And He said unto them, Thus it is written, and thus it behoved Christ to suffer, and to rise from the dead the third day. Luke 24:46
As He met with his disciples after His resurrection, the Lord Jesus sought to comfort and restore them. He also spoke of the Scriptures that He had discussed with them earlier throughout His three years of ministry. At this time, He ‘opened their understanding, that they might understand the Scriptures’. What a wonderful revelation they received that day! All of the Old Testament was revealed to them in a way that they had never grasped before. Suddenly, the great tragedy of the crucifixion, and the wondrous miracle of the resurrection, all made sense. Just as He did with the folks on the Emmaus road, He spoke to them of all those things in the Scriptures concerning Himself.
Because of the presence of the Holy Spirit with us, we have the same benefit if the same great revelation and realization today. When we gather to remember Him, let us keep in mind that we are celebrating the culmination of all of the prophecies, the reality of all of the types, the fulfillment of all of the offerings and ordinances. We are not told, of course, what Scriptures specifically He referred to during His message to his followers in that upper room meeting, although He did speak of the law of Moses, the prophets, and the Psalms (verse 43). But we thrill to know that throughout the Old Testament times, the Word of God was providing revelations of Christ. And in our New Testament Assemblies, we can appreciate and remember those same revelations.
We know that our Saviour did not suffer just to fulfil Scripture. But we also know that He could not have failed to fulfil Scripture. That is why when we read and study and appreciate the Gospels and their accounts of His life, ministry and sufferings, we also read and study and appreciate those portions of the Old Testament that identify for us the things that were written before.
Let us draw near today to appreciate His suffering and resurrection, and to also appreciate how the Word of God provides for us the details, in both the Old and New Testaments, of His suffering and His resurrection. -Jim MacIntosh