The Gospel in the Hebrew Bible

The disciples wondered in amazement upon seeing Jesus risen from the dead. In the midst of the confusion and joy, Jesus solemnly pronounced to them the following:

Then he said to them, “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 and the prophets and the psalms must be fulfilled.”
Then he opened their minds so they could understand the scriptures, and said to them, “Thus it stands written that the Christ would suffer and would rise from the dead on the third day, and repentance for the forgiveness of sins would be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem” (Luke 24:44-47).

Jesus thus affirmed to the disciples how He fulfilled and was fulfilling all which was spoken of Him in the Law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms. To this end, He opened their minds to understand the Scriptures, that is, the Hebrew Bible, and how it bore witness to His life, death, resurrection, ascension, lordship, and imminent return.

We can therefore ascertain much regarding the Gospel in the pages and witness of the Hebrew Bible, and we do best to allow the Apostles and their associates to point the way forward for us.

From the very beginning, the Apostle Peter proclaimed what God had accomplished in Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, ascension, lordship, and imminent return in terms of the witness of the Hebrew Bible. He began his address to the Israelites on Pentecost by declaring the event the fulfillment of what Joel prophesied would take place “in the latter days” (Acts 2:16-21; cf. Joel 2:28-32). Peter enrolled David as an anticipatory witness of Jesus’ resurrection, ascension, and lordship by quoting Psalms 16:8-11, 110:1 in terms of what the Apostles witnessed God accomplishing in Jesus (Acts 2:24-31).

Peter would frequently evoke concepts and passages from the Hebrew Bible in the way he would speak of what God accomplished in Christ. In Acts 3:13, Peter proclaimed God as having glorified Jesus His “Servant”; by common confession, Peter was making deliberate reference to the “Servant Songs” prevalent in Isaiah’s witness, particularly in Isaiah 42:1-9, 49:1-7, and especially Isaiah 52:13-53:12. Peter would often speak of Jesus’ crucifixion as “hanging upon a tree,” perhaps a common idiom for crucifixion, but one drawn from the wording of the legislation offered in Deuteronomy 21:22-23, which itself highlights the shame associated with the death of a criminal.

According to Peter, the elements of Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, ascension, lordship, and imminent return were announced beforehand by God through the prophets and holy men of old, and came to pass in the midst and to the benefit of their descendants (Acts 3:18-26). Peter and the other Apostles, by means of the Holy Spirit, went about proclaiming the fulfillment of all the prophets had spoken in Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, ascension, and imminent return, things which they discerned through the Spirit of Christ working within them and for the benefit of those future generations (1 Peter 1:10-12).

The Apostle Paul, like Peter, would enlist Moses, David, and the prophets as witnesses regarding what God would accomplish in Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, ascension, lordship, and imminent return; like Stephen, he would proclaim the Gospel to many Israelites in terms of the rehearsal of Israelite history (Acts 13:16-41; cf. Acts 7:1-53). Paul also understood what God had and was accomplishing in Jesus as the fulfillment of the hope of Israel, as God making good on everything He had promised their fathers (cf. Acts 26:2-8, 22-23).

But Paul determined to make one thing clear: the Gospel was not imagined or invented by people (Galatians 1:11-12). According to Paul, the mystery of what God accomplished in Christ had not been disclosed to previous generations as it had been made known by means of His Apostles and prophets in the Spirit (Ephesians 3:4-5).

In so doing, Paul was not suggesting the prophets had no understanding whatsoever of what God would accomplish in Jesus; instead, he affirmed the prophets did not imagine or invent the story of Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, ascension, lordship, and imminent return, for it was only appropriately and properly understood as Jesus accomplished it all. We should not imagine Peter would disagree with Paul: Peter himself well embodied Paul’s principle here, since Peter continually did not fully and really understand what God was doing in Jesus until after His ascension and when he received the Spirit. Furthermore, in terms of the welcoming of the Gentiles as Gentiles (the mystery of which Paul spoke in Ephesians 3:4-6), it was Peter himself who became a major participant in God’s revelation, for Peter was called by Cornelius on account of the angel, and Jesus Himself visited Peter and gave him the vision and sign of the unclean animals, and the Spirit prompted Peter to go on with Cornelius’ associates, and Peter saw how God gave the Spirit to Cornelius and his associates just as God had given Peter and the Apostles the Spirit on the day of Pentecost (cf. Acts 10:1-11:18).

Paul had been well read and well-studied in the Hebrew Bible before Jesus met him on the road to Damascus; afterward, his perspective on the Hebrew Bible would be informed by what God had accomplished and was accomplishing in the life, death, resurrection, ascension, lordship, and imminent return of His Son Jesus Christ. Paul set forth Adam as a type of Jesus in both Romans 5:12-21 and 1 Corinthians 15:20-45, in terms of the catalyst for death and redemption from it, and in terms of the body as it is now and the body as transformed in the resurrection (cf. Genesis 2:1-3:22). Paul affirmed God proclaimed the Gospel to Abraham in advance in Galatians 3:8. We should not imagine Paul thought God set forth a creedal level understanding of Jesus, His nature, and His purposes, but the proclamation was in the promise of the blessing of the nations through Abraham’s seed (cf. Genesis 12:3, 18:18). Paul would go on to establish how Christians do not obtain an inheritance of God independent of the promise made to Abraham, but are reckoned as children of Abraham by faith, and therefore able to be welcomed into the promise which was fulfilled in Christ (Galatians 3:6-29). In these, and many other ways, Paul returned to the Hebrew Bible which he knew quite well and now in it saw the witness regarding what God would accomplish in Jesus.

Paul would even bring concepts from the Hebrew Bible to bear on how he explained the Gospel. The resurrection of the dead was anticipated and expected in the Hebrew Bible, but primarily in terms of the general resurrection of the dead on the final day (cf. Daniel 12:1-2). God raised the Lord Jesus Christ from the dead; while Matthew recorded witnesses of other resurrections taking place around that time in Matthew 27:52-53, no one believed or suggested the general resurrection from the dead envisioned in Daniel 12:1-2 had taken place. When attempting to explain the resurrection of the dead to the Corinthian Christians, Paul spoke of Jesus as the “firstfruits” of the dead, attesting to the future promise of the resurrection for all believers on account of Jesus’ resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:20-24). “Firstfruits” came from Exodus 34:22-23 and other passages in the Law of Moses, in which Israel was to offer before God the first fruit of any of their harvests. In this framework, offering God the first fruit would engender confidence in God providing Israel with the “second fruit” and “third fruit” and perhaps beyond. There is no automatic or intrinsic association between the “firstfruit” and the resurrection in the Hebrew Bible; instead, Paul mined some of the concepts and imagery in the Hebrew Bible in order to better explain what God was doing in Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, ascension, lordship, and imminent return.

The author of the Letter to the Hebrews deeply explored the Hebrew Bible in light of what God accomplished in Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, ascension, lordship, and imminent return in compelling ways. He vividly perceived Jesus’ humiliation and exaltation in the Septuagint reading of Psalm 8:4-6 in Hebrews 2:5-11, and confessed how Jesus is the Pioneer of salvation for all who follow and suffer in Him as a result. The majority of the Letter to the Hebrews featured its author’s careful exegesis of Psalms 95:7-11, 110:1, 4, and Jeremiah 31:31-34, all to the end of exalting Jesus as the high priest according to the order of Melchizedek, able to secure a new and better covenant in His life, death, resurrection, ascension, and lordship, and as a guarantee of His return (Hebrews 3:1-10:31). Like Peter and Paul before him, the Hebrews author gave assurance of the Gospel as the fulfillment of all God had promised to Israel; he extolled the examples of the people of faith in the Hebrew Bible, yet then encouraged his current audience to follow after Jesus since they would not be made perfect apart from those who have come to hope and trust in Jesus (cf. Hebrews 11:1-12:2).

God brought His revelation regarding Jesus to a conclusion with all that which He gave to Jesus to show His servant John on Patmos in Revelation 1:1-22:21. From the beginning of Revelation until its very end, the visions John saw were rooted and informed by events and images in the Hebrew Bible. Such proves literally true (one of the few truly “literal” things about Revelation!): the first thing John saw was Jesus described in ways which align with and evoke the “one like a Son of Man,” the “Ancient of Days,” and the “man clothed in linen” in Daniel 7:9-14, 10:5-6 (Revelation 1:10-20), and in the end John saw the holy city, the river flowing from the throne, and the tree of life with leaves for the healing of the nations, all of which evoke what Ezekiel saw in Ezekiel 40:1-48:35 (Revelation 21:1-22:5). In between, almost every aspect of the vision drew from or alluded to some event or imagery described in the Hebrew Bible.

Thus God in Christ could show John a vision of what was and would be for Christians while drawing heavily from the imagery of the Hebrew Bible. In this way God made known how all regarding which He had spoken and promised in the Hebrew Bible would find its fulfillment in Jesus. We can see the shift in emphasis on account of what God accomplished in Christ even in these examples. In Daniel, the “Ancient of Days,” the “one like a Son of Man,” and the “man clothed in linen” are different characters; in John’s vision, their characteristics are combined in Jesus, glorifying Jesus as fully human and fully God (Revelation 1:10-20). The bulk of Ezekiel 40:1-48:35 described the imagined new temple for Israel, with the city and the river flowing from the temple receiving far less consideration; in Revelation 21:22, John was explicitly told there was no temple or a need for a temple, since God and Jesus the Lamb were in its midst, and thus the focus remained entirely on the holy city, the glorified people of God (Revelation 21:1-22:5).

We can learn much from Peter, Paul, the Hebrews author, John, and the other inspired writers of the New Testament regarding how we can perceive the Gospel in the Hebrew Bible. We will find prophetic encouragement which has unique reference to the work God accomplished in Jesus, as in Joel 2:28-32. We will find anticipatory witness regarding Jesus from Moses, David, and the prophets, as in Psalm 110:1, 4, or Isaiah 52:13-53:12. We can discern types of Jesus in many of the characters found in the pages of the Hebrew Bible, from Elijah to Eliakim ben Hilkiah (cf. Isaiah 22:20-25). Concepts, frameworks, and images presented in the Hebrew Bible might provide compelling ways to communicate regarding what God has accomplished in Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, ascension, lordship, and imminent return, as seen with the firstfruits and the resurrection and the whole of Revelation.

The Hebrew Bible remains the witness of all God spoke to the fathers through the prophets (cf. Hebrews 1:1). We always do well to first seek to make sense of the Hebrew Bible in terms of its original context. It is likewise often helpful to also consider how it would have been understood in Second Temple Judaism. It was never intended, on its own, to establish authority for faith and practice in the covenant between God and all people in Christ. But much of what God spoke to the fathers through the prophets involved the promises and expectations which would find their fulfillment in ways no one really expected: in the life, death, resurrection, ascension, lordship, and imminent return of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, the Son of God, and we do well to read and understand the Hebrew Bible accordingly. May we well perceive the Gospel in the Hebrew Bible, and seek to follow the way of Jesus our Pioneer and obtain salvation in Him!

Ethan R. Longhenry