the jesus biographies
Jesus Biographies Study Guide
On the day of His resurrection, the risen Christ joins two of His disciples who are solemnly walking the seven mile road home from Jerusalem to Emmaus. Not recognizing who He is, the pair engage Jesus in conversation about the awful events of the past three days. Jesus listens quietly as they forlornly share about the great prophet from Nazareth, whom they had hoped was the Messiah, being condemned and crucified just outside Jerusalem. Perplexing them even more is a wild report that some of Jesus' followers had visited His tomb and found it empty.
What could it all mean?
Rather then responding with a shrug of His shoulders, Jesus levels a rebuke. He insists that they should have known that the Christ would pass through suffering to glory. They should have anticipated Jesus' death and resurrection.
They should have seen it coming.
That same day, Jesus shares a bread-and-fish lunch with His disciples. Halfway through the meal, Jesus begins to teach, opening their minds to understand the Scriptures, adamant that every word of their bible was prefiguring the events of His Gospel. The Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms all tell the same story: the Christ would die, the Christ would rise, and the nations would be saved.
In other words, the Old Testament is the biography of Jesus.
The Jesus Biographies preaching series at Seven Mile Road is designed to help us understand one of the ways in which this is true. It is not only the events, institutions, prophecies, and offices of the Old Testament that prefigure what Jesus would accomplish in the Gospel.
It is also the biographies.
In one sense, the Old Testament is a fascinating collection of eclectic biographies: Adam, Abel, Abraham, Amos, Ahab, just to name a few of the a's. And yet Jesus maintained that, in another sense, the Old Testament is a single biography: His. And so we would expect that many of the stories of Old Testament saints would be getting us ready for the story of Christ.
And that is exactly what they do.
For the next 18 weeks we are going to study the biographies 18 different Old Testament characters. And in doing so, we are going to see, over and over again, that they were readying us for suffering and glory of Christ.
