“This One will be our peace. When the Assyrian invades our land, when he tramples on our citadels, then we will raise against him seven shepherds and eight leaders of men. They will shepherd the land of Assyria with the sword, the land of Nimrod at its entrances; and He will deliver us from the Assyrian when he attacks our land and when he tramples our territory” (Mic 5:5-6).
Many of the readers of my devotionals are Jewish, like myself. We came to faith in Yeshua not because we were seeking another religion, but because we wanted to study our own more carefully. And the most Jewish place to begin our search was not the later writings of our rabbis, but the original writings of our greatest hero, Moses, and his prophets. Our search led us to ancient passages that looked unmistakably like “that man” from the New Testament, whom our parents and religious leaders insisted was not for us. But the miraculous connection between prophecy and fulfillment prevailed upon our minds, and the love of God poured out through Yeshua’s sacrifice prevailed upon our hearts.
But no sooner had we put our faith in Yeshua than our rabbis began to dissuade us from what they regarded as our temporary insanity. They sought to prove that the New Testament ripped passages from their original context in the Hebrew Bible, passages that had nothing to do with the Messiah, and deceitfully misappropriated them in a new and foreign context to prove that Yeshua is the promised Messiah.
The most classic example is Matthew’s interpretation of Isaiah 7:14 with reference to Yeshua’s virgin birth in Matthew 1:23. We are told that Isaiah 7:14 cannot be about the Messiah because that passage had to be fulfilled hundreds of years before the birth of Yeshua, in the days of the Assyrian empire (see Isa 7:15-25).
By spending more time carefully reading the Hebrew Scriptures, we find ourselves even more convinced that Yeshua is the promised Messiah than we were when we first believed.
But what about the prophecy concerning the Messiah’s birth in Bethlehem (Mic 5:2)? Like Isaiah 7:14, it is also placed within a historical context that refers to the Assyrian conquest (Mic 5:5-6). So too is the prophecy about the birth of the child called Mighty God, who will establish an eternal kingdom for David (Isa 9:6-7 [5-6]), as well as the promise of a shoot from Jesse who will restore the paradisiacal conditions of the Garden of Eden (Isa 11:1-9). By carefully reading these passages in their literary rather than their historical contexts, we soon discover that these prophecies have in fact been placed in contexts that refer to the establishment of God’s kingdom in “the last days” (Isa 2:2; Mic 4:1).
By spending more time carefully reading the Hebrew Scriptures, we find ourselves even more convinced that Yeshua is the promised Messiah than we were when we first believed.
“So Jesus said to the twelve, ‘You do not want to go away also, do you?’ Simon Peter answered Him, ‘Lord, to whom shall we go? You have words of eternal life. We have believed and have come to know that You are the Holy One of God’” (John 6:67-69).
