“You are also to count off seven sabbaths of years for yourself, seven times seven years, so that you have the time of the seven sabbaths of years, namely, forty-nine years. You shall then sound a ram’s horn abroad on the tenth day of the seventh month; on the day of atonement you shall sound a horn all through your land. ‘You shall thus consecrate the fiftieth year and PROCLAIM A RELEASE through the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you, and each of you shall return to his own property, and each of you shall return to his family” (Lev 25:8-10).

Time and again, it’s the prophets of the Hebrew Bible who teach us how to read the Torah, and how to understand the New Testament’s interpretation of the Torah too. The proclamation of release for every indentured servant in the Year of Jubilee seems to have been an ideal, never fully realized during the time period of the Tanakh (see Jer 34:8, 15, 17). For the prophet Isaiah, this unrealized ideal in Leviticus 25 served as a shadow of the future Messianic hope. That Isaiah interpreted the Year of Jubilee as a Messianic prophecy is confirmed by his reuse of a very unique phrase taken from Leviticus 25:10: “to proclaim liberty.”

“The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me, because the LORD has anointed me to bring good news to the afflicted; He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, TO PROCLAIM LIBERTY to captives and freedom to prisoners; to proclaim the favorable year of the LORD and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn” (Isa 61:1-2).

In the Gospel of Luke, Isaiah’s already-Messianic interpretation of the Torah provides the theological vision for Yeshua’s mission (Luke 4:17-21).

Moses provides the ideal, Isaiah the commentary, and Luke reveals the identity of the one who has come to fulfill it! When the New Testament authors say that Yeshua is the fulfillment of the Torah, they are not reading him back into places in the Scriptures where he is not. Rather, they are reading the Torah through the lens of the inspired commentary of the prophets! And since the prophetic interpretation is an inspired interpretation, the Messianic interpretation of the Torah is authorized by the living God himself!

“Then beginning with Moses and with all the prophets, He explained to them the things concerning Himself in all the Scriptures” (Luke 24:27).