Pointers to a Divine Messiah - Discovery Website

Pointers to a Divine Messiah

Many Jews at the time of Jesus were expecting the arrival of the long-awaited Messiah, the forthcoming ruler of Israel who would bring peace and transformation to the entire planet. Yet some Jewish writings from around this period also suggest that some Jews were expecting a direct appearance of Yahweh, the God of Israel, on earth.

In fact, both these events are described on numerous occasions in the Old Testament, but curiously there is often no clear distinction between them. In one particularly well-known example, Isaiah 9.6, for instance, we are told that a ‘son’ will be born, who will carry ‘the government . . . on his shoulders.’ Yet he bears the titles ‘Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father’, which are almost identical to descriptions of Yahweh elsewhere in the book (Isa. 28.29; 10.21; 63.16).

More extraordinary still is how the description of the Messiah’s arrival in Jerusalem on a donkey in Zechariah 9.9 begins with by echoing the strangely circular statement that we find earlier in the book, in which Yahweh appears to send himself :

‘Shout and be glad, Daughter Zion. For I am coming, and I will live among you,’ declares the LORD . . . . I will live among you and you will know that the LORD Almighty has sent me to you.’ (Zech 2.10-11).

How can Yahweh send Yahweh? Yet the claim is there, right in front of us, in the Old Testament, which supposedly enshrines the undivided unity of the one unique God.

Even today, however, the 'Messiah' for which many Jews are still waiting is still conceived as very much a human figure. Despite the fact that the same correspondences between Yahweh and the Messiah repeat over and over again throughout the Old Testament, no mainstream Jewish sect apart from the early church seems to have fully explored the relationship. In many ways Judaism has had to develop in reaction to the church, its troublesome teenage offspring!

However, as the pages below show, the links between the descriptions of Yahweh in the Old Testament and those of the promised Messiah are often very striking. When we add in descriptions of the 'angel of the LORD' and the 'wisdom of God', which seem to point to a shadowy figure identified with Yahweh and yet alongside him, the mystery only increases! And when we bring in to play other passages hinting at two beings called 'Yahweh', such as we find in Genesis 19.24, we are clearly dealing with something beyond the grasp of normal human understanding!

Only one model really makes convincing sense of these phenomena - the understanding of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit that begins to develop the New Testament. For many, such as Jews, Muslims, Jehovah's Witnesses and others with similar beliefs, such an idea is shocking to the deepest degree! If the unbreakable unity of God is absolute and non-negotiable, attempts to challenge it may seem tantamount to blasphemy.

But are we being reasonable in expecting God to fall into our neat categories of human understanding? Why, in fact, should an infinite and transcendent being prove accessible to the human mind at all? Let us, therefore, examine the links below with an open mind. For the claims of Christianity to truly stack up, they do need to make sense of this extraordinary network of correspondences that we find in the Old Testament.

To explore the links between Yahweh and the Messiah, click here.