In fact Malachi 3:1 says…
1 “Behold, I am going to send My messenger, and he will clear the way before Me. And the Lord, whom you seek, will suddenly come to His temple; and the messenger of the covenant, in whom you delight, behold, He is coming,” says the Lord of hosts.
Had Jesus arrived just 40 years later, the temple would’ve already been destroyed as it was in 70 AD, and Jesus would not have been able to fulfil this prophecy…
But He showed up at just the right time…
To take it a step further, Ezekiel predicted in the 21st chapter in verses 26 and 27, there was an interruption to the succession of the Davidic kings…
No one knew where the next king would come from, but everyone knew it had to be in the line of David.
Then Jesus shows up on the scene with both a legal claim and a natural claim, in just the right season…
6 For while we were still helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.
He died just at the right time!
Had he showed up at any other time, these prophecies wouldn’t have been fulfilled, but Jesus showed up at just the right time to be the Right One…
Not only did He come at just the right time, but He was born at just the right place…
2 “But as for you, Bethlehem Ephrathah,
Too little to be among the clans of Judah,
From you One will go forth for Me to be ruler in Israel.
His goings forth are from long ago,
From the days of eternity.”
Had he come from anywhere else, this prophecy wouldn’t have been fulfilled, but Jesus came at the right time and was born in the right place…
To quote the late, great William Darrel Mays Jr… BUT WAIT! THERE”S MORE!
Not only did He arrive at just the right time, born at just the right place, but He was also heralded by John the Baptist…
For us in the 21st century, 2 millennia removed from the context, John the Baptist seems like a strange character, out of place in the story, but then you think back to the first part of the verse in Malachi we just read…
1 “Behold, I am going to send My messenger, and he will clear the way before Me. And the Lord, whom you seek, will suddenly come to His temple; and the messenger of the covenant, in whom you delight, behold, He is coming,” says the Lord of hosts.
He will clear the way before me… Jesus wasn’t the messenger, He’s God in the flesh… He’s the Lord who suddenly came down to His temple…
So there had to be a messenger first…
Isaiah chapter 40 confirms this thought, that there would be a messenger. He describes him as a “voice calling, clear the way for the Lord…”
3 A voice is calling,
“Clear the way for the Lord in the wilderness;
Make smooth in the desert a highway for our God.
Matthew picks up on this and claims the fulfillment:
3 For this is the one referred to by Isaiah the prophet when he said,
“The voice of one crying in the wilderness,
‘Make ready the way of the Lord,
Make His paths straight!’ ”
And all of this is before Jesus ever does anything. Just showing up at the right time, in the right place, with the right forerunner fulfills all these scriptures….
When He begins his ministry, He starts in Galilee which is the tribal lands of Zebulun and Naphtali as predicted in Isaiah 9:1.
The Life of Christ: A Study Guide to the Gospel Record Fulfilled Prophecy
Remarkably, in all Israel’s long history no prophet used both these areas as his headquarters, so God reserved them for His Son so that there could be no mistaking His unique qualification as the Messiah.
He alone, of all Israel’s prophets filled the messianic specification of giving sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, and healing to the halt as predicted in Isa 35:5-6…
Call Worship Team
I could continue on this track for weeks and weeks reciting all the prophecies and typologies that Jesus fulfilled…
Scholars differ on exactly how many prophecies Jesus fulfilled, but it’s somewhere between 200 and 400 prophetic utterances that look forward to the Messiah…
To put that number into perspective, I found this article that speaks to the probability of one man fulfilling prophecies…
From the journal Science Speaks, Mathematician Peter Stoner offered the following calculated figures:
After examining only eight different prophecies, they conservatively estimated that the chance of one man fulfilling all eight prophecies was one in 10^17. To illustrate how large the number 10^17 is (a figure with 17 zeros), the professor gave this illustration:
If you mark one of ten tickets, and place all the tickets in a hat, and thoroughly stir them, and then ask a blindfolded man to draw one, his chance of getting the right ticket is one in ten.
Suppose that we take 10^17 silver dollars and lay them on the face of Texas. They’ll cover all of the state two feet deep.
Now mark one of these silver dollars and stir the whole mass thoroughly, all over the state. Blindfold a man and tell him that he can travel as far as he wishes, but he must pick up the one silver dollar that has the special mark on it. What chance would he have of getting the right one? Just the same chance that the prophets would’ve had of writing these eight prophecies and having them all come true in any one man, from their day to the present time.
The probability of a single man fulfilling just 48 of the Old Testament prophesies that specifically point to our Lord would be one in 10 followed by 157 zeros.
The fact that Jesus fulfilled at least 200 and up to or more than 400 prophecies leaves the final probability of one man fulfilling all these prophecies…. Incalculable…
For reference, here’s a scale:
So what is it that we are to do with all this information?
Here we are faced with this incredible body of evidence that Jesus is who He said He is…
And if He is who He said He is, then we should listen to what He said He came for …
10 “For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost.”
Jesus is speaking in this passage, using one of his favorite titles for Himself, and his purpose is to seek and save that which was lost…
Do you know Him?
Altar Call