Welcome to the fourth course in the program on the Life of Christ.
Lesson 1 - The Age of Shadows
How should we understand the relationship between the Old and the New Testaments? One way the Church Fathers explained this was by dividing the history of salvation into three stages: the time before Jesus’s first coming, the time after his second coming, and the period in between. These stages can be described as shadow, reality, and image. The age of shadows refers to the period of the history of Israel until the coming of Christ. This history contains biblical shadows of future realities.
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Lesson 2 - The Fulfillment of Scripture
All four Gospels agree that Jesus fulfilled the Old Testament, but the way they go about teaching this differs. In this lesson, we will study how each Gospel addresses this issue. These differences are complementary and help us understand the particular perspectives and priorities of each of the evangelists. This theme is important because it is something unique to Christianity. Therefore, biblical prophecy functions as a visible proof which shows that the assent of faith is by no means a blind impulse of the mind.
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Lesson 3 - Prophecies of the Messiah
Jesus is present in the hundreds of prophecies found in the Old Testament that speak of him. Together, they form a clear picture of who the future Messiah will be: He will descend from the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Judah. He will be a king from David’s line. He will come by the year 135 AD, at the very latest. He will come as a son given to us and be born in Bethlehem of a virgin. And he will be a blessing for all mankind because he will restore our friendship with God by defeating our enemy, the serpent, although he will die in the process.
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Lesson 4 - Typology of the Messiah
In this lesson we will how God used concrete events in Israel’s history as allegories to teach us abstract spiritual truths. In theology, these realities are called types and they prefigure or point to future spiritual realities by way of analogy. In doing so, God was adapting to our human way of learning because we form abstract concepts from concrete realities—for example, children learn to count with their fingers. We read the Bible typologically because the Gospels show us that Jesus did so and that he taught his disciples to do so as well.
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Lesson 5 - Jesus and Israel
No other nation in history has been given a greater mission than Israel. God called Abram and established his descendants as his first-born son to help him bring salvation to the other nations. Israel accomplished this principally by being the nation which received God's Son and formed him in his humanity. In this way, God fulfilled his original plan for all of mankind.
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