"The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor... to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him, and he began by saying to them, "Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing." — Luke 4:18–21
1. Recap: The Monarchy and the Path to Exile
The previous session established the Davidic Covenant — God's unconditional promise to David in 2 Samuel 7 that his line would produce a son whose throne would be established forever. What followed, historically, was a rapid unraveling. Almost immediately after Solomon's death, the kingdom fractured. Solomon's idolatry — his accommodation of the gods of his foreign wives — had corrupted the heart of the nation, and God declared through the prophets that the unified kingdom would be torn apart.
The result was the Divided Kingdom: ten tribes in the north, retaining the name Israel, governed from Samaria; and two tribes in the south, the kingdom of Judah, governed from Jerusalem. Each had its own king. Each pursued the gods of the surrounding nations, defaming the name of the one who had claimed them as his own.
God's response followed the pattern he had announced. The northern kingdom fell first. The Assyrian king Sennacherib conquered Israel's ten tribes, deported them into Assyria, and repopulated Samaria with people from other Assyrian territories. Those ten tribes scattered into the nations and never returned as a distinct people. The land they had occupied became Gentile territory — the Samaritans who later inhabited the region were a mixed people, neither fully Jewish nor fully Gentile, and despised by Judah for precisely that reason.
Judah watched all of this happen and did not learn. God sent prophets to warn them. They imprisoned the ones who told them hard truths and embraced the ones who promised comfort. Eventually Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, came against Jerusalem, destroyed the city and the Temple, and marched the survivors into exile in Babylon. Among the most prominent of those exiles was the prophet Daniel — whose visions, addressed in a later session, contain the only fixed chronological framework for end-time events anywhere in Scripture.
The prophetic literature that now occupies the study was produced in and around this exile period. When people suffer under oppression they seek God for answers. The major prophets — Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel — were the answers God gave to that seeking, and they address not only the immediate crisis of exile but the entire arc of what God intends to do for Israel and for the world.
2. Psalm 2 — The Messianic Expectation
Psalm 2 is the iconic messianic psalm — the clearest distillation of what the Jewish world, in the exile period and beyond, expected the Messiah to be. The nations are conspiring against God and against his anointed one — the Hebrew Messiah, the Greek Christ, the English "anointed." The one enthroned in heaven laughs at them. God speaks: "I have installed my king on Zion, my holy hill." The king responds with the divine decree: "You are my son; today I have become your father. Ask of me, and I will make the nations your inheritance, the ends of the earth your possession. You will rule them with an iron scepter; you will dash them to pieces like pottery."
This passage describes something real, and something that is still coming. That must be said clearly. The error of first-century Jewish expectation was not that they believed the Messiah would come in power and crush his enemies — they were correct. The error was in reading this as the whole story, when it was only half of it. The Messiah would come twice. The first time looked nothing like Psalm 2. The second time will.
3. The Unfaithful Sisters — Jeremiah 3
Jeremiah 3 presents one of the most arresting images in the prophetic literature. God speaks to Jeremiah using the framework of a marriage to describe his relationship to the two kingdoms. Israel and Judah are sisters. God is their husband. And both have been unfaithful.
The language he uses for idolatry is deliberate: adultery. Worshipping foreign gods is not religious error in some abstract sense. In God's framing, it is the violation of a covenant of intimacy. He had entered into relationship with Israel. She turned to other lovers. The foreign gods represented by idols are not empty stone — they are real spiritual entities, the principalities assigned to the nations at Babel, ancient beings who have had millennia to study humanity and exploit its weaknesses. Their power is real, though it is nothing like God's. They cannot be everywhere at once. They cannot know everything. But they are savvy, patient, and malevolent.
Israel — the northern kingdom — had already been sent away with a certificate of divorce because of her adulteries. Judah had watched this happen and not changed her behavior. God says of her: she did not return to him with all her heart, but only in pretense.
Yet the passage does not end in finality. God calls the northern kingdom back. His intent is to gather both kingdoms, unite them, and restore them to the land. "In those days, the house of Judah will join the house of Israel, and together they will come from a northern land to the land I gave your forefathers as an inheritance." Jerusalem will become the throne of the Lord, and all nations will gather there to honor his name.
This has not happened. The northern tribes have never returned. Their restoration is a future event, reserved for a time the study will reach as it moves toward Revelation.
4. The Righteous Branch — Jeremiah 23
Jeremiah 23 opens with God indicting the shepherds — the kings and leaders who have failed to tend his people. Their failure brings judgment. But judgment is not the final word.
"The days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will raise up to David a righteous branch, a king who will reign wisely and do what is just and right in the land. In his days, Judah will be saved and Israel will live in safety. This is the name by which he will be called: the Lord Our Righteousness."
The phrase "the days are coming" is a recurring marker throughout Jeremiah. It signals a future event — but gives no timeline, no coordinates, no indication of how far off it is. The Jews reading this passage understood that a king was coming from the line of David who would reign with perfect justice and wisdom. What they could not determine was when.
This is one of the built-in challenges of reading biblical prophecy from a human standpoint. When multiple future events are prophesied without fixed timelines, they appear compressed — stacked against each other in the distance, the way distant mountain peaks appear to occupy the same plane when viewed from the valley floor. The prophets were standing in the valley, looking at events separated by centuries, and what they saw was real but undifferentiated by time. Only as history moved closer to each event did the distances between them become visible.
5. A Letter to the Exiles — Jeremiah 29
Jeremiah 29 contains a letter written to the first wave of exiles Nebuchadnezzar had already transported to Babylon — written while a remnant of Jerusalem still stood. His instructions are not what might be expected from a prophet of restoration. He does not tell them to resist, to organize, or to expect a quick return. He tells them to build houses, plant gardens, marry, raise children, and pray for the prosperity of the city of their captivity. Because in Babylon's welfare, they will find their own.
This was a direct challenge to false prophets circulating among the exiles, promising imminent reversal and restoration. Jeremiah names them as deceivers — speaking in God's name what God had not said. Their confidence rested on nothing more than the assumption that because Israel was God's people, God would always fight for them on their terms. The assumption was catastrophically wrong.
The letter contains a passage that has become among the most quoted in Scripture: "For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future." Its comfort is real. But its context is almost always stripped away. God is saying this to people who have just watched their city destroyed and their families marched into exile. The hope is genuine; the path to it runs through exactly the difficulty they are experiencing.
The pattern is consistent throughout Scripture. The disciples were told to go into all the world, but did not scatter until persecution drove them out of Jerusalem. Paul, imprisoned and unable to travel his circuits of churches, had time instead to write — and most of the New Testament is the product of his confinement. What looks from the outside like limitation and loss is frequently, in God's economy, the very condition under which the most significant work happens.
Jeremiah gives the exiles a timeline: seventy years. After seventy years in Babylon, God will bring them back to the land. He makes no mention in this passage of the Messiah's arrival, the permanent restoration of the kingdom, or the reunification of the tribes. The near promise — return from Babylon — is given clearly. The far promises are reserved for a later word. The distinction between the near and far fulfillments of God's prophecies is itself a recurring feature of the prophetic literature, and one the study will develop further when it reaches Daniel.
Key Principle: God's faithfulness does not always look like immediate deliverance. Sometimes it looks like instructions to settle in, plant crops, and trust — and the fruit of that faithfulness is not visible until long after it was sown.
6. The Return and the Day of Trouble — Jeremiah 30
Jeremiah 30 looks past the return from Babylon to a much larger event: the complete restoration of both kingdoms, the end of foreign dominion over Israel, and God's direct reign. The register shifts.
The passage describes what it calls a time of trouble for Jacob — suffering unlike anything before it, described in the language of birth pains. This phrase, "the time of Jacob's trouble," is where the Jewish term for the period known in Christian eschatology as the Great Tribulation originates. It refers to the final, most intense period of judgment that precedes the restoration of God's kingdom on earth. (The specific shape and timing of this period will be addressed in detail when the study reaches Daniel.)
What follows the trouble is the restoration promised across all of these passages. The yoke is broken. Foreigners no longer enslave them. God's people serve the Lord their God — and David their king, whom God will raise up for them. The Davidic Covenant is again in view: the king on David's throne who reigns forever is not Solomon, not any of the divided-kingdom monarchs, but the one the prophets have been pointing toward across every generation.
When Jeremiah 30 says God will bring back "Israel and Judah" from captivity, he is not referring only to the Babylonian exile of Judah. The northern kingdom is in Assyria. The prophecy encompasses both — a restoration that never happened after the Babylonian exile, and that has not happened since. Israel's return to the land in 1948 and the expansion of that territory in 1967 are partial and preliminary. The full gathering of all twelve tribes, reunited under their king, remains ahead.
7. The New Covenant — Jeremiah 31
Jeremiah 31 is where the prophetic portrait reaches its deepest note — and it is introduced with a cryptic detail that functions as an embedded prophecy of the Incarnation.
Before reaching the New Covenant declaration, verse 22 records this: "The Lord will create a new thing on earth — a woman will surround a man." The ordinary sequence of human birth is a woman carrying a child who will grow into a man. This statement describes something different: a man — a pre-existing man — surrounded by a woman. Not produced by a man and a woman; contained within a woman without a human father's contribution. The only way to make sense of this in physical terms is a virgin birth, in which the one being born has an existence prior to the birth itself. The note immediately before the New Covenant declaration is that the one who will embody that covenant enters the world by an unprecedented mechanism — because he comes from outside it.
The New Covenant itself, declared in Jeremiah 31:31–34, is explicit:
"The time is coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their forefathers when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, because they broke my covenant, though I was a husband to them... I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people... I will forgive their wickedness and remember their sins no more."
Several features are essential. First, the new covenant is explicitly made with Israel and Judah — not a replacement people, not the church as a substitute. The church participates in the new covenant; it does not become the covenant's intended recipients in Israel's place. This matters for understanding both the future of Israel and the church's proper posture toward it.
Second, the new covenant is unconditional in a way the Mosaic Covenant never was. The Mosaic Covenant was bilateral — blessings contingent on obedience, consequences following rebellion. That covenant Israel broke repeatedly. The new covenant operates differently: God writes his law on hearts, not external tablets. The transformation is internal and permanent. Human faithlessness cannot break what God writes into the human person by his own Spirit.
Third, the mechanism of the forgiveness at the new covenant's center — whose blood establishes it, how the debt is paid — is not yet named in Jeremiah. That comes later.
God closes the passage with a declaration of Israel's permanence: only if the sun, moon, and stars can be disrupted, only if the measurements of heaven and the foundations of the earth can be discovered and exhausted, will he reject the descendants of Israel. The covenant is as fixed as the created order. He has not abandoned them, and he will not.
Key Principle: The new covenant is not a replacement of God's promises to Israel but the mechanism by which those promises are finally and permanently fulfilled — written on hearts rather than stone, and sealed by blood rather than human compliance.
8. Psalm 110 — The Priest-King
Psalm 110 is the most frequently cited Old Testament passage in the New Testament. It opens with a statement Jesus would later use to confound the Pharisees: "The Lord says to my Lord: 'Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet.'"
David is writing. David is calling the coming king "my Lord" — a figure above David himself, despite descending from David's line. The king is installed at God's right hand, rules in the midst of his enemies, and receives an eternal priesthood — not in the Levitical order but in the order of Melchizedek, the ancient priest-king of Salem to whom Abraham paid a tithe in Genesis 14. The significance of this priestly order for understanding Jesus' unique office will be addressed in a later session, when Hebrews develops it at length.
The psalm's closing verses describe what the king does on the day of his wrath. He will crush kings. He will judge nations, heaping up the dead. He will crush the rulers of the whole earth. This is the same clearing-away described in Jeremiah 30 — the destruction of evil as the precondition for the establishment of God's kingdom. There will be no mercy on that day, not because God will have become cruel, but because the time for mercy will have passed. The choices will have been made. The harvest will be ripe. What the Proto-Evangelium of Genesis 3:15 first announced — the crushing of the serpent's head — arrives, finally and completely, in this moment.
9. Psalm 22 — The Song from the Cross
Psalm 22 opens with the words Jesus cried from the cross: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" That opening line is not simply an expression of anguish. In the interpretive conventions of the first century, citing the opening words of a passage was a way of invoking the whole — drawing the attention of every literate listener to its entire content. Jesus, in his final hours, was identifying himself as the fulfillment of this psalm. He was making a declaration.
The psalm describes in precise physical detail what crucifixion looks and feels like from the inside — written by David roughly a thousand years before crucifixion was practiced by any power in the region. The sufferer is surrounded by mockers who taunt his trust in God. His bones are out of joint. His strength is dried up. A band of evil men encircles him. His hands and feet are pierced. His garments are divided and lots are cast for his clothing.
Then the psalm pivots — and the pivot resolves the most common misreading of Jesus' words from the cross. Verse 24 states: "He has not despised or disdained the suffering of the afflicted one. He has not hidden his face from him, but has listened to his cry for help."
God did not forsake Jesus. The psalm Jesus cited as his own — the one he was fulfilling in real time from the cross — explicitly states that God did not turn away from the one suffering. The cry of dereliction is not a report of abandonment. It is the opening of a song that ends in vindication: "They will proclaim his righteousness to a people yet unborn — for he has done it." The same declaration Jesus made from the cross in another form: It is finished.
Key Principle: When Jesus said "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" from the cross, he was citing a psalm — and the psalm he was citing explicitly states that God did not hide his face from the one suffering. He was declaring fulfillment, not reporting abandonment.
10. The Servant Songs — Isaiah
Isaiah contains a series of passages centered on a figure God calls "my servant" — a designation that appears with enough consistency and cross-reference across Isaiah 42, 43, 49, 52, and 53 that they are recognized as a connected body, sometimes called the Servant Songs. Each passage adds a dimension to the portrait.
Isaiah 42 introduces the servant as one on whom God's Spirit rests, who will bring justice to the nations — but not through force. He will not shout. He will not break a bruised reed or snuff out a smoldering wick. The same figure who rules with an iron scepter in Psalm 2 appears here in a completely different register: patient, tender, faithful. He will also be "a covenant for the people and a light for the Gentiles" — the first explicit extension of the servant's mission beyond Israel to the entire human family.
Isaiah 43 surrounds the servant's identity with the language of God's absolute uniqueness: "I, even I, am the Lord, and apart from me there is no savior." The servant through whom salvation comes is not a created mediator working alongside God at a distance. He shares the identity of the one who is the only Savior.
Isaiah 49 develops the theme of concealment: "In the shadow of his hand he hid me; he made me like a polished arrow and concealed me in his quiver." The servant has been hidden. Read against the larger narrative already established, the reason is not arbitrary. A figure destined to crush the serpent's head, traveling through the lineage of Abraham and David — his identity had to be protected from an adversary who has been working to disrupt that lineage since Genesis 3. He was hidden until the moment of deployment. The same passage declares that the servant's mission exceeds Israel: "It is too small a thing for you to be my servant to restore the tribes of Jacob... I will also make you a light for the Gentiles, that you may bring my salvation to the ends of the earth." This is the Abrahamic Covenant arriving at its fulfillment — all nations blessed through Abraham's seed.
Isaiah 52:13–53:12 is the most detailed prophetic portrait of the suffering servant in the Old Testament. What makes it extraordinary is not simply that it describes suffering, but the precision with which it maps onto crucifixion — centuries before crucifixion existed as a practice anywhere in the region. His appearance is disfigured beyond that of any man. He is despised and rejected, a man of sorrows. He is led like a lamb to the slaughter and does not open his mouth. He is assigned a grave with the wicked, though he has done no violence. He is made a guilt offering — a category within the Torah's sacrificial framework that requires death.
But the passage does not end in death. "He will see his offspring and prolong his days, and the will of the Lord will prosper in his hand. After the suffering of his soul, he will see the light of life and be satisfied." The sacrifice is real. So is the resurrection.
The question presses itself: should the Jews have known from Isaiah 53 alone that the coming servant would die? The language is explicit. He is led like a lamb to the slaughter. He is cut off from the land of the living for the transgression of the people. He is made a guilt offering. There is no way to read it otherwise. But human beings naturally gravitate toward the portions of what God has said that promise relief, triumph, and vindication. The passages about the conquering king were read, taught, and internalized. The passages about the suffering servant were not — not because they were absent, but because nobody builds their hope on suffering. It doesn't feel like good news.
Key Principle: The suffering servant of Isaiah and the conquering king of Psalm 2 are not two different figures. They are the same person, arriving twice — and the prophets described both comings, often in the same passage, without the temporal perspective to distinguish them from one another.
11. Today This Scripture Is Fulfilled — Luke 4
The session's argument comes to a head in Luke 4. Jesus, in the synagogue at Nazareth, is handed the scroll of Isaiah. He finds a specific passage — Isaiah 61 — and reads:
"The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor."
Then he rolls up the scroll, hands it back, and sits down. Every eye in the room is fixed on him. And he says: "Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing."
He had stopped in the middle of a sentence. The full verse in Isaiah 61 reads: "to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor and the day of vengeance of our God."
He stopped before "the day of vengeance."
This was not carelessness. He was not there to execute vengeance. The rest of Isaiah 61 — the rebuilding of ancient ruins, the restoration of devastated cities, Israel inheriting a double portion, everlasting joy — none of that was the assignment of the first coming either. He was there to preach good news, to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim freedom, to announce that the year of God's favor had opened. The suffering servant of Isaiah 53, the one who does not break a bruised reed in Isaiah 42 — that was what the first coming was for.
Everything he did not read, he has not yet done. The day of vengeance of God is coming. The reunification of the tribes is coming. The restoration of what has been devastated for generations is coming. What Jesus stopped before in that synagogue is the mission of the second coming. He announced it by the absence of a clause.
Key Principle: Jesus stopped reading Isaiah 61 in the middle of a sentence because the sentence describes two different comings separated by an age. He fulfilled everything up to the pause at the first coming. Everything after the pause is the mission of the second.
12. Why the Jews Missed It — and Why It Matters for Us
The Jews of the first century did not miss the messianic prophecies. They knew Isaiah, Jeremiah, and the Psalms. The problem was not ignorance but selection. The passages that spoke of triumph were read and preached. The passages that required suffering and death were not. The Messiah they were looking for was Psalm 2 without Isaiah 53 — and when a man of sorrows arrived in their midst instead of an iron-scepter king, they could not reconcile what they saw with what they expected.
There is a temptation built into that failure worth naming directly. When Satan offered Jesus all the authority and splendor of the kingdoms of the world during his wilderness testing, the offer was real. The authority was genuinely Satan's to give — taken from Adam at the Fall, the Prince of This World exercises it still. What Satan was offering was a shortcut: the inheritance Jesus had already been promised, without the suffering. Jesus refused — not because the offer was empty, but because he understood that the suffering was not incidental to the mission. The cross was not an obstacle to the kingdom. It was the only path to it.
Can the same selective reading that caused the Jews to miss the first coming cause the church to miss what is still coming? The answer is yes — and that is precisely why this study exists. The prophets described both comings. The second coming is preceded by events that will be addressed in detail through Jeremiah's "time of Jacob's trouble," Daniel's chronological framework, and ultimately Revelation itself. Understanding what has been written, in full and in context, is what produces the biblical worldview robust enough to stand when the pressure comes.
(The next sessions will address what it means to live under the new covenant — the believer's identity in Christ, the relationship to the Mosaic Law, and how the church relates to Israel in the unfolding of the remaining prophetic promises.)
Key Scriptures
- Psalm 2 — The nations conspire; the Messiah installed on Zion; the iron scepter
- Psalm 22 — The song of the cross; God does not hide his face from the afflicted one
- Psalm 110 — Lord to my Lord; the priesthood of Melchizedek; the day of wrath
- Jeremiah 3:6–20 — The unfaithful sisters; the certificate of divorce; the promise of return
- Jeremiah 23:1–8 — The righteous branch raised up for David; the Lord Our Righteousness
- Jeremiah 29:4–14 — The letter to the exiles; seventy years; plans to prosper
- Jeremiah 30:1–9 — The time of Jacob's trouble; both kingdoms restored; David their king
- Jeremiah 31:22 — A woman will surround a man
- Jeremiah 31:31–34 — The new covenant; the law written on hearts; sins remembered no more
- Isaiah 42:1–9 — The servant; a bruised reed he will not break; a light for the Gentiles
- Isaiah 49:1–9 — The servant hidden; too small a thing to restore only Israel
- Isaiah 52:13–53:12 — The suffering servant; the guilt offering; he will see the light of life
- Isaiah 61:1–2 — The year of the Lord's favor; the day of vengeance not yet read
- Luke 4:14–21 — Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing
These notes are part of an ongoing study and are intended as a companion resource, not a replacement for personal engagement with Scripture. All claims made here should be tested against the biblical text.