Sermon Transcript
Deuteronomy 34:4-5 and verse 9. And the Lord said to Moses, Moses, this is the land of which I swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob. I will give it to your offspring. I have let you see it with your eyes, but you shall not go over there. So Moses the servant of the Lord died there in the land of Moab according to the word of the Lord.
And Joshua the son of Nun was full of the spirit of wisdom, for Moses had laid his hands on him. So the people of Israel obeyed him and did as the Lord had commanded Moses.
Malachi 3:1-3, 4:1-3, 5. Behold, I send my messenger, and he will prepare the way before me. And the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple, and the messenger of the covenant in whom you delight— behold, he is coming, says the Lord of hosts. But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner’s fire and like fuller’s soap.
He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the sons of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, and they will bring offerings in righteousness to the Lord. For behold, the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be and stubble. The day that is coming shall set them ablaze, says the Lord of hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch. But for you who fear my name, the sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings. You shall go out leaping like calves from the stall.
Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes. 2 Chronicles 36:22-23. Now in the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, that the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah might be fulfilled, the Lord stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia so that he made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom and also put it in writing. Thus says Cyrus king of Persia, the Lord, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he has charged me to build him a house in Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Whoever is among you of all his people, may the Lord his God be with him, let him go up.
We’ll start today with a trick question. Uh, how many times does the Old Testament end?
How many times does the Old Testament end? You can think about it for a second. If you aren’t a Christian or you aren’t familiar with the Bible, uh, the Bible is divided into Old Testament and New Testament. Old Testament is everything before Jesus, so you can think BC. Uh, so how, how many times times does the Old Testament end?
Do you have your answer? Everybody got a number in your head? The reason why it’s a trick question is because there are multiple right answers. First, of course, you could say it only ends once because there is only one Old Testament. So, whoever thought it ended once, you are correct.
But wait, the Old Testament is not just one book. Instead, it is a collection of books that have been arranged in a certain order. In Protestant Bibles, the Old Testament contains 39 books written over a time period of probably thousands of years. So maybe the Old Testament ends 39 times, which means if any of you thought the answer was 39, you are also correct. But wait, in Jewish tradition, those 39 books are not 39 but are instead instead 24.
That doesn’t mean that Protestants have any extra information. We don’t. It’s the exact same total amount of text. We just divide what’s there differently. So, for instance, in ancient Hebrew text and Jewish Bibles even today, the Tanakh, they have books like Ezra and Nehemiah combined as one book.
We have them as 2, same with Samuels and Chronicles. So, again, Protestants didn’t add anything. We just divide what is there differently. So maybe that means the Old Testament ends 24 times. If any of you wanted to say 24, you are also correct.
But wait, the ancient Hebrews organized those 24 books into 3 separate scrolls, 3 sections: the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings. The Law, the Prophets, and the Writings. The Law being the first 5 books traditionally believed to have been written by Moses. That’s Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy.
The prophets were the prophets, there’s 19 of those. And then the writings were historical records, Psalms, and other wisdom literature. Law, prophets, writings. Jesus Himself even refers to the Old Testament in that way, Luke 24:44, which means by the time that Jesus arrived on the scene, the religious leaders, the scribes, had already categorized their Scriptures into these 3 different sections. So, if the ancient Hebrews and Jesus organized the Old Testament into 3 sections, maybe it ends 3 times, right?
Maybe it’s a trilogy. So, if any of you thought the right answer was 3, you are also correct. But wait, there is at least one more correct answer, and it is 0. You could say the Old Testament doesn’t end, but that it was intentionally written and arranged to leave you hanging. In other words, if the Old Testament were a romantic comedy, it would cut off right in the middle of the chase scene.
You may have noticed in nearly every single romantic comedy, when you are about an hour and 40 minutes into the movie, one love interest needs to chase after the other love for some reason. One person is going to move or is about to marry someone else, and there’s limited time, and there must be a chase. Usually, the chase is literally running somewhere. Sometimes, it’s driving, but there’s some kind of chase in almost every romantic comedy. Now, imagine if the movie cut off, faded to black right in the middle of the chase scene.
You know, before one love interest could apologize to the other one or say, I don’t actually want you to move, I was just being silly, or, I found out you’re a prince, sure, I’ll marry you, or, forgive me, before any of that could happen, right in the middle of the chase, running through the airport terminal to get to the other one, and roll credits.
You’d probably jump out of your seat. You’d say, that’s the end? That can’t be the end. Like, where is the rest of the movie? You might yell at the screen.
You may even say, if somebody asks you later, you might— they might say, how’d you like the movie? You’d say, well, it was okay, right? But it didn’t really have an ending. Sure, they stopped filming at some point, but it had no resolution. It just had angst, questions, anticipation.
We don’t know if it’s going to work out between the two of them. That’s where the Old Testament leaves us, with this feeling that there must be more. There must be. In fact, and this is what we’re studying today, it’s not just the Old Testament in general that leaves us hanging. Instead, it’s each of the 3 sections of the Old Testament individually— Law, Prophets, Writings— each of them individually close in anticipation of what could be next.
Each one stops on the verge of something, which is notable because in 2 out of the 3 scrolls, they knew what was going to happen next. It had already happened, especially by the time of arranging the books. The lingering question of what’s next, it had been answered, but they didn’t put the resolution at the end. Instead, they ended with a cliffhanger. Hanger.
In other words, the ancient Hebrews did not always organize their Scriptures chronologically, and instead they organized them theologically. They built into the very arrangement of their books the ideas of expectation, waiting, and longing, and we’re not there yet, and the story isn’t over. They thought, even if we have some amount of resolution to our cliffhanger, we know that there is more to to come. So, they were intentionally putting themselves in a perpetual state of anticipation just by the way they arranged their books. So, we are going to study the ends of these 3 different sections today, which will conclude our current series.
We are starting a new series on January 8th, which will be our 40-day all-church focus for 2023, and we are looking at what a blessing church is, different ways that being part of a local church is amazing and necessary. So, be sure to be here for that. That starts January 8th, and make sure you’re in a group so that you can get the discussion aspect of the study as well. That’s January 8th. But this fall, for the last 10 weeks or so, we have been studying how every genre of the Old Testament is actually about Jesus.
Exodus, which is the Passover, Law, Temple, Wisdom, Prophets, Kings, Exile, Return, all of it about Jesus and what He would eventually do. And today, to tie a bow on the series, we study the conclusion of 3 different sections of the Old Testament. We’re ending at the end, which is a perfect way to close the series and the perfect study the Sunday before Christmas. Christmas, because each of the 3 conclusions to the 3 scrolls is pulsating with expectation for its final fulfillment to arrive. And then He does, and that’s Christmas.
So, as we look at these 3 different sections to these— or 3 different ends to these 3 different sections today, we’ll see the leader who takes them into the land, the leader who brings both judgment judgment and deliverance, the leader who builds them a temple. That’s the leader who takes them into the land, the leader who brings both judgment and deliverance, and the leader who builds them a temple. And then we’ll wrap up with how the baby in the manger is the ultimate fulfillment of all of those unmet expectations. So first, the leader who takes them into the land. Is it Joshua?
The first section of the Old Testament ends with the book of Deuteronomy and Moses’ death right before the Israelites crossover into the Promised Land. So the Israelites have not gotten the land yet, and now they have lost their leader, Moses, the guy who had captained the ship as they escaped from slavery into Egypt, fled through the Red Sea, received the 10 Commandments on top of the mountain, wandered in the wilderness. Moses had been at the helm for those 40-plus years and had led them right to the precipice of having their own land, their own country. They had been homeless, essentially, for generations and generations, They had been slaves and then nomads for as long as anyone could remember, but now they’re going to get their own place. They’re going to put down some roots.
They’re going to be able to say, this right here is my dirt. But right when they’re on the verge of that happily ever after, so to speak, Moses dies. He’s not going into the land. So who is going to lead them into the land? The immediate answer is Joshua, which is pronounced Yeshua in Hebrew.
That name should sound familiar. We’ll come back to it later. But Yeshua means deliverer, which is fitting because Joshua would deliver the Israelites into the Promised Land. But the first scroll ends before they go into the land. A deliverer has been named, Joshua, and the people are about to go into the land, but then they don’t.
It’s totally cutting the movie off right in the middle of the chase scene. We have been following this group of people and their saga for so long in this first scroll. It’s against all odds, they basically, they’ve made it to where they are. They started as one man, Abraham, but then from that one man, they grew to over a million people, but then they became enslaved, and then they were liberated out of slavery, and then they survived really miraculously. Miraculously in the desert.
And even though they didn’t know the way, somehow they made it to the edge of the Promised Land only because God had led them there. It’s a, it’s a tale of twists and turns and near escapes. And now finally, this nation of wanderers that started as one man and had never had a permanent home of their own is about to become a real country with defined borders. But right before it happens, roll credits.
It’s an odd place to end the movie. It’s odd, especially when you consider at the time of writing the end of the book of Deuteronomy, they already had the land. They already had it. Now, most of the book of Deuteronomy, we believe, was written by Moses, but not the end part because Moses dies at the end part, so it makes it more difficult to write after after you’re dead. So someone else later writes a little wrap-up blurb and tacks it on to the end of Deuteronomy to explain the death of Moses and Joshua taking the reins.
And whoever that was, maybe Joshua, that wrote the wrap-up to the story didn’t wrap up the story, didn’t include the resolution. The resolution would be documented in the next scroll. But you have to ask, why end an expectation like that? Why end in excitement that something is about to happen? Why not include the happily ever after part when they knew exactly and had already experienced what the happily ever after was?
Why leave that out? It’s a deliberate literary choice and it makes a theological point. Even though they had the land, especially by the time the scrolls were compiled and arranged, by then. They already had the land. But they knew they were still waiting on the real land.
They were waiting for the forever land because when God promised the Israelites the land, He promised they would have it forever and ever and ever. And what they could not have known, but they somehow anticipated, is that this world, our little blue dot in the vastness of space, will not last forever in its current form. It will last a long, long time, but not forever, and God had promised them forever. So somehow they knew they were going into the Promised Land, but it wasn’t the real Promised Land. It wasn’t the new heavens and the new earth.
They were home, but at the same time they weren’t. They had a restlessness to have a permanent, a really permanent, a never-ending ending place of their own. They were still looking forward to their forever home. The term forever home is not one I hear people around here use very often, but other places in the country, maybe because more people can afford homes in other places, a young couple might begin married life with an apartment and then they get what they call a starter home, and then eventually they are able to buy what they call their forever home, and it’s a place they think they are never going to have to move from again. And if you are a Christian, you might want to reconsider using the term forever home for some real estate that you buy, because no matter how fancy the house is, it is not your forever home.
Home. Like, no matter how high up the real estate ladder you climb, and hey, I hope we all are able to do that, it will not be anything close to our real forever home which resides in eternity alone. But couples who are climbing the real estate ladder, before they get to their so-called forever home, they often feel a restlessness that they’re not there yet. They still don’t have the home that they’ve always They’re in a home, they’re glad about that, but they’re also working towards something else, and they know there’s more yet to come. And that’s how the Israelites felt, or at least it’s what they built into the literary structure of where they ended the first scroll.
They had the land, they had the leader Joshua to take them into the land, but they were waiting in anticipation because they didn’t have their forever home yet. Yet. They knew they weren’t really delivered yet. They were still waiting on another leader, a forever leader, so to speak, to deliver them into the forever land. They were waiting on another Joshua, another Yeshua, the real Yeshua, to lead them into the real land where they would never be restless, never have further on the ladder to climb.
And that is the end of the first scroll. It leaves us wondering, when will the real Joshua get here? Scroll number 2 ends with the book of Malachi. Chronologically, Malachi is the last prophet of the Old Testament, which is why it is the final book of the Old Testament in our Bibles. And like scroll number 1, scroll number 2 ends without being resolved.
It ends in a foretelling of what will eventually happen. Malachi says there will be a day, and he calls it the Day of the Lord, but it will be a day when a leader comes in both judgment and deliverance. And Malachi names who that leader is. It is God himself. The leader who brings both judgment and deliverance is God.
Malachi 3:1 states, it is the Lord who comes to the people, God himself. And on the one hand, he will be like a furnace, Malachi 4:1, that will set ablaze all the evil in the world and totally burn it away. On the other hand, when God shows up, he brings great deliverance. Some people will jump like calves released from stalls, Malachi 4:2. So God brings both judgment and deliverance.
Very similar to what we see with many other prophets, Malachi simultaneously comforts people and warns people. He comforts them by saying that all the evildoers in the world who seem to escape justice will eventually be judged. The bad guys won’t get away with it in the end. There will be a grand accountability, a blazing furnace kind of accountability. And that is actually comforting if you have really been wronged.
Wronged, if you have really been hurt by someone, it is comforting to hear the people who hurt you are not going to get away with it. That is comforting. Another comfort Malachi gives is that God will liberate those who have hoped in God. And finally, no one will be able to oppress God’s people again. And for the Israelites who have been conquered and conquered and conquered again.
Assyria and Babylon and Persia had come in and done significant damage, or threatened, had brutal war practices, and there was no end in sight. After Persia, there would be Alexander the Great from Greece, and after him, then there would be Rome. Israel always seemed to be under someone else’s rule. Someone wasn’t being fair to them. Israel constantly felt oppressed because they were.
So, for them to hear, one, the bad guys aren’t going to get with it, and 2, there will come a day when God’s people are liberated. That’s very comforting. That’s on the one hand. But then, on the other hand, Malachi, again, like many other prophets, also warns people about their own sinful behavior. He asks questions like, who can endure on the day when the Lord comes?
Malachi 3:2. If God is really going to come here and hold everyone accountable, who of us can stand? Answer, no one. None of us. Because who of us hasn’t participated in some way adding to the pain, suffering, and evil in the world?
We all, right, on the one hand, we rightly complain when somebody hasn’t been fair to us, and that’s totally valid. We should complain. That’s okay. But at the same time, could anyone complain that we have not been fair to them? Of course they could.
There are likely all kinds of people that we have hurt over the span of our lives. Even the people who are the victims of the most severe injustice in the world have also themselves acted unjust to others. So Malachi asks, who could stand on the day of the Lord? No one. The warning is we are all in trouble if God comes here like a blazing fire fire, which He will.
That’s the warning. But we need to hold the warning and the comfort together like Malachi does. There is a complexity to the day of the Lord. Some people will jump like calves released from stalls, and in Malachi 3, the fire of the Lord does not incinerate everyone. Instead, for them, it refines, it purifies.
So, Malachi is very clear. On the one hand, everyone deserves judgment. Everyone. But at the same time, he makes it just as clear that some people aren’t judged. Instead, they are liberated.
They are purified. How all of that is going to work, Malachi does not fully answer. He just says the day of the Lord will be one of both mercy and justice. Sin will be punished, which is justice, but some sinners will receive mercy. That’s deliverance.
So how’s God going to do both? Malachi doesn’t fully tell us the details, but he does say, he adds, before the day of the Lord comes, a prophet like Elijah will announce that it is about to happen. Someone like Elijah will come, and then after that Elijah guy comes, the Lord himself will come in mercy and judgment. And then Malachi Malachi ends. Roll credits.
And remember, Malachi was chronologically the last prophet of the Old Testament. So unlike the ending of scroll number 1 and the ending of scroll number 3 that we’ll talk about in a second, the reader of scroll number 2 can’t find out what happens next after Malachi somewhere else in the Old Testament. There is no after. As far as the Old Testament is concerned, God does not speak through another prophet after Malachi. So, at the ending of scroll number 2, right, you just feel we’re still in the middle of the story.
Once again, it’s leaving us hanging. We’re not to the end of the movie yet. If this were a movie, you would expect a sequel because you need some resolution. When will God show up in mercy and judgment, and how is He going to pull off both at the same time? You won’t find the answer in the Old Testament.
It just leaves you hanging. So, on to scroll number 3. Scroll number 3 ends at what our Bibles call 2 Chronicles with a leader who is about to rebuild the Israelites a temple. It is totally out of order chronologically, but the backstory is, if you forget, that Babylon had destroyed the old temple and carried people off into exile where they had had been for 70 years. And of course, the people in exile longed to get back to their land and longed to build another temple because they couldn’t fully practice faith in the way that God had instructed them if they didn’t have a temple.
If you remember from earlier in our series this fall when we talked about the temple, we said the temple was a place where heaven met earth because God was there. It was where life met death and life symbolically won. It was like, it was a place like God’s beachhead in enemy territory where God was gonna retake back the world from the clutches death and life would win. And it was a place where grace met justice, that sin was symbolically paid for through sacrifice and the offender was forgiven. That was the temple.
Heaven meets earth. Life defeats death. Grace meets justice symbolically. And they didn’t have it anymore. It had been destroyed.
It was crushing to them. But here at the end of scroll number 3, there emerges a leader, Cyrus. He’s the king of Persia. He’s a pagan king. And as far as we know, he didn’t know God at all, but he comes forward as a leader who will make it possible for the temple to be rebuilt.
So, at least in a temporary sense, the leader who will build Israel a temple is Cyrus. That’s fantastic news. But again, the scroll ends without it happening. It’s about to happen. It’s on the verge of happening, and then And it doesn’t happen, which is totally strange because again at the time of writing or at least at the time of arranging these books, the temple had already been rebuilt.
They had documents, they already had documents detailing the rebuilding of the temple. Those are the books of Ezra and Nehemiah and they had those books and they actually put Ezra and Nehemiah earlier in scroll number 3. So, when you read scroll number 3, the book documenting the rebuilding of the temple, Ezra and Nehemiah, it comes before the book saying that the temple is about to be rebuilt, Chronicles. It’s like 2 coming before 1. If it’s a romantic comedy, it’s putting the happily ever after somewhere in the middle of the movie and the chase scene at the end of the movie.
It’s an intentional literary choice. And again, it communicates an ongoing expectation. Even though one temple is already they understood they were waiting for another temple. They were waiting for another Cyrus, the real Cyrus, to build them the real temple, the real temple where heaven would really meet earth, where life would really conquer death, and grace would really meet justice. They’re waiting.
And then scroll number 3 ends, and the Old Testament ends. It ends in expectation. And anticipation, hoping. It’s waiting for the real Joshua, Yeshua, to take them to the real land, waiting for the real Cyrus to build the real temple, and waiting for God himself who would somehow provide both judgment and deliverance from sin at the same time. And all of that fulfillment would be announced in advance by someone like Elijah.
Elisha, and then the Old Testament ends, right? It’s on the verge of breakthrough, but no real breakthrough happens, which brings us to Christmas. 400 years after Malachi, 400 years after God not speaking through a prophet, finally God breaks his silence and John the Baptist speaks, playing the role of a Elijah. John the Baptist looks at Jesus and says, there he is. There’s the one we’ve been waiting for.
There’s the one the entire Old Testament was waiting for. There is the Lamb of God who comes to take away sin. There is God’s Son. There is God the Holy One himself. He’s standing right there.
Christmas is the arrival of the real Joshua, the real Cyrus, the real God, into a manger in Bethlehem. Jesus is the true Yeshua. Jesus’ name in Hebrew is actually Yeshua. That’s what Mary would have called him. Here, Yeshua.
We end up with the name of Jesus in English because Yeshua gets transliterated from the original Hebrew into Greek and becomes Iesous, and then Greek gets translated into English and Iesous becomes Jesus, whereas the Old Testament figure Joshua gets transliterated directly from Hebrew to English, so Yeshua becomes Joshua instead of Jesus because it didn’t take a detour through Greek. I know you don’t care, but I had to tell you. Jesus’ name is actually Yeshua. Now you know and can impress no one. But more than the name, Jesus fulfills the role of Yeshua.
Jesus is the true deliverer of God’s people into the true Promised Land of eternity with Him, new heaven, new earth forever. And Jesus not only builds the temple like Cyrus did, He is the temple. We talked about this weeks ago. Jesus is where heaven meets earth, where life conquers death, where grace meets justice for real. He is the temple they had been waiting for.
He tells the religious leaders of his day. If you tear down this temple, I’ll rebuild it again in 3 days, which is speaking of his resurrection after 3 days in the grave. He is the temple. And finally, Jesus is the true God who brings both mercy and judgment. Jesus answers the question of how can God at the same time both liberate people from their sin and pay the penalty that justice demands because of their sin.
He resolves Malachi’s tension. How can the fire of God not consume the guilty and God still call Himself just? How could God rid the world of evil without ridding the world of us? How could that happen? Because on the cross, Jesus takes the penalty that justice demands onto Himself so we can be free.
He substitutes Himself in our place. He is judged instead of us. On the day of the Lord, Jesus is crushed, leaving no root or branch so that we can be the calves released from the stalls. We are forgiven through our faith in Him. We are liberated.
Law, prophets, writings, scroll 1, scroll 2, scroll 3, all about Jesus. After spending months in this series, I hope you see Jesus did not just fulfill individual prophecies from the Old Testament, though He did do that, but more than that, He fulfilled the entire sense of expectation that the Old Testament sets up. The Old Testament has this ache for more in every single section, and then Jesus arrives to answer that expectation. The entire Old Testament was always about Him. It was always about waiting for specifically Him.
And whether you know it or not, He’s the one we’ve been waiting for too. He’s the one we need. At this Christmas, may you see Him in His totality. May you see Him as the fulfillment of all of your hopes, all of your expectations. He didn’t just come for Israel.
He didn’t just come to complete the Old Testament. He came for you, and He came for me.
Let’s pray.
Father, thank You for fulfilling what this world needed most by bringing Jesus. Thank You, Lord, that He will deliver us into a forever land with You that we can live in, in harmony without strife or war or disease or poverty, that You are creating that place and He will lead us there. Thank You that You will will pay what justice demands. Thank You that no one will get away with anything, and at the same time, Lord, that You can— that You provide a path for forgiveness for those of us who seek You and put our trust in You to save us, Lord. Thank You, Lord, that You are where heaven meets earth, where life defeats death, and where grace so beautifully meets justice, that we may be redeemed.
May we embrace you for all that you are this season and always. We pray those things in Jesus’ name. Amen.
