John 5:46

“For if you believed Moses, you would believe Me; for he wrote about Me.”

Luke 24:44-48

“Then He said to them, ‘These are the words which I spoke to you while I was still with you, that all things must be fulfilled which were written in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms concerning Me.’ And He opened their understanding, that they might comprehend the Scriptures. Then He said to them, ‘Thus it is written, and thus it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead the third day, and that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in His name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem.’”

Jesus, the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. One of the cries that we see from many today is that they think that Jesus would teach differently today than He did when He walked the earth. Many would say that Jesus would have ‘learned more’ and that His teaching would be different. Many try to make it look like Jesus and Paul taught differently about things, and that if Paul were to teach today, there would be very different teachings. Nothing could be further from the truth. Jesus did not abolish the law of Moses; He fulfilled it and obeyed it right down to the nth degree.

The entire Bible is about Jesus.

Just this morning in my devotions, I was reading from Matthew about the birth of Jesus, the new King of the Jews, and the Scribes were able to quote Micah 5:2. And then when the children were hunted down and killed by Herod, we are told that this is a fulfillment of another prophecy from Jeremiah 31:15. We can go on and on, but over and over we see that event after event in the life of Jesus is supported by an Old Testament prophecy. There are some 309 prophecies about Him that are fulfilled in the New Testament.

So, over the next little while, we will explore the person of Jesus in the Old Testament and show Him and the real, present face of God and the Person of God. It can be difficult for people to see Him at times, and I will endeavor to be as clear as possible so as not to cause more confusion, but to cast a light and show Him more clearly.

We begin right at Creation; we are told in John 1:1-2, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made.”

Jesus, we are told, was right there at the Creation. Look at the last phrase, nothing was made without Him. This is an interesting irony, as we explore the verses in Genesis 1:26-27, where Man is made. Here are the verses: “Then God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.’ So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.”

I had never thought of it until one of my Preacher brothers mentioned this, but Jesus made Adam in His image; we understand that to mean that Man is a triune being at the existence level: mind, body, and soul. But let us even look at the mechanics: two hands, two feet, legs, shoulders, muscle structure, ligaments, and the like; how our bodies work, the need to eat, drink, sweat, and all the ways that our bodies work, we are made in the image of Jesus. Thus, this body design existed before us, in Jesus.

We know that angels can appear in the image of a man; both Gabriel and Michael appeared as men, but other angelic beings were very different. The cherubim, for instance, had 6 wings, and even though they had the face of man, they were obviously different. In contrast, the angels that accompanied Jesus (God) to Sodom looked like men, and they could speak in the known language and engage in conversation.

Genesis 19:4-5, “Now before they lay down, the men of the city, the men of Sodom, both old and young, all the people from every quarter, surrounded the house. And they called to Lot and said to him, ‘Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us that we may know them carnally.’”

The men of Sodom assumed that the angels were simply men from their appearance. So, we see that we are made in Jesus’ image right down to how we look and how we walk, talk, breathe, and exist.

One of the other images of Jesus to look at in Genesis today – and there will be many others as we move on in this journey – is in Genesis 3 in general, but we will specifically look at verse 15. In verse 8, we are told that Adam and his wife (not yet named) ‘heard God walking,’ and they ‘hid’ themselves from Him. God, in turn, had conversations with Adam and his wife, and if we take the conversation as far as we can, it would seem that this was not the first time God had seen Adam. Many think that Adam was made in the Garden of Eden, but we are told that God put him there.

Genesis 2:15, “The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.”

But after Adam had sinned, God made this amazing promise to Adam and his descendants in Genesis 3:15, “And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her Seed; He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise His heel.”

This is the very proclamation of the Gospel in the Bible; this is the Promise that the Second Adam, Jesus, would do what the First Adam could not and be perfect and sinless. Notice that the promise is that ‘her Seed’ will come and kill the serpent (Satan). Many of you will know this, some may have never heard this, and for those of us who have our faith in this Promise, it is good to hear it again. In biological terms, the man produces the ‘seed,’ the sperm that brings life to the dead egg of the woman. This should say ‘his Seed,’ BUT it does not; THE Seed is of the woman without the help of a man. This, of course, is the promise of the virgin birth. We see this repeated in Isaiah 7:14.

“Therefore the Lord Himself will give you a sign: Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a Son, and shall call His name Immanuel.”

Jesus, born of a virgin, no help from a man, thus no sin nature that is passed from the first Adam. This Seed, the Promised Immanuel, will come and crush the head of the Serpent, and in the process, be temporarily hurt, a bruised heel. One recovers from a ‘bruised heel’; one does not recover from a ‘crushed head.’ This Seed, Jesus, the Messiah, will come and kill Satan, and in the process, be temporarily hurt. This Seed will deliver us. By the way, Immanuel is God with us. Jesus is God, the promised Seed.

There are many more wonderful pictures of Jesus in the Old Testament, and we will explore as many as we can over the next few weeks. He is coming again soon, and just like He was the principal character of man’s history, He is also the principal character of our future.

Look up, Jesus is coming soon, very soon.

God bless you,

Dr. Sean Gooding
Pastor of Bethany Baptist Church
70 Victoria Street, Elora, Ontario

Judges 2: 11-19

¹¹ Then the children of Israel did evil in the sight of the Lord, and served the Baals; ¹² and they forsook the Lord God of their fathers, who had brought them out of the land of Egypt; and they followed other gods from among the gods of the people who were all around them, and they bowed down to them; and they provoked the Lord to anger. ¹³ They forsook the Lord and served Baal and the Ashtoreths. ¹⁴ And the anger of the Lord was hot against Israel. So, He delivered them into the hands of plunderers who despoiled them; and He sold them into the hands of their enemies all around, so that they could no longer stand before their enemies.

¹⁵ Wherever they went out, the hand of the Lord was against them for calamity, as the Lord had said, and as the Lord had sworn to them. And they were greatly distressed. ¹⁶ Nevertheless, the Lord raised up judges who delivered them out of the hand of those who plundered them. ¹⁷ Yet they would not listen to their judges, but they played the harlot with other gods, and bowed down to them. They turned quickly from the way in which their fathers walked, in obeying the commandments of the Lord; they did not do so.

¹⁸ And when the Lord raised up judges for them, the Lord was with the judge and delivered them out of the hand of their enemies all the days of the judge; for the Lord was moved to pity by their groaning because of those who oppressed them and harassed them. ¹⁹ And it came to pass, when the judge was dead, that they reverted and behaved more corruptly than their fathers, by following other gods, to serve them and bow down to them. They did not cease from their own doings nor from their stubborn way.”

There has been a cry out against the idea of Christian nationalism over the past few weeks, and there are a lot of videos accusing many prominent conservatives of being ‘Christian Nationalists.’ I am a Christian, and I love Canada. I know that the only way to save Canada, or any nation for that matter, is to return to the God of the Bible in our homes and our schools. If we as a nation will humble ourselves and obey God, He will save our nation.

I was reading this morning how God protected the nation of Judah because Asa, a good king, humbled himself before God. I recently saw that Poland has made Christianity the official religion. This is a slippery slope; one cannot legislate obedience to God.

Now we have the Ten Commandments, and these are the basis for the laws that govern most Western nations, but serving Jesus is a free-will choice; it cannot be legislated. Each man must have the freedom to either worship or not to worship the God of the Bible. Over and over again, we see that the Pharisees tried to kill Jesus because He taught a different religion (look at Matthew 12 1-14, Mark 2:23-3:6, Luke 6: 1-11). Over and over again, we see that – when we mix religion and politics – freedom to be different always dies first.

Just yesterday, I was watching an undercover reel from one of the main mosques in London, England, and there, the woman teaching the other women made it clear that the penalty for leaving Islam is death. I can think of many people over the years that have left Islam to follow Jesus; they are under the threat of death. In contrast, I know of many professing Christians who have ‘left’ the faith. They decided that Jesus was no longer for them. While we pray for them, anguish for them, and fear for them, no Christian I know has suggested hunting them down and killing them.

When we look into the passage from the Book of Judges, we see the beginning of a pattern that would be repeated for 400 years under the Judges and then for another 400 years under the King of Israel. When there was a Judge or King that obeyed God, the nation, in general, obeyed God. But, and it always happened, when there was a Judge or King that did not follow God, the people strayed away into idolatry and demon worship.

It is essential that people obey God based on a personal encounter and true belief in Jesus – that they have a full reliance on Jesus’ finished work on the cross and the empty tomb as the salvation they have and hold on to.

I would love for our leaders here in Canada to espouse the ways of God; to run the country on the laws and principles of the Scripture; it would be nice to hear my Prime Minister talk about Jesus and not about the world-ending agendas that are set up by globalists that hate everything about God. At this time in Canadian history, our government is trying to revoke the charitable status of churches or any non-profit that will not agree with them on homosexuality. They will call for taxing properties and income like a business, effectively bankrupting a lot of churches. But even with all that, I would have the separation of church and state.

The kind of power that spiritual power can offer can only be handled by one man, Jesus. One day He will merge the political and the spiritual perfectly. But even then, there will be free will. In fact, there will be so much free will that Satan will be able to make an army (see Revelation 20:7-10) to make war against Jesus. The people involved in this battle would have seen Jesus, heard Jesus, seen Him solve world problems, and seen His power; yet, they could choose not to submit to Him and instead follow Satan. This is free will, given to us by our Creator, knowing full well that free will would cost Jesus His life.

You cannot legislate people into righteousness. You cannot legislate people into Heaven. What we ask for, what we need, is simply the freedom to present the Gospel. In the same manner, the Muslin should have the freedom to speak about his religion as well. The atheist would be free to not believe and be free to not be sure. The people should be free to choose; that is all that is asked for from us who are conservatives. Let us be able to present our Biblical ideas with just as much freedom as you can present your non-Biblical ideas.

When people hear the truth, then the Holy Spirit will take that and change them. The other side knows this, and that is why they try to shut us up. The Pharisees could see the way that Jesus’ love, compassion, power, and the way He taught affected the people and drew them away, thereby diminishing the power and influence of the Pharisees. They wanted to even kill Lazarus because Jesus raised him from the dead (John 12:9-11).

I love hearing the political leaders of the USA speak about Jesus. I saw Secretary of State Marco Rubio give an excellent explanation of the Gospel recently. I know that the POTUS calls on Jesus often and that the cabinet meetings and many of the meetings begin with prayer. But I would never want to see Christianity become the ‘state religion.’ Christianity is in the hands of local churches; it is our job to spread it and teach about it, and we should not ever vacate that place to the state, NEVER. Jesus is coming to judge us, and we need to be ready to give an account of the proper stewardship of the Gospel.

Yes, I am a Christian, and yes, I pray that Canada will return to God, but of their own free will, not because of legislation from the government.

God bless you,

Dr. Sean Gooding
Pastor of Bethany Baptist Church
70 Victoria Street, Elora, Ontario