There’s no verse for a suffering Messiah in the Old Testament, because the idea of a suffering Messiah, the thing that the Messiah would have to do, to die a sacrificial death, that had to be kept secret from the supernatural powers. Paul says in 1 Corinthians chapter 2, had the rulers of this world known what was going to happen. Had they known, they would never have crucified the Lord of Glory. Satan himself knows who Jesus is. The supernatural powers know he’s there. They know part of what the reason he’s there, he wants to kickstart the Kingdom of God and reclaim the nations.
But what the supernatural powers don’t know, is what the catalyst for all this is. What has to be kept secret is how all of the pieces could be found somewhere scattered in the Old Testament and then reassembled into a complete profile of the Messiah. The problem with the Jewish view of the Messiah was that it was incomplete, they’re going with the term anointed and specifically the king, the anointed king. They’re expecting a descendant of David who would come and be a military deliverer, someone to really get them out of exile, to regather the tribes, and they will have their kingdom again.
The idea of suffering is nowhere on the radar. The only way you get it on the radar is to go back in the Old Testament and say, what does the Old Testament say about kingship and who gets to be king? We find out that the king is also God’s son and God’s son is also Israel. In Exodus, God uses that terminology, there’s some sort of conceptual alignment between the king and the people, because the king represents the people. Wait a minute, if the nation is God’s son, the nation in the book of Isaiah is described as the servant collectively. Israel is not just the servant, there’s an individual servant that ministers to Israel, to take care of their exile problem.
There’s a corporate servant and an individual servant and in Isaiah 53 the Messiah is not there suffering, but the servant is the servant the individual who represents the nation who is the son of God and represents the corporate son of God who is the ruler. This is why you get in the later chapters of Isaiah, the idea of the kingdom of God extending over all the other nations. There are dozens of biblical theological points scattered throughout the Old Testament about one individual who is related to a corporate entity called the people of God in some way. This whole picture, that is what Peter was talking about in Acts 3:18.
But what the supernatural powers don’t know, is what the catalyst for all this is. What has to be kept secret is how all of the pieces could be found somewhere scattered in the Old Testament and then reassembled into a complete profile of the Messiah. The problem with the Jewish view of the Messiah was that it was incomplete, they’re going with the term anointed and specifically the king, the anointed king. They’re expecting a descendant of David who would come and be a military deliverer, someone to really get them out of exile, to regather the tribes, and they will have their kingdom again.
The idea of suffering is nowhere on the radar. The only way you get it on the radar is to go back in the Old Testament and say, what does the Old Testament say about kingship and who gets to be king? We find out that the king is also God’s son and God’s son is also Israel. In Exodus, God uses that terminology, there’s some sort of conceptual alignment between the king and the people, because the king represents the people. Wait a minute, if the nation is God’s son, the nation in the book of Isaiah is described as the servant collectively. Israel is not just the servant, there’s an individual servant that ministers to Israel, to take care of their exile problem.
There’s a corporate servant and an individual servant and in Isaiah 53 the Messiah is not there suffering, but the servant is the servant the individual who represents the nation who is the son of God and represents the corporate son of God who is the ruler. This is why you get in the later chapters of Isaiah, the idea of the kingdom of God extending over all the other nations. There are dozens of biblical theological points scattered throughout the Old Testament about one individual who is related to a corporate entity called the people of God in some way. This whole picture, that is what Peter was talking about in Acts 3:18.
