fringe who had long ago left the Southern Baptist Convention
said to me, “I don’t want any theology, I don’t want any doctrine,
all I want is Jesus Christ.”
And I said, “Well that’s fine, and that’s a doctrine.” Did he think
Christ was a name stenciled on some Palestinian mailbox in
Galilee? No, that is to say Jesus the Messiah. When you say Jesus
Christ, you are not just speaking a first and a last name, as if this
is a European construct. That is saying, Jesus the Messiah. Yeshua
HaMashiach. Jesus the Messiah; it is all there in the land of Israel.
There among His own people, Jesus declared Himself to be the
Messiah. He showed Himself to be the Messiah.
Matthew begins his gospel recounting the tracing of the
genealogy of Jesus, the Son of David, Son of Abraham. He
summarizes the genealogical structure like this, and I quote from
Matthew 1:17. “So all the generations from Abraham to David are
fourteen generations, from David to the deportation to Babylon,
fourteen generations and from the deportation to Babylon to
the Messiah, fourteen generations.” This is the history Israel has
been building to completion from the beginning to the dawn
of the Messianic age. Jesus is the promised King of David’s line.
Mark begins his gospel by declaring that Jesus is the Christ, the
Son of God. The unmistakable, undeniable claim of all the New
Testament is that Jesus is the Messiah. This is central to the
apostolic proclamation. It is central to the Scriptures, and to deny
this is not to deny the part, but to deny the whole. On the road to
Emmaus, Jesus demonstrated how the Scriptures in their entirety
revealed the very details of His earthly ministry and the meaning
of those events in salvation history, demonstrating that He is the
Messiah. Israel’s hopes and prayers had been answered and the
Messianic Age had come.
I’ll refer you to Acts chapter 2. In this marvelous text, which
records for us Peter’s great sermon on the Day of Pentecost,
we see this declaration made clear. Beginning at verse 14: