Hello everyone and Merry Christmas. To be honest my heart has been led astray from God for a few years now and I've been wanting to change this for awhile. I've looked into many religions plenty of times, but I always end up back to ambiguity between Judaism and Christianity. My main hang up is the common Jewish criticism that Jesus doesn't fullfill many of the Messianic prophecies mentioned in the OT, particularly in Isaiah. These prophecies being for example, the temple being rebuilt, weapons of destruction being destroyed, the dead rising, etc. Can anyone explain how Jesus fullfilled these prophecies? The response, "They'll be fullfilled during the Second Coming," has felt like a cop out to me recently, so if anyone can explain why it isn't, I'd be very grateful. Thank you all for reading this.
A question
Other urls found in this thread:
christianthinktank.com
en.wikipedia.org
twitter.com
I'll bite …
Christ is the temple
Death was conquered
Lazarus
Anything else?
/thread
It's not like Jesus showed up for 3 years, fulfilled everything possible, and disappeared. Jesus still acts in the world by His Spirit, so the prophecies began to be fulfilled at His nativity but their fullfilment will only be complete at the eschaton. It's not only "they'll be fulfilled during the second coming" but "they're being fulfilled right now".
Now, with that said,
already addresses those. Surely you have other objections than those extremely basic ones.
These are satisfactory answers user, thank you. I'll copy and paste a few more that I've found:
Still waiting on the zombie apocalypse, too.
To be honest I haven't looked into the verses referenced by most of these so if they're innacurate or something please correct me.
Whoops accidentally left a bit of text in there from the one of the lists I copy and pasted, excuse that please some of those lists were pretty confrontational and had an anti-Christian bias, I apologize in advance.
Do you not realize that several of the prophecies in the Prophets are specifically eschatological? What do you think the Day of the Lord is?
Some of these, like Isaiah 26:19, are understood to be about the eschaton even in Jewish theology.
Jews still say that the messiah is supposed to be a mortal religious leader who will not die and come back during the end of times but will fullfill the prophecies during his lifetime, where in scripture they based this off of I'm not entirely sure. Jews also tend to say that God's law is eternal and God isn't prone to whimsy such as the following:
Genesis 17:9, Exodus 12:14, 12:17, 12:24 12:43, 13:3, 27:21, 28:43, 29:9, 30:21, 31:17, 34:27, Leviticus 3:17, 6:22, 7:34-36, 10:9, 10:15, 16:29, 16:31, 16:34, 17:7, 23:14, 23:21, 23:31, 23:41, 24:3, 26:46, Numbers 10:8, 15:15, 19:10, 19:21, 18:23, 35:29, Deuteronomy 4:40, 5:29, 12:28, 18:5, 28:46, 29:28-29, 32:40
If you want my honest opinion, you're looking a little too hard at the whole thing. You're worrying about words instead of ideas, missing the forest for the trees. Did Jesus fulfill the Messianic prophecies? Yes. Did Jesus fulfill the lawyer's minutia? …
Incidentally, are you looking at an English Bible for these verses or have you studied Hebrew and the language of Torah?
That's interesting, I'll think about that, thanks user.
English Bible
And likely many thousands of others.
Dead people rising everywhere.
Thank you all for the answers you have given me, I really do appreciate them. I do have one more burning question still sort of left unanswered however. Is there any particular part of the OT/Hebrew Bible that foretells Christ's second coming? I know of Isaiah 53 and Daniel 9:26, but a mention of anything else I may have forgotten or have looked over would be very kind!
What of Isaiah 53?
Oh yes, that was my mistake. I do recognize Isaiah 53 but wasn't thinking about it during the time of writing the OP. I was more thinking about the other prophecies in Isaiah. Please excuse that blunder, I apologize.
The weapons being made into plowshares and resurrection of the dead are eschatological, related to the millennial reign that hasn't come yet and the end times
"Joy to the world" is about the second coming and is based on psalm 98
The prophecies of the Old Testament describe two contradictory roles for the Messiah–one as a suffering servant, the other as a righteous and conquering king–which you can read about in closer detail here:
christianthinktank.com
Interesting is the observation that for the Messiah to first appear as a king, it would entail the imposition of a rule totally foreign to nearly all the human wills of the world, with no change of heart likely for any of them, hence why the idea of the same Messiah appearing on two separate occasions and for two different undertakings makes the most sense as a resolution to the inconsistency we see in the prophecies. The Messiah comes first to call everyone to repentance as an invitation to the Kingdom, but when He comes again it will be to judge: "When the Son of man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate them one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will place the sheep at his right hand, but the goats at the left."
Some Jews always knew this too. They even proposed a Messiah ben Yosef (Jacob's son and the pattern for the Suffering Servant) and a seperate Messiah ben David (the warrior king). Some thought ben Yosef would be killed and then ben David would appear and take revenge on his enemies.
en.wikipedia.org
It did happen in a way.. except they were one and the same. And like Joseph, Jesus became a light to the Gentiles and saved them from spiritual famine. And he did take revenge on his enemies. It just happened to be the very people Jewish leaders didn't think about: Themselves. Jerusalem and the temple were destroyed and the Church eventually conquered the Roman empire. And it still moves on.
And I will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of grace and pleas for mercy, so that, when they look on me, on him whom they have pierced, they shall mourn for him, as one mourns for an only child, and weep bitterly over him, as one weeps over a firstborn.
Zechariah 12:10 ESV
John referenced this in his gospel in 19:37.
Zechariah chapters 12-14 are all about the Day of the Lord.
Merry Christmas everyone! Thank you all for your wonderful answers, they are exceptional and I obviously have much more studying of the Bible to do. Speaking of that, I did come upon two verses that lead me to ask another question, I hope they aren't getting annoying at this point.
These verses being Matthew 16:28 and Mark 13:30.
What is Jesus referring to in Matthew 16:28? The Transfiguration that follows? His resurrection? Or his Second Coming? If it's his Second Coming then there are obvious problems right? And what does Jesus mean by this "generation" in Mark 13:30? At first glance these verses seem to be contradictions and discredit Christ's legitmacy, but I'm sure there is an explanation and I'd be very grateful if anyone would tell me it.
Matthew 16:28 most likely refers to the transfiguration (in the next chapter) or the resurrection according to other people.
As for Mark 13:30 this generation means the generation of Christians, in a way to comfort the disciples, telling them they would fail and the generation would still be alive at the second coming. We shouldn't think of this generation as a literal generation of a few decades otherwise the Epistle of Peter wouldn't make sense
2 Peter 3:3-4
2 Peter 3:7-10