The desire to live – to stay alive – is hardwired into the human brain. Even those who have experienced a lot of suffering and problems in life will still strive to stay alive. The desire to live is also seen in another way. Since the beginning of recorded history, we see evidence for the quest for immortality. The pyramids, tombs, and golden coffins of the ancient Egyptians and many other cultures bear striking witness to these peoples’ attempts to maintain their existence after death. Ancient stories such as the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh also focus on the heroic quest of individuals to find eternal life – the same quest still followed today by much modern medical, genetic, and cryogenic research.
But the story always ends in the same way. Eternal life is sought in many ways, but always lies beyond the grasp of humanity. The Bible clearly indicates that this is because humans have been looking in all the wrong places and do not naturally grasp how immortality could be gained. The apostle Paul puts it this way: “but it has now been revealed through … Christ Jesus, who has destroyed death and has brought life and immortality to light through the gospel” (2 Timothy 1:10).
This fact underscores something else the Bible is adamant about – that immortality and eternal life is not something we can get, it is something that we can only begiven. We see this mistake in the biblical story of the young man who approached Jesus saying “Teacher, what good thing must I do to get eternal life?” (Matthew 19:16, emphases added here and below).
The apostle Paul speaks to this truth when he writes to the Christians in Rome “the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 6:23) and “To those who by persistence in doing good seek glory, honor and immortality, he will give eternal life” (Romans 2:7). Notice that Paul is clear that we do not have eternal life – it is something that must be granted to us.
Paul is just as explicit in writing to the Corinthians “When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: ‘Death has been swallowed up in victory’” (1 Corinthians 15:53-54).
So, the Bible is clear that this gift of immortality is not something we can earn, rather it is the result of the undeserved grace of God that he bestows on us. Nevertheless, that does not mean that there is nothing we must do in order for God to choose to give the gift. We are not granted eternal life automatically simply because we want it and God desires to give it to us – as Jesus himself confirmed: “For my Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day” (John 6:40). Here we see the primary prerequisite to receiving the gift – faith in the Son of God.
Paul wrote about another prerequisite “To those who by persistence in doing good seek glory, honor and immortality, he will give eternal life” (Romans 2:7). This is not a teaching of gaining immortality through works – Paul is perfectly clear that we are not saved through our own deeds (Ephesians 2:8-9; etc.). But he acknowledges that doing good is the outward fruit that proves we have inwardly turned to God and accepted his will in our lives. That is a truth as old as the Old Testament proverb “In the way of righteousness there is life; along that path is immortality” (Proverbs 12:28). We do not earn eternal life, but God will not give it to those who do not show they have accepted his will in their lives.
It is then, and only then, that humans will find the eternal life they so deeply desire. Not because we have earned it, or get it in some way through our own efforts, but – as the apostle John wrote – because “this is what he promised us – eternal life” (1 John 2:25).
Interestingly, the Lord’s Supper was not always kept in the way we may be familiar with today. Nowadays many people celebrate the memorial of the Last Supper and Jesus’ death with small, identical wafers of bread, and small measured portions or sips of wine for all the participants. But things were not always that way.
In the New Testament, we find that the apostle Paul reprimanded the church at Corinth for the way in which they celebrated the Lord’s Supper. Apparently, people took their own food and drink to the event – the rich taking much, and the poor very little. As Paul wrote: “when you come together, it is not the Lord’s Supper you eat, when you are eating, some of you go ahead with your own private suppers. As a result, one person remains hungry and another gets drunk” (1 Corinthians 11:20-21). Paul tells the church they must eat together and indicates that restrained amounts should be available for all (verse 33).
This was the regulated form which became practice in the remembrance of the Last Supper that is the celebration of the Lord’s Supper in many denominations today. But although we may remember this New Testament story, another change that we may not be aware of has occurred through time relative to the Last Supper.
Although we may be conscious of the abundance that many people enjoy in the developed world today compared to many other areas, we may not be as aware of the abundance so many have in today’s world compared to what was available in the past. Fascinating but little publicized research conducted several years ago at Cornell University throws light on the abundance which many of us take for granted.
In a careful study published as “The Largest Last Supper: Depictions of Food Portions and Plate Size Increased Over the Millennium,” researchers Brian and Craig Wansink analyzed the amount of food depicted in fifty-two paintings of “The Last Supper” produced over the last thousand years. Each painting was analyzed in order to ascertain the content of the meals depicted, and changes which occurred over time in the size of portions in the paintings. Cleverly, the sizes of the loaves of bread, the main food dishes, and the plates were all compared to the average size of the heads shown in the paintings in order to gain a benchmark reference of size. A computerized CAD-CAM program was used to allow selected parts of the paintings to be scanned, then compared in order to get accurate size comparisons to calculate the food portion sizes with more precision.
As the researchers suspected, the number and size of the food portions in these paintings increased dramatically over time. From AD 1000 to the present, the amount of the food depicted in the paintings increased by 69%, and the size of the depicted plates increased correspondingly by some 65%. This is certainly not a matter of chance, the researchers say. There is no question that the amount of food available to people in much of the Western world has grown dramatically over the hundreds of years covered by the study and this is reflected in artistic representations. What was first shown as a simple meal has grown in artistic interpretations to more recent depictions of the Last Supper which suggest almost feast-like proportions compared to earlier paintings.
Today, many of us enjoy much greater abundance than our ancestors, as well as those less fortunate than us in other parts of today’s world. Representations of the Last Supper can remind us that we have much to be thankful for physically, as well as spiritually. Paul himself reminds us of this when he refers to the cup of the Lord’s Supper as “the cup of thanksgiving” (1 Corinthians 10:16) – something we can, and should, appreciate physically as well as spiritually.
Around the turn of our present era – just before and during the life of Jesus – two Jewish rabbis lived and rose to considerable fame. Even if you have heard of one or both of these teachers of the law, you may not know much about them – despite the fact they both had considerable influence on what we read in the New Testament today.
The first of these teachers, Hillel the Elder, also known as Hillel the Great (c. 110 BC – AD 10), lived in Jerusalem during the time of King Herod and became the most famous Jewish scholar of that era. The second scholar was Shammai (50 BC – AD 30), who tradition says was a Pharisee who became a leading Jewish teacher and whose influence was also considerable in the development of Jewish thought.
Although their lives overlapped, Hillel was about sixty years old at the time of Shammai’s birth; but some of their interactions are recorded, and their teachings were completely different. Generally speaking, Hillel’s teachings were more lenient and compassionate, while those of Shammai were more strict and severe. A famous example is that Shammai said it was wrong to tell an ugly bride that she looked beautiful, while Hillel said that all brides are beautiful on their wedding day. While Shammai and his followers believed only worthy students should be admitted to study the law of God, Hillel and his disciples stressed that the law may be taught to anyone, in the hope that the person would grow and become worthy.
Shammai’s strictness could be extreme. He and his followers said that if someone forgot to ask a blessing on a meal and had left the place where he ate, the person must return to that place to recite the blessing. Hillel said, however, that the person could recite a blessing in the place where they realized their omission. But While Shammai could be overly strict, sometimes Hillel could be overly lenient. For example, Shammai held that a man may only divorce his wife for a serious transgression, but Hillel allowed divorce for even such trivial offenses as burning a meal.
This is why Jesus said “anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, makes her the victim of adultery” (Matthew 5:32) – clearly distancing himself from the teachings of Hillel on this point. Jesus also phrased the “Golden Rule” of “do to others what you would have them do to you” (Matthew 7:12; Luke 6:31) in a positive way, in contrast to Hillel’s famous but more negative expression of the same concept. But in other ways, Jesus sided with Hillel over Shammai. While Shammai stressed the importance of the Jewish people and their temple, Hillel – and Jesus after him – was more accepting of non-Jewish people and looked beyond the temple (John 4:21).
But Jesus did not follow either of the major rabbis’ teachings exclusively, and in a sense, his agreement with them was often coincidental. This is seen in the fact that the discussions of the two scholars and their followers contributed to the belief that the oral law – as expounded by Hillel and Shammai – was just as binding as the written law of God. Jesus firmly rejected this approach of many in his day by citing Scripture: “They worship me in vain; their teachings are merely human rules” (Matthew 15:9). Nevertheless, much of what we read in the Gospels is a result of Jesus rejecting or confirming what Hillel and Shammai taught on various points – the major theological views of his day.
The influence of these teachers on the apostle Paul was also extensive – especially because Paul had studied with the scholar Gamaliel (Acts 22:3) who was the grandson of Hillel. The book of Acts relates that Gamaliel intervened on behalf of the apostles of Jesus when they were seized and brought before the Sanhedrin – doubtless because many of their teachings agreed with aspects of his own and that of his grandfather, Hillel. Nevertheless, we see many instances in the writings of Paul where the apostle disagreed as well as agreed with the views of his celebrated teacher, and the views of Hillel and Shammai before him.
Ultimately, we can study and understand the New Testament without the teachings of the great rabbinical thinkers of New Testament times, but knowing something of their views can sometimes help us better understand what Jesus and Paul had in mind when they gave examples of how and how not to interpret the law of God.
* For more information on the historical background of the New Testament, download our free e-book Inside the Four Gospels: Four Portraits, Many Lessonshere.
“For unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given; and the government will be upon His shoulder. And His name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace” (Isaiah 9:6)
It would be hard to exaggerate the importance of kingship in the ancient biblical world. Kings ruled their people with total power – the king was viewed as either a god himself (as in ancient Egypt) or as the representative of God or the gods (as in ancient Israel and many other Near Eastern cultures). As a result, the birth of an heir to the throne was a symbolically important occasion which was often celebrated in stories of mythic and legendary proportions.
The picture of human rulership painted by these royal birth stories is in stark contrast to Isaiah’s prophecy of the great king who would come. While the “birth oracles” of human kings promised that they would be mighty conquerors destroying their enemies, Isaiah pictures a divine King who would strive for peace. The contrasting nature of the human rulers and the promised King is also seen in their titles. It was common in the biblical world for rulers to take a throne name along with various titles that emphasized their greatness. In Egypt, for example, each pharaoh took five such descriptive titles as part of the coronation ceremony.
The coronation of the King promised by Isaiah is reflected in the statement that “the government will be upon His shoulder” and the four double titles Isaiah gives for the royal child who would be born are kingship titles similar to those used by human rulers, though the second and third stress the true divinity of Israel’s promised King:
Wonderful Counselor: Like the others that follow it, this is a title consisting of two words that convey a single idea. The expression could mean “A wonderful Counselor” or “One who gives wonderful counsel.” The second idea is found elsewhere in Isaiah (see Isaiah 28:29) and is probably what the prophet intended.
Mighty God: In the Hebrew, this title (el-gibbor) is literally “Mighty God” – an expression Isaiah also uses in Isaiah 10:21. While the title “Wonderful Counselor” connects wisdom to the Messiah, “Mighty God” connects strength to him – the two fundamental aspects of good kingship. In Isaiah 11:2 the prophet speaks of exactly these characteristics in “the Spirit of counsel and of might” with which the Messianic child would be born.
Everlasting Father: This title is literally “Father of Eternity,” but it does not mean the promised One would be the Creator of time, or describe the coming King as being eternal. Rather, it means One who continually – eternally – acts as a Father to his people.
Prince of Peace: This last title is particularly interesting as it is almost unique among the titles of ancient Near Eastern kings. Although Egyptian kings often said their reigns would bring about a “repeating of days” or a return to the perfection of original creation, their empty boasts meant little to the people they ruled. Isaiah’s promise of peace in the reign of the coming King is unequivocal, however, and is repeated in the verses following his title, in Isaiah 9:7.
Skeptics have sometimes claimed that the king promised by Isaiah was simply Hezekiah, the son of Ahab – in both of whose rules Isaiah prophesied. However, the titles to be given the promised King could hardly apply to Hezekiah (see also Isaiah 7:14), and he died at a time of great problems and impending national downfall (Isaiah 39:5–7) rather than the greatness foretold by Isaiah.
Nevertheless, many of the people of ancient Judah who heard Isaiah’s prophecy of a coming great King may have believed it applied to Hezekiah. Their country was threatened, and because the ancient Jews doubtless saw the similarities between the names and description of the promised King and those of the physical kings of their time, they looked for a leader in their own time who would be an immediate answer to their physical and political problems. It was doubtless incomprehensible to them that the promised King would not come for centuries after Isaiah spoke, and that when he did arrive he would be born into very humble surroundings rather than a palace, and – perhaps most of all – that he would be very different from the kind of kings with which they were accustomed. But God’s promise to his people held true, nonetheless – and although the promise would not be fulfilled for a number of centuries, it would be fulfilled forever.
* * * You may like the latest blog post on our Living With Faith website here.
Jesus was not the only messianic figure to appear in ancient Palestine. The Jewish people of the first century were waiting for a messiah who would rise up to free them from Roman rule – and a number of seeming messiahs did appear (Acts 5:37). Two of the most important of these supposed messiahs were Simon bar Giora and Simeon bar Kosevah. You may not have heard of these individuals, but for many they were of life and death importance in their day, and their stories carry a message we can all learn from.
Simon bar Giora (died AD 70/71) was probably born during the later life of Jesus or only a few years after Jesus’s death. He was one of the many patriot leaders who emerged in Judea as a result of Roman oppression and misrule, and he eventually rose to prominence as the head of one of the major Judean factions during the First Jewish-Roman War. These patriot leaders gathered large followings and attacked both the Romans and those seen as Roman sympathizers. They appear to have been motivated by religious as well as political concerns and Simon apparently proclaimed liberty for slaves and the oppressed, very likely following Isaiah’s message (Isaiah 61:1) of the Lord’s Anointed who would bring good tidings to the humble and proclaim liberty to the captives – just as Jesus had done (Luke 4:18). But while Jesus did not claim to go beyond this point at his first coming, Simon embraced the following words of the prophecy which were that the anointed would also “proclaim … the day of vengeance of our God” (Isaiah 61:2).
Simon was a physically powerful man, and his victories against the Romans exhibited good leadership and strategic thinking as well. Even the Jewish historian and Roman collaborator Josephus – who clearly hated Simon – was forced to admit that the leader “was regarded with reverence and awe, and such was the esteem in which he was held by all under his command, that each man was prepared even to take his own life had he given the order.” In fact, Simon was acclaimed by the people as their messianic savior, yet when the tide of war turned and the Romans eventually defeated Simon, he was taken to Rome and executed there. In Judea, in the wake of the brutal Roman victory and resulting destruction of the Jewish temple in AD 70, Simon was soon forgotten.
Simeon bar Kosevah – also called bar Kochba – (died AD 135) achieved even greater fame with the Jewish people, convincing them of his anointed status at the time of the Second Jewish-Roman War. This second Jewish rebellion took place sixty years after the first and lasted approximately three years. During that time Bar Kosevah tried to revive the Hebrew language (by then largely replaced by Aramaic and Greek) and to make Hebrew the official language of the Jews as part of his messianic ideology. Although he was widely accepted by many Jews as the messiah who would free them from Roman misrule (he was even said to be the messiah by Akiva, the most famous rabbi of the time), Bar Kosevah also made many enemies. He did not unify the people, and according to the early Christian writer Eusebius, he executed many Christians for their refusal to fight against the Romans.
Bar Kosevah was also not a great military strategist or leader and despite many early victories achieved with an army of over 200,000, his downfall to the Romans was inevitable. After his defeat and death, most Jews soon forgot his messianic status and later Rabbis changed his name – calling him “Bar Koziba,” meaning “Son of the Lie.”
After the disastrous Second Jewish-Roman War, messianic hopes and claims diminished, but when the Jewish Talmud was composed, it made several predictions for the arrival of the messiah, including the year 440 (Sanhedrin 97b) and 471 (Avodah Zarah 9b). Around this time a Jew named Moses of Crete claimed that he was the one the Talmud had predicted. Promising that, like his biblical namesake, he would lead his followers through the water and back to the Promised Land, Moses convinced many of his fellow Jews to leave behind their belongings and march directly into the sea. Moses himself disappeared, but many of his followers drowned. He too was soon forgotten.
But these and other claimed messiahs all teach us something important about the Christian faith. While the death and resurrection of Jesus is often disparaged by cynics and disbelievers as just another messiah story, perpetrated by those who did not want to give up their messianic hopes, it is clearly different. Despite the expectations and whipped up emotions of the followers of the many supposed messiahs, not a single one was believed to have been raised from the dead. The followers of each of these pseudo- messiahs simply accepted their leader had been killed, and their movements disappeared almost overnight. This was not so, of course, with the early Christians who, had they not believed that Jesus had been resurrected, would have simply done the same as the followers of every messianic figure before and after him, and given up.
That the early Christians did not give up their hopes is obviously based on the great many individuals the New Testament tells us were witnesses to the resurrection. As N. T. Wright has written: “We are forced to … account for the fact that a group of first-century Jews, who had cherished messianic hopes and centered them on Jesus of Nazareth, claimed after his death that he really was the Messiah despite the crushing evidence to the contrary” (The Resurrection of the Son of God, p. 562). The followers of no other messiah claimed anything like that. The good news of Christianity is that Christianity is not just another messiah story.
King David’s life and reign are so well documented in the Bible that the many people involved – truly a cast of hundreds – can be confusing at times. But the identity of some of these individuals is important for understanding David’s story.
For example, the individual Zeruiah is named a total of twenty-six times (twice as many times as Nehemiah, for example) in four separate books of the Old Testament. Zeruiah also had three prominent sons: Joab, Abishai, and Asahel (2 Samuel 2:18). But who was Zeruiah?
The answer to this question is found in the genealogy of David, recorded in 1 Chronicles 2:3-16. This genealogical summary records that David had seven older brothers (also mentioned in 1 Samuel 16:10-11) and two sisters. Zeruiah was one of David’s two sisters, and the three sons of Zeruiah (Joab, Abishai, and Asahel) were David’s nephews. This explains a number of otherwise puzzling events or circumstances in David’s reign.
For example, 2 Samuel tells us that when David’s son Absalom attempted to forcibly take the kingship and sought to kill his father, he made Amasa the commander of the Israelite army (2 Samuel 17:25). Even though Amasa led the forces that tried to overthrow and kill David at this time, once Absalom had been defeated King David retained Amasa as commander of the army in place of the previous commander Joab who had disobeyed David by killing Absalom.
We might wonder why David would trust Amasa, but the answer to this question is found in 2 Samuel 17:25 and 1 Chronicles 2:16–17. Amasa was the son of a woman called Abigail (not David’s wife by that name). This Abigail was David’s other sister in addition to Zeruiah (1 Chronicles 2:16). So Amasa was David’s nephew. This is why David asked Amasa, “Are you not my own flesh and blood?” (2 Samuel 19:13).
Unfortunately for Amasa, Joab (the son of Zeruiah) killed his cousin to regain his role as head of Israel’s army. The fact that Joab was David’s nephew explains why David would not execute him despite his crimes, but had Solomon kill him – as Solomon did not have the same direct familial ties to the commander.
Royal politics, as with many other aspects of life in the biblical world, were often driven by such family connections and relationships. Responsibilities to close family members were particularly strong, and it was rare for individuals in power to kill or even punish close relatives unless they were perceived as a direct threat. In the cases we have looked at here, David not only would have had to break this societal attitude if he had executed his nephews Amasa or Joab, but also he would have disgraced his own sisters by doing so.
The identity of David’s two sisters helps us to understand David’s actions or lack of action on several occasions and looking at the family connections involved can often help us to understand the story of this and other Old Testament kings.
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