Concerning this salvation, the prophets who prophesied of the
grace that was to be yours made careful search and inquiry, inquiring about the
person or time that the Spirit of Christ within them indicated, when it
testified in advance to the sufferings destined for Christ and the subsequent
glory. (vss.10-11)
It’s new, but it’s not new. It is different, but it is rooted in what
came before. Peter is focusing the
message of salvation, as presented up to now, in the Old Testament, in the
Bible of his audience. Drawing out the
prophesies of Jesus from the Old Testament, Peter is saying that the Spirit of
Christ is what guided their hands and hearts, their searches and inquiries.
It is not simply some vague search into the past for
predictions of Jesus, it is not something so general as to be useless, but it
rather focused, this inquiry. With a
broad enough set of predictions about some Messiah in the future, one could
make the argument that it was not Jesus, but somebody else that was being predicted. This testimony, in advance, is of the
sufferings that Christ would undertake, and the glory that will come, focused
details from the life and ministry of Jesus that cannot be so easily denied.
The focus on the sufferings, and then the glory of
Jesus dispel another misconception about Jesus coming into the world. Many in the land of Judea were looking for a
warrior-king, which Jesus was not. The
paradigm of the Messiah was the New David, not the Suffering Servant. Jesus not filling that role could be argument
to reject him altogether.
Peter is laying out a bigger argument, arguing that
God’s Spirit, the Spirit of Christ, what in the Trinity is the Holy Spirit, is
the divine guide to what the prophets brought from the words of God, what the
prophets brought as the message fulfilled in Jesus, what the prophets brought
from their careful search and inquiry to reveal the grace, to reveal ‘this
salvation’ that comes through Jesus.
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