Thursday, May 19, 2016

What Shall We Do With Those Weird, Incomprehensible Passages in the Old Testament?


1 Peter 2:6

‘For it stands in scripture: “See, I am laying in Zion a stone, a cornerstone chosen and precious; and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame.”’

In the prophet Isaiah, it seems that the Northern Kingdom, which was taken into permanent captivity by Assyria, to disappear off the historic scene, is the subject of the prophet’s words.  There are talks about covenants with Sheol, what, in the Old Testament, is the realm of the dead. 

Against this captivity, this giving up of hope, enters the word of the Lord.  This is the cornerstone God is laying in Zion, a structure to stand against the destruction that the people of Ephraim, the leading tribe of the Northern Kingdom.  The prophet is proclaiming God’s hope against the condemnation.

So what does that have to do with the people to whom Peter is writing?  Not a blessed thing, directly.  Like many of the lessons of history, if you apply them too directly, you are going to run into trouble.  Rather, there is a principle to be drawn here.

The passage in Isaiah proclaims God standing against a feeling among the people of hopelessness, hopelessness even unto death.  It is centuries later and the same kind of hopelessness, the apparently eternal dominance of the Romans, is in place.

But the power of God, his laying a cornerstone in Zion, that cornerstone finding its fulfillment in the Lord Jesus Christ, it is the fulfillment of that prophecy in the current age of Peter.

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