Help me give a response to the assertion that Jesus did not fulfill the OT entirely.

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Cifrado

Puritan Board Freshman
This is what we have so far. I'm not sure how to give a proper response to something like this. Perhaps you could offer some insight.

"The OT does predict a messiah but not one who saves from sin. The messiah was supposed to return all captives back to Israel and setup a strong Israel which would never be captive again. Salvation from sin is never mention in conjunction with the messiah. Jesus did do these simple things. Jesus wasn't a great political leader .

Why Don't Jews Believe In Jesus | The difference between Judaism and Christianity

What is the Messiah supposed to accomplish? The Bible says that he will:

A. Build the Third Temple (Ezekiel 37:26-28).

B. Gather all Jews back to the Land of Israel (Isaiah 43:5-6).

C. Usher in an era of world peace, and end all hatred, oppression, suffering and disease. As it says: "Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall man learn war anymore." (Isaiah 2:4)

D. Spread universal knowledge of the God of Israel, which will unite humanity as one. As it says: "God will be King over all the world—on that day, God will be One and His Name will be One" (Zechariah 14:9).

The historical fact is that Jesus fulfilled none of these messianic prophecies.

Christians counter that Jesus will fulfill these in the Second Coming, but Jewish sources show that the Messiah will fulfill the prophecies outright, and no concept of a second coming exists.

Jesus doesn't fit the messianic prophecies.

I support my claim with scriptural references. Even though I believe none of it, I can still see the problems and Jesus is not necessary and he doesn't fit the bill of messiah according to the Jewish text. He may fit the bill to Paul but not to the scriptures."

Below is another post by this same person

"In the OP I claim that according to the OT Jesus nor any other savior is required for forgiveness of sin. Ezekiel, a "prophet of god", says all you have to do is turn from your ways and god imputes righteousness to you. This is much more simple and reasonable than human sacrifice especially since human sacrifice is condemned in the bible. Jesus is not mentioned in the OT and the messiah who is mentioned is not a savior for sin. He is a savior from captivity and oppression. A political leader who defeats their oppressors by military operations. I listed the references on here already. Care to comment?"
 
Tell him to read the New Testament and the Old Testament. Seems he's read neither (quoting a few verses scripture means nothing).

He sounds like a Dispensational too...coincidentally enough
 
This response sounds similar to that of many of the Jews in Jesus' day.

First, I'd prove that the Messiah would indeed come to save His people from their sins (though that's not the only reason of course- Christ is our Prophet and our King as well- not for just the Jews only, but the whole world!) I think even the prophets in the Old Testament understood that God would do something about the failure of the sacrificial system to cleanse sin and guilt once for all, though obviously it was only seen in types and shadows.

I'd begin with Jeremiah 31, Isaiah 53, and Malachi 3.
 
The OT does predict a messiah but not one who saves from sin.

"Then why bother? If the messiah doesn't save from sin, I'm not interested."

The assertion that the messiah is not supposed to be one who, by his substitutionary death, saves from sin... well, that the heart of the argument you're trying to refute. I suspect that before you make any headway you'll have to get the other person to see that without such a messiah we're all lost. He first has to at least admit that if the Christian view of Jesus is true, it would be the best thing God could ever do for mankind. He has to wish it were true, even if he doesn't yet believe it's true.

Then, get him to expand his view of the foretelling of the messiah beyond a few passages from the prophets. It's the totality of the Jewish Bible—the creation and fall, the accounts of the patriarchs and the exodus, the types contained in the Law of Moses, the reign of the kings, the saving of a remnant, the wisdom of the Proverbs and the cries of the Psalms—that all together point to the need for a savior exactly like the One who came.
 
The people of Jesus day (or any day, for that matter) in general did not have genuine spiritual sensibilities. So they, like people today, or before the time of Christ, crave a Savior who will validate their passions for things to go their way in terms of this world. It's all they want, and they can't imagine anything better.

Their blindness is: the world they conceive as their present home isn't problematic enough, they don't feel the need to be saved FROM it, to be saved from its fallen and ruined condition, which ruin is headlined by their personal ruin, their personal contributions to its corruption; besides all the death and evil that they've inherited from their fathers, and from everyone else's fathers--going back to the Garden.

In other words, the Messiah the writer thinks the OT points to is nothing more than just another political and military hero--the best of the best perhaps; but still just someone who will finally make it possible for men with sufficient motivation to make it good in the home of the overcomers. This view is exactly the Pharisees' vision of what OT religion is all about.

The writer is refreshingly honest in what he accepts and what he rejects. With this glaring omission: he seems to overlook the "Jewishness" of Jesus and his original followers, along with the vast majority of the original converts to Christianity in the first decade or so following the Cross (and the Resurrection). It may be convenient, but it is selective to read-out of Messianic expectation in the 1C the spiritual themes that Jesus embodied and taught. In the main, "his own did not receive him;" but still there were those who did--people who either were expecting, or who came to embrace and even suffer for a spiritual Messiah, in hope of attaining a part in the resurrection to life eternal. To pre-remove those Jews from among those whose interpretation of "Messianic expectation" is legitimate, is prejudicial.


One point of observation:
a. the idealized Ezekiel temple (chs.40ff) was the NEXT (or second) temple that was to be built, from the standpoint of Ezekiel himself. Where does the writer insert "third" into the text of Ezekiel, an older priest who wrote his vision "in sight" (prophetically, so to speak) of the razed and blackened foundations of the first? Apparently, those who built the second Temple, in either its initial (Ezrahite) or remodeled (Herodian) examples had no intention of erecting along Ezekiel's meticulous model, probably because they recognized it as an "ideal."

The real question is what does the Lord mean when he declares, in the pregnant language of the Old Covenant, that he will dwell in their midst, in some sort of sanctuary? Solomon had long before acknowledged that the heaven of heavens could not contain God, much less the impressive Temple he built. The true perception of God's greatness recognizes that no structure (not even an idealized one) can adequately "house" God.

So, the poster is guilty of of imposing a childish, literalist expectation of the fulfillment of Ezk.37:26-28 on the original hearers, of assuming they were too unsophisticated to be able to see beyond materialist fulfillments. The poster seems to think that since the second Temple wasn't erected on the material lines of Ezekiel's description, that it was Messiah's job to so erect it (which then reads a "third" temple into the text of Ezekiel). While dispensationalists have in the last hundred years popularized the material view of Ezekiel's temple (and placed it's erection in the Millennium, as the FOURTH temple, since another one is supposed to be built in the interim according to them), this is not the "spiritual" view generally held by the Christians who have considered the matter down through history.

And, it is not as though Jesus himself never addressed the question, or sought to disabuse people in his own time of a materialist obsession with the standing Temple, which some of them clearly thought of as being Ezekiel's Temple rebuilt, along materialist lines (since his description was ideal). The disciples thought Jesus' prediction of the fallen temple (Herod's, Mt.24:1-3) was coterminous with the end of the world. Jn.2:19-21 has Jesus making a shocking (and offensive, besides misunderstood) testimony that should his enemies "destroy this temple," that he would in three days time re-erect it. The text is plain: he understood himself to mean his BODY.

The NT view is that the closest conceivable dwelling of "God with us" is that God inhabits a body (which is his own creation, since men certainly do not build them, though they are instrumental in propagating and beautifying them). Say what he please about how wrong he thinks the NT is on the question, the poster's materialist understanding of Ezk.37:26-28 was addressed by Jesus already, anticipating and rebutting it in terms of his resurrection.

Of course, the poster does not believe in Jesus resurrection either; much less likely does he believe that Jesus predicted his own death and resurrection in fulfillment of Ezekiel's prophecy along with the rest of the OT. But simply to assert that Jesus did not do what the OT "predicted" assumes that his own, wooden and unserious (since he doesn't believe it anyway, being an atheist or whatever) reading of the text is the proper sense of it. He's giving preference to one set of readings, and dismissing without any justification a serious and believing treatment of it. He most likely thinks Christians do a selective-reading of the OT, never even considering such a "weighty" objection as he has raised. He's too ignorant and narrow-minded to be a dispassionate judge of the evidence.


The poster's other points are also addressed by NT writers, who were mainly ethnic Jews, and deeply religious. In the end, all we see is a rehash of the age-old battle over what sort of religion is "biblical religion" (both OT & NT). In this context, we can put the question thus, as it was in the 1C: Are the Pharisees right?

A "yes" answer gives you another version of the original Jesus-as-Christ rejection which was heartily received in the 1C, and ever since, by a large part of humanity (not only Jewish).

A "no" answer leads toward a consideration that the (Jewish) Apostles might have been more faithful to the spirit of their professed OT religion, exemplified by the prophets, and the priests, and the patriarchs back to Abraham, and even to the beginning of the world.
 
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