So, we have man and woman in a fallen state, no longer in face-to-face communion with God. He owed a debt of life he could not pay, but God did not forsake man and woman. Even at the fall of Adam and Eve, God gave a promise to Eve that her seed would bruise the serpent’s (Satan’s) head, Genesis 3:15. This was a promise of a savior, someone who would battle Satan for humanity and bruise his head and defeat Satan in his effort to enslave God’s creation man and woman. The implication is that woman would have a virgin birth because the male supplies the seed in childbearing. Isaiah later predicted,” Therefore the Lord Himself will give you a sign: Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a Son, and shall call His name Immanuel.” Isaiah 7:14. Immanuel means “God with us.”
God did not go against his word. He said the man had dominion in this world, and even because of man’s disobedience, Satan had a place of power in the earth; God would not force His will on humanity because it is not God’s nature. The human will of man and woman is a sacred gift of God, a gift God would not supersede or take back. To do so would alter God’s intention toward man and woman to be free moral agents made in God’s image. Satan is the one being that wants to dominate the will of man because he hates humankind and wants to control their place in the universe. God would work through man to bring his human creation back to him. A man would win back life for all humanity; a special man, a complete man, a man who was not spiritually dead but alive with the life of God in him.
God would deal with man in the physical world. In the last one hundred years, medical science has discovered that man’s physical life was in his blood. It supplies nutrients and life-giving oxygen to all the body cells; we have no physical life without it. Genesis 9:4 says, “But you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood.” The Bible declared the importance of blood and that it was life to the body thousands of years ago. God said the shedding of blood was required to forgive sin in man’s life, Hebrews 9:22. The law and procedures of sacrifice in the earthly temple of God in the Old Testament shed animal blood to cover a repenting man’s sin. This practice had its beginning in the Garden of Eden after the fall of man when they partook of the Tree of Knowledge; Adam and Eve lost the covering of the Glory of God in the childlike innocents God created them. Without this covering, they realized they were naked, Genesis 3:7. The first shedding of blood was to cover their nakedness. God made skins from the animals to clothe them, Genesis 3:21. God postponed the total death of man and woman’s being by entering into a blood covenant with those obedient people in the Old Testament.
After the flood, God contacted a man to make the foundational blood covenant between God and man. This man was Abraham, the father of faith to the Jews and Christians today. God found a man to believe in him and trust him. This covenant would demand the life of God or man if it was not honored, and it would provide a way for man to have spiritual life restored. The climax of the Abrahamic Covenant was at Jesus’ death at the cross, 1900 years after Abraham. It truly made way for the child of promise Jesus.
Even though Sarah, who was Abraham’s wife, was found to be unable to have children, Genesis 11:30, God told Abram (as he was known then) that his seed or children would inherit the land, Genesis 12:7. Many years went by, and Abraham was still childless. But even at an old age, Abraham trusted God to fulfill his promise to him. The story is told in Romans 4:18-25.
“Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed and so became the father of many nations, just as it had been said to him, ‘So shall your offspring be.’ Without weakening in his faith, he faced the fact that his body was as good as dead—since he was about a hundred years old—and that Sarah’s womb was also dead. Yet he did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, being fully persuaded that God had the power to do what he had promised. This is why ‘it was credited to him as righteousness.’ The words ‘it was credited to him’ were written not for him alone, but also for us, to whom God will credit righteousness—for us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead. He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.” After a time with Sarah in her 90’s and Abraham about a hundred, Isaac was born the child of promise. God always fulfills his part and continues to work in people’s lives.
And then, even as Adam had been, Abraham had a place of proving. God told Abraham to offer his son Isaac as a sacrifice to God. After Abraham realized it was actually God asking for his son, he prepared to sacrifice his only son of promise to God. God told him to go to a place called the Land of Moriah, which is known later as Jerusalem’s hills. Mount Moriah, which is the traditional site where God led Abraham, is also the site of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem. Blood sacrifice was performed later there for the sins of the people of God in the Temple. Not too far from there was to be the crucifixion of Jesus the Nazarene many years later.
Abraham willingly would have obeyed God, knowing that God would raise his son from the dead if necessary, to keep his promise. As Abraham raised the sacrificial knife to take the life of Isaac, God stopped him from offering his son and said, “…because thou has done this thing, and not withheld thy son, thy only son, …in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed, because thou has obeyed my voice” Genesis 22:16-18. God would now return Abraham’s faith and offer His only begotten Son for humanity through the seed of Abraham, John 3:16. Now God had a people to bring to the world deliverance. The one to set humankind free from spiritual death would come from the seed of Abraham.
Through Moses, God established the Law to reveal man’s sin, 1 John 3:4, and Romans 3:20. And God confirmed the priesthood and the ordinates of animal sacrifice to cover man’s sin for a season. God could deal with a repentant man under these sacred conditions. Fellowship with man and woman was vital to God and his intention from the beginning. God made humankind to commune with Him. But in all this, they had to obey God’s Word. When they followed, they were blessed. When they disobeyed, they were cursed. Humanity would know good and evil, blessing, and calamity.
Because Satan was given power in this world through man’s disobedience, Satan was stopped in his destructive plans when man and woman obeyed God’s word. But spiritually dead man disobeyed God many times, which made way for Satan and his evil nature to bear fruit in man. There must be a way to make man spiritually alive, so God could call man and woman his child again and live with him.
So, God devised a plan before the foundations of creation to bring man and woman back to him, and God would work through humanity to accomplish it, Ephesians 1:4, 1 Peter 1:19-20 and Revelations 13:8. This plan involved people throughout the Old Testament that trusted God and gave God access to the heart of man. God would work with the cooperation and the obedience of man. By His court in Heaven, God could not legally force himself on man and woman’s heart. A unique, complete man must win eternal life back for humankind. Jesus was born to complete God’s Holy plan. God wanted to bring the kingdom of heaven to earth in the hearts of men and women. This is why Jesus declared, “ The kingdom of heaven is at hand.” Jesus told stories and parables about the kingdom of heaven. He knew of this because He understood the kingdom of heaven.
Was Jesus the promised one? Was Jesus the one to bruise Satan’s head and win back this world for humankind giving access to the Throne of God in heaven for man and woman? Was Jesus the seed promised to Abraham that would bless the nations of this world? Was Jesus the Messiah (Anointed One)? Was Jesus, Emmanuel (God with us), and our redemption?
In the record of the genealogy of Joseph’s ancestors, the earthly adopted father of Jesus, we see people like Josiah who lived through the Hebrew exile the Babylon, Solomon, who was the son of David, a great king in his own time. There was Boaz who married Ruth. Their story is told in a book in the Old Testament that has Ruth’s name. Also was Judah, one of Jacob’s twelve sons, Isaac’s son, the child of promise to Abraham, Matthew 1:12-17.
In the record of Mary’s genealogy, the mother of Jesus, Joseph, and Mary has a familiar ancestry from King David back to Abraham. What this means that Jesus was the seed of Abraham as promised by God. In Micah 5:2, written about 700 B.C. Bethlehem is foretold as the Messiah’s birthplace, and in Luke 2:4-6, Bethlehem is recorded as the birthplace of Jesus. The Messiah’s virgin birth was prophesied in Isaiah 7:14, 735 years before the birth of Jesus. The angel Gabriel visited Mary and told her she would give birth to a son and call his name Jesus even though she was a virgin and had never been with a man. This miracle would be done through the power of the Holy Spirit without the aid of any man, Luke 1:26-38.
In Isaiah 53:3, men would reject this man of sorrows; over 700 years later, Jesus came to his own, and his own received him not, John 1:11. Jesus’ crucifixion was described in the prophecies of Isaiah 52:14, Isaiah 53:1-12, Psalms 22:1-18, and Zechariah 12:10. The descriptions of sorrow and rejection were prophesied hundreds of years before the Romans refined this way of death. These Scriptures show the Old and New Testament bare testimony of Jesus as the Son of God and the promised one for the reconciliation of humanity to God.
Prophecies Fulfilled by Jesus: Outline: Click Here
(Prophecies Concerning Jesus, “Prophecies Fulfilled by Jesus”) ®
This outline shows the Old and New Testament bare testimony of Jesus as the Son of God and the promised one for the reconciliation of man to God.
I want you to realize something here; God, Himself in the manifestation of man, came to earth as the son of man and God. Jesus called himself the “son of man,” showing his kinship to Adam. He got this from his earthly mother, but the Holy Spirit was his father. His direct kinship to God made him the first complete man to walk the earth since Adam. His spirit was alive and in communication with the Father God. He was called the last Adam, 1 Corinthians 15:45. Jesus was the only man born of a woman who could pay the debt of spiritual life. Jesus was spiritually alive, all the spheres of being, spirit, soul, and body were active, and he walked in perfect communion with the Father God as Adam once did. But unlike Adam, Jesus was Spirit-directed, his mind and body sought the will of God, and that was the redemption of man.
JESUS
GOD SPIRIT SOUL BODY SATAN
BLESSING CURSE
Now God had a physical way into the earth. Jesus was and is the express image of the person of God, Colossians 1:15 And Hebrews 1:3. God was represented personally in Jesus; “He who has seen me has seen the Father,” John 14:9. For the first time since Adam, a spiritual child of God, walked the earth. As Adam became a child of disobedience, Jesus became a child of obedience. Philippians 2:4-8 tells us Jesus thought it not robbery to be equal with God, but put in himself the form of a servant and became obedient unto death.
Throughout the ministry of Jesus, he had to contend with Satan, the usurper of power in the physical world. In every situation, Jesus defeated Satan in his attempt to compromise his mission. When being tempted in the wilderness and during the confrontation with the Devil (Satan) in Luke chapter four, Jesus did not correct Satan when he claimed to have all the kingdoms of this world delivered to him. He tempted Jesus by offering all authority if Jesus would worship Satan, but Jesus answered, “ Get thee behind me Satan: for it is written, thou shall worship the Lord God, and He only shall thou serve,” Luke 4:8. Jesus held tightly to the word of God to defeat Satan, unlike Adam, who disobeyed the words of God.
After the study of scripture, you begin to see a plan of God to bring man unto himself. Humanity would now have a chance to walk free of the bonds of Satan. Like everything, God does his plan was perfect. Even Satan did not understand God’s plan. 1 Corinthians 2:6-8 tells us that if the princes of this world had known the plan of God, they would not have crucified the Lord of Glory. Satan is called in the bible the prince and power of the air.
To man’s mind, the situation was hopeless, but God found a path. “But when the fullness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons.” Galatians 4:4-5. Since the Holy Spirit conceived Jesus, he was not a fallen son of Adam. Therefore Satan had no claim on him. But because he was “ made of a woman,” he was an authentic human being and qualified as a bonafide member of the human race and able to enter the legal fight to reclaim Adam’s lost estate. Jesus would be the missing link between God and man. Jesus is the door that gives us access to God. Jesus came to break the hold that Satan had on man, and he did his job.
“ The Spirit of the Lord is upon me…to proclaim liberty to the captives and the opening of the prison to them that are bound.”
Isaiah 61:1