JESUS’ SPECIAL BIFOCALS
By: Frank Tunstall, D. Min.
Jesus empowered His disciples to interpret the Old Testament Scriptures through the bifocals of 1) His stunning triumph at His cross and 2) His resurrection three days later. The Lord walked out of His tomb, leaving it utterly empty and shamed.
Without dispute, Golgotha was one of Jesus’ special bifocals. The Lord made there the sacrifice for the sins of any person who repents with Godly sorrow and confesses Jesus as Savior and Lord. The second lens was His resurrection. Jesus mortally humiliated His tomb and promised all believers the gift of eternal life with God in heaven.
All preaching and teaching, and all study of Jesus’ life and ministry must be taught looking through these bifocals.
THINK ABOUT IT: The devil’s number one deception was then, and is today, leading people to misinterpret the Word of God. During Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness, for example, it was Satan’s chief tactic, albeit unsuccessful. To defeat Satan’s strategy and to guide people in the faith in every generation, it was necessary for the Lord to author in print what He had taught His disciples.
For years I struggled with the question, how could the disciples remember everything Jesus said?
Paul wrote Galatians, the first New Testament book to be written, about twenty years after Jesus’ ascension. The Apostle John wrote the last New Testament book, the Revelation, another thirty years later. I believed the disciples were highly intelligent men, but I didn’t think they were smart enough to remember everything Jesus taught. I knew enough not to doubt the Scriptures, but I had no explanation for my hang up. Then, one day the answer came; it had been there all along, but I missed it.
Two great truths leaped out at me. The first was on resurrection night when Jesus “opened the minds of the apostles to understand the Scriptures.” Jesus was speaking about the Old Testament Scriptures and the New Testament to come (Luke 24:25-27; 44-45). Yes, an anointing goes with understanding the Scriptures.
The second is recorded in John 14:26: “The counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name,” Jesus said, “will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you” (John 14:26). This identifies the “teaching” and “reminding” ministry of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit taught the disciples all things about Jesus, and reminded the disciples of what Jesus said, so that the apostles got it right when they wrote their letters and epistles that became the New Testament (2 Peter 1:21).
The result was the Spirit bequeathed to history the written record of Jesus’ teaching for every generation.
The Old Testament in the Gospel Story
Jesus taught the apostles to examine the Old Testament through the bifocals of His death and resurrection too, and it enabled the disciples to discover how completely the prophets had set the stage for the New Covenant. Hence, the apostles could write the New Testament in harmony with the Old Testament. The great unifier was the twin bifocals – the death of Jesus and His glorious resurrection. This achievement has strengthened believers and silenced the Lord’s critics as the Gospel has gone forward generation after generation.
The Old Testament preserved, albeit veiled, the New Testament gospel for centuries, until the Lord’s triumph at Calvary opened the truth that had been in the first Covenant all along. Understood from this perspective, the New Testament is the Holy Spirit’s inspired revelation of what was already in the Old Testament (Romans 1:2; Galatians 1:11; Galatians 3:8). It became the responsibility of the New Testament writers, as inspired by the Spirit, to mine these veins of golden truths in the Old Testament and express them in the context of Jesus’ great achievement at Calvary and His empty tomb. The New Testament shows how the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus as the Lamb of God unifies the two covenants into one message.
Jesus of Nazareth, “the Word” of God, is the central dream of the Old Covenant, and the central dream–come–true of the new Covenant. In the power and anointing of His own Person, Jesus merged the Old Testament and the New Testament into one unified Holy Bible. In the Old Covenant Jesus is the Messiah who was to come. In the New Covenant He is the Messiah who has come. His mission as the Lamb of God was to take away the sin of the world (John 1:29, 35). The result is the two Testaments blend into one divinely inspired Sacred Canon. The two Covenants are just this closely interrelated. Jesus overcame all sin at Golgotha and then sealed the triumph three days later with his resurrection.
The role of the Holy Spirit was to inspire the writers whom the Spirit chose to record the grand ole’gospel story and teach all things about Jesus (2 Peter 1:21). The Holy Spirit has perpetuated this written gospel through the centuries since as the ageless book that has spread Jesus’ message worldwide.
This very true-to-life story will make the point.
He Wrote the Rule Book
“A number of years ago, when I was playing in a friendly men’s softball game the umpire made a call that incensed our coach. He didn’t agree at all with the ump’s interpretation of a specific league rule. The game stopped and a heated discussion ensued. Finally, the ump sighed as he pulled a rulebook from his back pocket and proceeded to read page 27, paragraph 3b, section 1. “As you can clearly see,” he concluded, “this rule means that my call must stand.”
Unconvinced, my coach yelled, “But you’re not interpreting that rule correctly.”
To which the ump replied, “Uh, excuse me, I think I should know: I wrote the rulebook.”
After an awkward silence, my coach walked back to the bench. Shaking his head and pointing to the umpire he told the team, “Get ahold of that guy. He wrote the rulebook!”
Author unknown to me.
Jesus didn’t just affirm and endorse the words of Scripture. He talked with the authority of the one who authored the Scriptures; He wrote the book. This fact is what makes the Scriptures so very inspiring and anointed. God’s one and only Lamb in His own Person is the message of the Scriptures.
Yes, the New Testament developed precisely because Jesus gave the capability to the apostles to understand the Scriptures through the bifocals of His death and resurrection. This gift also proved to be the vitally crucial factor that enabled the disciples, guided by the Holy Spirit, to lay the foundation of the Lord’s church (Ephesians 2:20; Luke 24:25, 32).
To this day every sermon and Bible lesson should be prepared looking through those same bifocals, the death and resurrection of Jesus.
