He Dwells Among Us

Jesus Christ said that the Law and the Prophets were about himself, and that he had come on earth to fulfill both. Matthew 5:17 reports, “Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them.” This means that any account which presents him as only fulfilling the Prophets, let alone those which also portray him as occasionally overriding the law, will have distorted both the nature of his ministry and the manner of its completion. Jesus is the descendant of Abraham appointed by God to be a blessing to “all the families of the earth” (Genesis 12:2,3). Psalm 133:3 reveals the nature of that blessing to be everlasting life for human beings. And yet, the accounts with which we are familiar concentrate just on what Jesus did and what was done to him. Such an approach is bound to sidestep his specific purposes in doing the things he did and the specific reasons for what was done to him.
It naturally fell on the last of the prophets to herald the promised Messiah and identify him to the Judahites and the world. John the Baptist, as the last of the prophets, came to prepare the way of the promised Messiah by calling the people to repentance and the forgiveness of their sins through a baptism of renewal. The Baptist identified Jesus as the Messiah. Jesus would divide his time between giving a clearer definition of the Law, fulfilling it, and teaching us how to live in accordance with it. He would also do good to those needing it. While accounts of his life confidently say that this or that thing he said or did fulfilled one prophecy or another, it is hard to find accounts which similarly present how elements of his mission fulfilled the Law also.
One crucial example of such misdirection has to do with the manner of Jesus’ atonement for human sins. It is through the atonement that he created a path to everlasting life for us. His sacrifice of atonement was subject to all provisions of the governing Levitical Law, for nothing would be an atonement sacrifice unless it fully conformed to each of the Law’s stipulations. Leviticus 1:1-17 lays out the atonement sacrifice which would create a path to everlasting life for us. Psalm 16:8-10 states, “you will not leave my soul in the abode of the dead, neither will you let your holy one see corruption. You will show me the path that leads to life…” Contrary to the general belief, the guarantee that the Messiah’s body would not be left to decompose was not the promise of his resurrection. The promise of resurrection was actually the portion of the passage that said his soul would not be left in the abode of the dead.
In Judahite practice, corpses were left in their tomb to decompose, and, after a year, the bones were collected and interred in an ossuary. As the Messiah’s body would be needed for the completion of the atonement sacrifice, it clearly could not be left to decompose in the usual Judahite manner. It would need to be fresh for its immolation. Immolation is the final step in an atonement sacrifice as stipulated in Levitical Law. Jesus acknowledged that he would meet all the Law’s requirements. His sacrifice was a free-will offering, and not obligatory, nor in any way coerced (John 10:18). It was in that same spirit that he fully cooperated at every stage of his arrest, trial, conviction, sentencing and crucifixion. He did not at any point offer a defense. He even sought forgiveness from the cross for those who were engaged in his execution, pleading that they did not know what they were doing. An atonement sacrifice does more than obtain the forgiveness or remission of sins. It purges sins and makes it as though they had never been committed. It expunges the death which is the wages of sin. It opens up the path to everlasting life for us. This topic is more fully discussed in the final chapter of this book.
Presenting Jesus’ ministry as a fulfillment not merely of prophecy but of the Law as well creates a fuller and more revealing account of his mission. It enables us, for example, to understand the correct significance of his missing body in the tomb. What happened to it and what both Peter and John understood and believed from what they saw are likewise discussed in the final chapter.
With his own new commandment, Jesus instituted the kingdom of heaven on earth for us. With his own blood, he sealed the covenant through which we undertake to live by his new law. My previous book, What Did Jesus Do? was my initial attempt to present Jesus from the viewpoint of both the fulfillment of prophecy and the fulfillment of law. The present book is a much more complete and thoroughly substantiated presentation. Through his birth, Jesus fulfilled prophecy; through his mission, he fulfilled the Law. Unless we understand how he fulfilled the Law, we cannot with clear conviction grasp what he did, much less understand how he did it. Our faith would rest on an incomplete and opaque foundation. In the end, correctly understanding what we profess to believe is the surest bulwark against wavering. Jesus himself stressed the necessity of understanding that which we believe (Mark 4:12; Matthew 13:13,14; cf Isaiah 6:9).
If we are to understand how Jesus came and fulfilled the Law, it is essential not to detach the Gospels from Tanakh or Hebrew Scriptures, as though the Gospels were free-standing, self-contained accounts of Jesus and his mission. On the contrary, the Gospels are much better understood as compositions by evangelists who rooted their acceptance and understanding of Jesus Christ wholly in Hebrew Scriptures and wrote to complete those Scriptures with the story of the doings and teachings of the Messiah promised in Tanakh. Mark quickly establishes Jesus as the Son of God, first known on the basis of the archangel’s announcement which was the fulfilment of the prophecy of Tanakh (Isaiah 7:14). Matthew and Luke derive Jesus from genealogies flowing from and through Tanakh. And John introduces Jesus as the creative and missionary Word of God, who proceeds from the Father, and is declared by God in Tanakh to go out and not return without having accomplished his mission. The Gospels cannot be properly understood unless grasped as the fulfilment of the central promise in Tanakh in a manner fully observant of Levitical Law.