197 - On the Road to Emmaus [B]

On the Road to Emmaus
Mark 16:12–13; Luke 24:13–35
Matthew Lesson #197
April 22, 2018
www.deanbibleministries.org

Opening Prayer

“Our Father, we’re thankful for this opportunity to open Your Word together, to fellowship around the bread of Your Word. As our Savior said, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.”

“Father, we are reminded that this is not an academic pursuit, but it is life itself, that as we feed on Your Word, our capacity for life, our capacity for love, our capacity to serve You expands.

“We come to recognize that the purpose for our existence is to serve You in this life in whatever capacity. You have given us talents and spiritual gifts. That which energizes the whole is our relationship with You, and that is grounded in our understanding and application of Your Word.

“Father, may we not only be refreshed and encouraged by our study of Your Word, but also be challenged, that this should be the centerpiece of our lives.

“We pray this in Christ’s name, amen.”

Slide 2

Open your Bibles with me to Luke 24. We are studying one of my favorite episodes in the Scripture and that is Jesus in this conversation with these two disciples on the road to Emmaus. I wish we had recorded what He said because He gives a course as only He can give it in Christology—that is the study of the Person and work of Jesus Christ—as it was predicted and prophesied in the Old Testament.

What a wonder that would be to have the Lord focus on and walk us through what the Old Testament predicted and prophesied regarding the Messiah. That’s our focus in this section today.

Slide 3

In the previous lessons, what we have looked at are the post-resurrection appearances.

He first appeared to Mary Magdalene, and she did not recognize Him initially. She thought He was the gardener, and then when she did recognize Him, she said, “Rabboni, my teacher!”

We see this close relationship that He has with Mary. It is not this distorted view that liberals come up with. It is the devotion of a child of God to her Lord and Savior.

The second appearance is also to women. He appears to the other women that had been with Mary that had watched and observed as He had been buried in the tomb, and then they had come back early that morning to bring even more spices to make sure that everything was done appropriately, only to discover that the tomb was empty.

He appears to them, and this is described in Matthew 28:9–10. The appearance to Mary is described in John 20:11–18. Then we have the third appearance which is in Luke.

We are studying Matthew, but Matthew, as well as the other Gospels, does not give everything. I like to point out at the beginning of these lessons—for those who may have just come in for this one lesson or just start in the middle of this watching online—is that as we came into the last couple of days of our Lord—when He is going to the Garden of Gethsemane, His prayer at the Garden of Gethsemane, what transpired there, His arrest, transportation to the six trials—that not all of these things are covered in any one Gospel.

I have put these together, so that we are studying the entire Gospel presentation—the symphony as it were, of our Lord’s last two days on the earth in His humanity—the events that are referred to in this particular passage.

He has risen from the dead. He has appeared to Mary. Apparently, He ascends to the Father between that first appearance and His second appearance to the other women, and now He is going to appear to these two disciples on the road to Emmaus.

Slide 4

Mark summarizes this appearance for us in Mark 16:12–13:

“After that, He appeared in another form to two of them—contextually that’s just disciples—as they walked and went into the country.”

He doesn’t identify where they were going; He just makes a very brief summary. He appeared to two of them as they walked and went into the country. “And they went and told it to the rest—that is the rest of the disciples—but they did not believe them either.”

As I pointed out last time as we talked about those who doubt, I think it is unique to the Bible as a piece of religious literature when you are just comparing it with the Koran or you’re comparing it with the Bhagavad-Gita, the sayings of Confucius, The Book of Mormon or any of these types of literature to present the main figures of the Bible showing their sins, their doubts, their lack of faith, their failures again and again.

By contrast, only Jesus has no faults. I think that’s one of the implications of that. It brings out the impeccability of Jesus as He who is sinless and that all others are sinful and corrupted by sin.

This also points out that the disciples, as well as the women, were not anticipating that Jesus would rise from the dead. He had told them at least eight times in different situations that it was necessary for Him to go to Jerusalem where He would be arrested, turned over to the Gentiles, He would be crucified, He would die, and He would rise on the third day.

They should have known this. They should have anticipated it. The guards, the Sadducees, the unbelievers recognized that He said this; but the disciples, those who followed Him, those who had believed He was the Messiah, just completely missed it.

The point there is often we are the same way. We are spiritually dense, even though we are spiritually alive, even though as Paul says in Ephesians 1:18, “The eyes of your understanding [soul] being enlightened;”—it’s a perfect tense; it happened at salvation. We nevertheless still— because we often have our own agenda, are in carnality, whatever it is—just aren’t the brightest bulbs available.

These two disciples depict this. The other disciples lack faith, but it also gives evidence of the fact that they were not intentionally trying to deceive people or to manufacture something new—a new religion, a new system.

They did not set out to convince or to create a scenario of a resurrected Jesus. They didn’t believe it. They had to be brought to that understanding and that belief on the basis of the evidence.

Slide 5

We read in Luke that there were two of them. That takes us back to Luke 24:9 to the statement that the women remembered His words, and they returned from the tomb and told all these things to the Eleven and to all the rest. All the rest would be those disciples that were not of the eleven disciples. They were not the inner circle of disciples. They were the broad circle.

We are reminded that there was a group of 70 disciples in Luke 10:1–17 that were sent out to Israel to proclaim the gospel of the kingdom. These two were part of that broader circle of disciples that were not as close to our Lord as the Twelve, but they were with Him a lot. There’s more of a crowd there in Jerusalem.

These two left; they are not identified initially. We don’t know the name of the second one. It’s not for a few verses that we learn in Luke 24:18 that Cleopas is the name of one of them.

Luke 24:13, they “… were traveling that same day to a village called Emmaus which was seven miles from Jerusalem.”

It takes a couple of hours to make that kind of walk if you’re walking fairly quickly. I walk quite a bit. I walk usually about a 14 or 15 minute mile. That would take about 1¾ hours, but that’s if you’re really focused on walking and not just sort of walking along.

That would take anywhere from probably 2 to 2½ hours, and especially if you’re having conversation and talking about things, it’s going to take a little bit longer.

We don’t know where Emmaus is. There’s a lot of debate, a lot of discussion. Archaeologists think it might be one location, Josephus refers to another location, but it’s really unsettled because none of the locations that bear a similar name are seven miles from Jerusalem.

We just haven’t discovered where this Emmaus was located. But Luke makes it clear—and under the doctrine of inerrancy, it is precise—that it was approximately seven stadia from Jerusalem.

Luke 24:14, “And they talked together of all these things which had happened.”

Slide 6

They are immersed in conversation, and we learn in Luke 24:15 that they are not only conversing and reasoning. The word there for reasoning is they’re not having a hostile argument; they’re just debating with each other. They are trying to process what has taken place.

They’re saying, “Well, what about this? We thought He was the prophet, but He did this. That seemed to prove He was the prophet, but now they crucified Him. What’s happening? Was our faith misplaced?”

They’re trying to comprehend what has just happened in the midst of their despair and their disappointment, and that they have invested their lives in Jesus as the Messiah, and now it seems that that has come to nothing.

They have only heard at this point that the tomb was empty. They have not heard that He has risen from the dead. They only know that the tomb was empty. That doesn’t mean anything to them. It could be that somebody stole the body.

They debate among themselves, and then this third individual approaches them. They’re on a road; there would have been a lot of foot traffic. There would have been those who were going from one place to another, and it would not be uncommon for people to group together and to talk about things, especially at this busy time.

Remember, this day is only two days after Passover. The day before, Saturday, was the first day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread, so this was a time when people would not be traveling. This is the first day of the week; it is the Day of First Fruits, the day when people would be returning back from Jerusalem to their homes, so there would have been a lot of traffic on the road.

They have this individual join them, and He begins to engage them in conversation. They don’t recognize Him. That’s Luke 24:16, “Their eyes were restrained.” This is a passive verb in the Greek and often verbs like this are referred to as a divine passive. We’re not told who restrains their eyes, so this is called a divine passive because it is assumed that the One who restrains their eyes is God.

He prevents them from recognizing who Jesus is because He wants to make this a teachable moment. They don’t recognize Him, and He appears to them and He walks along with them and enters into their conversation.

They are going to explain why their faith is shaken. There are some who have suggested that they weren’t believers, but that’s not true. Often there are those who have a shallow view of salvation. They think that if you are truly saved, you don’t have doubts. They think that if you are truly saved, you don’t fail morally or spiritually for any length of time. Some will say, “Well, you may for a while, but then you will always return back to the Lord.” This is not what the Bible teaches. The Bible teaches that if you have trusted in Christ as Savior, at that instant you have eternal life. But that does not guarantee automatically that you will grow.

Growth comes because you feed yourself. Just as when a baby is born, he is alive, but if that baby is not nourished and fed, then he will not survive. He will be malnourished; he may die.

That doesn’t fit the analogy spiritually because you have a lot of believers who are born, but they never grow, they never nourish, they never take in the milk of the Word. As a result, they never learn anything about the Christian way of life. They never learn anything about their walk with the Lord, so their lives will often resemble an unbeliever. They may be extremely immoral. That’s because they just haven’t been taught anything yet, and they haven’t grown.

The Gospel doesn’t guarantee that you will grow. It guarantees that you will be saved and spend eternity in Heaven, and that is because Jesus Christ died on the Cross for your sins, and you trusted in that.

I was pleased yesterday when I watched the funeral service for Barbara Bush here in Houston that the Gospel was presented. It wasn’t made as clear and precise as I would like it to be, but at least salvation verses were quoted, and it was clearly stated that she had trusted Jesus Christ as her Savior. That is the key. Everything else just relates to your spiritual life.

I had a situation a few weeks ago, where I went to another Episcopal service, where the only way you got the Gospel was that it was part of one of the verses that they quoted. You heard it when Jesus said, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in Me, though he may die, he shall live” (John 11:25).

That’s often quoted, but unfortunately in so many churches and in so many services, things like that are stated, but they’re never explained. God the Holy Spirit can use that to tweak people, to cause them to wake up a little bit if they are positive and to want to know more, but it is a tragedy that churches don’t explain what this means.

This is clear, if you are a believer: you may be confused because you lack knowledge, you may despair because you don’t understand anything about the promises of God, you may doubt because you’ve just never looked at the evidences of Christianity, but that doesn’t mean that you aren’t saved. Sadly there are those who comment on this passage that because they were confused and despairing and doubting that they were not saved, but that is not the case. They are going to learn differently.

One of the other things I want to point out here, first observation. We are going to make several, most of them won’t come until we get to Luke 24:28 next week, but some observations that we learn about the resurrection body. People often have questions about this: what happens when we die?

In fact, there is a story that has been told by different people. I believe it’s true, reflects a true incident, that some many years ago now that President George Herbert Walker Bush and Barbara Bush had questions about death. I am not sure when this occurred. It may have been back not long after the death of their four-year-old daughter, which was many, many years ago, and they were concerned about what happened at the time of death.

So they called Billy Graham, and Billy Graham took the time to come and to visit with them, and he explained to them what happens at death and what happens in the afterlife, what the options are, and that if you believe in Jesus Christ, you will have eternal life, and that after death, you are face-to-face with the Lord.

He tells the story that yes, when they finished the conversation, they both said, “Well, that’s what we thought, but we just wanted to make sure.” I think that’s good evidence that they are both believers.

A lot of people have questions: “Well, what happens at death?” At death, our soul, our immaterial being is separated from the body. As believers we know that we are face-to-face with the Lord, according to 2 Corinthians 5:1–10. We’re absent from the body; we’re face-to-face with the Lord. That’s a good passage; they read that at the service yesterday.

We have some sort of interim body because we know that in Luke 16, the rich man in Torments and Lazarus the beggar seemed to have some sort of body. He says, “I want Lazarus to dip his finger in the water and place it on my tongue.” That suggests there’s an interim body.

We don’t get our resurrection body until the Rapture. At the Rapture, 1 Thessalonians 4:16–17, those who are “… dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And thus we shall ever be with the Lord.”

It is at the Rapture that we receive our resurrection body. People ask questions, “Well, what do we know about the resurrection body?” I’ll wrap this up and summarize it next time when we finish all these observations

Slide 7

1.      One of the first things we will observe here is that it appears to be a normal body.

They didn’t look at Him and see a glow. His eyes didn’t look weird. He looked like a normal everyday person. There was nothing about His resurrection body that attracted any sort of attention. It appeared to function like any normal mortal body.

As we’ll see next time, when they arrive in Emmaus, they have dinner together, and He eats and He drinks—doesn’t drink wine because He’s not going to do that until He comes in His Kingdom—but He has all of the normal functions of a regular physical body, so that we know that the resurrection body can do those things. We will come back and make some other observations about that as we go along.

Jesus asked them the first question. I want you to notice that He doesn’t come along and tell them what they ought to believe and instruct them how they have been wrong in doubting. Instead He takes a very important tact and that is to ask questions. He wants them to come to a self-realization of what is going on. He wants them to think through the issues and come to the conclusion on their own, so He is opening their minds with questions.

Slide 8

He asked the first question. “And He said to them, ‘What kind of conversation is this that you have with one another as you walk and are sad?’ ” (Luke 24:17). He recognizes they’re debating, but this is a conversation that is negative, they’re expressing their doubts, and they are very sad. We learn from that of their despair.

Slide 9

Then we see their answer. Cleopas is the one who answers. Luke 24:18—this is where we first learned the name of one of them—“Then the one whose name was Cleopas answered and said to Him, ‘Are You the only stranger in Jerusalem, and have you not known the things which happened there in these days?’ ” This has been at such a center of the attention of the disciples and those they know, that they can’t imagine that anyone would have been in Jerusalem and not heard about this.

Considering there were maybe as many as a million people in Jerusalem, according to figures from Josephus, it would not be unusual that someone would be there that wouldn’t know. I’m sure that many people knew this was something that was very significant: the trial that they had with Pilate, the crucifixion. That many would have heard of one thing or another. It would’ve been talked about. They’re amazed, “How can you not know what has been going on in these days?”

Slide 10

Jesus asked the question then, Luke 24:19 “What things”—what exactly has been going on?— “So they said to Him, ‘The things concerning Jesus of Nazareth, who was a Prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people.’ ” We learn from this statement from Cleopas that he recognizes and has believed that Jesus was a prophet.

This takes us back to Deuteronomy 18:19 when Moses said there would arise in the future a prophet like him. This future prophet is a Messianic prediction; that is one of the key passages, and Jesus identified Himself as that prophet.

They believed that He “was a prophet mighty in deed,” referring to the miracles that He performed. They understood that those were signs of His claim to be the Messiah. He healed the lame, He gave sight to the blind, He healed the lepers.

These were thought of by the rabbis as miracles that were distinct to what the Messiah would do. Nobody else can heal, give sight to a blind person, or heal a leper. Only the Messiah when He comes would do that. So, they are alluding to those miracles.

Then they said, “He is mighty in word.” His teaching, His handling of the Word of God was distinctive. He did not teach like rabbis taught. Rabbis teach like, “Well, so-and-so says this, so-and-so says that. These are the views: go home, be warm, and be filled.”

That’s how a lot of pastors teach today. They will tell you all the different views and be warm and be filled. God bless you. Go home. And you never learn anything about what the Bible actually teaches.

They believe He was powerful in miracles and in the Word. As He taught, He was powerful in both of these “before God and all the people.”

Slide 11

In Luke 24:20 they said, “and how the chief priests and our rulers—those two terms summarize all of the religious leaders: Sadducees, Pharisees, Herodians, and all the different groups—how the chief priests and our rulers delivered Him to be condemned to death, and crucified Him.”

The language here is the same language, the same verbs that Jesus used when He predicted that He would be delivered to the Gentiles, that He would be condemned to death and crucified, and that He would rise from the dead.

Notice that they get four out of five terms present. They leave out the resurrection. Jesus talked about how He would be delivered. He would be condemned to death. He would be crucified. He also said He would rise from the dead, but they don’t remember that.

Then they say what they do believe. Luke 24:21 “But we were hoping that it was He who was going to redeem Israel. Indeed, besides all this, today is the third day since these things happened.”

A couple of things to note here when he says this is this phrase that “we were hoping that He was going to redeem Israel” alludes to a statement in Jeremiah 14:8, which indicates the Messiah would be the hope of Israel. They are stating here that they believed He would be the Messiah, He would be the hope of Israel, and that He would redeem Israel. But what they are thinking probably is in terms of the political redemption and deliverance from the power of Rome. That was still a problem. They yearn to be free from the power of Rome.

This was why Jesus didn’t trust Himself to the crowd at the end of John 2. In John 2, He comes to His first visit to the temple. He casts out the money changers. He performs many signs and many people believed in Him. Then you have this statement, “but He didn’t trust Himself to them.”

The Lordship salvation people will say, “That’s because their faith wasn’t a saving faith.” But that’s the same phrase in that verse that you have all the way through John. PISTEUO is the verb, EIS, and then CHRISTOS. The prepositional phrase is always there, “Believe in Jesus.”

Semantically the phrase “believing in Jesus” and “believing that Jesus” are equivalent. This has been studied many times by scholars. Those are semantic equivalent. Some people say, “Well, you just have an academic faith if you believe that Jesus. You just have to believe in Jesus.” That’s just nonsense.

They believed in Jesus. The reason Jesus didn’t trust them isn’t because they weren’t saved; it’s because they hadn’t learned any doctrine yet. They hadn’t come to understand that His Messiahship wasn’t going to deliver them politically from Rome. Jesus wasn’t going to trust them because they didn’t have the right agenda yet. They were saved, but they didn’t understand what God’s plan was at this particular time.

Here we see that Cleopas and the other traveler, the other disciple, didn’t quite comprehend it, and they’re not connecting all the dots including the resurrection.

They go on to say that it’s been three days since this happened. As I pointed out a couple of weeks ago, this is Sunday afternoon, it’s the third day; it began on Saturday at sundown. And Saturday at sundown, the third day begins and the second day ends.

That means everything on Saturday or Shabbat was the second day. Friday night was the second day. The second day began at sundown on Friday. That means that at sundown on Friday, the first day ended. The first day is the day when all the action is taking place.

When they make this statement here, they say today is the third day since all these things happened. “All these things happening,” happened between sundown Thursday night, which began the first day, and sundown Friday night. What happens?

After sundown Thursday night, there is the Last Supper with the disciples, Judas is dismissed and he goes and betrays the Lord. The chief priests and Sadducees and religious leaders send out people to the Garden of Gethsemane and they arrest Jesus. His trials take place. He’s taken to Golgotha to be crucified. He is crucified, and then He is placed in the tomb. All of that happened on the first day.

Because He is in the tomb for part of the first day, according to rabbinical thought as I quoted from the Mishnah, any part of the day is a whole day. That Jews and other middle Easterners did not count time the way we count time. You can’t think like a Western European influenced by Greco Roman time counting and understand this.

In the Middle East going back to the Assyrians and the Babylonians, if you became a king on December 31 of 2017, then 2017 is counted as the first year of your reign, even though you’ve only reigned for part of the year.

If you were to become president on December 30 of 2017 and died on January 2 of 2019, according to the accession year reckoning that they used, you would have reigned three years, even though that reign would only be 368 days long.

We would say, “Well, they just reigned a year and three days or two days.” But they would say, “No that was counted as three years.” This is why the chronology in the Old Testament gets difficult because your successor comes in on January 2 of 2019, and 2019 is counted as your third year. It is also counted as his first year. That’s why there’s confusion, but that gets into other issues.

This is very clear what they’re saying here. What did they say? “These things.” They’re talking about all these things that they’ve just talked about: how the chief priests delivered Him to be condemned to death and crucified Him. That all happened on that first day, so this is very clear.

Luke 24:22, they go on to say, “Yes, and certain women of our company, who arrived at the tomb early, astonished us.”

Luke 24:23, “When they did not find His body, they came saying that they had also seen a vision of angels who said that He was alive.”

As far as they know, they never heard of the women seeing Him alive; they just heard that the angels announced this.

Luke 24:24, “And certain of those who were with us went to the tomb and found it just as the women had said; but Him they did not see.”

Up to this point they are not aware that anyone has seen the Savior. This is their report.

Slide 12

Jesus says to them, Luke 24:25, “Oh foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken!”

See they’re saved, but they haven’t believed everything yet. They haven’t understood it. You have to understand things before you can believe it, and they haven’t understood it yet, so they haven’t believed it.

Jesus calls them foolish ones. In the Old Testament a person is a fool if they do not follow the Scripture, if they do not understand the Scripture, and if they do not let the Scripture influence their thinking. That’s what He is saying, they’re foolish because they’re slow at heart to believe. They have not accepted what the Scripture has said, and it’s not that they haven’t believed some of it, but they haven’t believed all that the prophets have spoken, which speaks of the resurrection of Christ.

Luke 24:26, “Ought not the Messiah—if you think about it as the Messiah, it may be a little clearer to you because He’s talking about the Messianic prophecies and He says—Ought not the Messiah to have suffered these things and to enter into His glory?”

The confusion that the rabbis had in Second Temple period was that the crown, the glory would come before the suffering, that the crown would come before the Cross. They had failed to note that in the Scripture the Cross, the suffering would precede the glory. Jesus is pointing this out, “Ought not the Christ to have suffered these things—the Cross before the crown—and to enter into His glory?”

Luke 24:27 “And beginning at Moses—Moses who wrote the Pentateuch. Often when you see a phrase like this “Moses and the prophets,” it refers to the Pentateuch. “… and all the Prophets” would include all of the Old Testament. “And beginning at Moses and all the Prophets, He expounded to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself.”

Here’s my question for you this morning. If you were going to have a conversation with someone, and you’re talking about Jesus and who He is and who He claimed to be and what He did, how would you present Jesus? How would you do this?

The point that I am making is that for many of us, the strategy that we adopt when we start to present the Gospel is that we make certain assumptions that they know who Jesus is, they know who God is, and they have some basic understanding of Christianity. That is just not true in this country anymore.

When you travel outside of this country, especially if you’re a missionary into some place in the East, in Asia, in India, in Africa, some places maybe in South America where they worship many gods, you come in and you say Jesus is God. Well, they just add Jesus to their other gods. They don’t understand that the God that you are worshiping is THE God of the Bible.

This incident I mentioned several times lately in midweek studies, when Abraham defeats Chedorlaomer and the kings of the East up near Laish, or Dan as it is called later, and he comes back to Jebus or Jerusalem, we have this passage where he gives a tithe.

First of all, that’s badly used by a lot of folks to say that we ought to give tithes. He’s not tithing his money. He is not giving 10% of Abraham’s money; he is giving 10% of the plunder, which really belongs to the king of Sodom and Gomorrah and the other cities of the plain.

He is giving a tithe as a tribute to the king-priest, Melchizedek, of Jerusalem, who the text says worships El Elyon, the maker of Heaven and Earth. That’s what sets El Elyon apart. All of the other cultures around worship gods and goddesses who were not creators of everything in Heaven and Earth. Only the God of the Bible is the Creator of everything in Heaven and Earth.

This is why there’s so much debate over creation vs. evolution, because that’s at the heart of identifying the unique God of the Bible. He is the Creator of the heavens and the earth and the seas and all that is in them. That sets Him apart.

When we start to talk to an unbeliever about God, we need to take time to make sure that they understand who God is, that we need to understand who they think, what did they think of when they think of God? What do they think of when they hear about Jesus? What are their preconceived notions and assumptions that they’re bringing to the table that when you talk about God and Jesus, they’re loading that vocabulary with their assumptions and not your assumptions? We have to talk about that. You can’t just assume that because they have grown up in America that they have a working knowledge of who God and Jesus are; they might.

This is a situation where you have the two disciples and Jesus all understand and know the Old Testament, so they have that common ground, and they can start right in. But He starts with Moses. He doesn’t start with His own life or with the incarnation.

He’s going to walk them through, and He’s not just focusing on passages related to the crucifixion, the suffering, and the resurrection of Jesus. The text says that He takes them through all the Scriptures, the things concerning Himself. He’s going to walk them through all passages that have to do with Messianic types and predictions and prophecies in the Old Testament.

That’s a great exercise to engage in. But if you were going to sit down with somebody, you wouldn’t have the time to take them through everything, but how would you do this? Can you think of 10 things that you would use as benchmarks, key events, in the Old Testament that you would walk people through?

This was the philosophy behind a book that John Cross and his team at Good Seed wrote about 20 years ago called Stranger on the Road to Emmaus following that principle. It’s an outstanding book. They’ve modified it to reach two different cultural background people.

“Stranger on the Road to Emmaus” takes you through from the Garden of Eden all the way to the resurrection, but it’s addressed to people who already have a common theistic biblical understanding of God and Jesus.

They understood that there were a lot of people that were reading it that didn’t have that frame of reference, so they rewrote it, and they called it By This Name. It’s about 80% the same text, but they have some different things in there to target those who don’t have that common ground.

They come from a Buddhist background, Eastern mystical, New Age, atheist type of background, and so it addresses that.

There’s another one that they modified called All That the Prophets Have Spoken, and this is for those who have a Jewish or Islamic background. It’s targeted to nuance what the basic approach is in Stranger on the Road to Emmaus.

It’s very, very well done, and it’s something that you could read through, and any believer would understand because it gives the broad overall narrative of the Old Testament going from the Garden up to after the resurrection.

Jesus does that here.

Slide 13

What would you do? You’re taking somebody through, what passages would you talk about? I thought, first of all, if we go through Genesis, the main thing that we would want to do as we go through Genesis is look at the promises of the seed.

Slide 14

1.      The promises of the Seed.

From the very beginning following the fall, God makes this statement to the serpent. Genesis 3:15, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed—that is your descendants—and her Seed—that is her descendant. He is focusing on one particular one—He shall bruise your head—which would be a fatal wound—and you shall bruise His heel.”

That seed promise is what starts you through Genesis. Go to Genesis and read to Genesis 5 and to Genesis 10–11. Most people skip those chapters because they’re genealogies. What those genealogies are doing is tracing the line of the seed. All the genealogies in the Old Testament are tracing the seed line so that you realize by the time you come to the genealogy in Matthew 1 that that’s who Jesus is. He’s the Seed that Genesis 3:15 is talking about.

Genesis 12:3 is the promise God makes to Abraham—the Abrahamic Covenant—which says,

“I will bless those who bless you and I will curse them who curse you, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

The seed has gone from Eve to Abram, and from Abram it’s going to come down through his son Isaac. Genesis 21:12 God said to Abraham, “Do not let it be displeasing in your sight because of the lad—that is Isaac—or because of your bondwoman. Whatever Sarah has said to you, listen to her voice; for in Isaac your seed shall be called.” So, the seed goes to Isaac.

Genesis 26:4, God is talking to Isaac, “I will make your descendants multiply as the stars of heaven, I will give to your descendants all these lands; and in your seed all the nations of the earth shall be blessed.”

It goes from Abraham to Isaac, it goes to Jacob in Genesis 28:14, then to Jacob’s son Judah in Genesis 49:10 where you have the promise that “The scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh [He Who is promised] comes; and to Him shall be the obedience of the people.”

You trace the seed through Genesis, and that trajectory is to a descendent of Judah.

2.      When you get into Exodus, you have the Passover lamb.

We’ve covered this many, many times that the Passover lamb was to be without spot or blemish. When he is sacrificed, no bone is to be broken. All of these are pictures of the Messiah who, when John the Baptist comes on the scene, says that He is the “Lamb of God Who takes away the sin of the world.” The Passover lamb is important as a picture of what’s going to happen with Jesus.

3.      The predictions about the birth of Jesus.

Micah 5:2, He will be born in Bethlehem. Isaiah 7:14, He is going to be born of a virgin. Isaiah 9:6, He will be called Mighty God, that He will be called Immanuel, that is, God with us. He is full deity that has entered into human history. These passages are cited in Matthew 1:23 and Matthew 2:6.

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4.      The suffering Messiah in Isaiah 53.

We don’t have time to go through it. We have a whole study on Isaiah 53, but if you read through it, Isaiah 53 talks about the Servant is the One Who will die for His people, and by Him they will receive righteousness. You walk through Isaiah 53 as one of the most profound prophecies in the Old Testament.

Other prophecies in Isaiah:

5.      The Messiah would be validated by miracles.

In Isaiah 35:5 you have the statement, “Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped, and the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the dumb sing.”

That’s fulfilled in Matthew 9:35, that Jesus is healing every kind of disease and every kind of sickness. He’s healing the lepers, He’s giving sight to the blind, and the deaf are hearing.

You have other prophecies:

6.      The Messiah would enter into Jerusalem on a donkey in Zechariah 9:9, fulfilled in Matthew 21:6–11 on Palm Sunday as He enters into Jerusalem.

7.      The resurrection in Psalm 16:10 that God would not allow His body to see corruption and that this is specifically cited in Acts 2:31 as being fulfilled in the resurrection.

8.      He’s betrayed by a friend. This is predicted in Psalm 41:9, and it is fulfilled in relation to Judas’ betrayal of Him in Matthew 26:49.

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9.      He’s sold for 30 pieces of silver. Zechariah 11:12 is the prophecy, and that was the betrayal price paid to Judas Iscariot in Matthew 26:15.

I could have chosen many; there are over 100 prophecies that are fulfilled in the first advent.

10.  He is buried in a rich man’s tomb according to Isaiah 53:9, and that’s fulfilled in Matthew 27:57–60.

Those working with probabilities have added these up and said if you were just to have 10 prophecies—there are over a hundred—the probability of 10 being fulfilled in one person is equivalent to:

filling up the entire state of Texas with silver dollars to the height of four feet, marking one of them with an “X” or a dot or something, stirring that one marked silver dollar into the whole mass of silver dollars covering the entire state, and the chances of a blindfolded person picking that one out are better than 10 of these coming true in one person. And we have 100 that came true in one person!

This is a line of evidence that we can use when we are witnessing. Our Lord Jesus Christ used this. They are believers already, but it is to confirm and to establish their faith as they grow as believers. That would have been a great lecture to have heard that day: Jesus taking them through the Scriptures.

They knew things about the Old Testament that you and I don’t understand. Their knowledge, the biblical literacy of the average Jew in Israel at this time probably surpasses 99.9% of American Christians. We are basically ignorant in comparison. We are almost biblically illiterate by comparison because they would memorize sections of the Scripture.

Not like today in Judaism where they memorize a lot of stuff for a bar mitzvah; they don’t know Hebrew. They knew Hebrew in the first century, and they understood what they were memorizing, and they knew it. They were biblically literate, and they understood that when Jesus used just a phrase, they understood the whole story, the whole episode, the whole background.

Sadly, that doesn’t happen with many of us today. We just don’t know the Word. Our culture has become biblically illiterate.

What this supplies for us is the evidence that Jesus is exactly Who He claimed to be, and it opened their eyes.

We will come back to understand that, starting in Luke 24:28, next Sunday morning.

Closing Prayer

“Father, thank You for this opportunity that we have to study Your Word and to focus upon Jesus. That we see that You have revealed to us down through the ages from the fall of Adam and Eve, down all the way through the resurrection, prophecy after prophecy, pattern after pattern, picture after picture, that portray for us Who the Messiah would be, so that He could be clearly identified. And no other than Jesus of Nazareth fits that bill.

“Father, we pray that if there is anyone listening to or reading this message or here today that has never trusted in Jesus the Savior, that they would understand that’s the issue. The issue isn’t our failures, our sins, our flaws. The issue is what Jesus Christ did about them, that He died and paid the penalty for our sin on the Cross, so that we have forgiveness in Him, and that He has wiped the slate clean, and the only issue is trust in Him.

“At the instant that we do say in our minds, “That’s true. I believe that,” that instant we’re saved and have eternal life that can never be taken from us.

“Father, we pray that You help us to understand all these truths. In Christ’s name, amen.”