God Becomes Man, Lesson 24: Full, Perfect, and Sufficient

Series Overview

On Wednesday nights throughout the next nine months, we will be walking our way through the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, learning the story of salvation, especially how everything points to and is fulfilled by Jesus.

Lesson 24: Full, Perfect, and Sufficient
Lesson Overview

We move now from Jesus’ teaching and healing ministry to the final week of his life, his passion and death. Because of general familiarity with the actual narratives of Christ’s passion, we will explore the meaning of Christ’s sacrifice through the lens of the Letter to the Hebrews. This early Christian sermon roots Jesus’ death within the context of Israel’s history in general, and the sacrificial system of the Tabernacle in particular. We will see how the author of this sermon endeavors to answer the question: how does Jesus fulfill Israel’s hope, and by extension, the hope of all mankind.

Additional explanatory gloss: When looking at the passion and death of Jesus at this point in our series, you may expect that we would take the actual passion narratives in the Gospels as our launching point. As will become quickly apparent, we do not look at those texts at all. Why? The choice was a strategic one:

1. the passion narratives themselves are descriptive and offer little in the way of theological interpretation of the events described (though they hint at it frequently); they largely just describe what happened.
2. because of the passion narratives' popularity, and the fact that we just made our way through Holy Week where they are prominently featured in the public liturgy of the church, it is fairly safe to assume broad familiarity with the story itself of Christ's crucifixion.
   
3. it is theological interpretation that is our primary focus here, looking at the passion in light of the larger biblical story, and especially the story of Israel, and for that we must look to the Epistles of the New Testament, whose role in the biblical story we will return to in two weeks' time.
   

For these reasons, we will turn to the theological meaning of Christ's passion and death rather than the narrative descriptions of it, a broad working knowledge of which may be safely assumed, for our purposes in this lesson at any rate. And there is no better theological interpretation of the Cross of Jesus in light of the story of Israel anywhere in the New Testament than that in the Letter to the Hebrews.

Key Text(s): Hebrews 7-10
Office Texts: Psalm 110; Genesis 22; Hebrews 10:1-25

Media

Technical difficulties again this week prevented the recording of a video. Click the link below for a complete audio recording of the lecture.

god_becomes_man_l24_full_perfect_and_sufficient.mp3
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