Excerpt from my afternoon reading.
“The Story of Jesus Christ, then, isn’t a story that came out of nowhere like the Book of Mormon, and it isn’t a timeless set of ideas as with Plato’s philosophical writings. The Story of Jesus Christ is locked into one people, one history, and one Scripture: it makes sense only as it follows and completes the Story of Israel.”
The King Jesus Gospel, Scott McKnight, 50.
The Gospel is the whole story of redemption. Dr. Walter Kaiser often summarized that the Old Testament and the history of Israel were leading somewhere. It was designed to accomplish the blessing of the world through a people (the Jews) and a Messiah (Jesus) who would reconcile the world through suffering that would lead to glory.
He called it the “tripartite formula of the promise” that reveals itself in nearly every book of the Old Testament. The three parts:
- “I will be their God” (cf. Genesis 17:7-8 28:21)
- “You shall be My people” (cf. Exodus 6:7, 4:22, 19:5-6)
- “And I will dwell in your midst” (cf. Exodus 29:45-46
He insisted that that formula, stated in whole or in part, appears in more than 50 passages in the Old and New Testament.
In addition to Scott McKnight’s book (above), I would recommend Dr. Kaiser’s
The Promise-Plan of God: A Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments
and
Recovering the Unity of the Bible: One Story, Plan, and Purpose.
Your heart will thrill to a fuller, bigger, longer, deeper gospel story than you ever imagined.
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